390. The Emotional Anhedonia Of Jerks

The Emotional Anhedonia Of Jerks

This continues entry 389, where I defined hedonists as persons, whose pleasure center is more or less insensitive and imperceptive to emotional and non-physical stimulation.   
One of the emotions, that hedonists are deprived of, is feeling affection.  Affection is the stimulation of the pleasure center by the mere inactive presence of a significant and valued other person, even while this person does nothing beneficial and is at this moment not physically stimulating to the pleasure center.  
Affection between a couple logically leads to the wish to be together, because this causes good feelings.    Affection is an important part of caring love, affection causes a couple to feel bonded and to enhance this feeling reciprocally.   

Commitment means to be bound by certain obligations like sharing decisions and being reliably and predictable there for the other.   Affection causes a partner to be bound by intrinsic commitment.   When feeling intrinsic commitment like affection as a positive stimulation for the pleasure center, then what otherwise would be defined as even burdensome obligations, is instead experienced as a natural own wish to express love, care and affection.  


As long as I made the mistake of projecting on men my own innate reaction, that getting physically involved automatically creates affection, bonding and commitment, I have been puzzled, why and how it is possible, that so many men are jerks, who ruthlessly use a woman as a commodity without feeling guilty.   

By now I have come to the conclusion, that the core problem is their inability to feel affection for a partner.   What I called bonding disability before, it is the lack of feeling connected by affection, in spite of getting sporadic or recurrent benefits in the form of physical pleasure from her.    While affection motivates a couple to care reciprocally for their emotional and physical wellbeing, without affection there is onesided exploitation and abuse.    

Unfortunately for the woman, in the beginning of a relationship, before both partners know each other well enough, the behavior of a man driven by strong sexual dishomeostasis to gain access to the woman's body shows behaviors, that are easily confounded with affection.     Once he has succeeded and is in a state of temporary homeostasis, the truth becomes obvious.    The bonded man continues to express affection, the man in control over a source of benefits seizes the behaviors, that had appeared as affection, because he has reached his goal.  

Anhedonia is described as a symptom of several clinical disorders, when there is a general insensitivity to feeling pleasure in spite of the presence of stimuli.   But I did not find any information about any form of innate anhedonia as a personality trait, which is only partial and limited to non-physical stimulation.    So this is my speculation:  There exists an innate emotional anhedonia, which includes an inability to feed affection, and which as a consequence makes instinct driven men use women's bodies without commitment.   

Emotional anhedonia deprives hedonists of the ability to experience affection both as a motivation for the own behavior and also when expressed by the partner.    This does not only cause the hedonist to perceive a woman as a commodity, it also deprives the hedonist from the major information input about what to expect concerning the partner's motivation to remain with him.   The hedonist cannot calculate the probability of her staying with him by the information from her expression of love and affection, because he is mindblind to perceive them as such.    

Therefore unfortunately for the woman, the hedonist, who gets benefits from her as from a commodity, knows only one method to ascertain her future availability.   This method is  domination by power and control over her. 


Hedonists are not automatically jerks.   As long as hedonists are aware of their limitations, they can choose fellow hedonists as partners.    Hedonists can be realistic and rational and accept the principle of earning and of a fair balance of giving and receiving.    A hedonist can agree upon extrinsic commitment.   He can get from a woman all the physical pleasure that his infatuation enables him to perceive, and he can decide to give her in return, whatever she asks as a fair deal.  

But when a hedonist gains domination and control over an epicurean victim, who does not get, what she needs and wants, then he becomes a jerk and a hazard for her.   Therefore jerks are hedonists with a victim.   

There are variations of the dynamics, why a woman perceives a hedonist as a jerk due to his treatment of her. 

1. The emotional moron is simply oblivious that she suffers from the restricted and humiliating role in his life, because he projects and believes to give her the same as he wants and gets.    In the latency times between the homeostations of his needs, the woman is of no interest to him.   He calls it his personal space and is willing to allow her the same.    He is not aware that her affection for him causes her the wish to share more than he wants.
2. The psychopath knows, that she suffers from the restricted and humiliating role in his life, but he has not conscience and is as unable to feel guilty as he is to feel affection.
3. The narcissist also feels no affection for her and considers her as a commodity for his physical needs.    But he also feels a primitive non-physical dishomeostasis in his need of narcissistic supply.   When he does notice her behaviors meant to express love, care and affection, he misinterprets it as her agreement with his entitlement and grandiosity delusion.   But when her expressions of appreciation and her caring acts for his wellbeing are not received with responsiveness and reciprocity, but mistaken as fulfilling her purpose, duty and due to him, this causes her also to be a suffering victim.    When this destroys her affection and her motivation to express it, he considers her as flawed.     The narcissist wants more benefits from the woman than the psychopath and emotional moron, but it is also humiliating her by only using her as a commodity.        

In previous entries I had already speculated, that maybe those men, who in our times appear immature, selfish, cruel and irresponsible are just genetic relapses to earlier stages of evolution.   This can also include the relapse back to when affection and monogamy had not yet evolved, when men procreated purely by physical infatuation with the body of a woman.    Epicureans have a brain evolved for abstract cognitions, abstract emotions, non-physical pleasures and the joy of being bonded by affection and are therefore the farthest advanced in the evolution towards the ability to strive for individual subjective wellbeing.    Hedonists were and are still so much driven by instincts and dishomeostasis, that while they were very successful in multiplying the human species, the price for this was paid by the suffering of the women, who were used predominantly as breeding bodies.