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Pubis And Politics
Why some people are tremendously keen to be sexual arbiters, and why their declamations are invariably wrong
We humans are a relatively simple species. We’re in perpetual competition with each other, although we’re usually blithely unaware of the fact. We make most of our decisions based on feelings and instincts and then dress our decisions retrospectively with a superficial gloss of reasoning. As a social species, we live within group norms which constrain our behavior.
Shaping these norms can sometimes give us significant power and thus advantage over our less manipulative peers.
We need only see how readily huge numbers of people are manipulated by the mass media to see that it’s quite easy to shape group norms provided one can generate enough noise. When it comes to the realm of human sexuality, our natural inquisitiveness about who’s doing what with whom means that we’re forever searching for information about the current norms of our particular group. What are Midwesterners fantasizing about this week? What do working class British people get up to in those after-hours car parks? What kinds of sexual activity are presently deemed acceptable and which kinds are supposedly deviant?
