Sex Education for a Young Cyborg
There’s an episode of Star Trek: Voyager in which the Doctor attempts to explain the basics of romance and dating to the ex-Borg crew member, Seven of Nine (who happens to be one of my favorite Star Trek characters). Despite making a superficial sort of sense, the Doctor’s advice ends up creating a thorough mess of things. This is partly due to the fact that the Doctor’s role on the show is to be an occasional comedic foil; but it’s also because, I suspect, that the writers of the show didn’t really understand what they were talking about.
I have a long-standing mental habit from early childhood, one in which I engage in an imaginary dialog with an alien, time-traveller, or other non-human entity. In these internal dialogs I attempt to explain, at great length, why humans behave the way they do. This includes discussions as to the nature of politics, government, art, law enforcement, and so on. As you can imagine, the function of these conversations is to clarify my own thoughts on the matter.
Naturally, the incident with Seven of Nine’s education ties in with my life-long habit. As an outsider with an alien perspective, Seven is the ideal conversant: someone who lacks the assumptions that we all take for granted. On the other hand, since Seven is in fact a biological human female (well, mostly), she is potentially capable of experiencing the same instinctive physiological drives and sensations that other humans would. So a conversation about sex and dating is not entirely an abstract exercise for her, without any possibility of common referents.
In this essay, I will attempt to provide a description of human sexuality and dating practices as if I were explaining them to Seven of Nine. This will attempt to answer a number of questions, such as: why do humans engage in these complex mating rituals? Why do we have such a diversity of sexual appetites? What is the purpose of “small talk”? Why does homosexuality exist? Why, in a ballroom dance, does the man traditionally take the lead? And so on.
Note that my answers will no doubt be somewhat ethnocentric; I can’t speak for every culture. Also, I am no scientist: I’ve read a fair number of books on evolutionary psychology, and attended a lot of intimacy and relationship workshops, but I would caution anyone against treating my opinions as authoritative. Much of this essay is based on my own experiences or speculation.
I will say, however, that a secondary goal in writing this is to promote universal compassion; to explain why things are the way they are without indulging in moral condemnation of anyone’s sexual orientation.
Sexuality and Diversity
Most terrestrial animals and plants reproduce sexually. The reason for this is that sexual reproduction is a highly successful strategy for species propagation and adaptation. Unlike asexually-reproducing species, which can only evolve through mutation (a slow and chancy process), sexually-reproducing species are able to “shuffle the genetic deck” every generation, greatly speeding evolution. Among other advantages, this allows these species to keep pace with evolving viruses and bacteria, which can adapt quickly due to their vastly shorter lifespans.
However, the genetic resilience provided sexual reproduction only works in species with diverse populations. If a population consisted entirely of clones, then shuffling the chromosomes has no benefit. Thus, is it advantageous, from an evolutionary perspective, to maintain a degree of biodiversity within the human population.
Sexual behavior, specifically mate selection, also drives evolution. An individual who is sexually attracted to a mate who is “more fit” will have offspring that are also more fit — more likely to reproduce within a given environment. Being attracted to reproductive fitness is itself a kind of fitness.
There is a strategic evolutionary advantage to having a diverse set of sexual mating preferences within the human species. Imagine what would happen if all human males were only attracted to, say, women with blonde hair. This would have multiple negative effects: first, because there aren’t enough blondes to go around, most men would have to live their lives with their desires unfulfilled; so would dark-haired women. Worse, it would mean that dark hair would be evolutionarily selected against and would eventually disappear from the population, reducing biodiversity.
I think that having diverse sexual appetites keeps the human population diverse, and prevents us from “averaging out” distinctive and potentially advantageous traits as a result of excessive inbreeding.
Because humans are a cognitive species, our sexual instincts are also influenced by cognitive agendas. We not only look for sexual partners that have have particular physical characteristics, or which provide our favorite sensory stimuli, but we also seek individuals whose intellectual and emotional characteristics appeal to us.
For example, I myself am sapiosexual — I’m romantically attracted to women who have a rich intellect, creativity and imagination.
Recognizing compatible mates is, from a neuro-cognitive standpoint, a fairly difficult problem. Although scientists can draw a clear line between “what is human” and “what is not human” at the genetic level, humans generally don’t have access to that level of information — all they can go on is the input of their senses. Our sensory pattern-recognition capabilities need to be broad enough to include a diverse population of individuals: people of different skin tones, body types, ages, dress styles, haircuts, people with scars, amputees, and so on — but narrow enough not to include, say, inanimate objects that happen to look human-like. All of this neural circuitry is expensive in terms of the metabolic cost needed to maintain it.
In evolution, there is a principle of “use it or lose it” — if a biological capability has an ongoing maintenance cost, and doesn’t contribute to reproductive fitness, then it will eventually atrophy and disappear — because individuals without that capability will require slightly less food, making them more fit.
To deal with the complex problem of recognizing mates, humans use a multi-channel approach: sexual attraction is driven by a multitude of different factors or signals, operating on different perceptual levels. You can think of the human libido as being composed of a collection of various “recognition modules” which sense and evaluate various aspects of a potential partner. (This is a metaphor — don’t take it as biological truth.)
Here are some of the recognition modules that I have identified:
Visual — because, like other primates, sight is such a primary sense for humans, there is a strong visual component to sexual attraction. In many cases, vision is used to evaluate the anatomy of a mate. Certain anatomical features are correlated with reproductive fitness, and thus tend to be considered more attractive.
Tactile, olfactory and other senses — humans can also be erotically stimulated by their other senses. Specific scents or modes of touch can trigger arousal, for example. In some individuals, intense, even painful, tactile stimulus in the right places can be highly pleasurable. (Although this usually works better if the individual is already aroused before the stimulus is applied.)
Intellectual — some individual prefer mates who are highly intelligent; others prefer the opposite. However, intelligence is not an easy thing to assess — you have to spend considerable time interacting with someone to get an accurate sense of just how bright they are. This and other mental assessments occur during the complex human mating dance.
Emotional — the emotional life of a partner is a major factor in assessing desirability. We tend to desire partners we can empathize with. One particularly strong kind of erotic emotion is reciprocated desire — the desire to be desired by the object of one’s affections.
Support — another kind of reproductive fitness is the ability of a partner to provide an environment for raising children. We tend to find individuals more attractive when we assess that they are consistently and competently able to provide resources for this. (Even if we ourselves have no intention of having children, we still find it attractive.)
Like intelligence, this characteristic is hard to assess, so we often use various proxy attributes — such as whether the individual has accomplished notable deeds.
Confidence — confidence is an emotional signal that advertises competence and capability, and is often used as a shortcut for those underlying qualities because it is easier to recognize directly. It can lead to trouble if the confidence turns out to be unwarranted.
Power — primates have a strong instinct for recognizing and reacting to power relationships between individuals. Many humans find it sexually arousing to give up control and let someone else take charge, while others find it equally arousing to be the one in control. There is a similar set of instincts around wanting to be protected from the hazards of the world vs. the desire to be the one doing the protecting.
It is important to understand that there is great genetic variability in these “modules”: both in terms of the specific stimulus that the modules are recognizing, and how we weigh the outputs of these modules relative to each other. For example, some people are very visually oriented, while others de-emphasize appearances almost entirely.
It is also important to understand that this mate recognition process is not a conscious choice, and may even run counter to our conscious desires. It is not all that uncommon for people to be sexually attracted to individuals that, in their conscious minds, they dislike. Similarly, individuals who are in positions of power in their daily life may find it erotic to play the submissive role. And, in rare cases, individuals have sexual desires that can never be realized, either because the object of their desires does not exist in reality, or because the person they are attracted to is not capable of informed consent and could be harmed by engaging in sex.
Nor can these preferences be altered. In Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, it describes how psychological studies have shown that straight men, gay men, and lesbian women have almost no “erotic plasticity” — meaning that their erotic responses are fixed and do not alter over the course of a lifetime. Straight women, on the other hand, are shown to have a higher plasticity than the other groups. This does not mean that a straight woman will turn lesbian or even bisexual, but rather that the set of arousing triggers may gradually alter in response to changes in their physical and social environment. This can be a source of confusion for the affected individuals and their mates.
Fortunately for most individuals, our sexual preferences represent a broad envelope of possibilities, and we have the power of conscious choice within those boundaries. While we might be attracted to an individual who would be hard to live with, we can choose (if we are wise) to find others who are similarly attractive but are much more suitable.
In some cases, an individual may not even be cognizant of their own sexual preferences. Feelings of arousal and desire for partners generally shows up gradually during the age of puberty. It is not always obvious which stimulus triggered these feelings, and learning to identify the patterns in one’s own sexual responses and what causes them is a skill which can require years to acquire. This is a form of emotional intelligence.
Classifying one’s own sexual appetites is only the first step; after that comes the process of accepting their existence as part of one’s self. This may be particularly challenging for individuals whose sexual orientation does not conform to the accepted norms of society. Eventually an individual may choose to make their sexual orientation a part of their public identity; or if they are concerned that their friends and family will disapprove of them, they may choose to keep their preferences hidden and stay “in the closet”.
In some cases, an individual’s sexual preferences may result in non-procreation. Being attracted to the same sex — or no sex at all — may seem like a contradiction of the principle of natural selection. One might ask, why does this non-reproductive pattern of behavior persist? Why doesn’t it simply breed itself out?
I think the answer is that there are several countervailing forces at work here. Humans are a social species and survive in groups. It is not necessary for every member of the group to produce offspring (especially during periods of over-population), but any member of the tribe can contribute to the welfare of the next generation (see the grandmother effect). And the existence of a diverse set of erotic tastes, combined with the fact that a perfectly accurate mate recognition algorithm would be too neurologically expensive, means that there will always be statistical outliers who are not part of the mainstream.
Traditional vs Modern Gender Roles
The process of dating includes a lot of nostalgic behavior, that is, patterns of interaction that harken back to an earlier time.
In traditional patriarchal societies, men were presumed be dominant; culture, religion and law all placed males at the top of the social hierarchy. Such societies were often violent and put a premium on brute strength and combat prowess; men were valued for their larger size and musculature. Women, on the other hand, were relegated to a purely domestic role centered around their reproductive capability.
Life in such societies was typically miserable for the vast majority of individuals, and no sensible person should wish for a return to such times. In our modern, more enlightened age we have recognized that the traditional gender roles are not only unfair and unjust, but also counterproductive. In a highly advanced technological society, women are just as capable to contributing to the progress of science, engineering and medicine as men; it’s highly wasteful to ignore the talents of half the population by limiting their ambitions to domestic tasks!
Nevertheless, fossilized remnants of traditional behavior still exist, and some are even accepted within modern society (although whether that remains to be true in the future is an open question.)
For example, women in 21st century Western society are presumed to be more decorative than men — they wear more colorful and flamboyant clothing on average (go to any Macy’s and compare the relative size of the men’s and women’s departments). Many women also paint their faces with lipstick and eyeshadow, and this is considered to be a strong signal of femininity. These markers even show up in video game characters.
The extra effort that women spend making themselves attractive is akin to the Peacock’s Tail: a costly signal that serves as a proxy for reproductive fitness. In some societies, women had to wear impractical, physically confining clothing in order to be considered attractive; some even required women to surgically alter their bodies in order to conform to societal notions of beauty.
Because of this, high-status men in traditional societies were expected to be protective of women in their debilitated state. For example, in Victorian England, when a man and a woman would walk down the sidewalk together, the woman would hold the man’s arm so that he can steady her. The man was also expected to walk on the outside of the sidewalk, nearer to the road, protecting the woman from the occasional mud splatter of passing carriages.
Fortunately (for both men and women), we no longer confine women in this way. While economic and cultural gender discrimination still exists, it is a shadow of what it used to be.
When it comes to dating, however, there is a certain appeal for doing things in the old-fashioned way, at least in a playful, light-heated, role-playing manner. Women may not need to be protected, but it’s nice to be able to pretend for a little while that someone would be willing to be your protector.
For example, a gift of roses from a man to a woman is a signal of romantic interest. Flowers are particularly suitable because they have no practical value, but are hard to acquire; this means that they are an effective costly signal of fitness, but cannot be interpreted as a bribe or payment for sex. They are also pretty.
Similarly, traditional ballroom dancing centers around a soft power dynamic where one partner (usually male) takes the lead and the other partner follows their movements. (Although in the dance classes I have gone to, women are allowed to take the lead role if that is their preference.) The goal of this leader-follower interaction is not to physically shove the follower around the dance floor by brute strength, but to gently steer them with subtle tactile signals.
Such antiquated dating behaviors are generally perceived as harmless by modern society; they don’t limit the life choices or economic prospects of either men or women in any significant way, and are the source of much creative ingenuity and art.
Moreover, fluency in these archaic, traditional patterns is seen as a form of competence and skill, which makes one potentially more attractive. (However, if overdone, it can also seem creepy.)
This traditional approach towards dating does not appeal to everyone, but it does appeal to many, and adds an additional layer of complexity to an already complex process.
The Chase
Another traditional gender stereotype is that males pursue females: men are the hunters and women are the hunted, or to put it more delicately, males are expected to initiate intimate contact while women wait to be contacted. You can see this asymmetry in action on any online dating site: straight women are flooded with inquiries from random men, while straight men tend to send out lots of messages that go unanswered.
Although this stereotype has some truth behind it, the situation is actually much more nuanced: a fairly common pattern is one where a woman makes the first move, but does so in a way that is so subtle that the man may not recognize it consciously. This allows the man to hold on to the illusion of being the first mover.
An example of this is “mirroring”, that is, imitating the actions or body posture of the other person. The challenge here (and part of the fun) is to avoid reading these ambiguous and subtle signals incorrectly. She put her coffee cup down next to mine — is that a signal of interest, or just an accident?
Like any stereotype, there are many exceptions: not everyone conforms, or wants to conform, to society’s expectations in this regard.
In my own case, even though I am a heterosexual male, I have always been uncomfortable with traditional notions of masculinity, particularly around this idea of pursuit. And because I find it so off-putting, I’m not particularly good at it; the romantic relationships I have had in my lifetime have all been ones where I was the one being hunted. (In one noteworthy case, back issues of the magazine Electronic Musician were used as bait. True fact!)
This “hunting” metaphor is not perfect — in a real hunt, the prey wants to escape, not be caught. In a romantic pursuit, the “pursued” presumably wishes to be caught, eventually — but only by the right person, and only after the hunter has expended sufficient effort in the hunt to be deemed worthy. It wouldn’t do to make the chase too easy, but one has to be careful to distinguish “playing hard to get” from “not interested”.
In a world where there is intense competition for mates, we have evolved various social and cultural defenses against unwanted romantic attention — ways to escape a potential pursuer and deflect interest away from us. It’s awkward and uncomfortable to tell someone “no” in response to their attempts at sharing intimacy; much more comfortable to nip those things in the bud before it ever gets that far.
Individuals whose physical appearance are close to society’s norms for beauty tend to spend a lot of effort fending off would-be suitors. A lifetime of doing this can really chafe.
Perhaps in prehistoric societies, men literally chased potential mates, but the march of history is also a march of abstraction: everything gets more sophisticated and subtle, to the point that the “chase” today happens largely on a verbal and mental level. Both the pursuer and the pursued engage in complex strategies to achieve their goals, and these strategies evolve over time.
During my time in the U.S. Air Force in the late 1970s, I was subjected to a lot of dating advice by my barracks mates — how to “get girls”. None of these methods ever worked for me, and most of them I never tried, judging them to be manipulative and borderline unethical.
However, I did observe that many of the strategies presented to me were clever attempts to impress the opposite sex. It occurred to me years later that any rigid formula or advice shared between men would eventually be known by women as well (especially by the smart, savvy ones that I was most interested in), and that such tricks would become tired clichés, impressing no-one.
Eventually I realized that the world of dating was what some philosophers would call a reflexive system, one in which a continuous co-evolution of tactic and counter-tactic creates vast, almost unbounded complexity. Much like the stock market, any successful formula would eventually falter as the market adapts to it; only strategies based on fundamentals would have any staying power.
One strategy that is fairly timeless is for the pursuer to hide their intent, at least in the initial stages. In the “hunting” metaphor, this the equivalent of sneaking up on the prey to avoid spooking it.
This strategy has a number of benefits. Sudden, unexpected romantic interest from another can seem scary and dangerous (often for good reasons), and may trigger a defensive reaction. Instead, the strategy is to form a non-romantic friendship first, one that feels comfortable and safe, and then gradually introduce a sexual aspect to the relationship — to “turn up the heat”. This “slow” approach also gives sufficient time to assess the deeper qualities of the potential partner and determine overall suitability.
However, this strategy also has a downside — any time you hide your intent, you risk being inauthentic, and that is not good for relationships. There’s a fine line that one must walk, between coming on too strong on the one hand, and deception or outright lying on the other.
One popular technique for gradually turning up the heat is flirting. A friend of mine once called flirting “the sexual art of plausible deniability”. Properly done, a flirt is ambiguous — it gives the recipient the choice as to whether to interpret the signal in a sexual or a non-sexual way. Flirts can be verbal, involving complex wordplay and double-entendres, or they can involve other kinds of signals such as body language. The best flirts are spontaneous, creative, and highly situational; not merely repetitions of stale formulas.
Moreover, flirting has the advantage of being a game that both the pursuer and the pursued can play; and by allowing the recipient to choose the interpretation, it allows them to feel as safe or as daring as they wish. It also provides a path for de-escalation if it turns out that one’s romantic desires are not reciprocated.
Avoiding Objectification
It’s important not to confuse the signal with the sender.
As biological beings, we perceive the world through the input of our senses. Those inputs are processed by our conscious intellect, but they also affect us on an instinctive level.
In a rational, sentient being, how does instinct work? How does it affect our conscious thought processes? One way is by introducing a significance bias to certain kinds of sensory experiences.
For example, as social and verbal animals we instinctively give increased attention to spoken voices compared to other sounds. As cognitive beings we develop an instinctive “theory of mind” — we care about what other people think and feel, typically much more than we would care about the internal state of some inanimate object. In psychology we refer to the “intentional stance”, meaning that we evaluate activity driven by conscious intent differently from behaviors driven by mere blind physics.
Similarly, as mammals with a sex drive, certain kinds of sensory inputs (as perceived by the ‘recognition modules’ mentioned earlier) cause pleasant feelings and awaken desires. I’ve often felt that there is a hidden part of my brain that is normally asleep, but when it senses some anatomical feature I find attractive, that part of my brain seems to wake up and say, “look at that, that’s really interesting, pay attention to it!”
However, that specific feeling exists only within my brain; it is not an intrinsic quality of the subject. And this is important because while my feeling may be a thing, the source of those feelings is not — it is a person.
There is a natural temptation for lazy minds to see people as mere utilities for producing the kinds of feelings they like. There’s a kind of Pavlovian behavioral conditioning going on — every time we experience the presence of a person we are attracted to, we get these feelings, and so we start to mentally conflate those feelings with their source.
As a heterosexual male, when I look at a sexy woman, there’s a part of me that instinctively wants to say, “Mmmm, that’s nice…”, but what is the “that” in that sentence? The “that” is not the woman (which would be objectification), but rather the pleasant feeling that I experience. I could instead say, “She’s nice…” but that would not be true, since I know nothing about what kind of person she is. Part of the problem is that our language is limited, it doesn’t have a good set of adjectives for expressing these distinctions. When we label someone as “sexy”, we may think we are talking about a physical or behavioral attribute of that person, but what we are really talking about is our own internal mental state.
Why is this important? Because people don’t like to be treated as mere utilities for providing pleasure or economic resources; they want people to value them for their whole selves as unique individuals. Moreover, this objectification often leads to various kinds of exploitation: we treat objects differently, since they don’t have the same inherent rights as persons. This requirement for moral consideration is part of the very definition of the word “person”.
It’s also important not to disrespect people for not meeting your criteria for attractiveness. The fact that you aren’t attracted to everyone is perfectly OK, just as it’s OK not to like chocolate ice cream. That’s part of who you are. But that does not in any way mean that those people are ugly or wrong.
Dating is hard
I’ve discussed a number of factors which contribute to the overall complexity of human mating behavior. Dating is not only complex, it is fractally complex: the more you zoom in on the details, the more complexity you discover.
And yet, when we find someone to love and are with them, it can be the simplest thing in the world.
