Crossing the Jordan

Last night, I came across something that Jordan Peterson said nearly four years ago that enraged the Marxist-Feminist crowd. Of course, that's nothing new. The guy is a frickin' lightning rod for attacks by Leftists. 

He made the rational assessment that incels¹ are dangerous men who get in fights, start wars, kill & maim people and are in general a detriment to society. Therefore, having fewer of them around is a Good Thing®. 

He further noted that Western Civilization solved this problem some thousands of years ago with an institution that we call "monogamy" - and went further by using the unfortunate term "enforced monogamy" - touting its benefits to society. 

Now, this is nothing new. There is a fair amount of academic research supporting this idea. But the Marxist-Feminist Left came unglued over his use of the word "enforced," warping it into something that he never said and didn't mean. 

By "enforced monogamy," Peterson merely meant monogamy that is imposed by one's culture, instead of imposed by biology.  An example of the latter is Branta canadensis, aka Canada Goose, which mates for life.  Few species do this, but of those that do, it's encoded into their DNA.

Homo sapiens has no such coding.  Since Man emerged from chimps half a million years ago, our DNA has coded us to use the mating strategies of most mammals, which emerged about two hundred million years ago.

"Eggs are expensive; sperm are cheap"

All life forms are programmed to continue their species.  Survival is our strongest urge; reproduction is second.  DNA wants to copy itself, and it wants those copies to survive to make more copies.  It doesn't just want copies of itself, it wants strong copies that can kick the asses of whatever is trying kill those copies.

Males can impregnate many, many females in short order.  In some species, a male can make hundreds of little copies of itself.  Female mammals don't have that luxury: they have to nurse their young, then feed them, teach them to hunt, etc. until the little ones are strong enough to make it on their own.  Depending on the species, each female is only able to make a few, to a few dozen, copies of her DNA.

So, how to make sure that your DNA survives to replicate itself?  Males play a numbers game by creating lots of babies.  Some will die, but if you make enough babies, some will survive.  Since female mammals can't do that, they will choose the strongest, healthiest, most badass male in the herd, so that her baby will be the biggest, healthiest, most bad-ass of the babies, so that her DNA will prevail over that of the other females.

This has been evolving for two hundred million years.  For H. sapiens, it didn't change until about ten thousand years ago.  It is programmed into our DNA for males to want sex with as many females as possible, and for all of the females to want to mate with the same male.  So, a pareto-like scenario has evolved where something like 95% of the females will mate with, and only with, 5% of the males.  And the males will fight each other to be in that 5%.

This is why males fight.  Every male wants to continue his DNA, but he must be stronger than the other ones in order to do it.  This is especially brutal in elk:  I've seen a herd of one bull and dozens of cows, copulating, when another bull showed up to challenge him.  If you see this (such as at Rocky Mountain National Park), keep your distance.  People die up there from getting too close, or between two bulls.

Female hypergamy

It also means that female mammals will be hypergamous.  If another male shows up that is stronger, healthier, more bad-ass than the one they've been mating with, they'll drop the latter in a heartbeat.  They want the best DNA they can get.

All of this worked fine - some men getting several women, others getting none and going out to die in some useless war somewhere - until the dawn of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago.  Then it didn't work so well.

Enter stage right:  an economist

When H. sapiens began planting crops, everything changed.  No longer hunter-gatherers, people had possessions:  land, herds & flocks, and houses.  And they wanted to keep them.  

In 1988, Freidrich A. Hayek published The Fatal Conceit:  The Errors of Socialism, a grandly sweeping volume that begins with a discussion of "cultural evolution."  In it, he makes the argument that in this new order (i.e., agriculture), certain practices that had served the human species well had to be abandoned for new values, new practices.  The process was a gradual one that slowly replaced Man's natural instincts for unnatural ones that better ensured his survival.  One of these was monogamy.

So, humans invented monogamy.  Males had to curb their appetite for sex-with-everyone, to at least get a steady supply of it that most of them would otherwise do without.  Women had to curb their hypergamy and choose well, because they were not allowed to branch-swing.  As time went on, societies that practiced monogamy were more stable, grew more food, had better animals, and were wealthier than societies that were not.  I shan't speculate on why this is, but Jordan Peterson (and not a few sociologists and anthropologists) are sure that it's because of the incel problem.

Incels are the males in the herd that couldn't find a mate.  They fight.  They cause trouble.  They rape women.  They even start wars.  Monogamy began the practice of "there's someone for everyone," and men who had a wife and family had an outlet for their sexual energy, able to turn their attention to raising their crops and herds.  Wealth increased.

But there's a trade-off.  Two hundred million years of biological evolution is not easily disposed of with a few thousand years of cultural evolution.  Deep down, men still want to fuck anything with a vagina.  Deep down, women still want to dump a man if she sees something better.  Monogamy solves some problems, but requires tradeoffs for both sexes.

Monogamy freed us from the problem of incels.  Recent technology has freed us from monogamy, and now we have an incel problem again.  Jordan Peterson seems to think that we need to re-instate monogamy.  I, for one, do not think that that genie will ever go back into the bottle.  For one thing, divorce statistics tell us that about half of the human race cannot be monogamous (i.e., remain sexually faithful to one person for a lifetime).

There is another solution.  No one wants to think about it:

Sluts

Sluts - women who aren't particularly picky about their sex partners, and willing to have a lot of them, are, in my opinion, the ones who will save us.  For various reasons, no woman wants to marry an incel, but lots of slutty women are willing to host one for a night.  One woman can service several incels, which neatly solves the problem of a shortage of women eligible for marriage.  

We have technology that didn't exist even a hundred years ago.  Most of the social problems caused by promiscuity now have solutions.  If society would begin removing the stigma of a woman with a strong sex drive, we might begin seeing a drop in the alarming number of men who can't find sex - and a drop in the violence that they cause.

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1 Involuntary Celibates. In short, men who are unable to find a woman for sex. For more information, use a search engine.