489. Demisexuality And Morals

489.   Demisexuality And Morals
Somewhere I read the suggestion to imagine a world, where more people were demisexual.    
My spontaneous reaction was to think, that this would be one huge step nearer to paradise, especially for women.   But this needs some elaboration. 

Humans can hardly survive alone, they need to be part of a system of cooperation and division of labor.   As a result, they need rules to guide the behavior.   

I am an atheist, so I omit any consideration of rules followed by people in fear of punishment and consequences from any deity or agent, that does not really exist.  This therefore excludes considering the special monogamy of men, who fear to be punished by a god.   

I consider morals as a choice based upon the consideration of the consequences of the own behavior upon others.  For non-religious people, the most logical rules are those derived from a balance between self-interest and responsibility and consideration.    
There is the golden rule, there is the tit-for-tat strategy and there is the Epicurean principle of not harming and not be harmed.    Behavior in accordance with such principles can be called moral behavior.  

There are two kinds of moral behavior, proactive and abstaining.    Proactive moral behavior means fulfilling accepted obligations, abstaining moral behavior means to refrain from hurting and harming actions.    The latter includes avoiding invisible harm and emotional hurting.   Knowing, which behavior inflicts physical or material damage, is generally unambiguous and usually easy.   But recognizing invisible emotional damage requires knowledge and awareness, predicting and preventing it needs even more thereof.  

When potential victims are spared from being hurt or harmed, it is not always obvious, why they are spared.    Someone can either use self-control in accordance to moral rules, or he can just have no urge or need towards this action.  

The difference between promiscuous behavior compared with monogamy and demisexuality is an important aspect of human life, where people are either hurt or spared.  

To illustrate this:

I have been mentioning in previous blog entries my disgust, when at a younger age travelling in Mediterranean countries, I was approached by male predators initiating contact with me as prey.   I would have appreciated a serious and civilized conversation.   But they were more often than not just jerks drooling over my body.    Their intention to harm me was obvious. 
But in the few cases, when I did get the chance to have a nice, friendly and intellectually interested talk about the country's culture, I was not able to know the reason, why I was spared the insult.   

The men's reason not to attempt to harm me could be:

• Generally moral:   The consideration to not risk to hurt a woman by using her body, while she gets probably emotionally attached.       
• Monogamously moral:  The consideration for his partner, whom he does not want to hurt by cheating.
• Selectively only drooling over some bodies, but not over all and I had the luck to not trigger his instincts.
• As a demisexual never drooling over a body.

Being emotionally attached to a person and needing the reciprocity of exclusive attachment in return is an experience made by so many human beings, that it can be considered a part of human nature.   Being cheated on or dumped by someone, with whom there is such an attachment, is one of the most frequent reasons of emotional pain.  

It can be so extreme, that it causes not only severe suffering, but often also PTSD, alcoholism, illegal and prescription drug abuse, suicide, violence, outbreak of dormant psychiatric illness.   There is also the indirect damage to the children of broken families.   Someone under emotional distress is more prone to cause an accident at a job, where he is responsible for other people's safety.  

If this sounds like an exaggeration, it is because in the media and in the social norm, monogamy has become stigmatized as outdated, while promiscuity is supposed to be normal behavior.   It is a very damaging myth and urban legend, when the promiscuous jerks not only claim, that people were not made to be monogamous, but when they also influence others to imitate them.  

It is the other way around: Many people are not made to be the victims of promiscuity.  Those who suffer as the victims of ruthless and cruel promiscuity are treated and considered as defective not only by social norms, desensitization, denial and power structures, but also by the christian religion demanding them to accept suffering and to wait for the compensation after death.  
  
But while the social norm encourages promiscuous jerks to feel no conscience or inhibition, the emotional and psychological reality of individual victim's experiences is very different.    Anybody, who reads self-help forums about relationships and personal experiences, will again and again read heart-breaking stories of the same problem:   Persons, especially women, suffer nearly always severe pain, when dumped or cheated by the partner, to whom they had become emotionally attached and whose exclusivity had become their emotional need.   

Feeling attached and then being dumped and not valued as a partner is being hurt and harmed.   Moral behavior means not only to avoid hurting.  It also means to avoid the risk of hurting.   Every time, when two persons get intimately involved, this realistically bears the risk of creating emotional attachment, even in spite of both consenting not to get attached.    In the best case, the situation remains symmetrical, either both or none.    

But as a result of biological differences, usually a woman bears the much higher risk of planned or involuntary emotional attachment.    This implies a high responsibility for a man, in the case of his wish to behave morally.    If he does not care, he is a jerk.   Since the promiscuous use of a body always includes the risk of hurting, promiscuity can be considered as immoral behavior.   As a conscious choice, it is an immoral attitude.  

When a person avoids unreciprocated attachment, this appears as moral behavior in the perception of the person not made a victim.   But a man, whose behavior appears moral, can abstain from promiscuous abuse for different reasons:

• He is consciously living morally.  He is monogamous by empathy, consideration and responsibility.
• He is demisexual.   Female bodies do not trigger sexual instincts, so monogamy comes natural to him.  

Therefore demisexuals are the men with the highest quality of outwardly appropriate behavior towards women, even though their behavior is not necessarily caused by a conscious moral decision.   

A world, in which all men are demisexuals, would be a better world, as long as there are not more men morally motivated to avoid hurting women by being monogamous.

This will be continued.