The Last Bastion Of Absurdity

I think you're right; I've thought of it that way for a while now. Female fidelity and modesty are actually in the best interests of males (and society in general, I spose) while it's more acceptable for men to be sexually promiscuous, simply because the more women they sleep with, the more chances they have of passing on their own DNA.

So wombs are pretty much humanity's greatest resource, and our only guarantor of continuation...

To me, then, a lot of the male mistreatment of women throughout history doesn't make sense; women should be cherished and their needs raised above the needs of men, to ensure healthy reproduction. Instead, history shows that men have devalued women through the (here, simplified) argument that it's their DUTY to give birth to offspring, rather than a male privilege to have a woman carry his child.

... I vote we hold all the wombs hostage until men agree to our terms (and we should also steal all the cloning technology, just in case they never give in).

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Gah, my reply got eaten by... not even the intertubes, by some bizarre quirk of my mouse-button setup. What the hell!

Anyway, I was saying that the mistreatment is just one half of the treatment of women throughout history. The thing is, in order to justify that whole cult of the womb thing, men pretty much had to think of women as property. And there are two ways you can treat property - you can think of it as something that's yours to do with as you please even if you break it, or you can treat it like your favourite necklace or whatever that you keep where nothing can harm it, etc. So the whole cherishing thing did happen just as often, but we hear less about it because it's less immediately irking. But it's also a part of the woman-as-property paradigm. That's pretty much why some feminists hate having doors held open for them.

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Darn them mouse-button setups!

I actually never thought of it in the sense that we don't see the good (and I say good tentatively, for want of a better word), cherishing type of "property" treatment because it's less immediately irking - which I suppose is very true.

But as you say, both treatments come back to viewing women as property.
You can almost see how holding something sacred morphed in to a desire to protect it, then a devaluing of women in general due to characteristics that men pretty much attributed to women in the first place - their comparative weakness, or "need" for protection.
But that's highly simplified and probably somewhat incorrect, oh wells.

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Keeping this just on (modern) sexuality - because there's a tangled mess of other issues that are tangentially involved - I'd pin the blame on the patriarchy. By which I mean men. Or, rather, they way that they socialise themselves.

In the few studies where they've looked at it, it turns out that rather overwhelmingly men don't actually orgasm. Some researchers have even gone so far as to say that a male orgasm doesn't exist at all.

Note that it's different to ejaculation, which is where the menfolk get a bit confused; male sexuality is oddly happy if blood gets into the penis, followed by ejaculation sooner or later.

Now, follow carefully: why should this happen? The responsible parts are essentially the same - that is, densely-packed nerve endings near the skin surface, and the parts of the brain they're wired up to - so there's no physiological reason for orgasms to be sexually dimorphic.

And yet, they are. If we instead want to look for a socialised difference, we've already got it: this weird, asymmetric sanctification of the sexual experience.

(Note the big words? Flimsy theory in progress. I'll reply to myself so I don't run out of comment.)

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So, consider: we're socialised to see female sexuality as sacred. As important. As something that needs some kind of emotional attachment. In practice, this all translates to sex beginning well before anyone's fumbling about with buttons, to physiological and hormonal responses that eventually translate into the preconditions for something that could kill you (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDMGJeW2NmY).

On a certain level, men are socialised to play along with this as something that leads to sex rather than preparing for it - and for them, sex translates as finding somewhere for a blood-filled penis to go for a few minutes, as some kind of grand triumph of penis sine cerebro. And, again - if it's all physically working, they're not particularly bothered by much else.

If we take the difference in experience as a result of this sexualised feeling/doing dichotomy, it's fairly obvious where a difference in sanctity comes from - there seems to be vastly less to be gained by a cult of the penis, so why bother sanctifying or ritualising or exploring it?

Once that happens, it all just begins to reinforce itself, over and over again. It becomes memetic, it becomes commonplace, and it's why I think that non-orgasmic women are seen as dysfunctional whereas non-orgasmic men with virtually identical nerves and brains are just a part of the scenery.

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Wait, I'm confused. Ejaculation != orgasm? What's the difference?

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Ejaculation doesn't equal orgasm!

Maybe they've evolved out for men, like wisdom teeth. =P
They're unnecessary for reproduction, after all.

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There's a theory that orgasms exist to make reproduction worthwhile - so, they'd act mostly as an incentive to keep contributing to herd survival.

(And the gene for wisdom teeth is nowhere near the sex chromosomes. :) )

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Don't patronise me. =)
Wisdom teeth are simply an example of something that is evolving out due to redundancy. Why should there be a physiological connection for the analogy to work conceptually?!
I was trying to point out that orgasms are completely useless in terms of simple passing on of DNA (compared to what Maggie brought up; the necessity of the womb to reproduction and thus its sacred status), and I TRIED to obliquely/ironically refer to the orgasm-as-incentive theory (which yes, I am familiar with), by sarcastically suggesting that orgasms aren't necessary for reproduction - when they in fact are, if you consider desire/incentive to reproduce as part of the reproductive process itself, and not just a lead-up. You obviously got the reference but didn't understand where I was coming from.

Next time I'll just say all that and not try to be ironic; it obviously doesn't work for me, even with "=P" all over the place.
I'll leave the pithy witticisms up to Maggie from now on! *salutes*

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Mmmm, witty pithicisms...

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Get them while they're hot!

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Because I misread the sentence? It looked like you were saying that wisdom teeth were evolving out for men, insert confusion here.

(Plus, wisdom teeth are completely unnecessary for reproduction. In the absence of weird dental kink, anyway. :D)

Methinks I was still in informationy-reference-librarian mode, rather than fun-internet-witticism - so it was more "informations, I has them" than anything else, without the proper "so-what-do-you-know-about-the-subject-already" thing beforehand.

My bad; and next time, I'll leave the obliviousness to the cap'n. *offers a box of '=P's*

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Heh, yeah it was a badly constructed sentence, very open to misinterpretation.
Apparently wisdom teeth are evolving out for everyone, male and female. Some people never get them. I lost the URL of the article I read it in though so can't link. I haven't got my wisdom teeth yet so I'm hoping that I turn out to be a freaky mutant. =D

I think I took your "informations, I has them" at an "you obviously don't know anything, so have some informations" angle, and got snippy. Sorry, and box of '=P's accepted!

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Ohnoes! Drama averted! Is this even still the Internet? :D

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Drama? On MY journal?

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It's more likely than you think. Except for the part where it's not.

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They're confused too. It's why I like that hypothesis for this particular phenomenon: it relies on immediate results, motivations, and easily-observed psychosocial characteristics.

The difference is mostly a lot of brain activity, floods of hormones, and a few other things. On functional brain scans, it looks a lot like an epileptic seizure.

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Wow. So why is it that men are the proverbial horndogs of stereotype again?

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Because they're taught by society and by themselves and even - a little - by us that they're meant to be. Because on average they have eight times the amount of the hormone responsible for sex drive. And, maybe, because it's not as satisfying as they expect it to be, so they keep trying and trying and trying.

That third one's completely made up, so: probably just the first two.

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Wow, that's a bit of a gyp. I mean, getting huge volumes of the hormone that makes you want sex but not enough of the one that makes it totally awesome :P

Although I suppose it must be there to balance it out for the sake of the continuation of the species.

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