Is Monogamy “The” Problem?

This is an issue of my fascination. Let me tell you briefly why.

As you grow up within certain cultures, they want you to believe that women and men are entirely different. You learn that males are looking for sexual mates all the time, but females—on the contrary—are absolutely uninterested in anything sexual; if they engage in sexual activities, they do so only to please the male with whom mating has been “approved” by those who lead their lives.

Sigmund Freud, when confronted with the question What do women really want?, replied, at once: That’s something I still don’t know. So, a man dedicated to dealing with men and women whose problems seemed to be that their lives demanded from them attitudes towards sex that were incompatible with their biological nature, was—within the confines of the main stream human culture—unable to answer such an important question.

My experience throughout life has been more towards what Meredith Chivers found out in her experiments than towards what Emily Nagoski implies that we should believe and accept and control ourselves to be happy with. This is what she has to say:

Indeed, the whole a-woman’s-genitals-are-more-honest-than-she-is [bold is mine] thing is a zeitgeisty thing lately, with Alain de Botton saying that genitals are “unambiguous agents of sincerity.”

Emily Nagoski The Dirty Normal

“Zeitgeisty” Thing Lately…

If you have seen the documentaries named “Zeitgeist”+something else, you know now what Emily Nagoski is worried about. This woman is tremendously in love with the establishment and believes very deeply and with great conviction that her goal, her mission as a scientist, is to convince everybody that what our culture demands from us—all the behaviors and values systems—is what rocks, what should be followed.

Thus, the goal of all scientist of behavioral sciences is to find ways of making people live in a bliss within the confines defined by the status quo. As far as she is concerned, any findings that shake the foundations of the main stream culture, are Zeitgeisty things. I can imagine her and those that think of themselves to have such missions, arguing endlessly on behalf of the structures ordered by the culture, and even trying to find connections to the nature of humankind in the “main stream” cultural system.

Her attitude is identical to that of traditional medicine: help the patient endure the pain, but continue feeding her the same food that’s making her sick.

My question is: Why is it so difficult for this kind of persons to understand that, precisely as scientists, it’s their most delicate obligation to be totally honest with the individuals of the species and act on behalf of the happiness of them? Instead, they seem to be acting on behalf of the Establishment, which organizes things to benefit only very strict minorities among the human groups.

So, yes, Dr. Nagoski, yes, it’s true: it’s all very zeitgeisty, and hopefully everything will follow the same path.

A woman’s genitals are more honest than her carrier

Does that mean we need to distrust women because they lie? Why would Emily Nagoski get so pissed off about a fact found in a perfectly controlled experiment? Why doesn’t she simply proceed to accept the facts and try to understand them without the bias of what the culture needs things to be?

When Emily Nagoski—herself a Ph.D.—reacts to Chivers' study, she is projecting a gender identity feeling—one of being attacked. “Oh, no, we are not liars! We simply don’t find, in the brain, what our genitals are expressing.” Why is her need to say this so strong?

I would say: They are lying, so what? Have they not been trained by culture to hide their real feelings about sex? Aren’t they supposed to be educated so that they will never sound like they want or need or would like to engage in sex?

The “main stream” culture—if you allow me to call “Western European Culture” like that—has mostly dictated that women should behave “low profile” when sex is involved. The background of such attitude is probably buried in the horrible 450 years or so when the dark ages—called like that precisely because nobody would like to remember—wanted to tame the feminine character by applying the fears of the Inquisition.

If their acts of repression over women were registered, any registries must have been destroyed or effectively buried to be never found. The Christian fundamentalists of those times were no different than the present time Taliban in Afghanistan. Didn’t the latter destroy a Buddhist Temple that had been carved on a mountain side for centuries? Wasn’t that an act of barbarism? Well, the acts perpetrated by Christians during the dark ages and earlier in Alexandria—remember Hypatia—were no different in intolerance than the recent Taliban acts.

The way women are treated by the Taliban is probably just as bad as they were during the times of the Inquisition. Women who behaved with any air of freedom and sensuality, were immediately denounced to those in charge of handing them over to the Inquisition for trial. It is calculated that over three million women’s lives were interrupted—they were separated from the pool of genes and were not allowed to reproduce. How many were actually burned in the fires of the Inquisition? The number is probably impossible to determine accurately.

The women who would survive were those capable of disguising their real feelings—as discovered by the Chivers' study. Today the world is somewhat different—not entirely so, though. Some attitudes prevail, probably as disguised in men and authorities as the real biological feelings of women were found to be in Meredith Chivers' study.

“Monogamy is not the problem”

Wow, wow! Dr. Nagoski is concentrated in one objective, one task, one main agenda—does she really work for super special entity?—and that is, to make us believe that, no matter how difficult it may be to adapt to the needs of monogamic marriage, it isn’t in such kind of arrangement where the problem is, but in the lack of practice and imagination to make it work.

Is what Dr. Nagoski implies different in any way to what—for instance—the Roman Catholic Church proclaims? Perhaps the only difference comes from the fact that the aforementioned religious institution pretends to convey the monogamous model as something ordered by the Super Entity of the Universe, which they call “God”. This Super Entity, understanding the limitations of the human species, approaches some individuals of said species and gives them “instructions”—The Bible—of how things should be.

And, of course, the order—“Be Monogamous”—can’t be the problem, since it was given by the Creator of the Universe Himself!

Is that what Dr. Nagoski is implying? Please, somebody out there, use the comments space of this Blog to help us understand Emily’s agenda.

Are you, Dr. Nagoski, really trying to tell us that the problem is in the human species, which obviously did not evolve to be monogamous?