Pegs and Holes

[BornReady]

Here's a blog by Scott Adams. It's somewhat sexist but I think he has a point. I'm interested in what you think if you feel like taking the time to read it.

If you have a round peg that doesn’t fit in a square hole, do you blame the peg or the hole? You probably blame neither. We don’t assign blame to inanimate objects. But you might have some questions about the person who provided you with these mismatched items and set you up to fail.

If a lion and a zebra show up at the same watering hole, and the lion kills the zebra, whose fault is that? Maybe you say the lion is at fault for doing the killing. Maybe you say the zebra should have chosen a safer watering hole. But in the end, you probably conclude that both animals acted according to their natures, so no one is to blame. However, if this is your local zoo, you might have some questions about who put the lions with the zebras in the same habitat.

Now consider human males. No doubt you have noticed an alarming trend in the news. Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world. The current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior. That seems right. Obviously we shouldn’t blame the victims. I think we all agree on that point. Blame and shame are society’s tools for keeping things under control.

The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn’t ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, “Here’s your square hole”?

The way society is organized at the moment, we have no choice but to blame men for bad behavior. If we allowed men to act like unrestrained horny animals, all hell would break loose. All I’m saying is that society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness. No one planned it that way. Things just drifted in that direction.

Consider Hugh Hefner. He had every benefit of being a single man, and yet he decided he needed to try marriage. Marriage didn’t work out, so he tried the single life again. That didn’t work out, so he planned to get married again, although reportedly the wedding just got called off. For Hef, being single didn’t work, and getting married didn’t work, at least not in the long run. Society didn’t offer him a round hole for his round peg. All it offered were unlimited square holes.

To be fair, if a man meets and marries the right woman, and she fulfills his needs, he might have no desire to tweet his meat to strangers. Everyone is different. But in general, society is organized as a virtual prison for men’s natural desires. I don’t have a solution in mind. It’s a zero sum game. If men get everything they want, women lose, and vice versa. And there’s no real middle ground because that would look like tweeting a picture of your junk with your underpants still on. Some things just don’t have a compromise solution.

Long term, I think science will come up with a drug that keeps men chemically castrated for as long as they are on it. It sounds bad, but I suspect that if a man loses his urge for sex, he also doesn’t miss it. Men and women would also need a second drug that increases oxytocin levels in couples who want to bond. Copulation will become extinct. Men who want to reproduce will stop taking the castration drug for a week, fill a few jars with sperm for artificial insemination, and go back on the castration pill.

That might sound to you like a horrible world. But the oxytocin would make us a society of huggers, and no one would be treated as a sex object. You’d have no rape, fewer divorces, stronger friendships, and a lot of other advantages. I think that’s where we’re headed in a few generations.

 

[HK]

It's pretty offensive for an article to suggest that society is forcing men to commit rape by expecting them NOT to fuck everything that moves.

Men and women are not so incredibly different. Women have natural desires too, it's a huge stereotype that men are horny motherfuckers who only keep it in their pants through fear of being outcasts, whereas women are chaste angels who don't really like sex but put up with it satisfy the men and keep them quiet.

If a man can't control himself to the point that he feels he needs to rape someone, his issue is not that society is expecting too much of him.

 

[Peter Parka]

So I can go round, raping and murdering and blame society because I'm just doing what men naturally do? But all those yobbo laddettes you see out on a Saturday night fighting and puking over the pavement are acting right out of character?

What a retarded article.

 

[BornReady]

I don't think he's suggesting that men should be allowed to rape anyone. But some men do seem to be naturally too aggressive and promiscuous for the good of society. Should we look to science for a solution? What if men could be genetically engineered before birth to be better behaved? Is it better to teach men to control harmful urges or to take the harmful urges away? Perhaps we're approaching an era where we can play God if we choose to. Is this dangerous talk or something worth consideration?

 

[Butterfly]

Monogamy is overrated. That is my stance LOL

As for his vision of a sexless future... I may have to slit my wrists if that ever came to be in my lifetime. I like sex way too much to stop having it.