692. The Difference Between Abusers And Nice Guys Explained By The Dual-Process-Theory

692.  The Difference Between Abusers And Nice Guys Explained By The Dual-Process-Theory

In entry 691 I presented the dual process theory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory

Speculating that the predominance of one of the two systems is distributed along a bell curve can help to explain the difference between abusers and nice guys. 


By the criteria of their behavior, men can be roughly classified into three groups:   The abusers, the nice guys and those oscillating between abuse and attachment depending on circumstances.  

These three groups represent the two extremes and the middle area of the bell curve between the predominance of either system 1 or system 2.   The two extremes are clearly defined by an innate strong tendency, while the cut off between the groups and the behavior in the middle is fuzzy and depends upon external influences. 


System 1 can explain how instinctive physical urges towards a female body lead to the attitude of objectification.  

A predominant system 1 determines men to be abusers.  They do not comprehend the meaning of commitment and/or they are unable to get emotionally attached to a woman and/or they are disabled from recognizing the value of women's brains.   They commodify women as toilets for their body waste without even considering any alternative.  
Men with a strong predominance of system 1 are most probably men with a high libido, which causes them to perceive dishomeostasis as an overwhelming discomfort and to be strongly triggered by the perception of female bodies.   They also probably have a hedonistic pleasure center getting mainly stimulated by physical stimuli.

System 1 thinking causes men to confound every coincidence of their experienced dishomeostasis and the availability of female bodies as an automatic justification and entitlement to abuse women, perceiving them as existing for the purpose of being abused.  
Men, whose thinking is determined by system 1, are not any better than animals, they are unable to anticipate or to have empathy for the consequences of ruthless copulation. 

System 2 can explain the emotional and intellectual need for companionship leading to the attitude, that women are cognitively attractive and suitable for monogamous long-term attachment.  

A predominant system 2 determines men to be nice guys.   They automatically get emotionally attached to a woman, whenever they get physically involved.   They have an own genuine emotional need for commitment and bonding.  They have rational and intellectual needs for companionship with a woman.   Whatever the strength of their libido may be, their rationality enables them to have sufficient self-control to keep away from women's body unless they choose a companion.    They are Epicureans, who are mainly attracted to, motivated and stimulated by emotional and intellectual pleasures and joys.

System 2 enables men to act with responsibility and consideration and to appreciate attachment also for themselves.  They comprehend the impact of their behavior upon women.   
Men, whose thinking is determined by system 2 are able to recognize women as their human equals with a brain.  Only these men deserve to be called human.


According to the dual-process-theory, system 1 and system 2 coexist in each human's mind. 

I am not implying all abusers to be completely void of the system 2 nor all attachment formers to be completely free from the system 1.   Many men have both tendencies in any combination of strength in themselves.   Which one defines their attitude and their behavior depends upon circumstances and external influences.    Some abusers do feel doubt, guilt or remorse or they recognize abuse as a transgression, at least when the own sister is the victim.  Attachment formers can also be tempted by triggered instincts due to the exposure to drastic stimuli.  

Men in the middle of the bell curve are thus under contradictory internal tendencies towards a choice, which is dichotomous between either abuse or attachment.  Abuse and attachment are mutually exclusive by definition.   While at any moment, only one can be chosen, some men choose abusive behavior only under some specific circumstances and refrain from it at other occasions.    They are the men, whose choice is prone to be determined or impacted by external influences.
 
While many more traditional societies force violent abuse and injustice upon women, the modern western societies are very much biased towards subtle and non-violent forms of abuse.   Such abuse is the social norm of the majority, who considers pornography as an everyday media intake and prostitution as a job like any other, and who is seriously desensitized by the drastic oversexation of every day life and the media.    Only a very strong innate tendency towards system 2 enables a minority of the most precious men to be the nice guys void of the inclination towards abuse.

The effect of this detrimental social norm can sometimes be observed as a discrepancy of the predominances in the same man.   There are men, who appear to be predominantly system 2 persons in their professional life, in the pursuit of their hobbies and even with their families and friends.   Whenever it gets known, that such a man has cheated on his wife or has been to a brothel, it seems very incongruent with his other demeanor.   Due to external influences, the control of system 1 over such men is restricted to only when women are the victims.   So far I have never heard of any reversed case, of a man behaving generally by system 1 but applying system 2 to women. 

Thus, at the extreme end of the bell curve, the abusers are persistent and permanent abusers, while the social norm reinforces the men in the middle of the bell curve to also be abusers, but they are intermittent abusers.  They cause less harm but they are nevertheless a hazard to those women who happen to become victims.     

Therefore, unfortunately, there are many more abusers than nice guys.   

623. Defining A Disorder Without Consideration For The Victims

623.  Defining A Disorder Without Consideration For The Victims

"Now a UCLA-led team of experts has tested a proposed set of criteria to define "hypersexual disorder," also known as sexual addiction, as a new mental health condition."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121019102802.htm

This article is just another example of the implicit general desensitization to the plight of victims.   The paramount importance of treating sexual addiction for the purpose of protecting others from becoming victims is not even mentioned in this article.
Oversexation is not considered a problem, as long as the promiscuous jerks are satisfied, while all the harm is burdened upon their objectified, dumped and cheated upon victims.  But when the jerks suffer themselves, it is all of a sudden recognized as a problem:

"Of the 207 patients they examined, 17 percent had lost a job at least once, 39 percent had a relationship end, 28 percent contracted a sexually transmitted infection and 78 percent had interference with healthy sex."

"Our study showed increased hypersexual behavior was related to greater emotional disturbance, impulsivity and an inability to manage stress."

615. Social Change And Psychotherapy

615.   Social Change And Psychotherapy

I have been mentioning the growing amount of harm done either carelessly or ignorantly by promiscuous jerks as the consequence of the social norm of oversexation and the subsequent desensitization and lacking empathy for the suffering of the abused women.   (Entry 493:  The Social Norm Of The Drooling Men)

In a world, where men have their on average greater physical strength as an advantage enabling them to gain power and control over resources including media by hook or by crook, the instinctive reaction of many, if not most men is subconsciously welcoming the social norm of oversexation.  While some men would not consciously admit this, I have rarely found anybody explicitly pointing out the damage caused by it.   

By considering the appropriate place for sexuality being the privacy of couples' bedrooms I am sometimes even called a prude.   But I consider it as much better to be a prude than an animal blindly driven by instincts.  

Therefore I was very pleased to have found George Simon's web page.  He is a clinical psychologist and therapist, who has described this unfortunate social development with much better words than my limited English allows me to do.     The emphasis in the following quote is mine.

"Character Disturbance is indeed “the phenomenon of our age.” That’s because the intensely socially repressive atmosphere of earlier times has been supplanted with an atmosphere of entitlement, permissiveness, and license. It’s not as common for people’s shame and guilt to be so unreasonably intense and unyielding that they become pathologically debilitated with anxiety. Rather, it’s more common for folks to lack enough shame or guilt to inhibit them from doing harmful things to themselves as well as others. So, it would be fair to say that character disturbance is indeed more prevalent these days, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that significantly disturbed characters are everywhere."

http://counsellingresource.com/features/2011/10/10/are-they-everywhere/

But Simon not only expresses with better words than myself similar concerns about contemporary permissiveness and lacking inhibitions and constraint.   Simon takes this further to a very clever observation, which had never occurred to me:  The assumptions, upon which psychotherapeutic interventions are usually and implicitly based, have become obsolete and are lacking behind and failing to react to the real problems caused by the drastic social changes of the last decades.      

Therapeutic interventions helpful for people being overwhelmed with unbearable negative emotions about themselves are counterproductive to people, whose problems is predominantly the harming and exploiting of others, while harming themselves is only secondary by depriving also themselves of the benefits of close and harmonious relationships.  

Simon explains the example of denial:

"In classical (psychodynamic) psychology, denial is an unconscious ego defense mechanism.  Basically, that means that a person unwittingly puts up a barrier to experiencing what is too painful to consciously bear."

"Sometimes, denial is truly an unconscious psychological state.  Sometimes, it’s a refusal to admit a problem.  Sometimes, it’s a tactic of manipulation and impression management.  And the basic tactic of denial can be expressed in several other subtle variations such as feigning innocence, feigning ignorance, and acting surprised.   But no matter what form in which it comes, it’s most often merely a way of lying. "

"Disturbed characters of all sorts frequently engage in denial.  It’s extremely rare, however, that they do so because they are in such inner distress over their behavior that they simply can’t consciously accept what they’re doing.  Most of the time, they know exactly what they’re doing, but they want you to think otherwise."

http://www.manipulative-people.com/denial-what-it-is-and-isnt/

"Disordered characters often won’t admit when they’ve done something wrong, and resist looking at any role their behavior patterns have played in creating problems in their lives.  They lie to themselves and others about their malevolent acts and intentions as a tactic to get others off their back.  If their denial is forceful and convincing enough, others will likely be successfully manipulated. "

"Denial is not only an effective manipulation tactic, but it’s also a sure sign someone is not about to change his or her way of behaving.  A person who won’t acknowledge their wrongs in the first place isn’t likely to feel any inclination to correct them.  Habitual denial is the way many disordered characters resist internalizing the values and standards of conduct that could make them more socially responsible."

http://www.manipulative-people.com/denial-manipulation-tactic-4/

547. The Subtle Immorality Of Christian (Pseudo-)Morals

547.   The Subtle Immorality Of Christian (Pseudo-)Morals

This continues entries 545 and 546.   

I watched this video made by a group of people around Reisman
 

The Kinsey syndrome

http://www.drjudithreisman.com/archives/2009/03/watch_videos_on.html#table34

This video presents principally the same information concerning Kinsey's misconduct and aberrations as does Tate's documentary.    I can agree with the simple attribution to Kinsey of the onset of the sexual revolution and with Reisman's pointing out, that pornographic magazines like Playboy are one facet of the damage done by the sexual revolution.  Her elaboration of the harm of pornography in her article in entry 545 is excellent. 

I see this in a wider context of an unfortunate reciprocal reinforcement between social development and technological progress leading to the fatal oversexation of society.    Kinsey's mere claim of what and how sexual behaviors should be a social norm happened to coincide with men's instinctive predispositions to commodify women.  But only the development of a sufficiently high quality of photos, moving pictures and recorded voices made the presented virtual persons in the media such a good imitation of real people, that there impact upon the brain is nearly or completely the same as if they were real.   
   

Beyond this partial agreement, the bias of some of the conclusions, interpretations and claims of the video make me shudder.    This video is one more example, how any morality derived from a religious belief system can be very immoral, when morality is measured by how much the victims are either harmed or spared.   

The morals of any religion arbitrarily defining sin cannot be more rational to the needs of individual humans than is the belief system itself.

Bias/fallacy 1.  The video attributes Kinsey's part in the atrocities to children to his having rejected religious beliefs.    There are many possible explanations of what was wrong with Kinsey causing him to harm other humans.  Maybe his behavior was due to psychopathy or any other disorder, but it was certainly not caused by the absence of religion.  

Bias/fallacy 2.  The video condemns behaviors, even though they do no harm.    

Homosexuality is generally condemned.  The video does not distinguish between the differences in the harm caused by either promiscuity or monogamy.    A caring committed couple is beneficial to each other, independent of both partners' gender being the same or different. 

Bias/fallacy 3.  The video even condemns beneficial behaviors.   Abortion is condemned, even though legal abortion is beneficial.   Women are protected from harm, while nobody is harmed.        

Bias/fallacy 4.   The video condemns necessary preventive adaptations to reduce the risk of harm, even though the causes of the necessity cannot be changed.  

The video condemns sex education for children.    The ubiquity of the oversexation of the media makes it nearly impossible to avoid young children to be exposed to age-unsuitable material.   Age appropriate sex education can reduce the risk or prevent harm.   

Bias/fallacy 5.   The video is not concerned about subjective harm, only about sin and fraud.  
Example 1:  The tragic case of the girl, whose father was paid by Kinsey for taking notes during his abuse of his own daughter.  
In Tate's documentary, she was presented as a suffering woman having been traumatized by an outrageous act.
In the religious video, she was presented as a witness of Kinsey's sin and fraud, her lifelong suffering was omitted.   
Example 2:   A man is interviewed about having ended his pornography addiction due to in his own words his 'fear of god'.   There was not one word of consideration, guilt or remorse concerning the victims abused directly and personally by him or indirectly by the production of the pornography.   He did not change his behavior to stop harming others, only himself.    He subjectively stopped to sin, not to harm.  

Bias/fallacy 6.   The video implicitly shows the christian attitude, that nothing done to an adult woman is a sin bad enough to be mentioned, let alone condemned.   In the christian world view, women are meant to suffer and to wait in patience until their god does his job to compensate them after their death for the plight.   

The video's attributing a lot of harm to children to the influence of pornographic magazines like Playboy is very stringent.   But there is not the least logical reason to protest against harm only when the victims are children, but to completely omit all of the harm done to women in the video's entire duration is over two hours.  

It is absurd to consider women as growing up automatically for the destiny of sufferings by male abuse and commodtification.    Harm to adult women is misinterpreted as a god's will, which therefore cannot be a sin to bother about. 


In addition of being already apistic, because this fits my rationality, any belief system, in which morals do not serve to protect and prevent all people equally from being harmed and abused, is as repulsive as it is dangerous.   
in the above example, the immorality of alleged morals happens to be christian, but this is just one example, some other religions inflict even more drastic harm on the victims by the alleged justification of a cruel pseudo-moral.  

545. Erototoxins - What All Men Should Be Aware Of But Very Few Are

545.   Erototoxins - What All Men Should Be Aware Of But Very Few Are

In entry 544 I wrote about how the influence of the oversexation of the media has aggravated men's innate tendency towards an asymmetrical basic attitude towards women as described in entry 543. 

This is not my imagination.   There are scientific sources.    This study is about the damage done on men's brains by magazines like Playboy, Hustler and Penthouse.    

http://www.drjudithreisman.com/archives/History_and_Science_-_Erototoxic_Images_Drive_Sex_Trafficking_Demand.pdf

It is an important article to be read entirely, especially by those men, who do consume pornography with the naive illusion, that it would not affect them.    No selection of quotes could sufficiently represent the scope of the outrage reported in its 20 pages.   

This article taught me a new word:  Erototoxins.   In Reisman's own words:

"Pornography, “sexually explicit media,” function as “Erototoxins,” the toxic side of eros, converting complex persons worldwide into objects one ‘screws into’ via one or more of several orifices."

Cigarettes are sold with obligatory warnings printed upon the package as these:  

Smoking kills 
Smoking seriously harms you and others around you

Every item of pornography and other erototoxic material should have a warning too:

Pornography kills women and children
Pornography seriously harms your brain and causes you to harm others around you

544. My Fantasy Of The Golden Age Of Neuroscience

544.   My Fantasy Of The Golden Age Of Neuroscience

The last half century has been the age of great electronic and technological progress.    This enabled the ubiquity of the impact of media bringing along also the collateral damage of invisible, subtle and unrecognized emotional harm to many people.  The media have enhanced the already innately detrimental effect of the obsolete male instinctive urges even more in the wrong direction, as oversexation and promiscuity have been made a social norm.   
Men's instinctive tendency to the asymmetrical attitude towards women (entry 543) has been implicitly and subtly reinforced as a consequence of this unfortunate social norm.
 

This is generally overlooked, ignored and denied, and society pays a high price for this.  Women suffer directly and more knowingly from commodification and objectification forced upon them.   Men are deprived of the higher emotional benefits of bonded monogamous commitment, but they are usually oblivious of this, because the deprivation is hidden behind the superficial immediate satisfaction available by the abuse of female bodies.  They are not even aware of what they are depriving themselves of, as they never had a chance to experience anything better due to being exposed to the oversexation too early during childhood.         


Regularly reading newsletters informing about really amazing results of research in neuroscience has led me to wonder, whether we may now be at the onset of the age of neuroscience.  It even has the potential to become the golden age for women, would neuroscience achieve the very significant goal of removing the slippery slope of the ongoing reinforcement of the worst male behaviors and attitudes.   

While women's mere complaints about suffering from commodification and asymmetrical attitudes (entry 543) are dismissed by men as female shortcomings, the growing evidence of effects observed by brain imaging methods is more difficult to disregard.    Hard and multiple evidence could finally have an impact upon men's persistent denial, how their own instincts are a real problem requiring to be dealt with.  

If this insight would be widely accepted, then this could lead to the application of medical science and neuroscience to develop methods to reduce men's needs for sexual homeostasis down to a beneficial level, where is seizes to damage women.   While the body of unattached females would no longer trigger any urges for abuse in men, they would instead always be attracted first to a woman's mind and personality, before they are attracted to her body.  

It would certainly be easy to create some pills, which combine the bonding of oxytocin and a reduction of libido or even some appliance for brain stimulation for this purpose.    A bonding helmet for men similar to Persinger's helmet would be a great invention.   

What a dream:   A helmet stimulating a man's brain, and even the worst jerk would become a caring, responsible, bonding, monogamous nice guy, feeling a need for commitment.    This would give women the option to reject any man, who refuses to use this helmet.   A helmet could thus free humanity from the scourge of male promiscuity.  

But I am taking my fantasy even one step further to mere science fiction.    If it were not just a helmet, which a man can decide to use or not, but if it were a chip to be planted in every man's brain, this could really create a paradise on earth: 
There would only be nice and decent men never hurting a woman.   No more rape, no more adultery, no more using and dumping, no more predators making women miserable by the degradation of pursuing them as prey.   No more prostitution, no more pornography,   A woman would be safe to chose, where she wants to be at any time of the day or night without risking to be attacked.  

All the above are far fetched and unrealistic dreams, as long as men generally do not have any insight, how much their excessive sexuality does not enhance but destroy the emotional quality of life, which is a potential of human cognition but only when it is unrestricted and undistorted by instincts.   The obstacle are all those men lacking any comprehension of the benefits for themselves of any method resulting  in the replacement  of the primitivity of their being animals with true humane happiness.  

 

Men's choice to either allow themselves to be controlled by their instincts or to control the instincts are rarely ever motivated by consideration of women's dignity or by the rational question of equality or by doubting the justification of asymmetrical attitudes (entry 543).

Throughout history and up to now, sometimes men have and still do fight against their instinctive urges for sexual homeostation, but the reason is always religious or philosophical and not any consideration for women.   They focus upon their success or failure concerning their self-control as a part of their self-esteem and self-worth.   They do not reject instinctive urges as a distortion of men's cognition concerning the attitude towards women, they do not value the avoidance of damage to women.    Sparing women is not their goal, it is only a lucky collateral benefit.     
The catholic priest, who succeeds in keeping his hands off his house keeper does not do this by respect and consideration for the woman.   He does this by fear of punishment in the afterlife and as a prevention of feeling a failure and looser due to his vows of celibacy.   

539. Movies Are Contributing To The Harm Done By Promiscuous Jerks

539.   Movies Are Contributing To The Harm Done By Promiscuous Jerks

I have been mentioning before, that promiscuous jerks are predisposed by instinctive animal urges, but that the harm done to the victims is magnified by the sad influence of the media propagating, enhancing and reinforcing the social norm of oversexation.  

A recent study gives some evidence, that the influence of movies is contributing to women's plight by supplying the wrong role models.    

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120717162743.htm

"Adolescents who are exposed to more sexual content in movies start having sex at younger ages, have more sexual partners, and are less likely to use condoms with casual sexual partners,"

"Many adolescents turn to movies to acquire "sexual scripts" that offer examples of how to behave when confronted with complicated emotional situations. For 57 percent of American adolescents between the ages of 14 and 16, the media is their greatest source of sexual information. They often don't differentiate between what they see on the screen and what they must confront in daily life ."

What this study indicates as the fatal influence of sexual scenes in general movies, can logically be expected to be even worse in pornographic movies. 


There are other sources providing some further contextual explanations.    

1.  Kanazawa has pointed out, that people are misled to confound the mere moving pictures of people on TV with personal friends, because the evolution of the human cognition had no yet enough time to adapt to the realistic technical representations of people.   The spontaneous and subconscious human perception does not distinguish sufficiently.    

http://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/pdfs/ehb2002.pdf

This has fatal consequences.   

Commercial movies are made to entertain people, not to educate them towards responsibility and consideration.   The stories of movies are not realistic.  They are in some way extreme and often dangerously pseudo-realistic.   Women are often abused in a drastic way, which in real life would be legally punished, but the severe harm experienced by them is omitted in the movies, because it is not entertaining.    They are damaged as objects, not harmed as humans.

Adolescents need the valid and beneficial role model of the happy serenity of a bonded monogamous couple.   But what should be encouraged most for imitation lacks any entertaining thrill.  Such a couple's happiness is as beneficial for the two partners themselves as it is dull and boring to the curiosity of gossiping and scandal enjoying bystanders, not matter if in real life or on a screen.    

Therefore the perception of the adolescents watching movies is mislead by confounding the images of the role models on the screen with real people appearing as an extension of their social environment.   Thus the influence of such role models to be imitated is dangerously strong.   

The adolescents are misled to consider the unreal, fantastic and extreme events and activities of the observed stories as if this were a valid representation of real life.

For the consumers of the movies and even more of pornography, abuse seems to end without any consequences, when the movie ends.  But in real life, abuse not only concerns a transgressor, but also a victim.   The abuser's onesided perception of having terminated the abusive event does not really end it.   Real life jerks cannot fully avoid to witness the visible reactions of the victims.  Even those jerks, who are not bothered or insensitive to whatever they do themselves often do notice the suffering, when the victims are their family members harmed by other jerks.

In short, real life harm has more or less observable consequences, which serve as a deterrent.   This deterrent is lacking in the movies.  The harm done by the promiscuity shown in the movies is hidden and omitted as if it did not exist.  Thus the movies mislead adolescents towards oblivion and denial of what they do to their victims by imitating the abuse.

2.   Milgram's experiment have been lately reinterpreted:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120718164947.htm

"The researchers hypothesized that, rather than obedience to authority, the participants' behavior might be better explained by their patterns of social identification. They surmised that conditions that encouraged identification with the experimenter (and, by extension, the scientific community) led participants to follow the experimenters' orders, while conditions that encouraged identification with the learner (and the general community) led participants to defy the experimenters' orders."

Explaining the physically barbaric act of applying electro shocks by identification can be generalized to explain the emotionally barbaric act of men's promiscuous objectifying of women's bodies also by the identification with the imitated actors in the movies.

527. Objectification And The Empathy Gap

527.  Objectification And The Empathy Gap

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy_gap

"A hot-cold empathy gap is a cognitive bias in which a person underestimates the influences of visceral drives, and instead attributes behavior primarily to other, nonvisceral factors."

"The crux of this idea is that human understanding is "state dependent"."

"Implications of the empathy gap were explored in the realm of sexual decision-making, where young men in an unaroused "cold state" failed to predict that in an aroused "hot state" they will be more likely to make risky sexual decisions,"

But this works also in the inverted situation, when they make risky sexual decision, which are risky not for themselves as predators, but for their unfortunate victims.
 
Men, who are driven by a high physiological urge of sexual dishomeostasis are often void of all empathy for those women, who are free of such an urge, but who crave instead for attachment and bonding.   Due to this empathy gap, some such men even have the delusion of their implicating women as instruments for their homeostation as being equally beneficial for the women.   These men are clueless, that in reality the women experience this implication as objectification and abuse.   They are unable to realistically evaluate the amount of pain, harm and even trauma, which they force upon the objectified women deprived of the reciprocity of commitment.

Outright jerks are dangerous beyond remedy, when they objectify women's bodies ruthlessly and with no consideration or responsibility.

As a consequence of the empathy gap, it is possible, that some men commodify women even though they do wish to be responsible and considerate.   They are so much caught in the biological trap of their instinctive urges, that when they use a woman's body without getting attached, this is due to their fallacy of not only assuming, but taking for granted the alleged reciprocity of the objectification by consent.  
Being tragically afflicted with their deficit of the emotional response of getting automatically attached by physical intimacy, their lack of empathy causes them to remain completely unaware of the devastation done to those women led on to onesided attachment before being dumped. 
Their objectification and commodification of women as a fallacy due to the empathy gap is a deficit in these men's education and maturation.   This fallacy is perpetuated by the fatality, that the afflicted men do not suffer themselves, instead imposing the suffering upon the women.    This fallacy is additionally enhanced by the social norm of the oversexation of society and the empathy is further damaged by the desensitization following the oversexation.  

523. Advertising As Evidence Of The Growing Desensitization To The Social Norm Of Oversexation

523.  Advertising As Evidence Of The Growing Desensitization To The Social Norm Of Oversexation

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120605113725.htm

"A recent study from the University of Georgia looked at sexual ads appearing in magazines over 30 years and found that the numbers are up."
"Using sex to sell everything from alcohol to banking services has increased over the years: 15 percent of ads used sex to sell in 1983; that percentage grew to 27 percent in 2003."

"Reichert said this upward trend in erotic ads is a reflection of society."

""Sex sells because it attracts attention. People are hard wired to notice sexually relevant information so ads with sexual content get noticed.""

""It takes more explicitness to grab our attention and arouse us than before," he said. "In the early 1900s, exposed arms and ankles of female models generated the same level of arousal as partially nude models do today. We can see during our lifetimes the changes in sexually explicit content on television, movies, books and other forms of media beyond just advertising.""

Generally, the spiral of habituation and desensitization followed by increasing the strength of the stimulation followed by more habituation and desensitization is well known from addictive agents, which are used for the purpose of stimulating the brain's pleasure center.   This is the case, no matter if the agent is physical like alcohol and drugs or non-physical like gambling.   Most addictions are predominantly detrimental for the addicted person himself.

The spiral of habituation and desensitization to the oversexation of everyday life followed by more drastic oversexation included into the social norm followed by more desensitization and so on is especially fatal, because it externalizes the suffering and damage to women as victims, while the afflicted men themselves succeed to avoid any conscious experience of harming themselves.  
Many men get habituated and desensitized to feeling entitled to the objectification and commodification of women and too often they unfortunately also have the power to impose this upon the victims. 
The women suffer, while too many desensitized men are so much addicted to the primitive physical pleasures of being animals, that they are completely oblivious of paying a very high price for this compensation by having lost and forfeited the true joy of bonded commitment. 

519. The Effects Of Desensitization On Perception

519.   The Effects Of Desensitization On Perception

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120515131719.htm

"everywhere you look, women's sexualized bodies are on display. A new study  [....] finds that both men and women see images of sexy women's bodies as objects, while they see sexy-looking men as people.

Psychological research has worked out that our brains see people and objects in different ways.

Pictures of people present a recognition problem when they're turned upside down, but pictures of objects don't have that problem.

People recognized right-side-up men better than upside-down men, suggesting that they were seeing the sexualized men as people. But the women in underwear weren't any harder to recognize when they were upside down -- which is consistent with the idea that people see sexy women as objects. There was no difference between male and female participants."

This study shows the real devastating harm caused by the social norm of the oversexation of society together with the media exposing everybody to its impact, even those, who do not wish to be desensitized.  

The results are scary.   Not only is the objectification limited to female bodies, but even worse, this perception is shared by the women.   

Taking into account men's physiological need for recurrent sexual homeostation as a biological reality supplies an explanation for the impact of the overwhelming influence of the ubiquitous desensitization by the media as far as it concerns men.   

Theoretically, men have different options of how to cope with this necessity.  There is the choice of either being a companion in committed monogamy or physical and virtual promiscuity.  This choice is determined by the emotional and intellectual influences of education and culture.  (In entry 101 -  Promiscuity is a Scourge of Humanity - I considered the existence of a promiscuity inhibition that predisposes people to pair bonding, until it is destroyed by desensitization.)   

But the desensitization by the oversexation of the media has deprived many men of a real choice, it leaves them only the two varieties of abuse by objectification of women's bodies, which is virtual promiscuity by the exposition to pornographic pictures and real promiscuity by copulating like dogs from the gutter.   They are desensitized to the state of complete oblivion of the fact, that women's objectified bodies contain a personality inside.    

Unfortunately for the women, the objectification of female bodies gives a huge benefit for their most primitive instincts to all those men, who are unaware of what they are losing by depriving themselves of the higher quality human benefits of emotional pair bonding.     

It is much more difficult to explain, why the women share the effect as is shown in the study.  Being degraded and abused as objects can certainly not be declared as beneficial to women by any person aware of the fact, that women have a personality, a mind, a cognition inside the body.    

Men's control over the media not only favors their own desensitization motivated by the urges of their instincts, obviously it also enables men to manipulate stupid and even average women into self-harming compliance with being used and degraded.   

It cannot rationally be denied, that many women today present their exterior in public in a way, that functions as a very strong appeal to elicit male instincts.  Many women are radiating the unequivocal message of being available as objects.   

This description of facts does not imply, that these women are consciously wanting, accepting or tolerating to be abused or to be the intended target of abuse.   They are the victims of the same devastating desensitization by the media as are the men.  But these women are double victims.  In addition to being the victims of male abuse, they are also the victims of themselves by enabling and contributing to the male abuse.  

The oversexation and objectification by the media has several effects upon women.  These effects are reinforcing each other:

Men have economic power and under extreme circumstances even physical power enabling them to supply for or withhold from women the means for survival and for a higher and more comfortable standard of life.  These men often use their power to coerce and manipulate women to serve their needs for homeostation.   

Whenever women subjectively experience the scarcity of men offering attractive resources,  they are prone to compete by deliberately sending triggers to men's instincts.  The strongest signals are considered as the best strategy to gain access to their resources.  It is a competition by self-objectification.    

People are at the risk of being oblivious of those effects, which never elicit any reactive behavior.   This is also the case for women, who do not usually experience male instinctive reactions to existing triggers, only because there is the contrast of other, even stronger triggers.    A woman in decent shorts and a t-shirt is the probable prey, when the alternative is a woman under a shador.   But the same woman has a good chance to be spared annoyance, when the alternative is a woman in a tiny bikini.  

Some women's competition for triggering men's instincts has led to a dangerous and dysfunctional extent of the self-sexualization of nearly all women, no matter if this helps or hinders their real intentions.  Fashion for average women has currently reached a generally accepted and tolerated amount of lascivity, that is biased to accommodate only the competition of the self-objectified women.  

For those other women, who do neither want to trigger instincts, nor to sell themselves nor to be abused, it hides men's true hazardous extent of susceptibility to triggers.  These women are only spared to experience themselves as triggering instincts as long as they are compared with those doing worse on purpose.  

Being a bit less lascivious does not protect them from being abused by desensitized men, whenever there is nobody else to serve as a stronger trigger.  By the general desensitization, these women are made unaware of how contra-productive this is to their real goals.     Being less lascivious than the extreme desensitized average is still too much, when a woman wants to attract a man with her brain and her personality. 

The more a woman is intelligent, educated and cultured, the more she is aware of the potential for the emotional benefits of a deep and dignified bonding with an intellectual companion and the more she suffers when degraded and objectified.   The ubiquitous oversexation is predominant in those media, which are catering mostly for the low and medium education level of the majority and not for the critical minority holding an elevated education.   
Thus the majority of women is encouraged to attempt selling their bodies as an acceptable way of getting advantages.   They are manipulated to not feel bad about selling themselves.  This attitude is enhanced in the media by omitting entirely the alternative of the true non-physical benefits of the monogamous companionship from women's awareness.   

The majority of women are not only kept ignorant and unaware, but they are manipulated to feel good about themselves as they are.   
They are the majority, and they have a detrimental impact on what is considered standard, normal and thus justifiable for all women.

I was wondering about the women participating in the study.  Do they really perceive all women as objects whenever presented visually as sexualized or do they distinguish between themselves as different from whom they would consider self-objectified and self-sexualized?  

Which led me to find the published original study, which suggests the female students could indeed be lacking to identify with the sexualized targets of the study:

https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/107553/1/Bernard%20et%20al.%20%282012%29.%20The%20sexualized%20body-inversion%20hypothesis.pdf

"Seventy-eight university students (41 men, 37 women; mean age = 20.5 years, SD = 2.7 years)

This suggests that, at a basic cognitive level, sexualized men were perceived as persons, whereas sexualized women were perceived as objects. Future research should examine why people perceive sexualized women as objects. One may expect that object-like recognition of women could be explained by a lack of identification with sexualized women among female participants and by sexual attraction among male participants

our findings showed no differences related to participant gender, which suggests that cultural beliefs that women are sex objects are shared by both men and women at a basic cognitive level."

509. The Fallacy Of Tantra

509.   The Fallacy Of Tantra 

The word Tantra in a man's profile makes me suspicious.   The word Tantra in the context of our western culture can have two meanings, both indicating something, that I prefer to avoid.  

Those who claim to be sophisticated, experience and define Tantra as one of many eastern woo-woo cults.  In entry 508, I already presented the debunking by the Great Tantra Challenge.   A man with such beliefs is not more my mindmate than is any other believer in some irrationality.   

But there is an even cruder interpretation, which reduces Tantra to a technique of instinct-enhancing gymnastics.  
While I react with repugnance towards the vulgarity of Penn & Teller, the last part of their show is nevertheless an example of how people are trained in Tantra:  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jFj_RL5QvM
 

The documentation shows people in the public activity of near-copulation, the pornographic display reminds me of the behavior of dogs from the gutter, void of any human dignity.    I cringe at the mere idea of getting involved with a man, who has participated in such a session.

It was not even clear, if the participants were committed couples.  But assuming them as couples attempting to improve something wrong between them, learning Tantra is not more an appropriate remedy for their problem as would be fighting a headache by hitting the head with a hammer.   The enhanced pain and enhanced pleasures are both only stronger sensation covering temporarily a persistent and not solved real problem.  

Long term happiness as a couple requires more than attractive bodies, but also specific psychological conditions.  When a couple is dissatisfied with what happens inside their bedroom, Tantra cannot be more than a pseudo remedy.  

Their real problems are very different, they are a consequence of the general mating fallacy.     
In many mammals including homo sapiens, the physiological male needs for sexual homeostasis and the motivation to pursue this by the stimulation of the pleasure center in the brain has evolved to trick people into procreation.  The infatuation between bodies has evolved to produce healthy offspring, but it has not evolved to last, especially not as long as people live today.    

The sad consequence of this is promiscuity.  

But there has also been the second evolution of human cognition including both emotional and intellectual needs and cognitive abilities to be guided by long-term thinking, non-physical enjoyments and self-control. 

The more the human intelligence has evolved enabling people acquiring education, sophistication and intellectuality, the more they are able to enjoy intellectual and creative pleasures.  Logically, in comparison with non-physical enjoyments, sexuality becomes a dull banality and less rewarding.  

The theoretical consequence is the cognitive ability to find happiness in monogamous close long-term bonding based upon intellectual and emotional intimacy.

In spite of the benefits of the advanced evolution of the cognition compared with the evolution of the more primitive instincts, many humans continue to fall into the trap of the general mating fallacy.   Due to this fallacy, people continue to consider sexual satisfaction as the purpose of and the reason for having a relationship and as the criterion for the choice of a mate.    

This fallacy is maintained and enhanced by the social norm of oversexation as already explained in entry 498 and entry 493.   

I would not be astonished, if some of the participants in the Tantra course were even singles and as mislead as to believe, that such skills would be of more advantage in the competition for a mate than personality and intelligence.   

Mistaking Tantra as a remedy when experiencing physical dissatisfaction as a couple is a behavioral expression of this general fallacy.  

1. How affective physical intimacy is experienced depends on the quality of the intellectual and emotional intimacy of the couple.   The quality of physical intimacy is a measuring device for the emotional quality of the relationship. 
   When there is a distortion of physical intimacy, it is absurd to apply mechanical remedies like Tantra.  Instead the couple needs to find out, what is wrong in the relationship.   When unresolved conflicts are damaging the emotional intimacy, then the couple needs to solve the conflict and repair the emotional bond.   When they restore the close bond, they also restore the non-verbal message of belonging together expressed by physical intimacy.    If external help is needed, couple's therapy improves much more than Tantra instruction. 
   
2. Some people are innately hedonists, and hedonists are the kind of consumers, who bring the most profits to capitalists.   Therefore they are the preferred role models as shown in entry 498.
   Others are Epicureans with predominantly cognitive and emotional needs.   It is absurd, when Epicureans are manipulated by the capitalistically propagated hedonistic social norms to attempt to experience the same as do hedonists.   Methods like Tantra are used to override Epicurean innate preferences.   
   Some Epicurean couples are mislead by the general fallacy to expect much more benefits from sexual activities, than there really are, when seen realistically with an unmanipulated mind.  Sexuality is nothing more than an instinct shared with animals, who have no cognition, who cannot enjoy anything better.   Animals have no choice, but humans do.
    
   Only maintaining a man's physiological homeostasis is a necessity for a relationship, but nothing more.  There is no rational reason to artificially attempt to get more pleasure from something, when it is experienced and considered as a mere banality.   
   
   If intelligent and educated people would be free from the detrimental social norm of oversexation and would instead fully recognize that they can enjoy a visit to a museum, a lecture or a good movie together more than bed activities, this would enable them to just shift their focus in a positive way to share, what they really enjoy most.    They would be out of the reach of capitalists selling Tantra.  

If a man believes in the possibility of improving a relationship by methods like Tantra, this scares me.   I am looking for a man as my mindmate, who shares the full awareness and recognition, that the quality of the affective physical intimacy depends only on the emotional quality of the relationship.

506. The Harmful Effects Of Pornography On Jerks And On Emotional Morons

506.   The Harmful Effects Of Pornography On Jerks And On Emotional Morons

As shown by a lot of scientific evidence in entry 505, exposure to pornography converts men into hazards to women with emotional needs.   

When men are knowingly harming women. they are ruthless jerks.   Others are emotional moron, who want to be decent and moral people, and who have a clear conscience believing to do nothing wrong.  They are oblivious or in denial of the real damage done by them.
This is a general observation, but it is also the case, when men harm first themselves by pornography and whose harming women is a direct consequence of having damaged themselves.  

When damaged men are outspoken in their refusal to commit, women have at least a fair chance to avoid being abused by them.   

But those men are the most dangerous, who appear, pretend or believe to want a companion, and whose bonding-disability is hidden until the discovery as the consequence of actually getting involved.   Women are mislead to agree to intimacy, which for them is the beginning of commitment.  They give and expect affectionate physical intimacy.  All they can get from the damaged men is being an object used in their mechanical copulations.  

These are two examples:

1.  The jerk:
 

I read somewhere on the web the desperate complaints of a guy, who has not only damaged himself by too much pornography, but who has reached the consciousness of suffering from it.    He describes with words, that resound his genuine pain and distress, how much he would want to have a woman as a companion.   But every time, when he wishes a woman to become his companion, the desensitization overrides everything else.  Physical involvement automatically converts the attempted mating into the subjective experience of another instance of his habitual abuse, and the woman meant as a companion is perceived as just one more degraded object and utility.    
This guy is a jerk, because he has recognized this effect upon himself, but in spite of knowing, what he does, he repeats his futile attempts to have a companionship.    Every time, when he tries again, he harms a trusting woman without feeling responsible.  
He is also jerk by being very selfish. His extreme exposure to pornography is the result of his making a good living by selling it.    He admits, that he continues his profitable business, knowingly inflicting the same harm upon others, in spite of being aware of having harmed himself.

2.  The emotional moron:

Recently I have corresponded for a while with a man, whose denial is remarkable.   He told me quite convincingly, that he really wants a long term monogamous relationship, and how much he is interested in communication and in companionship.   He put emphasis on his alleged appreciation for women.   He told me, that he never had a one-night-stand, and this of course made him attractive to me.  
When I asked him about his use of pornography, I thought it was merely a routine question.  I really expected a negative answer.    Instead I was consternated and horrified, when he admitted to having been consuming pornography habitually since over 40 years, whenever he was not in a relationship.   After 40 years, it is most probably an addiction.    

He naively considers pornography as a harmless everyday habit.   I have sent him the links to scientific articles about the harm done by pornography listed in entry 505.   Reading these articles had no impact upon his complete denial.   He claims that even if everybody else gets harmed by the exposure to huge amounts of pornography, he continues to believe, that he alone is the one exception, who has not been damaged.  

My mindmate to be found is neither a jerk nor an emotional moron.   He has no life history of abusing women, he has not desensitized himself neither by promiscuously using real bodies nor by exposing himself to the pornographic representations of abused bodies.

505. Science Indicating The Harm Of Pornography

505.   Science Indicating The Harm Of Pornography

For emotionally unharmed people, monogamy, commitment and exclusive pair-bonding are basic cognitive and emotional human needs. 
Promiscuity, polygyny, cheating, dumping, degrading and abusing others as mere bodies cause serious emotional harm to people.   

While the emotional benefits for individual human beings derived from the exclusivity of monogamy are the topic of romance in novels and movies, scientific research instead focuses mainly on general social, economic and evolutionary benefits of monogamy.  

Whenever I am reading men's profiles and the ubiquitous promiscuous and perverse wishes and goals, in addition to some feedback to this blog and to my own profiles, I sometimes feel as if I were an alien from another planet thrown into a filthy gutter.     

But luckily, I am not entirely alone with my evaluation of the damage done by the artificial social norm of an oversexed society.   There are learned and knowledgeable scientists studying the serious harm done by pornography.  

When already repeatedly expressing my disgust about the ubiquity of jerks openly pursuing promiscuity on the Internet and about the general oversexation of society, I had omitted to put special emphasis on pornography as the core of the problem.  Promiscuity is more an abstract concept, while pornography is its real life representation.  
The entire detrimental effects of the general oversexation including the subtle and indirect damage are like an iceberg, of which only one seventh is visible above the water.   This visible part is pornography, of which the harm can be shown most easily.     I already have called promiscuity a scourge of humanity, and so is pornography as its most visible expression.
 
While I was fully aware of the kind of damage done to users' brains by the exposure to pornography, I had not been aware to which extreme extensity and pervasiveness pornography had grown along with the ubiquity of the Internet.    While I cannot avoid being exposed to the general oversexation of daily life against my will, the access to pornography on the web requires proactive behavior.    By being able to avoid it, I was not fully aware the real magnitude of the problem.    

I attributed promiscuity directly to men's being physiologically driven by their strong animal instincts, this being aggravated by their having lost first the sensitivity to appreciate an emotional safe haven and subsequently also lacking the motivation to use self-control.  
Those promiscuous jerks and emotional psychopaths, whom I described throughout this blog as prototypes from my worst nightmares, have probably not become obnoxious and disgusting merely by an innate disposition.   Instead it is more probable, that the additional exposure to huge amounts of pornography has magnified their innate predisposition, until all their human qualities had been destroyed.  

It seems that pornography converts potential jerks into irreversible jerks.  

There has been done a lot of research on the different aspects of the harm done by pornography, and learned people have expressed and explained it much better, than I could do.   The following is a list of a some very good sources for further information.

Patrick F. Fagan: 
A Poison In The Home
http://www.diolaf.org/documents/Marriage%20and%20Family%20Life/Pornography%20Resources/a%20poison%20in%20the%20home.pdf
 

Patrick F. Fagan, Ph.D.
The Effects of Pornography on Individuals, Marriage, Family and Community
http://www.wifamilyaction.org/files/trya.campaigntoolbox.org/downloads/FRC_PornStudy_0.pdf
 

Mary Eberstadt  Mary Anne Layden 
THE SOCIAL COSTS OF PORNOGRAPHY
http://www.internetsafety101.org/upload/file/Social%20Costs%20of%20Pornography%20Report.pdf

Dr. Victor B. Cline:  
Pornography’s Effects On Adults and Children
http://www.stop.org.za/Victor%20Cline%27s%20Study.pdf

Ana J. Bridges 
Pornography's Effects on Interpersonal Relationships
http://www.socialcostsofpornography.com//Bridges_Pornographys_Effect_on_Interpersonal_Relationships.pdf
 

Jackson Katz: 
Pornography And Men's Consciousness
http://academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/genderandmedia/assignments/katz001.pdf

Rebecca Whisnant: 
Confronting pornography:  Some conceptual basics.
http://stoppornculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Whisnant-Confronting-Pornography.pdf

496. Demisexuality And Cognition

Demisexuality And Cognition

I claim:  Demisexuality (defined as "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." by http://outlawroad.tumblr.com/post/10265976595/gray-asexuality) is not a deviance, it is the appropriate evolutionary adaptation of sexuality as a part of the evolution of human cognition.  

Demisexuality as a concept causes a lot of confusion, as long as it is not explained as a part of a general model of human sexuality.   

The following model includes two main factors, sexual dishomeostasis and sexual behavior.    Because of biological differences, I am simplifying my model to only exploring the male side, which is determined by physiologically obvious indications.    In females, the procreation instinct interferes too much.  

The reasons for my simplification are shown in this research:
http://www.elainehatfield.com/79.pdf 
Cark/Hatfield: Gender differences in receptivity to sexual offers
In two studies, when a stranger was approached by a woman saying "I have been noticing you around campus.  I find you to be very attractive." and "Would you go to bed with me tonight?", the majority of men agreed.   In 1978, 75% did, in 1982, 69%.   In the reverse situation, all woman approached by a man refused.

The study was done on college students.  Such women have above average education and intelligence and no pressing need to marry a provider.   The men are at an age of high biological libido and before being restricted with obligations to a wife and children.  
Therefore the proportion of how many men agreed in this study is not representative for other social and cultural groups.  
But the different reaction of men compared with women in this study allows to conclude, that the reason for self-labeling as demisexual by considering it as a deviance is also different for men and for women.  
It is predominantly a male problem to experience deviance from the social norm of oversexation as a physiological deficit.  Females are under social pressure to act against their natural inclination and perceive their own demisexuality as a social deviance.   I explained this already in entry 493. (The Social Norm Of The Drooling Men)

My model of male sexuality is based upon two factors:

• Perceived sexual dishomeostasis
• Sexual behavior as a reaction to the presence and availability of a target body

As I mentioned before, I consider the strength of the libido in every age group of men as a continuum with a distribution along a bell curve.   The perceived strength and urge of sexual dishomeostasis represent the innate strength of the libido. As this is a model, I omit the effects of health issues.

Simplified, at both extreme ends of the scale, the libido determines the sexual behavior.   In the middle of the bell curve, sexuality is controlled and modified by human cognition.

1.  At one extreme end of the curve are the dangerous promiscuous jerks, who are so oversexed with high libido, that they are not only drooling over every woman's body but who are ruthless emotional psychopaths, who use and discard women without any conscience or consideration, even by force and coercion.  

2.  At the other extreme of the bell curve are the truly nonsexuals, who have no or very little libido and no need for sexual homeostation.

3.  In the middle of the bell curve, there is a moderate perception of dishomeostasis, but the experience and practice of sexuality is modified and controlled by cognition.   The cognitive control over sexual reactiveness to the perception of stimuli is a byproduct of the evolution of cognition.   

Without cognition, a man would not be different from any non-human animal.  A man without cognition and in the state of the recurrent dishomeostasis after the latency time since his last copulation, would drool over every woman's body, who is genetically suitable to trigger his instincts.   In the animal world, whenever a male feels dishomeostasis and perceives a target body, sexual behavior is the automatic reaction of a robot determined by instincts only.  

In this middle part of the bell curve of libido, there are several possible reasons, why at a given moment an available target body does not lead to sexual behavior.   A target body is the body of a woman, who is a stranger and whose physical attributes are such, that they trigger the automatic sexual behavior of every high libido jerk.  

3.1.  A man in a relationship, which maintains his homeostasis, never gets into the situation of being driven by so much dishomeostasis, that he is tempted to make use of the target body.   This situation shows the benefits of bonded and committed monogamy.  

3.2.  Other needs, urges and sensations are temporarily stronger than the stimulation by the target body, examples are hunger, fatigue, danger, sickness.   This effect limits the behavior of all men, no matter the strength of the libido.  

3.3.  A man has enough cognitive control to resist the instinctive responsiveness to the target body.   In contrast to animals, humans do not react automatically to stimuli.   Human cognition allows to base decisions upon the memory of past experiences, the knowledge of consequences and the knowledge of not directly visible additional factors.    The refusal to react to a target body with sexual behavior can be based upon the anticipation of better alternatives or of the unwanted consequences.   This rational evaluation can avoid the plight of some women, but it does not avoid those men's behavior, who have come to the conclusion, that they can get away with the abuse of a woman.   

3.4. A man's cognition interferes with the responsiveness to the target body.   This is, what is usually defined as demisexuality.   But this is more complex, because the human cognition can override instincts on several different levels of demisexuality.

Level 1.   Stimuli are filtered from perception, before they reach the brain.

• Some people with autism and Asperger's are known to be oblivious to incoming non-verbal signals.   An example are persons, who bore others with endless monologues, because they are mindblind to the non-verbal expression of others' boredom, annoyance, disapproval.
  It is possible, that the sexual stimuli from the target body can be filtered the same way.   I have been speculating before, that there is a personality type, that is a part of Asperger's, but which can also be found in people, who are far from having any clinically relevant symptoms.   Maybe demisexuality is a part of this personality.    

Level 2.  Cognitive needs are stronger than physical needs. 

Stimuli from the target body are discarded or deactivated subconsciously, when emotional needs are stronger.  Such cognitive and emotional needs can be:

• The needs to feel self-confidence, self-esteem and self-worth in accordance with an identity as a person with morals, education and intelligence.   In this identity, the body is only the container and supply system for the brain.  
• A value system, in which human cognition is valued highly, while animal instincts are despised.   There is a strong need to avoid cognitive dissonance by living up to the own standards.
• An Epicurean personality, to which emotional and intellectual stimulation causes generally stronger pleasure and joy than physical stimulation.   This includes the subjective experience of intellectual intimacy as very beneficial.
• Sensitivity and empathy blocking the perception of sexual stimuli, unless the partner shows unequivocal signs of happiness and attachment

Level 3.  Competing conscious stimuli

The stranger inside the target body not only sends out sexual stimuli, but also other stimuli, that are competing and by being stronger, override any sexual attraction on a conscious level.   

• Disgust sensitivity to a stranger's body impedes promiscuity.  Only a slow process of creating emotional closeness can be strong enough to override the disgust.   More in entry 108.   (Promiscuity and Disgust Sensitivity)
• Repulsion or fear based upon nonverbal signals or knowledge about the person as for example can be a contagious sickness or a criminal record.   

4.  The social norm has a strong impact upon what sexual behavior men consider as appropriate, no matter how much or how little it corresponds with their real needs determined by their place on the bell curve of libido.  In entry 493  (The Social Norm Of The Drooling Men), I pointed out the detrimental effects of the social norm of extremely and unrealistically high libido for all men.   But the social norm of celibacy, that prevents the catholic priests from marrying the housekeeper, with whom they have developed a monogamous attachment, is equally unrealistic.   
  
There is a need for a new social norm, which focuses upon both, the realistic recognition and acceptance of every man's individual level of libido and upon consideration and recognition of the real needs of women.  
The drooling promiscuous jerks, who are not controlled by cognition, are deviant and sick.   It is absurd to consider them as the role models for men in the current social norm.    A social norm is most suitable, when it fits best the needs of the majority, while it controls the hazard of the deviant and protects the weak and vulnerable.  

Monogamy is the most suitable concept for the men in the middle part of the bell curve, whose libido is at a healthy medium level.    Monogamy provides the best protection for women against being hurt and harmed.  
A new social norm of moderate libido and monogamy is the most appropriate to suit the actual evolutionary level of the human cognition. The oversexation of societies, which value the high libido of the men, who drool over every woman's body, is outdated and anachronistic.  

493. The Social Norm Of The Drooling Men

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.   

"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.

457. Desensitization To Violence

Desensitization To Violence

Here is some evidence for the desensitization of male brains to violence.   

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111130095251.htm

"Sustained changes in the region of the brain associated with cognitive function and emotional control were found in young adult men after one week of playing violent video games"

"For the first time, we have found that a sample of randomly assigned young adults showed less activation in certain frontal brain regions following a week of playing violent video games at home," said Yang Wang, ....."The affected brain regions are important for controlling emotion and aggressive behavior."

""These findings indicate that violent video game play has a long-term effect on brain functioning," Dr. Wang said. "These effects may translate into behavioral changes over longer periods of game play.""

The evidence for desensitization to violence can be taken as an indication, that the harm done to monogamous women by promiscuous men is most probably caused by the desensitization of male brains as a consequence of the ubiquitous oversexation of the media, of everyday life and of the easy availability of pornography.  

Unfortunately, violence is recognized by men as a problem, because the victims are often men, so men are themselves at  risk.    The desensitization to promiscuity is not equally recognized as a problem, because men profit, and only women are the suffering victims.   

407. Promiscuity Is The Real Cause Of Romance Scams

Promiscuity Is The Real Cause Of Romance Scams

"New online research led by the University of Leicester reveals that over 200,000 people living in Britain may have fallen victim to online romance scams"

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110927192347.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fscience_society+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Science+%26+Society+News%29

I claim, that the success of online romance scams is caused by the difference between what is available and what men are looking for driven by their instincts.    Male animal instincts and promiscuity are the cause of the scammers' success.    If the same portion of women as of men would want or accept flings instead of commitment, if there were an equilibrium of both genders looking for the same kind of relationships, there were no successful scammers.  

The basic of market economy is the simple fact, that the more something is scarce, the more people are willing to pay for it.  Nobody would pay for what is free and plentiful.  By their innate animal instincts, men have a much higher need for sexual homeostasis by using indiscriminately any haphazard female body than what is available for free.    

Therefore men can get sexual homeostation by force, manipulation or earn it, but it is not freely available.    They can 'buy' homeostation by giving a decent woman what she wants, monogamy, commitment, reliability.   They can otherwise buy homeostation by paying money.   Men with enough money and/or who are lacking the qualities to be accepted by a monogamous women prefer to just buy homoestation by money.   The flourishing markets of prostitution and pornography provide ample evidence of this.    If women were as promiscuous by instinct as are most men, there were no market.  

Unfortunately the tolerance and even positive general acceptance of promiscuity blurs the fact, that it is a man's problem, which is detrimental to women.     But the media responsible for the brainwashing of people are usually dominated by men.  Often they are influential enough to brainwash even women to lose all awarenes of what is beneficial and what is detrimental for themselves.  
Men's affliction to need sexual homeostasis is bad enough as it is by causing urges.   But the oversexation and growing tolerance and condoning of promiscuity in many modern societies has done a lot of damage even to men themselves, who deprive themselves of what would be most beneficial for them long-term.  I described this in entry 404 about men's marshmallow test.    

Many men, who are ignorant of evolutionary biology, have been brainwashed to believe the myth, that women are only repressed from being as promiscuous as men.    Instead of earning homeostation by self-control and monogamy, they annoy decent women with their attempts to use their bodies and then they are surprised to get rejected.    The tragedy of this myth is that the men, who project their own promiscuity upon women, are deprived of the awareness of the emotional damage of promiscuity upon monogamous women.    The women, who are brainwashed by this myth, are even more pathetic, because until they know better by experience, they reinforce men's belief in this myth.   


1.  Men as targets.

Scammers are taking advantage of this market situation.  Their male bait are bodies of women, that make the targets drool over their pictures.   The targets are made not only to believe to be able to buy the gratitude of the bait, but also to buy more control over her than they can expect to gain over women from their own country.   

2.  Women as targets.  

Being a woman, I myself have been either contacted by hundreds of scammers or have seen their profiles.   The scammers' baits are the fiction of monogamous, committing men, who have the morals and self-control not to be promiscuous.   Their targets are especially elderly lonely women, whom they expect to be most prone to have money and to be of a generation less tolerant to the uncommitted use of women's bodies.   
I know, how to recognize them, mainly because they are lacking the intellectual capacities of mature university educated men and because their fiction is created to attract their more typical targets, who are religious breeders.     
Those many men, who are brainwashed to believe in the myth of female promiscuity, express in their profiles not only, that they are looking for a long term relationship, but also their wish or willingness to have flings, non-strings-attached fun, friends with benefits and such.    They are ignorant, that this way they are repulsive to decent women and drive them to prefer the scammers.   The targets get attracted by the bait of the profiles of those fictitious monogamous men, who seem to be the rare pearls in the gutter of promiscuity.   Tragically they are scammers instead.   

In entry 101 I already declared promiscuity as a scourge of humanity.   Male promiscuity and the male delusion of female promiscuity are also enabling the romance scams.  That is one more reason to call it a scourge.