493. The Social Norm Of The Drooling Men
Social norms have a lot of power over susceptible and gullible people, because they influence behavior away from innate inclinations. Others are compared with social norms. Correct behavior is defined by social norms. The own self-esteem and self-worth depends on the comparison with social norms. Social norms define the perception of deviance.
Social norms are beneficial, when they guide behavior towards a morality, that has the goal of avoiding and minimizing suffering, hurting and harming.
Some social norms also do a lot of damage, especially when they are no longer appropriate to changed circumstances or when they serve the benefits of a powerful and influential minority but harm the majority.
One example is the social norm of high libido for men. This social norm is incongruent with the real human cognitively influenced sexuality, which is based upon the strength of the libido distributed along a bell curve.
The social norm of high libido corresponds in a very biased way only with one extreme end of the bell curve. This social norm declares the most extreme inclinations to be the best and to be most suitable for everybody. The definition of masculinity and virility includes high libido as a major ingredient. Low libido is strongly despised as a defect.
High libido itself is a biological predisposition. The social norm of expressed high libido is implicitly defined by men as experiencing themselves drooling over every female body, whenever this body is perceived as attractive in the implicit agreement of those, who drool the most.
Experiencing frequent drooling serves as the self-reassurance of meeting the requirement of the social norm of high libido.
The consequences of this social norm are very detrimental:
1. The technical advancement of life-imitating photos and movies and the distribution by printed media, television and the Internet has caused the oversexation of society and a general desensitization to this even for those, who do not benefit or even suffer from this norm.
2. According to this social norm, the promiscuity of the drooling men is considered as their entitlement, while the suffering emotionally attached victims of being dumped or cheated upon are considered as flawed and deviant.
3. Instead of rejecting this social norm as being detrimental to themselves, most women accept attempts to trigger men to drool more by modification of their exterior as the best solution of coping with the social norm. The compete to trigger the strongest drooling.
4. Those men with less libido, whose behavior would best fulfill women's emotional needs, are impeded from accepting themselves as they are. Instead they measure themselves in comparison with the harmful social norm. As a consequence, they either attempt to correct their alleged problem medically or they attempt to imitate the promiscuous jerks as role models. They deteriorate in the false belief of improving.
5. The widespread definitions of asexuality and demisexuality as a label for self-labeling are also a reaction to the fully accepted social norm of high libido.
Social norms have a lot of power over susceptible and gullible people, because they influence behavior away from innate inclinations. Others are compared with social norms. Correct behavior is defined by social norms. The own self-esteem and self-worth depends on the comparison with social norms. Social norms define the perception of deviance.
Social norms are beneficial, when they guide behavior towards a morality, that has the goal of avoiding and minimizing suffering, hurting and harming.
Some social norms also do a lot of damage, especially when they are no longer appropriate to changed circumstances or when they serve the benefits of a powerful and influential minority but harm the majority.
One example is the social norm of high libido for men. This social norm is incongruent with the real human cognitively influenced sexuality, which is based upon the strength of the libido distributed along a bell curve.
The social norm of high libido corresponds in a very biased way only with one extreme end of the bell curve. This social norm declares the most extreme inclinations to be the best and to be most suitable for everybody. The definition of masculinity and virility includes high libido as a major ingredient. Low libido is strongly despised as a defect.
High libido itself is a biological predisposition. The social norm of expressed high libido is implicitly defined by men as experiencing themselves drooling over every female body, whenever this body is perceived as attractive in the implicit agreement of those, who drool the most.
Experiencing frequent drooling serves as the self-reassurance of meeting the requirement of the social norm of high libido.
The consequences of this social norm are very detrimental:
1. The technical advancement of life-imitating photos and movies and the distribution by printed media, television and the Internet has caused the oversexation of society and a general desensitization to this even for those, who do not benefit or even suffer from this norm.
2. According to this social norm, the promiscuity of the drooling men is considered as their entitlement, while the suffering emotionally attached victims of being dumped or cheated upon are considered as flawed and deviant.
3. Instead of rejecting this social norm as being detrimental to themselves, most women accept attempts to trigger men to drool more by modification of their exterior as the best solution of coping with the social norm. The compete to trigger the strongest drooling.
4. Those men with less libido, whose behavior would best fulfill women's emotional needs, are impeded from accepting themselves as they are. Instead they measure themselves in comparison with the harmful social norm. As a consequence, they either attempt to correct their alleged problem medically or they attempt to imitate the promiscuous jerks as role models. They deteriorate in the false belief of improving.
5. The widespread definitions of asexuality and demisexuality as a label for self-labeling are also a reaction to the fully accepted social norm of high libido.
"An asexual is someone who does not experience sexual attraction. "
http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=Asexuality
"Demisexuals are asexuals who only experience secondary sexual attraction to people they know personally, usually based on some kind of emotional connection, whether platonic or romantic. They can’t feel sexually attracted to strangers, celebrities, or people they don’t very well. So demisexuality is all about sexual attraction, just like asexuality is all about the lack of sexual attraction."
http://outlawroad.tumblr.com/post/10265976595/gray-asexuality
Theoretically, the evolution of the human cognition enables people to derive their identity, self-esteem, self-worth from their intelligence, creativity, talents, knowledge, skills and also from behaving morally by avoiding to hurt and to harm others. The evolution of the human cognition has advanced far enough to free humans from the need to base self-esteem upon attributes of their bodies.
Any man with low or lacking libido has this option. But in spite of this, nearly all men seem to feel deficient, if they do not drool often enough over women's bodies. I cannot remember to have ever read or heard of any man, who prefers himself as someone with a low libido. Even men, whose religion forbids any behavioral expression of libido do not feel good when just having none but they take pride in conquering it.
It appears as if low libido in men automatically leads at least to low self-esteem, if not to more severe psychological problems. They seem just unable to consider and accept low libido as either not important or even as an indication of being the quality men, who do not hurt women. They cannot even change their opinion about themselves, when women tell them explicitly, that they prefer the monogamous non-drooling men with the moderate libido.
There are self-help and discussion forums for people self-labeling themselves as asexual, demisexuals, and similar labels. These forums seem to be populated by persons struggling with low self-esteem, lacking self-worth, subjective feelings of being deviant. They seem to be in the need of a niche, where they find others similarly afflicted. They share, what they experience subjectively as their common flaw of failing under the social norms of an oversexed society.
They have accepted this social norm without ever doubting its value or justification. It does not even occur to them to criticize or reject the social norm of high libido and drooling.
They repeat again and again their strong emphasis of the paramount importance of the difference between the absence of sexual attraction and the absence of or low libido. This very artificial distinction is a remarkable mental trick to resolve a strong cognitive dissonance.
They are unable to deny to themselves to recognize the reality of not drooling over women's bodies, while they are aware that this is considered a deficit according to the social norm. They want to be able to accept themselves as different without feeling deficient.
The social norm of high libido is an attribute of one person. The focus on lacking sexual attraction is a mental trick to shift the focus away from being someone with a personal deficit. Sexual attraction requires by definition the interaction of more than one person, it requires a target to be attracted to. Lacking sexual attraction as an explanation allows to externalize the alleged cause to the nonexistence of suitable targets. This can be accepted as a difference, which is independent of failing the social norm.
Humanity needs to adapt culturally to the human cognition by a radical shift of the social norms concerning sexuality. In another entry, I will make some suggestions.
