Men and Women
One aspect last night of straight people was the fact that men don't shake hands. The one who pushed me up to dance was Liz's friend. I decided to say goodbye to him. When I did it the first time, he merely nodded. I thought he must not have understood, and so I extended my hand, he merely nodded, raised his eyebrow and walked away. I understood it was somewhat silly, and maybe I should have just offered the fist bump instead.
With girls, however, we shook hands just fine.
I remember while at the dance, there was one average man with a thin woman. There were hugging each other in the dance floor, and he kept squeezing her ass. He squeezed it while they were talking. Then he squeezed it again while yelling in her ears. Then he kept his hand on her butt, and squeezed it again, as tightly as possible. She kept talking to him and being close to him. I'm glad women are sufficiently liberated that they can be manhandled and groped without feeling offended.
Yesterday afternoon, I went to a local library in San Leandro, mainly to try to support a local library rather than the dominion of Borders and Barnes and Noble. I came across an old book from 1984 called "The Redundant Male," written by two men. There were two pages on homosexuality that pretty much cover what you and I realize about the difference between men and women, and particularly if they were allowed to be their pure sexuality, which gays and lesbians generally are. Gay men were found to be promiscuous, a large percentage having hundreds of partners, and a quarter of them having partners numbering in the thousand. In contrast, women are more invested in monogamy.
Moreover, both men and women do in large number affirm the ideal is a monogamous relationship; however, men do not live up to this ideal. The book then went on to surmise that heterosexual men would do the same thing if given the chance. They would enjoy getting four minutes of blow jobs with anonymous women at a restroom stop after getting off work, if women were willing. And women are simply not willing.
The conclusion of the book tried to explain why men were necessary, and it was for protection against diseases because men and women mating help provide enough genetic variability to make T-cells that can fight back. It brought up some animal species that produce offspring parthenogenetically are vulnerable to diseases, because female lizards essentially clone themselves when remixing their genes for producing offspring.
As this book was published in 1984, HIV/AIDS was just getting started. There is also a new/old (?) argument that proposes viruses and bacteria do not actually want to kill off their hosts. If we see all living things as merely carriers for their DNA, and the DNA are selfish genes that want to be reproduced and passed on, then it is not in their best interest to kill off all of the hosts, for unless they are successful in inter-species crossing, they would die as well.
The arms race then, in this sense, exists only because of itself. The female lizards that have reproduced by parthenogenesis have survived so far not because they haven't been targeted by viruses, but because that any member of the species that were targeted would have been dead by now. Viruses and bacteria prefer to behave as parasites, like worms and other bugs, living off the people they infect to pass on to others.
They also result in some people hypothesizing that HIV/AIDS will eventually tame itself to become like the common cold, a seasonal nuisance. Even one scientist's controversial statement was that HIV and AIDS shouldn't be prevented because after he thought after several generations, our body will eventually develop a way to fight off the HIV/AIDS.
I can see the argument, but on the other hand, it is my view HIV became deadly not because it is deadly, but because, in your way of phrasing, "the world is lousy with people." The sex, prostitution, needle-sharing, and other habits had become so prevalent and intermingled that the most successful AIDS virus is the aggressive virus, not one that stays with the host, and so the virus tries to produce as many copies of themselves as possible to make sure that they can get through to the next host, and to make enough variability that at least one virus will produce an antigen that the host will not be able to create an antibody for.
Tuberculosis and the Black Plague and other boil-causing diseases kill quickly, and they depend wholly on having the world be lousy with people. HIV instead kills slowly. In contrast to tuberculosis, a pathogenic bacterium that cannot mutate quickly enough to evade antibiotics, were easily eliminated in first-world countries, HIV as a virus exploits the machinery of the human T-cell to make copies of itself and mutates at such a fast rate, that the human body was never meant to catch up.
I would surmise, with the huge number of deaths in Africa due to HIV, that a chance mutation preventing HIV from infecting the T-cells will arise and be more likely to be propagated. Since the human DNA is over 3 billion base pairs, one mutation that turns off such a vector of infection is extremely unlikely. It was just luck that the sickle cell anemia happened upon the group of people suffering from malaria, allowing them to better survive. Sickle-cell anemia is a tragic disease only when taken out of the context of malarial epidemic. When living in a place afflicted with mosquitoes, sickle-cell anemia is a success story for evolution. If the anemia mutation happened anywhere else, the child probably would have died without a chance to pass it on.
A humorous thing the book talked about was why women have large breasts for their entire life: In other animal species, breasts grow when the females get pregnant, so they can start feeding their young, and reduce when they have weaned the young. Human women, however, start lactating from the moment they hit puberty. The authors offered that the breasts were a way to suggest the buttocks, to compensate walking upright, since that means means men don't see the butt as much, except for dropped soap and other things. I can see that aspect, particularly in the fetish of putting the penis between the breasts much like sexual intercourse from behind rather than missionary position.
The other thing also interestingly discussed was the size of males in human species. It is more common for females to be larger than males. The largest whale that ever existed in the ocean was probably a female. The main reason for males to get larger is competition, when a male might have a harem of females to mate with, and therefore would need to be an alpha male. The authors could correlate the average size of males with the average number of females in a harem, concluding that the average size of men over women mean that men should have between 1 to 2 or 2 to 3 concubines.
What was interesting was they compared culture to biology. In some cultures, men can have more than one wife, but they could be closer to women in size, or vice versa--both of which are contradictory results indicating that this arrangement was made by culture, not by biology, and that it was due to outside influence, such as a dominant culture, that shamed them into choosing a different societal arrangement.
I will consider purchasing that book because it could make a nice addition to my collection. It was around $8 or $9, probably because in 1984, books were cheaper.
With girls, however, we shook hands just fine.
I remember while at the dance, there was one average man with a thin woman. There were hugging each other in the dance floor, and he kept squeezing her ass. He squeezed it while they were talking. Then he squeezed it again while yelling in her ears. Then he kept his hand on her butt, and squeezed it again, as tightly as possible. She kept talking to him and being close to him. I'm glad women are sufficiently liberated that they can be manhandled and groped without feeling offended.
Yesterday afternoon, I went to a local library in San Leandro, mainly to try to support a local library rather than the dominion of Borders and Barnes and Noble. I came across an old book from 1984 called "The Redundant Male," written by two men. There were two pages on homosexuality that pretty much cover what you and I realize about the difference between men and women, and particularly if they were allowed to be their pure sexuality, which gays and lesbians generally are. Gay men were found to be promiscuous, a large percentage having hundreds of partners, and a quarter of them having partners numbering in the thousand. In contrast, women are more invested in monogamy.
Moreover, both men and women do in large number affirm the ideal is a monogamous relationship; however, men do not live up to this ideal. The book then went on to surmise that heterosexual men would do the same thing if given the chance. They would enjoy getting four minutes of blow jobs with anonymous women at a restroom stop after getting off work, if women were willing. And women are simply not willing.
The conclusion of the book tried to explain why men were necessary, and it was for protection against diseases because men and women mating help provide enough genetic variability to make T-cells that can fight back. It brought up some animal species that produce offspring parthenogenetically are vulnerable to diseases, because female lizards essentially clone themselves when remixing their genes for producing offspring.
As this book was published in 1984, HIV/AIDS was just getting started. There is also a new/old (?) argument that proposes viruses and bacteria do not actually want to kill off their hosts. If we see all living things as merely carriers for their DNA, and the DNA are selfish genes that want to be reproduced and passed on, then it is not in their best interest to kill off all of the hosts, for unless they are successful in inter-species crossing, they would die as well.
The arms race then, in this sense, exists only because of itself. The female lizards that have reproduced by parthenogenesis have survived so far not because they haven't been targeted by viruses, but because that any member of the species that were targeted would have been dead by now. Viruses and bacteria prefer to behave as parasites, like worms and other bugs, living off the people they infect to pass on to others.
They also result in some people hypothesizing that HIV/AIDS will eventually tame itself to become like the common cold, a seasonal nuisance. Even one scientist's controversial statement was that HIV and AIDS shouldn't be prevented because after he thought after several generations, our body will eventually develop a way to fight off the HIV/AIDS.
I can see the argument, but on the other hand, it is my view HIV became deadly not because it is deadly, but because, in your way of phrasing, "the world is lousy with people." The sex, prostitution, needle-sharing, and other habits had become so prevalent and intermingled that the most successful AIDS virus is the aggressive virus, not one that stays with the host, and so the virus tries to produce as many copies of themselves as possible to make sure that they can get through to the next host, and to make enough variability that at least one virus will produce an antigen that the host will not be able to create an antibody for.
Tuberculosis and the Black Plague and other boil-causing diseases kill quickly, and they depend wholly on having the world be lousy with people. HIV instead kills slowly. In contrast to tuberculosis, a pathogenic bacterium that cannot mutate quickly enough to evade antibiotics, were easily eliminated in first-world countries, HIV as a virus exploits the machinery of the human T-cell to make copies of itself and mutates at such a fast rate, that the human body was never meant to catch up.
I would surmise, with the huge number of deaths in Africa due to HIV, that a chance mutation preventing HIV from infecting the T-cells will arise and be more likely to be propagated. Since the human DNA is over 3 billion base pairs, one mutation that turns off such a vector of infection is extremely unlikely. It was just luck that the sickle cell anemia happened upon the group of people suffering from malaria, allowing them to better survive. Sickle-cell anemia is a tragic disease only when taken out of the context of malarial epidemic. When living in a place afflicted with mosquitoes, sickle-cell anemia is a success story for evolution. If the anemia mutation happened anywhere else, the child probably would have died without a chance to pass it on.
A humorous thing the book talked about was why women have large breasts for their entire life: In other animal species, breasts grow when the females get pregnant, so they can start feeding their young, and reduce when they have weaned the young. Human women, however, start lactating from the moment they hit puberty. The authors offered that the breasts were a way to suggest the buttocks, to compensate walking upright, since that means means men don't see the butt as much, except for dropped soap and other things. I can see that aspect, particularly in the fetish of putting the penis between the breasts much like sexual intercourse from behind rather than missionary position.
The other thing also interestingly discussed was the size of males in human species. It is more common for females to be larger than males. The largest whale that ever existed in the ocean was probably a female. The main reason for males to get larger is competition, when a male might have a harem of females to mate with, and therefore would need to be an alpha male. The authors could correlate the average size of males with the average number of females in a harem, concluding that the average size of men over women mean that men should have between 1 to 2 or 2 to 3 concubines.
What was interesting was they compared culture to biology. In some cultures, men can have more than one wife, but they could be closer to women in size, or vice versa--both of which are contradictory results indicating that this arrangement was made by culture, not by biology, and that it was due to outside influence, such as a dominant culture, that shamed them into choosing a different societal arrangement.
I will consider purchasing that book because it could make a nice addition to my collection. It was around $8 or $9, probably because in 1984, books were cheaper.
posted by Alan at October 19, 2008
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