722. Until Death Do Us Part

722.  Until Death Do Us Part

"Archaeologists have uncovered a trove of relics and remains at Chapel of St Morrell in Leicestershire. Some relationships last a lifetime -- and archaeologists have discovered that they can last even longer after unearthing two skeletons at a lost chapel in Leicestershire that have been holding hands for 700 years."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140918091224.htm

More info:

http://ulasnews.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/hallatons-lost-chapel/

Here is another picture of a couple buried together:

http://www.dograt.com/2007/02/09/eternal-embrace/

I found no information concerning the ages of the dead couples.  Without a need to be converted into trees like the mythological Baucis and Philemon, I want to find a mindmate to grow old together, and it were an ideal to also die at the same time.  

699. Is The Own Body A Merchandise?

699.   Is The Own Body A Merchandise?

"French MPs have approved a bill that will penalise anyone paying for sex.

The bill, which was adopted by a vote of 268 to 138, with 79 abstentions, establishes a fine of at least 1,500 euros ($2,030) for buying sexual acts."

"The 1,500-euro fine is for first offenders - subsequent offences could be more than double that."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25217185

There are some more articles concerning the controversial aspects.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/09/opinion/frances-new-approach-to-curbing-prostitution.html

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/05/france-s-new-prostitution-law-targets-johns-ignites-national-debate.html
 

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2013/12/across-europe-growing-sense-legalized-prostitution-isnt-working/7777/

Opposition to the new law comes not only from men, but also from misguided feminists, who are probably too desensitized to be aware of the fallacy of their thinking.  

Prostitution fills the asymmetrical gap between the magnitude of most men's biological urges and the lack of the same amount and urgency in the majority of women.   If women would enjoy copulation without emotional attachment and without commitment as much as men, enough women would want this and no men would have a reason to pay for it.
  
Prostitution is enabled by the combination of the asymmetrical male urges and men's onesided advantages of physical and/or economical power.

There are two fallacies in the demand for legalized prostitution:

Fallacy 1.

Prostitution is called sex work.   Whenever there is no direct coercion, it is alleged and claimed to be a more or less fair deal.  
It would only be a fair deal and a free choice in the case, when a woman has a real, not only a legal right and chance to get all the schooling and training she wants and a well paid agreeable job, and when in spite of this she nevertheless prefers to sell the self-abuse of her body.     
Defining a woman's last straw in a dire need for survival as a free choice and as a fair deal is a fallacy of desensitized people. 

Fallacy 2.

There is a claim, that women should be completely free to do with their own bodies, whatever they want, including selling it.  

If this is to be accepted, then this has to be applied fully and with no other restrictions.   Women then should be given the full freedom of choice, how to use their bodies as a source of an income and what kind of harm they are most willing to suffer.
  
Right now, except selling blood, in most countries other methods are not legally available.   If there are illegal practices, the owner of the bodies get themselves very little, while criminal agencies make profit.   

Comparing the non-financial costs and benefits, prostitution is undoubtedly the worst option for the abused women themselves:

1.  Prostitution 

When a prostitute sells her self-abuse, she serves as a toilet for a selfish man's body waste. 

The costs for the women are the disgust and agony during the recurrent abuse and the long-term psychological and physical damage, for example often substance abuse and the inability to ever emotionally bond with a man.
 

The only benefits are what the abusers perceive as pleasure.  

2.  Selling body parts

Would the women be allowed the choice to sell a kidney (or any other body part, which can be sold without disabling oneself) instead, this would not merely enable a man to acquire selfish abuse, but it would help someone to survive and it would also safe resources needed for the general health care.   Recurrent dialysis is extremely expensive and inconvenient.   A woman (or any person) could be paid the amount of money saved by preventing some years of dialysis.   

The costs for the women are the risk of an operation and the loss of one kidney.  
 

The benefits are for all persons getting off dialysis and having a normal life with a working kidney.

3.  Selling unwanted babies.

Even the uterus and its contents are a part of a woman's body.  If unwillingly pregnant women are allowed any choice at all, it is between abortion and donating the child for adoption.  While it is considered as suitable to impose the paid more general abuse upon women's reproductive area for the mere satisfaction of men's instincts, there is no logical reason, why they should not be allowed to sell the use of the filled uterus instead.    
Women should have the right to the alternative of selling unwanted children or of producing babies for other people as surrogate mothers.  This should be a fair option for the avoidance of the agony of prostitution.  

The costs for the women are the inconvenience, suffering and expenses of pregnancy and giving birth.   For those women, who do not want to breed, there are no emotional costs. 

The benefits are the fulfilling of the breeding urges of those people, who are unhappy without children.  They would be spared futile fertility treatment and more babies would be available to be adopted.  The benefits are also for the babies, who grow up as wanted.

 

Selling body parts and babies has to be restricted as a direct deal between the giver and the health insurance or the receiver, without any greedy third party making profit from it.

Of course I cannot know it, but I am convinced, that many prostitutes would prefer to sell a body part or a baby, if only they were allowed to do this to prevent the agony of being abused. 

Either the own body is a merchandise to be freely used by its owner, then all forms of use have to be legal.   If it is not a merchandise, then prostitution cannot be defined as an exception, only because those powerful men with the influence over legislation are too often themselves the abusers wishing to perpetuate their privileges.   

 

It is an outrage that even in rich countries, some women are deprived of any other means of survival except the use of their bodies.   But it is even more an outrage, that these women are not even allowed a fair choice, how to use their bodies to acquire survival with the least harm for themselves.   

As long as it is considered as morally wrong to sell body parts or a baby, prostitution cannot, neither logically nor ethically, be justified by the right of women to do with their body, what they want.  
As long as it is legally impossible to sell a body part or a baby, men taking advantage of women selling self-abuse as this being their only legal option are abusers, who deserve to be punished.  

647. Masculinity Is Obsolete And An Anachronism

647.  Masculinity Is Obsolete And An Anachronism

Ruthless capitalistic people do not hesitate to enhance their profit, and propagating masculinity is just one example:

"Where male attitudes are concerned, a new study implicates magazine advertisements specifically aimed at men as helping to reinforce a certain set of views on masculinity termed "hyper-masculinity.""

"Hyper-masculinity is an extreme form of masculine gender ideology comprising four main components: toughness, violence, dangerousness and calloused attitudes toward women and sex."

"Vokey's results are consistent with considerable prior research showing a positive association between hyper-masculine beliefs and a host of social and health problems, such as dangerous driving, drug use and violence towards women. "

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130228113359.htm

Masculinity is not only a hazard to women and sometimes also to other men, it is also obsolete and an anachronism when considering the circumstances of modern life.


What is usually defined and understood by the word masculinity, are either physical traits or traits and behaviors derived thereof. 

• Strength, endurance, stamina, high libido
• Muscles, speed and fitness acquired by physical exercise
• Skills acquired by sports and exercises like catching and throwing objects, fighting, riding, climbing
• Aggression, violence, competition, risk taking, fearlessness, domination.

Masculinity does not include any intelligence and cognitive skills, which depend exclusively upon the quality of the brain.   Masculinity is understood as what distinguishes men from women.   The cognitive qualities, which women can have as much as men, are not used to define masculinity.    This reduces masculinity to physical traits.
Men can easily demonstrate their innate physical advantage by beating up, abusing and raping defenseless women, while any male claim of higher intelligence contradicts reality.   Only fools deny the evidence of women's cognitive equality.       

A positive attitude to their masculinity is men's pathetic attempt to interpret their biological advantage of merely physical strength as an alleged superiority.    It really is both sad and ludicrous to consider it a sign of superiority, when someone is physically able to force his will upon a helpless victim.


In prehistoric times the survival of hunter and gatherer societies depended upon men's attributes of masculinity.  

• Hunting for food and fighting for the protection against wild animals and marauders required physically strong and fit men, who cultivated masculinity.   
• Leaders had to proof their abilities by fighting and competing over other men.    
• When resources were extremely scarce, fighting over access to the resources was fighting over who would live and who would perish.  
• High male libido deprived women of a choice and caused many unwanted pregnancies.  This may have contributed to the survival of the human species by compensating for the high mortality.

Today, masculinity is obsolete.  

• Any intelligent, trained and educated person of both genders even with physical disabilities can do research and construct or invent machines, tools, appliances, chemicals, which are stronger and faster and more efficient than any prototype of an extreme masculine man could ever be.   
• Politicians, leaders, rulers, bosses need to be elected for their wisdom, responsibility, justice, intelligence, education and the ability to cooperate and to communicate.   Those who get to the top by successful fighting are the wrong ones to be there.   I suspect that masculinity contributes to the Peter principle.   
• Today, the global resources suffice for a modest, frugal life for all living humans, a fair distribution requires cooperation.   Fighting over resources today is fighting for unjust greed, not for basic survival.
• Today, male high libido causes women's suffering and global overpopulation.   Today, those who invent the best and safest birth control methods compensate for the damage, that male libido does.  

Today, many of those people of both genders, whose qualities enable them to contribute to the technological, medical, chemical and social progress, would have been failures and losers as cave men.  The females would have been wasted as breeders.    Femininity is as obsolete as is masculinity.   


When persons of both genders are wearing comfortable clothes like jeans and t-shirts, the most prominent visual distinction between natural and unmodified men and women would be a man's beard.   A beard is in fact the only distinctive sign a man's maleness, which neither does harm women nor can be used to do so by a man's choice.  
It is weird and absurd, that men shave off this sign of being men and then they compensate for the lost distinction by enhancing and accentuating what they consider as masculinity and what makes them hazardous.    A man with a beard presents himself so unmistakably as a man, that neither muscles nor aggression can add anything to this.     


What is needed is a model of humanity, which is contrasted with animality and which replaces the gender distinction.  Those cognitive qualities, which are the enabler of progress are gender-neutral.
Only primitive fools derive their identity from their masculinity and as being different from women.   Wise intellectual men derive their identity from the cognitive qualities of their brains.  They recognize this as shared with women but as a decisive distinction from animals.

Nothing of what I and many other educated and intelligent women wish to share with a man requires masculinity.   

503. Evolution And Monogamy

503.  Evolution And Monogamy

In entry 502, I pointed out, that human instinctive behavior has not yet evolved to adapt to the novelty situation of being free from survival needs, in spite of the cognitive reality, that emotional and intellectual needs have become strong influences upon human behavior.   
Under the pressure of survival needs people are coerced to make choices, which they would not make, were they free to choose by taking full account of their emotional needs.  

In this study, women's choice between polygyny and monogamy is explained by the survival benefits of the choice.   It is a very good example of the force of circumstantial restrictions upon options.   

Sathoshi Kanazawa / Mary C. Still:
Why monogamy?

http://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/SF1999.pdf

"If resource inequality among men is great, women choose to marry polygynously and the polygynous institution of marriage emerges. If resource inequality among men is small, women choose to marry monogamously and the monogamous institution of marriage emerges. The theory explains the historical shift from polygyny to monogamy as a result of the gradual decline of inequality among men."

The explanation makes perfect logical sense, as long as the options of the choice between monogamy and polygamy are restricted to those for physical survival.    When the choice of a man is a choice between starving and eating, the wish for an exclusive attachment is an unobtainable luxury.   There is no free cognitive choice considering also emotional needs.

Today the environment in the rich modern societies offers for the first time in history the true freedom of choice.    Relieved from the pressure of physical survival struggles, people are now able to sense and perceive their emotional and intellectual needs.   In this situation, monogamy is the best cognitive choice (entry 497)

10,000 and even 1,000 years ago, the situation was very different.   Physical survival depended upon access to scarce resources of food, clothing, firewood, shelter.   The total availability of these resources to a community, village or group was limited.   Even under the best favorable circumstances, people could not produce much surplus above their own needs.

• Everyday chores were time consuming.   Water had to be carried from the well, cooking required a fire and fire wood.      
• Without machinery, the production of all goods were slow and limited.  
• Food production depended on the climate.    Food had to be produced locally.
• Skills and knowledge were limited. 

As long as the access to fertile land, forest and water was unrestricted to all people, the sum of the resources allowed the survival of everybody on an equal low level.   But any inequality of power over such resources meant, that only the powerful men had the means to survive, while there was not enough left for everybody else.  Medieval systems of rich landowners exploiting their tenants are examples.      


Under such circumstances, a woman's theoretical choice between being the exclusive wife of a poor monogamous man and sharing a rich powerful man's wealth with other wives was not a free choice.   Her emotional needs were an unobtainable luxury beyond her reach, when the price for one poor man's emotional exclusive attachment was perishing and starvation for her and her offspring. 

This situation was aggravated by the lack of safe methods of family planning.   The woman was not even able to choose the monogamous poor man by restricting the number of offspring to match his resources. 

The woman's choice was further determined by her parents' power over her.  Under the pressure of lacking sufficient resources to keep all their children alive, parents coerced their daughters by dire necessity into the choice of the man, who could maintain them, even if she had to share him in a polygynous arrangement.    


Evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology are very valuable methods to explain hidden instinctive tendencies toward certain behaviors.   But it is a fallacy to confound explanations with justification, connivance or acquiescence.  

It is historical reality, that the superior physical strength of men allowed them to first exclude women from independent access to the survival resources and that the physically strongest men usurped greedily a disproportionally high share of the totally available resources.  This enabled a minority of men to gain control over the majority of women. 

Today the cognitive perception of non-material needs are just as much a reality, including the ability to act morally, to distinguish between justice and injustice and to suffer excruciating emotional pain as the victim of injustice.   Today we have reached a situation, where the instinctive reactions, that were helpful in a different environment, have become obsolete and detrimental.   

The most rational and least instinctive people are guided by their cognition to new adaptive behaviors to the changed environment, while the majority are still driven too much by dysfunctional and anachronistic instincts.


Therefore no scientific explanation of the choice of polygyny in the past by reasons of necessity can be morally used to deny people in the present society their emotional needs for the safe haven of a monogamous exclusive commitment.    No allegedly free choice for polygamy in the past is a valid excuse today for the promiscuous cheating and dumping by desensitized jerks.
When scientific research uncovers instinctive tendencies, which hurt others emotionally, then this is a reason to teach people enhanced awareness to fight their subconscious harmful tendencies, it is not justifiable to use scientific discoveries as an excuse for cruelty.     

502. Evolution, Survival And Emotional Needs

502.  Evolution, Survival And Emotional Needs

Bertold Brecht said it quite drastically "Erst kommt das Fressen, und dann die Moral".   There are different ways to translate this, because morals can be understood differently.   The translation as 'a hungry man has no conscience' may be the closest to Brecht's meaning. 
But it can also be translated like this: 'There are no morals, unless there is grub.'   In this sense, morals are more generally any cognitive influence on the behavior.  Usually (there are exceptions), as long as someone is driven by urgent and strong physical deprivations, non-physical cognitive needs are not strong enough to determine or even influence the behavior and all emotional needs are a luxury beyond imagination.   

I have already mentioned the theory of the environment of the evolutionary adaptation.   Today we life in an environment, that has drastically changed from what the human brain has adapted to by evolution, which according to this theory is the savanna as it was about 10,000 years ago.   But this environment had only insignificantly changed until a few centuries ago.   The most drastic changes for the majority of the population in the rich western countries came only during the last century.    

Only today's physical comfort and security of unlimited food supply, bright electrical light, warm water from the tap, central heating in sturdy buildings, health care, laws and law enforcement, safe birth control and nearly unlimited access to information provide people with an environment, in which they now are free to be fully aware of their emotional needs.    

This freedom to have full access to cognitive awareness is so new, that there has not been enough time to adapt the innate automatic responses for appropriate coping with emotional needs.      People have not yet learned to use their cognition as a tool to adapt to their emotional reality.   Today people are still driven by strong instincts, impulses and tendencies, that are dysfunctional in our highly technical environment:  

1.  The human brain has had not time yet to evolve sufficiently to the difference between real people and technically reproduced life-imitating representation of voices, still and moving pictures, because these only exist since about a century.   

2.  The human cognition has evolved as an evolutionary adaptation to survive successfully.   The sensitivity to have emotional, intellectual needs and to suffer pain, when such needs are not met, are only a byproduct of the evolution of cognition.  But these non-material and non-physical needs were hidden from the awareness by the much stronger dire necessity of a daily struggle for physical survival needs.   Someone at the point of starvation and perishing due to lack of shelter or serious disease has no awareness for feelings like dignity and appreciation.  Being hidden from awareness, the by-product did not influence evolution.     

Not being aware of emotional needs like for attachment and trust and of intellectual needs like for knowledge and comprehension while being under the pressure of hunger and life threatening perils is like being unable to hear the birds sing underneath the much louder noise of an electrical drill.  The evolutionary adaptation of human instincts is like being adapted to permanent loud noise.   When the electric drill is turned off, someone hearing the birds for the first time does not know, that what he hears as an irritating sound are birds.   Since in the recently changed environment the permanent threat of perishing has been removed, this has left people without sufficient innate understanding for the own and even more for the expressed emotional needs of others.     Whatever innate empathy and mirror neurons there are, they do not suffice to enable people to avoid hurting and harming others without a cognitive decision to do so.          

The tragedy of today's situation in modern rich countries is the discrepancy of people still treating others as the same ruthless instinctive driven animals in the savanna, while the comfort and security of the standard of life has freed the cognition and enhanced the perception for pain and suffering.     

Would people only ignore their own emotional needs, they would only harm themselves.   But the worst tragedy is the harm done to others due to the general oblivion and denial of emotional needs.   While people suffer emotional pain as targets of behavior, they continue to be unaware of inflicting the exact same pain on others, when they act driven by their own instincts.

The choice of how to interact with the other gender is a good example.    Today's environment allows everybody to attempt happiness in a monogamous committed relationship with one partner.    Instead men continue to promiscuously abuse women's body, and women are driven by greed to exploit men.   These causes suffering and makes them gullible customers for psychopharmaceuticals as already explained in entry 498.