msykim99,
He speaks on the power information, how it’s used and how it affects us at a young age. I strongly believe that women need to come to terms with reality. How many times have we heard stories of women getting cheated on? How many videos on social media have we seen of women bashing men because they’re all cheaters? WHEN will women realize that men aren’t wired to desire only one woman. If you keep trying to breathe under water and every time you try you can’t, I think that means it's not likely to happen.
Men and women are completely different. Women desire one man, men desire multiple women. We’re raising girls to believe that men should be faithful to them. This isn’t one of these vices that you can compare to alcohol or drugs. Yes we may want these things but do we need it? No. Sex is literally the foundation of existence. Yes moderating sex is important,
I don't think that it's gendered. I wouldn't be surprised if, because of their biology, men tend to have a stronger desire for novelty and variety (the number of children a woman can have isn't necessarily tied to how many partners they have. By contrast, a man who limits himself to one partner is necessarily reducing the number of children he can have since men can theoretically impregnate several different women within a year but a woman can only be impregnated by one person at a time) but I think women are necessarily wired for polyamory, or at least 'serial monogamy,' as well (I'll get back to this later). There are also plenty of men who have a reflective preference to be monogamous but I can agree with you that their instincts are what they are regardless of what they would want them to be.
If you're addicted to alcohol or drugs, you need those things. I think the difference is that we have a built-in addiction for sex that comes with puberty, if not earlier, it's a psychological and physiological need (for men, at least, I think that sexual stimulation is a physiological need), whereas we can avoid becoming addicted to alcohol and other drugs or wean ourself off those addictions through abstinence. For a normal post-pubescent male (or a pubescent one whose body produces sperm or should be producing sperm), the lack of a desire for sex seems to indicate a health problem.
but to dismiss it because our girlfriend or wife will get their feelings hurt is insane to me.
I don't see why the man's need for sexual/emotional intimacy with different women trumps his wife's emotional distress. The question in my mind is why would it hurt her to begin with (sometimes we are just wired to have a negative emotional response to something but sometimes our emotional distress is a direct result of holding rational values or beliefs that are immoral, invalid or false). To me, it seems to be one of two things broadly (this is just what comes to mind)- she's physically disgusted by the idea of sharing her man with people she's not attracted to or she values exclusivity for the sake of exclusivity. Many people will feel insecure at the idea of their partner being with others because they fear that they will leave them but this wouldn't be an issue in a world where everyone was non-monogamous (if I have to choose between a woman who is a 9, by my standards; not necessarily a conventional one, or a woman who is a 6, I will choose the 9. If I don't have to choose one over the other I will be with both of them. People would still be a rejected in a non-monogamous world but there would necessarily be less competition, and less rejection). I suspect that this will still bother some people because they want their partner to view them as special, ultimately because they value exclusivity for the sake of exclusivity.
To bring my point home; I look at it like this : girls are growing up with a false sense of reality. We’re lying to them. This is up there with not informing our youth about the importance of money and taxes. We don’t know until reality smacks us in the face. Women (and some moronic men) will call us selfish narcissist. There has to come a time as a society where things will shift. If what men feel isn’t normal then time will tell. I’m not here to bash women because I love them, but what men have done for the literal planet earth is remarkable. We are so spoiled as a society that even men have forgotten what we’ve done for everyone. We’ve gone through many phases, and STILL we desire multiple women. Women desire the man who is desired by multiple women. I rest my case. We are damaging the minds of our kids. There is a way to be responsible with multiple partners so there isn’t much of a case for any woman to make.
I half-agree with you when you remove gender from the equation. We are deeply conditioned to blatantly lie to ourselves and others about the nature of sexual attraction and this relates to minor attraction as well (people lie about being attracted to people other than their spouses, they lie about being attracted to teenagers and young people, they lie about being attracted to people whom it is taboo to be attracted to; like a family member or a minor or a friend's partner, they lie about being attracted to people whom they fear rejection from, etc. The last one has less to do with the kind of cultural conditioning I have in mind, though). People are factually not monogamous by orientation. If you accept that then the justification for behaving monogamously on principle seems really flimsy to me because the 'betrayal' should be that one's partner has a desire to sleep with others and if that desire already exists, I don't see what difference it makes whether or not s/he acts on it; in terms of their disloyalty (maybe it counts for something that s/he has conflicting desires, that a part of them rejects their own instincts, but a part of them still wants to be 'disloyal'). I'd rather someone who has a burning desire to murder other people not act on that desire but if there's something wrong with murdering other people, there has to be something morally wrong with wanting to murder other people. People will talk about STDs as a justification for monogamy (as though there are no precautions to take or being safe precludes all possible erotic/romantic intimacy) and miss the point that it's polygamy on principle that they are opposed to, people will often make an appeal to the possible consequences of a thing to justify opposing that thing fundamentally.
Scorchingwilde,
I literally know a man who is basically only ever attracted to one woman at a time, who's what you I would consider demisexual, while I'm very polyamorous myself and I'm trans. It's not a universal general that's true.
I try to avoid being presumptuous about what other people experience but I can push back when someone makes a claim about something that implies something about the nature of my own experience (e.g. if someone claims that pain sometimes feels good. I know this is false, through experience, because feeling inherently bad is what makes what I'm calling 'pain' 'pain' and unlike green fire I can't imagine a world where 'pain' didn't feel inherently bad, so even if I don't feel their pain specifically they are making a statement about something that I do feel since everyone's pain, by definition, is qualitatively the same. Part of the problem might be with how people
interpret their experience, in contrast with what it appears to be on its own). I can understand wanting to focus on one person, I think of 'infatuation' as obsession + affection + attraction and the obsession implies monogamy (you can only be 'obsessed' with something relative to the attention that you give to other things or at least basically comparable things. Someone is 'obsessed' with science fiction because they're more interested in science fiction than they are in other genres or other hobbies etc., 'obsession' is a disproportionate amount of attention to or 'interest' in something and it requires contrast because the line would be completely arbitrary if we just said that being obsessed with something is giving it a certain level of attention, it's what we give a high amount of attention to relative to other things. You can also be relatively exclusive without being monogamous but contractual monogamy is the highest level of exclusivity) but being infatuated with one person doesn't negate being attracted to other people. The traits that attract you to one person attract you to others. Besides personal history (if we're talking about an emotional bond), there is a set of traits that matter-of-factly explain why you like or are attracted to someone, and those traits aren't unique to them even if they are more x than is normal by degree (or maybe they show a combination of several favorable or dis-favorable traits that you normally don't find in people). There is some 'nuance' to this that I don't want to get into (e.g. you won't necessarily like a bowl of sugar just because you like sweet things but proportionality is a factor there, and someone; or a thing, can contain both pleasing and unpleasing qualities but you can't be traumatized by the sight of one orange and find an identical orange to be pleasing and a source of happiness) but I think that's undeniable as a basic principle (the simplest example might be the implausibility of being physically attracted to one person but physically repelled by their perfectly identical clone, they share the exact same appearance).
I don't think that wanting an emotional connection with a partner negates that, I would imagine that most people (men included) would prefer that, and if they strongly dislike someone that will block their natural attraction that they still have on some level. It's also worth noting that, because of diminishing marginal utility, we eventually become desensitized to people sexually and novelty or variety helps to restore that.
I don't care about the sex itself, the ethical principle behind this is important to me. I think that sexual exclusivity for the sake of exclusivity is wrong because it necessarily devalues the happiness of others (one's partner and the other people they might be interested in being with). I wouldn't care if you had a couple who wanted to focus on each other without an official contract forbidding them from being intimate with others, or at the very least not on principle (why would you not want your partner to share pleasurable intimacy with others, for it's own sake and not because it hurts you in some way that doesn't result from your valuing exclusivity as an end, just because it's not with you?). That said, once you account for certain ideological hang-ups, I also think that 'promiscuity' is in one's own best interests because the traits that attract you to one person attract you to other possible people and in suppressing your attraction to others you are desensitizing yourself to what makes even one person sexually pleasing to you. If attraction is not a choice then intentional monogamy necessarily leads to desire frustration (so does not being violent with people you dislike but you could learn to have compassion for them, you can't decide to not be attracted to multiple people simultaneously).