“The Dirty Normal”, scientific thought processes and debate

Some blogs exist only to attract people in agreement with the blogger. The authors leave no room for debate: they don't want to see any comments that too strongly argue against their primary point of view.

One such blog is The Dirty Normal by Emily Nagoski.

I am sensitive to rejection, especially when I'm careful in stating my points of views—perhaps in a not so subtle way—with some hard comments towards the person exposing the ideas I feel I need to combat.

Now, is such attitude a valid one? In the case of Emily Nagoski, the Ph.D., my intention was to call the attention of her readers to the fact that she might have a personal problem with what has been very carefully exposed in the book Sex At Dawn, which she has fervently disqualified from any possible value in the goal of understanding ourselves as a species.

In a few words, Sex At Dawn states that there must be something wrong in the way us, humans, have been trying to organize our lives surrounding our sexual needs, since all serious statistics show openly that marriages aren't working, neither males nor females can be naturally monogamous—that is, neither gender of the species naturally chooses one sexual partner and is perfectly happy, forever, to stick to it.

The sexual attraction for other individuals besides the “legal partner”—the socially accepted one—is constant and comes from both genders. We seem to be willing to forget that the socio-cultural organization by which we live today, is a response of our brains—a human elaboration—to try to be able to keep track of “who is the father of the children”. Now, was such a need something valuable for survival in an environment previous to the creation of agriculture?

The answer is a very simple no. On the contrary, it must have been much more a survival advantage to consider all males in a human group as contributing fathers to the lives of all children. Such an attitude is observable in groups of bonobos—the smaller chimpanzees—but mainly, with tribes organized differently—from the agricultural model—such as the Zoe from the Amazon.

Persons that become so delicate and sensitive about their conservative opinions—such as Dr. Emily Nagoski—raise suspicious about possibly underlying agendas in their general attitudes.

The way we eat when we sit at tables, the way we dispose of surplus material from our bowels, the way we cover our genitals and the way women can't even breastfeed their babies in public places, are all attitudes learned through social programming exerted upon us during our lives, since the day we first appeared in this world. Nothing in the mentioned behaviours is natural in any way; it is all the result of what our culture needs from us, the individuals.

Well, then, that's exactly what happens with our sexual behaviour. Just as we feel like visiting a toilet—but we withhold our urge until the time is right—we also feel some mild arousal when we see individuals that we feel attracted to; we control such arousal according to the cultural needs, just exactly the way we control our bowels until the time is right—which is slightly different for everybody: while some are quite comfortable visiting any toilets, some can only feel at ease at home.

Some people—Emily Nagoski is one of them—want to see our genes pre-programmed to behave in this or that way; they simply ignore the highly important and deterministic socio-cultural programming of our minds/brains throughout our regular lives, starting the day we're born.