Prehistoric Sex Patterns

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how sexual relationships worked in the past, i.e. who had sex with whom. By "the past", I mean maybe like a hundred thousand years ago.

My theory is based on the fact that men and women are not 100% compatible, and that that incompatability is due to the fact that we evolved our sexual wants under one set of conditions, and then those conditions changed. When those conditions changed, we adapted culturally, rather than evolutionarily, so our sexual wants do not match up with what our culture demands.

I'm not terribly experienced with sex unfortunately, but I have noticed that, between my wife and I, she is most interested in sex just after we've had it. I, on the other hand, am least interested in sex at this time. I'm most interested in sex about two to three days after I've had it, but at this time, she's really not interested in it at all. She doesn't get interested again for about eight days. Do other couples experience this same pattern? I don't know, but I think they might, because steryotipically, women tend to complain that men don't last long enough, and men tend to complain that women aren't interested often enough, so I don't think this pattern is unique to us.

Now, it's possible that this incompatibility caused a certain edginess in our species, and that this edginess somehow enabled us to survive better, but I think it's more likely that our sexual pattern changed at some point in the fairly recent past, and that we just haven't caught up with it evolutionarily.

What was that ancient pattern? Well, my wife is ready to continue having sex after I'm done, so maybe in the distant past, there would have been some other male present for her to have sex with. I'm ready to have sex again after a couple of days, and she's really not interested, so maybe there would have been some other female in the group for me to have sex with at this time. I'm basically thinking of a situation where we have several males and females living together in a group. The females in the group get interested in sex one at a time, and during that time, they have sex with all, or maybe just several, of the males in the group. If you look at my wife's and my pattern, you might think that three to four women would have been the average for such a group, and maybe two or three males. (I'm really not sure how many men my wife's libido might last through, it has, at least as far as I know, never been tested).

Think about it for a second. Having several males in the group would have provided a better defense against predators than the single male with a haraam of females pattern, and the pattern of sex that I've described would be able to help hold this group together. However, this pattern would start to break down if you had more than four or so males in the group. A single female, when it became her time, simply wouldn't be able to satisfy a large number of males. In this situation, it becomes better to match a single female with a single male, like we do today. My theory is that by the time we shifted to these larger tribal groups, we had already developed the capacity for culture, so we adapted culturally rather than evolutionarily.

So what does this mean to us now? Maybe nothing. However, we live in large enough groups now that we could easily subdivide into smaller groups similar to what we may have had in the past. Unfortunately, in our current society, job opportunities often require moves that would be harder to make with a larger multi-partnered family. In fact, our society is so fractious right now, that it's hard to keep single partner families together.

I know that communes did become popular during the 1960's, but they didn't last, I suspect because people moved around too often, and the close bonds that would have formed over a lifetime, had the communes lasted, never got a chance to form.

Anyway, that's my theory. My wife think's I'm crazy, and probably you do to (assuming anyone ever reads this), but it's my theory and I'm sticking to it. So there!

Advertising

There is an evil in our society, an insiduous evil that permeates our society so completely that we don't even notice it. It's all around us, but we don't notice it because it has become the norm. It is a constant humming in the background that we don't notice because we have become numb to it. This evil is ADVERTISING!!!

Okay, maybe not all advertising is evil, but some of it is.

Human children learn by watching those around them. They see some people that they admire, and they try to do what they do. They see other people that they dislike, and they try not to be like those people. This is a fundamental mechanism through which humans learn to get around in their world.

Advertisers take advantage of this to try to manipulate people into buying their products. Some examples:

• Mountain Dew has commercials where cool looking kids ride mountain bikes, or fly flying saucers, and then drink Mountain Dew. Kids who watch these commercials will see these great kids doing fantastic things and think: "Wow, that's what I want to be like". Then they see the kids drink Mountain Dew and they think: "Wow, I want to drink that". Of course, Mountain Dew has more caffeine than any other soda, and caffeine is addicting, so they're basically getting our kids hooked on drugs.



• Head and Shoulders had commercials where there was a good looking guy or girl, and another good looking guy or girl was interested in them until they saw the dandruff on their shoulder and were turned off by it. Then the person with dandruff discovers Head and Shoulders, and at the next party you see them chatting amicably with good looking members of the opposite sex.



• Joe Camel for Camel cigarettes.
  
  
• Virginia Slims suggesting that women aren't liberated unless they smoke Virginia Slims cigarettes.
  
  
• The Marleboro Man.

The point is that humans are basically very simple creatures with very simple learning processes. By tying into these learning processes, advertisers can get us to do just about anything they want. They're leading us around like cattle.

One set of advertisers gets us addicted to junk food by showing happy, fit, good looking people eating junk food, and that gets us fat. Then another group of advertisers makes us feel bad about being fat, and they show us a group of fit people exercising at a gym to make us think that we should go to a gym too. We're bouncing back and forth between wanting to eat that chocolate donut, then going to the gym to burn it off, spending money in both directions. It's a tug-of-war between the junk food sellers and the fitness clubs, with us in the middle.

Some people have remarked lately on the prevalence of obesity in our young people, especially among latinos. They exress alarm that this is happening, and then cry out that we need to do something about it. What we'll end up doing, of course, is spend more money on more advertising trying to get us to lead healthier lives, when what we really need to do is outlaw this manipulative type of advertising in the first place.

The ability to think for ourselves is what makes us who we are, and advertisers are taking that away from us. They are stealing our souls, and that is evil.

The Military

I saw a license plate cover on the way home today that said:

U.S. Marine Corps

Everything destroyed in 30 minites or next one is free.

I thought it was funny.

I've wavered a lot over the years in my feelings toward the military. I grew up during the 1960's when we were engaged in an unpopular war in Vietnam. Certainly opinions varied regarding the military even then, but the feeling that I picked up on the most was that anyone who joined the military was to stupid to think for himself, he'd been told that being a soldier was good when he was young, and he never questioned it as he got older.

In the 1980's, that attitude began to change. People started going out of their way to express respect and gratitude to anyone who was in the military, but I always felt that they were just being politically correct, that they didn't really respect the military, but that somehow respecting the military was part of the "new wisdom", and that they didn't want to appear stupid by contradicting that. I was probably wrong about that, but that's how I felt. Of course, I never contradicted anyone who said this because I didn't want to appear stupid, but I never really changed the way I felt about the military.

In the early 90's I started dating a women who would later become my wife, and who's family was very pro-military. Her father had joined the Navy at about the age of 14 at the beginning of WWII, and all of her brothers, and most of her sisters, had either joined or been involved with the military at one point or another. Of course, my wife told all of them about my feelings for the military, and there were a couple of discussions about it when I first met them, not bad discussions, but discussions nonetheless. This was about the time of the first Gulf War, and one of my wife's brothers was over there fighting.

Up until this time, I really hadn't had to examine my feelings about the military, but now I had to. Yes, I did believe the military was necessary, I thought there might come a day when we didn't need one, but right now we certainly did. Yes, if the U.S. was attacked, I would certainly go to war to defend her, even if I thought the enemy was justified in attacking us. I might turn around the next day and picket against her for whatever it was that caused them to attack us, but while we were being attacked, I would always defend. However, I would never allow myself to be used as a tool to enforce the greedy, power hunger goals of a corrupt administration. I would never give up my right to choose my own course of action based on my own sense of right and wrong.

That's the problem that I have with the military. Even after we were attacked on 9/11, and after we went to war in Afghanistan (a war which I whole heartedly supported, though I do have some issues about how it was carried out), I still could not praise individual military people. I have been involved with the Cub Scouts for almost four years now, and there are a lot of military families in our pack, yet I have never once thanked them for the sacrifices they made or the job that they did. The problem that I have with military people is that they have given up the right to judge right from wrong. They don't have the right to decide when they'll fight or what they'll fight for. It has to be this way because obviously that would lead to a very undependable army, but to give up that right is so obviously wrong to me that I just can't reconcile that with the idea that a soldier is good. I can never look at a soldier and thank him because there will always be in the back of my mind some disgust for the person for having done something so unclean.

Despite that, I am thankful that they don't feel the same way I do, because if they did, we'd all be in big trouble.

The Space Program

There's been a lot of talk lately about the space program, what with Spirit and Opportunity, and Bush saying he wants to set up a space station on the moon and send men to mars. Of course, Bush is proposing something that is completely out of our reach at this point, and to even suggest that we do this after spending billions of dollars on the war in Iraq is completely insane, and the fact that he would actually propose this like he really thinks we'll believe him is frankly a little insulting. But all that aside, I do think that this is the right direction to go.

I remember back in the 60's everyone was in favor of the space program. Everyone thought space was our destiny, and everyone wanted the U.S. to get there before anyone else. After we reached the moon, no one knew where to go next, and people started wondering if the space program was really worth it. NASA tried to come up with some kind of justification for keeping the space program alive, and they came up with the idea that there were experiments that you could do in space that you couldn't do on Earth. That at least gave people who supported the space program an argument against those who said the space program was a waste of money.

The justification for the Space Shuttle was that it would allow us to get into space more cheaply, but when there wasn't enough business to keep the Space Shuttles busy, they sent them up to do experiments, and doing experiments is the primary justification for the Space Station as well. Unfortunately, the experiments that they're doing up there are really lame, and they're detracting from the real reason that we want to go into space.

The same can be said for the Mars missions. There the justification is the search for extra-terrestrial life. This all started with the discovery of a small piece of a meteor, that supposedly came from Mars, and that had some structures that some scientists said may have been some kind of fossilized alien one-celled animal. Then they found some structures on Mars that looked like could have been caused by water. Nevermind that there could be a hundred other explanations for the meteor or the structures on Mars, those explanations don't inspire people to spend a lot of money to do more research.

The problem is that all we're doing here is chasing after pipe dreams. The research done on the Space Station really isn't all that great, and we're wasting a lot of resources on it. The Mars program is also probably going to end in dissapointment, and then people are really going to want to end the Space Program. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the Space Program, I just think we should focus our efforts on what really matters: having fun. Instead of experiments, we should be learning how to build things in space. Big things. Fun things. Things that we can play in. We should build a big gymnasium in space so that people can have fun in space. And then, because we're all paying for this and it wouldn't be fair for the astronauts to keep all the fun to themselves, we should send Hollywood up there to film all the fun everyone's having and make a documentary. Have you ever seen the films they currently make with the astronauts? They're worse than home movies. Good movies would help generate people's interest in the space program. That's the problem with NASA these days. They're not sharing.

Now, there's a practical side to all of this also, just so you don't think I'm being completely frivolous. Even when you're building fun things, you're still building, and you're learning how to build. You're also learning how to manipulate a lot of material, and coordinate the efforts of a lot of people. As for the gymnasium, people need to be able to move around, and they need to get some kind of excercise. Simply running a treadmill is too boring for most people. We need a sport. I'm kind of picturing a large room, maybe with fabric walls like a large balloon, with lots of structures inside, like bars to swing on, nets you can grab, and cylindars you can run on the inside of so that you're centrifugal force will keep your feet to the ground. This will not only give you excercise, but it will teach you how to maneuver in zero gravity. You may not even need to keep this room airtight. In fact, the outer fabric could just be a net. The astronauts could play in their space suits. That way they would get experience on how to manuever outside the Space Station. In fact, I just had this idea, you could put a loose net all around the space station, except maybe where the Space Shuttle or Soyuz has to dock. Then, if an astronaut is working outside the station and comes untethored, he just falls into the net.

And as for the movies, that is in part designed to help us learn how to do something else in space. I'm think both documentaries and Sci Fi films. The Sci Fi films in particular will require the designing of props, which will give us something else big to build in space. But mostly, the movies are about sharing. The Space Program doesn't belong to NASA, it belongs to all of us, and NASA has to put a lot more effort into sharing the experience with us.

Laser Tag

Tonight we did laser tag with the cubscouts. My two boys are in the cub scouts, and every year they go do laser tag with the money they earned from selling popcorn earlier in the year. I think it's one of the highlights of the year. This year, unfortunately, I didn't think ahead and I wore a long sleeve white shirt. With the black lights that they had in the arena, I light up like a spot light. There were only about three people in our group of 22 that had light colored clothing, and I was easily the brightest. Everyone else had the forsight to wear dark colors. Even so, I did pretty good in the first game, but I guess if you're playing a bunch of cub scouts, that doesn't really count for much.

Golf

I went and played golf today with a friend from work. I just started playing golf a few months ago. I basically suck pretty bad, but this time I was able to hit the flag from the tee with one shot on about a 125 yard hole. Unfortunately the ball didn't go in the hole, and I missed the put, so I only did a par on that hole. I did get a birdie on an earlier par-3 hole though. I think it was my first one. Basically it was a pretty easy course over all.

My reasons for getting into golf are pretty complicated. First of all, my wife has a friend whose husband is a golf pro. He somehow convinced my son that he would be good at golf, so then my son got interested in it. I'm always trying to find things that my son and I can do together, so that was pretty good motivation. Also, my wife and her friend would probably like us husbands to have more stuff in common, so my wife had mentioned a few times that our neighbor could give me and my son lessons. Finally, my dad, and several of my brothers-in-law, golf, so it would give me something to do with them. I didn't really like it that much when I started, but I'm starting to get good enough to enjoy it a little. I'm still not very good, but at least I no longer feel like a complete doof while I'm out there.

My First Entry

I first encountered blogs from a news article about Salaam Pax's blog on Iraq, I think it was in the Guardian. It didn't give a link, but I searched on the text "Where's Raed" and eventually found it. I was completely blown away by the potential of this new medium for taking control of the news out of the hands of large news organizations and into the hands of individual people. I had been looking for years for good alternative sources for news, especially from outside of the U.S., that would represent other opinions of what was going on in the world, and this exactly fit the bill. I think one of the problems of the big news organizations is that they don't have access to good sources in areas like the Middle East, and they basically just publish the press releases of those in charge. Blogs from people inside these areas are a perfect way around this.

For my own part, I have a lot of opinions about what is going on in the world, and I really wanted a place to air them. Especially since my wife is getting pretty tired of hearing them. :) Of course, I would love to hear peoples opinions of what I have to say, either pro or con.

I would like to take a moment to give recognition and thanks to those blogs who have inspired me the most:

- Where's Raed - The first blog I ever read, and a great source of information about how Iraqis viewed the war.

- Baghdad Burning - I really admire this girl for putting herself on the line to express her opinions of what is going on over there. She really makes what is going on over there a more personal experience for anyone who reads her blog. Whenever she doesn't write for a while, I get worried that something has happened to her.

- Turning Point - I wanted to get a soldier's view of what was going on over there as well, and Turning Point gave some very intelligent and well thought out opinions on the subject. He's back in the U.S. now. It's too bad he's stopped writing.

- Healing Iraq - I really like the way the stories of his work and career show what it's like to live in Iraq these days. Like Riverbend (Baghdad Burning), his blogs really open your eyes to what most peoples lives are like in Iraq these days.

- Ture Porn Clerk Stories - This one is obviously not about Iraq, but I'm interested in seeing different parts of the world from different perspectives, not just Iraq, and she is definitely seeing a different part of the world than I am.

It's probably only fair to tell you a little bit about myself, so that you can know where these ideas are coming from. I am a 40 something year old Software Engineer from Southern California. I'm married, have a few kids, etc.. I prefer to remain otherwise anonymous because I want to be free to say what I really think without worrying about some wierdo taking offense and targeting my family. I'm probably being a bit paranoid, after all, probably no one is even going to read this, but that's just the way I am.

So long for now,
LeRoy