"Adultery is human male nature"...Lol, what?

[TopazRaven]

Ok, so for any of what I am about to say to make sense, I need to tell you the whole story behind that lovely quote. I started reading this book, it's Dog Man, written by Martha Sherrill. It's more or less the biography of Morie Sawataishi, the man who saved the Akita dog breed from extinction after WWII. In the first chapter I noticed some interesting things between Morie and his wife Kitako. Their marriage behavior seemed a bit different to me and I wondered if it was just them as individuals or something in Japanese culture. I then decided to look up information about the average Japanese marriage.

Needless to say I found what I was looking for...along with something else. Apparently adultery is a very common thing in Japan and even expected of most men. I have to admit I was rather alarmed. I read through several sites, some written by people living in Japan, but I can't say how true this is. After all I don't live in Japan, I'm not married to a Japanese man and I'm certainly not Japanese myself. What drew my attention was that in the comments of one of the blogs I was reading someone pretty much stated that adultery was male human nature and that people are not meant to be monogamous. That sticking to one person for the rest of your life is a man-made ideal and polygamy is the norm.

So, am I the only one who thinks that is complete bull? Isn't that line of thinking sexism towards men?

[Atria35]

Yes and no. I think there's a certain cultural expectation that is sexist and demeaning towards men, assuming that they'll cheat and not be faithful. At the same time, I can't help but think of all the guys I know that were raised in good homes with expectations that they wouldn't and.... well... did.

It's very complicated. How do you study something like that, and see whether it's true or not? You can't make assumptions either way, really. Even in the Bible, polygamy was at one point endorsed (OT). So can we really say that they're totally wrong when they say that?

[TopazRaven]

I suppose not. I guess I'm just going off personal feeling. If I was married and my husband thought it was alright to go out and get it on with other ladies I'd be pretty upset. I just don't understand what's so hard about being faithful or sticking to one person for your married life.

[Warrior 4 Jesus]

Yes, the quote in the original post is complete and utter bull because people want any old excuse to do what they want without consequences. Both men and women are equally capable of adultery because both are born sinful and daily sin. The belief that a man and woman should only be married to one person for life is a Godly one, reflected in Christ and His Bride (the Church). Sticking with your wife/husband through thick and thin would be very difficult (think about how hard life is at times) but ultimately about valuing marriage and putting your wife/husband's needs ahead of you. Also, working through the tough times, not abandoning your post at the first sign of boredom or an argument.

I'm sure the Japanese women would have something to say about adultery being expected of their men (I don't think they'd be happy at all) but it's not like Japan treats it's men and women equally.

[TopazRaven]

It's kind of funny. Most of the comments where non-Japanese men talking about how they would want a Japanese wife so it would be alright for them to sleep with other women. It like....what is this? I don't even know.

[Atria35]

That sounds like cultural expectation. And... that's very creepy.

I do think things are changing, but faithfulness to one person, while endorsed by the Church, was never really expected by most people until very recently, historically speaking. Kind of how it was seen as totally okay for kings to wage war for pretty much 'just because', even though there was a commandment to not murder (for a great example of this, try reading Shakespeare's Henry V).

[Seto_Sora]

I totally agree with you Warrior! Absolutely spot on. But we don't only have a picture of fidelity in the New Testament, it is also in the Old as well. Now Atria you are right that there is polygamy in the OT, however, it's not anywhere stated as a good thing nor encouraged. It seems with the Bible's lack of condemnation with earlier men, it was more tolerated than anything else. However, in Genesis, we have one man and one woman. Not many. further, Solomon is condemned for having many wives as led him astray. Also you have one of the prophets (I think it was Nahum but I'm not 100% on his name) who married a loose woman and it is reported that of her three children, two were not said to be his. Finally she left him for a time. All of this was spoken of condemningly in picture of the constantly condemned Israel's Idolatry.
Lastly, I agree completely with you Topaz, its a horrible and wicked thing for a man to want this. I mean think of the feelings of his wife! I mean that is all I think of when I imagine adultery; how crushed she'd after trusting him and swearing herself to be faithful and he swearing to be also faithful to her. yeah, sad.

SDG

[TopazRaven]

I think it is important to remember women do cheat to and crush their poor husbands hearts as well. Personally I think it is wrong for anyone to cheat let alone want to, man or woman. Having a breif attraction to someone is understanble. It happens. Wanting to get with that person even though you are in a relationship with someone is a whole different story. I just think it's unfair to indicate adultery is a purley male thing and should be acceptable because it's 'human nature.' Even if it is there are a lot of things that are human nature that aren't acceptable.

[Midori]

This will not become a theology discussion thank you very much.

[TopazRaven]

Oh crap, should I have put this in theology then? For some reason that didn't cross my mind. I was just a bit miffed people where saying cheating is a-ok because it's human nature and wanted to see what others thought on the matter.

[Nate]

there is polygamy in the OT, however, it's not anywhere stated as a good thing nor encouraged. It seems with the Bible's lack of condemnation with earlier men, it was more tolerated than anything else.

This is pretty much true. The Bible never says "A man should have many wives," but it does say "If you want to have more than one wife, treat them all equally" as well as a warning to let the true firstborn be the head, and not the firstborn of the wife you like best.

So while polygamy was allowed in Israel, it wasn't particularly held up as a good thing, though there are verses that seem to encourage it, such as the Psalm that says children are like arrows in your quiver (and having more wives would mean more children, so get as many wives as you can so you can have as many kids as you can!).

However, in Genesis, we have one man and one woman. Not many.

One could argue that this means nothing if you hold to the interpretation that Adam and Eve were the only two humans that existed. It's kind of hard to have more than one wife if there aren't any other women on the planet.

Also you have one of the prophets (I think it was Nahum but I'm not 100% on his name) who married a loose woman and it is reported that of her three children, two were not said to be his. Finally she left him for a time. All of this was spoken of condemningly in picture of the constantly condemned Israel's Idolatry.

I think you're talking about Hosea, when God commands him to marry a prostitute...this is throughout the book of Hosea. I think it's supposed to be symbolic, yeah, although I would say that one, being a prostitute is not the same as having multiple spouses, and two, that there was a double standard back then in that it was totally okay for a man to have multiple wives, but not okay for a woman to have multiple husbands. This again really doesn't imply that polygamy/polyandry is inherently bad.

But yeah, adultery is definitely a bad thing, and both genders are capable of it, and it's an insulting gender stereotype to say that men can't keep it in their pants.

[Warrior 4 Jesus]

Far out Midori, how far does your definition of theology stretch?

[Yuki-Anne]

To fully understand this, we would need to delve into Japanese culture.

Japanese, it has been estimated, spend as much in the illicit sex trade as the nation does on its defense budget, and tens of thousands of Thai and Filipino girls are imported to Japan each year on "entertainment" visas to help Japanese men escape the stresses of their joyless lives as sararimen...
The fact is, however that these neon-gilded establishments exist precisely because Japanese find it so difficult to establish casual social relations in situations where money doesn't change hands. Data show that men and women live separate lives, have sex less often than those in other nations, and have little relaxed contact with the opposite sex...
In the traditional social structure of Japan, marriage was nothing less than a corporate merger involving to family empires... The prospective bride and groom had little to say over whom they would wed. Love had almost no bearing on a matrimonial contract.
...Those feudal attitudes toward marriage persisted well into the modern era.... As recently as 1982, three in ten marriages were arranged, government statistics show.

A 2004 Health Ministry survey... concluded that 20 percent of marriages had lacked physical intimacy for one year or more, while almost one-third of married couples had not had sex for at least a month.

Shutting Out the Sun, Michael Zielenziger, p. 178-180, 182

This is just a snapshot of Japanese culture. If you want a bigger picture, I'd encourage you to buy the book and read it for yourself.

I don't think this is a matter of falling in love with someone else. In that chapter of the book, the author cites a Japanese man who says that while many foreign couples can frequently say "I love you," and express their feelings to one another, if he said that to his wife, she would just look at him like he was crazy.

Part of Japanese culture is that you bottle up your feelings. You don't say what you really mean. You don't tell others how you truly feel. I read on the news just this week that a man who survived last month's horrific tsunami was reprimanded by his boss for crying at work. What we see as this amazing, tenacious will to survive and move on will, I'm afraid, end up being very psychologically unhealthy for the Japanese people, because they're not expressing their feelings and dealing with them; they're burying them and doing their best to pretend they're recovering normally. That's what they're being encouraged to do as a society. That's what they've always been encouraged to do.

This isn't to excuse the adultery culture that has developed in Japan, but when you have to save face and can't express yourself, even (and perhaps especially) in your own home, it can cause you to start looking for release and understanding elsewhere.

But there are other issues at work here as well. I just don't have time to delve into them right now.

[Seto_Sora]

meh! Unhealthy seems to me to be an understatement!

And thank you Nate for the clarification. I couldn't remember his name at all. lol But I think you expounded excellently on the point.

SDG

[shooraijin]

Far out Midori, how far does your definition of theology stretch?

I believe his comment was meant for Patrick's post. And yes, we're drawing that line pretty close.

[steenajack]

[quote="Yuki-Anne (post: 1472822)"]To fully understand this, we would need to delve into Japanese culture.



Shutting Out the Sun, Michael Zielenziger, p. 178-180, 182

This is just a snapshot of Japanese culture. If you want a bigger picture, I'd encourage you to buy the book and read it for yourself.

I don't think this is a matter of falling in love with someone else. In that chapter of the book, the author cites a Japanese man who says that while many foreign couples can frequently say "I love you," and express their feelings to one another, if he said that to his wife, she would just look at him like he was crazy.

Part of Japanese culture is that you bottle up your feelings. You don't say what you really mean. You don't tell others how you truly feel. I read on the news just this week that a man who survived last month's horrific tsunami was reprimanded by his boss for crying at work. What we see as this amazing, tenacious will to survive and move on will, I'm afraid, end up being very psychologically unhealthy for the Japanese people, because they're not expressing their feelings and dealing with them]

This just makes me sad. It amazes me to see how cultures can be so drastically different, but it makes me sad that an idea such as "you can't express yourself. Bottle it up" is practically embedded into a culture. I just makes me really sad. Human beings were created to love and be loved. They were created to share themselves with each other. It just really makes me sad for them....gosh though, does it ever explain A LOT of the things I've seen in anime and manga...at least culturally anyway.

[Warrior 4 Jesus]

Shooraijin, ah, thanks mate. That does make sense.

Yuki, I always thought the Japanese people were a bit less 'bottled up' in their emotions before WW2. I mean they had the whole performance orientation society down pat before then but was there the same hopelessness that there is currently in Japanese society?

[Midori]

I believe his comment was meant for Patrick's post.

Indeed it was. In fact, when I posted it was to an old version of the thread I had sitting in a tab (a mistake I make too often), and I hadn't even seen Topaz's post when I submitted my post.

[Dante]

According to my psych teacher, it's both a male and female thing - so yes, quite sexist towards men (and women too, because it implies that women don't want to have sex or are never tempted by the thought of infidelity). The reasoning as he explained it was that in order to maximize one's prospects of producing a surviving genetic heir, animals (including humans) might seek out other partners in order to increase the genetic diversity. Why would that be valuable? By increasing the genetic diversity of one's offspring, you've essentially done the equivalent of diversifying your portfolio in the gene-pool stock market. So supposed fifty years later a plague comes along that a few genes in partner 1s genetics are really prone too - all of your offspring with that partner die off. If you had ALL of your children with said partner, then that would be it, your genetic material would be kicked off the gene pool. But suppose that partner 2's genetics are resistant, then your genetics under that partner would manage to survive. As a consequence, those individuals that diversified their genetic portfolios survived and if that could be mapped into genes themselves, then it would pass on to us (in a relatively short period of time). In other words, death, which we consider to be the result of sin, actually biases creatures to have multiple partners.

There is, however, one slight problem here (and this may explain why monogamy or life pair-bonding occurs in humans), suppose the life-time of the creature is relatively short and in most life-times only one set of off-spring can be raised. In this situation, all the effort goes into the single offspring created in order to ensure their survival. So if humans live only to age 30 on average, and it takes about 13-14 years to raise our offspring, we practically spend the entire second half of our lives raising those young. But wait a minute - not even here does it hold. We're assuming that because the average lifetime was 30 years old, everyone made it about that time-period before kicking the bucket, but that's not the case. Here you could get married on year to one guy, then two years later he could drop dead leaving you with his kid (monogamy worked, he got one offspring), but if we listen to our vows, it's not "you shall be bonded from now on and shall never take on another.", no, it's "until death do you part." In other words, we have a polygamy of multiple partners that are separated by their deaths. So then, diversification occurs by pairing with partner 1 until they die, then partner 2 comes along and a new set of children is born. If partner 1 survives the whole time, that says something good about their genetics and so maybe a few more kids with said individual might be a good idea.

However, we live in a different world today, humans are now growing to be older and while raising our young now takes about 20 years, we are living to be 60, 70, 80 years old and beyond. Suddenly, humans are living long enough that we no longer diversify at all, we spend our entire lives with a single partner - and the old polygamy comes back into style genetically. In this situation, everyone is guaranteed to live long enough to basically produce several sets of offspring and in the event that certain changes in the world really effect one set of genetics, those that diversify and those that produce lots of offspring are the ones that will genetically prosper. And there is nothing to say that situations elsewhere didn't favor polygamy so that individuals with genetics biased towards it don't exist today. In such situations and as those individuals begin to acquire a larger bracket of the gene pool, polygamy will begin to return.

It is important to note that while we find this idea very dear to us, I've read that in some cultures, sex with multiple partners is the norm. These same cultures do not actually have a word for "adultery" as such an action isn't seen as evil, but just a natural part of life. Given such an extreme reaction, I'm left to wonder whether our personal hatred for the concept (we hate it with a particular passion that only seems outdone by our hatred of murder), is a cultural bias taught to us from childhood, or a natural result of some genetic affair. Likewise, it's important to remember that 1 Kings 11 says, "King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh's daughter - Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites. They were from nations about which the Lord had told the Israelites, 'You must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.' Nevertheless, Soloman held fast to them in love. He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines" So these weren't all just political marriages, he had essentially affairs with so many women that they had to practically round it off to manage the statistics in order to keep track of them all - and then married them so that he wouldn't be labeling it as adultery (is there really a difference?). Solomon lived about 80 years, so if he was a busy boy and started at 10, then... ~25,567 days / (700 wives + 300 concubines) = about 1 new girl every month (25 days). Apparently he got a new one every time they got their period. And while this was a negative thing in Solomon's life, 1) he apparently took after his Dad, David who is also famous for his love affairs with women and 2) he was also considered one of the greatest rulers of Isreal... along with David. So apparently cultural views on marriage have changed over time and currently we are highly influenced by a strong puritanical culture (maybe that's the way it should be - but that's how things stand), but things are changing for us too.

Note: This is all coming from what I remember in my psyche class about 10 years ago (with some personal research in between out of curiosity). It's borrows from genetics and from anthropology, so it's bound to cause a bit of a fuss - but given that it relates directly to this topic I figure it's important to note (as the entire topic basically focuses around the truth or falsehood of these premises).

As to what the truth is? I've never dated, I've never kissed a girl nor do I feel the desire to pair-bond at the moment. Consequently, I have no clue what I would feel if they took on another partner outside of me. This understanding I think, would at least provide me with the comfort of understanding that it's not entirely her fault, there's an entire human history of activity, a genetic epic that is shaping her actions and driving her impulses and sometimes those impulses overtake the persons ability to control them. Those same genetic impulses are ultimately responsible for the pattern of her biological past that ultimately allowed her ancestors to survive and her to come into being. So ultimately, I wouldn't have a choice between her cheating or not - that was already done, I have a choice between her existing or ceasing to exist altogether. Part of me has to at least feel glad that she exists, even if not solely for me.

While it would definitely cause a bit of controversy, I think a lot of tears could be saved by teaching people the ethics of this and teaching them to do one specific thing. Tell the truth. If they're going to jump from person to person and have a drive for multiple relationships, they shouldn't be grabbing individuals that want to form monogamous single relationships (which essentially means for life 1 single partner. period). Doing so and finding out it won't work is going to cause horrible emotional pain to the other person. If on the other hand, people concluded how they felt on the issue and told each other then this whole thing could be a lot easier (save the liars who are pathetic jerks anyways).

Anyways, I've got my ear-muffs on, commence yelling at me for tapping the sacred pillar of marriage - I'm used to the flak.

[Warrior 4 Jesus]

Really? I think it's much more simple than all that. I seriously doubt they're thinking 'this person is perfect because they would provide me with perfect offspring'. It's more likely that they just want to jump each other's bones because they like what they see and it feels good.

[Dante]

Really? I think it's much more simple than all that. I seriously doubt they're thinking 'this person is perfect because they would provide me with perfect offspring'. It's more likely that they just want to jump each other's bones because they like what they see and it feels good.

The thought process and the reason do not have to be the same. We have sex because it feels good, but it also happens to produce offspring. In other words, sex becomes a positive reinforcement for producing offspring (which otherwise we might choose to avoid). Likewise, when we say we prefer "cute" or "pretty" girls, what we're really saying is "I'm looking for subtle variations in symmetry that would could possibly be a sign of bad genetics - that way my offspring are the combination of two good sets of genes". Simply because the individual acts simple in their motives, doesn't mean that biologically something very complex isn't going on (When a guy says "that girl is hot" or a girl says "that guy is hot", you can take a whole new appreciation that the algorithms they've used in judging that mate are far more complex then you or I could ever hope to program in years of effort). A dog, for instance, can solve differential equations in order to calculate the proper trajectory to catch a disk thrown in the air at a beach - and good life-guards do the same in order to minimize their time in reaching a person in distress (along with birds who wish to minimize their energy usage). Do they think "what is the proper differential equation and all the numerical coefficients I will need to solve this" and get to work? No, but internally it all goes on without them even realizing it - running an incredibly elegant and powerful biological machine without them even realizing it - or even being able to calculate the results numerically on a test if given to them.

So, yes, they say "this feels good", but there is also a reason why it feels good, and a reason why they might choose to look for multiple partners. It's not simply a matter of randomness, these things are very well tuned.

[Midori]

Really? I think it's much more simple than all that. I seriously doubt they're thinking 'this person is perfect because they would provide me with perfect offspring'. It's more likely that they just want to jump each other's bones because they like what they see and it feels good.

The latter is a biological approximation of the former.

EDIT: MSP beat me to the punch on that one, so consider my post a condensed version of his.

With that I'll be leaving this conversation, because I don't want to be involved in a controversy in case I have to stamp it down.

[Kaligraphic]

When we read the comment that polygamy is the norm, it's very easy to jump on that as something offensive, but the fact of the matter is, most cultures throughout history have been polygamous - or, to be technical, polygynous. They have allowed for multiple wives to be associated with a single husband. This has actually proven to be both robust and efficient in allocating partners historically. Historically, men have typically had significantly higher mortality rates, from conflict, overwork, and like factors. Also, the greater physical strength and endurance of men meant that they produced more wealth. Given consistently lower population of males as opposed to females, it simply made sense for those males who were strong enough to survive and productive enough to be able to feed multiple women to take on multiple wives. It meant that fewer women died of starvation and populations were able to recover after conflicts, disasters, and other reductions.

Now, I will differentiate for a moment the concepts of adultery and polygamy. Polygamy is a common element of social organization. Adultery is not. Polygynous relationships still preserve information as to both parents. While there may be multiple women in the household, it's pretty hard to be confused about who is giving birth. On the other hand, knowledge of paternity has pretty much required a guarantee of fidelity up until modern genetic testing, especially in relatively undifferentiated populations. Adultery, as it has commonly been understood through history, has typically involved interference with knowledge of paternity. Even in cultures that have treated women as property, the objection to adultery is rooted in this. It is a denial of the husband's ability to reproduce, and a theft of the resources that would have gone to the husband's own offspring. The custom of polygyny was not based around ideas of just trying to sleep around, but was actually quite resistant to gigolos, treating them as thieves.

Hopefully, my lack of sleep hasn't made this too incoherent, but what I'm trying to get at here is that while polygamy is produced by natural sociological factors, it is quite distinct from adultery as has been historically understood. It's a very complex subject, and to reduce it to simplistic and morally loaded statements about male or female nature, whether to unthinkingly accept or unthinkingly reject them, is incorrect.

[Nate]

sex becomes a positive reinforcement for producing offspring (which otherwise we might choose to avoid). Likewise, when we say we prefer "cute" or "pretty" girls, what we're really saying is "I'm looking for subtle variations in symmetry that would could possibly be a sign of bad genetics - that way my offspring are the combination of two good sets of genes".

Your statements only make sense in a world where children would be an unavoidable result of sex. There are condoms, birth control pills, and surgical procedures that can reduce or even completely prohibit children from being conceived. Men with vasectomies like sex just as much as men who don't.

Also, where do your statements leave people that are naturally sterile/barren, or have become so over time? I'm pretty sure that people who are physically incapable of having children still like sex, which renders your statements nonsensical.

Not to mention your statements completely ignore people who have sexual attractions in which having children would be impossible, or like things in a mate that would actually be bad for childbirth. For example, I had a friend in the Navy who loved enormously fat women, like 500 pounds. He thought they were the hottest things alive. Obviously there are no reproductive benefits to being grossly overweight, so your statement that "We find sexually attractive what is good for kids" doesn't make a bit of sense. There's people who are sexually attracted to family members, are you going to tell me that's a positive thing as far as genetics are concerned?

[Atria35]

^ The thing is, Nate, we don't conciously think about those things. They just... happen. You can't see from the outside whether someone's barren when you first meet. Or whether someone has a vasectomy. And it's usually when you first meet that all that deciding whether someone is attractive goes on or not. That decision is pretty instantaneous. The physical part, at least.

We just have a courtship ritual that goes beyond that because we need to know if emotionally or mentally, they'll be good partners.

[Sapphire225]

When we read the comment that polygamy is the norm, it's very easy to jump on that as something offensive, but the fact of the matter is, most cultures throughout history have been polygamous - or, to be technical, polygynous. They have allowed for multiple wives to be associated with a single husband. This has actually proven to be both robust and efficient in allocating partners historically. Historically, men have typically had significantly higher mortality rates, from conflict, overwork, and like factors. Also, the greater physical strength and endurance of men meant that they produced more wealth. Given consistently lower population of males as opposed to females, it simply made sense for those males who were strong enough to survive and productive enough to be able to feed multiple women to take on multiple wives. It meant that fewer women died of starvation and populations were able to recover after conflicts, disasters, and other reductions.

Now, I will differentiate for a moment the concepts of adultery and polygamy. Polygamy is a common element of social organization. Adultery is not. Polygynous relationships still preserve information as to both parents. While there may be multiple women in the household, it's pretty hard to be confused about who is giving birth. On the other hand, knowledge of paternity has pretty much required a guarantee of fidelity up until modern genetic testing, especially in relatively undifferentiated populations. Adultery, as it has commonly been understood through history, has typically involved interference with knowledge of paternity. Even in cultures that have treated women as property, the objection to adultery is rooted in this. It is a denial of the husband's ability to reproduce, and a theft of the resources that would have gone to the husband's own offspring. The custom of polygyny was not based around ideas of just trying to sleep around, but was actually quite resistant to gigolos, treating them as thieves.

This.

From Biblical times to today, polygamy has been rooted into many societies and cultures, in which whether it is classified as what could be considered normal, even encourages given the fact that it allowed more offspring to be produced, especially during the older times like Pascal pointed out. Even some families in the US still practice it. However, adultery is a different matter all together as an outside party is involved, and should procreation take place and be successful, will not only lead to familial problems, but financial and judicial ones as well.

However, thanks to "protection," the chances of children being born can be hindered to near impossible. Which both adulterers and polygamists use to their advantage if they only seek sex for pleasure rather than reproduce. It is mainly the emotional toll and views of how unethical it is that have the greatest impact on either practicer. However...that just goes straight back to the main topic of Japan.

[TopazRaven]

I don't like polygamy. At all, but if that's what people want to do with their life, more power to them I guess. All parties there know and accept what's going on. I'll never think adultery is acceptable though. It just seems incredibly selfish to me. Only caring about your own pleasure/feelings. I would never want to hurt my signficant other like that. If I had one. Which I probably never will, but none the less.

[Yamamaya]

[quote="Yuki-Anne (post: 1472822)"]To fully understand this, we would need to delve into Japanese culture.



Shutting Out the Sun, Michael Zielenziger, p. 178-180, 182

This is just a snapshot of Japanese culture. If you want a bigger picture, I'd encourage you to buy the book and read it for yourself.

I don't think this is a matter of falling in love with someone else. In that chapter of the book, the author cites a Japanese man who says that while many foreign couples can frequently say "I love you," and express their feelings to one another, if he said that to his wife, she would just look at him like he was crazy.

Part of Japanese culture is that you bottle up your feelings. You don't say what you really mean. You don't tell others how you truly feel. I read on the news just this week that a man who survived last month's horrific tsunami was reprimanded by his boss for crying at work. What we see as this amazing, tenacious will to survive and move on will, I'm afraid, end up being very psychologically unhealthy for the Japanese people, because they're not expressing their feelings and dealing with them]

This might be why "hot blooded" characters in anime are so popular. It's a form of escapism, since most of the otaku sorts keep their emotions buried, so they can live vicariously through the emotional outbursts of the hot blooded characters.

Japan values control over one's emotions, however this leads to many issues such as a high suicide rate, and a lot rate of people seeking psychiatric help.

In general, this is why a lot of American guys(from what I've heard) think they have a really good chance of finding women in Japan. They hear about the sterotypes of Japanese men being unfaithful, demanding, and uncaring towards women, so American guys figure that with their training under 2nd and 3rd wave feminism, they have a good shot. Yes, it's sterotypical and a bit prejudiced, but it does have some basis in reality.

Like most societies, there are bad and good elements. Even the good elements can lead to bad ends. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

[Dante]

Your statements only make sense in a world where children would be an unavoidable result of sex. There are condoms, birth control pills, and surgical procedures that can reduce or even completely prohibit children from being conceived. Men with vasectomies like sex just as much as men who don't.

I believe that these are non-options for majority of the animal kingdom and for humans for majority of the time we've managed to exist. In other words, genetics for countering them are just barely getting some advantage (when they happen to have a lower chance of success) when the system changes, a new method arises and those genes lose their advantage.

Also, where do your statements leave people that are naturally sterile/barren, or have become so over time? I'm pretty sure that people who are physically incapable of having children still like sex, which renders your statements nonsensical.

Just because the car lacks tires to move doesn't mean the engine won't rev up. These are joint systems working in unison to make the system work. These systems work independently. You can kill a persons ability to reproduce and if they still have the equipment and programming to feel pleasure they'll still have pleasure. If you kill their ability to feel pleasure by killing the equipment or knocking out the programming but their equipment for producing offspring still works then they can still produce offspring even though they won't gain pleasure from the initiating act.

Also, where do your statements leave people that are naturally sterile/barren, or have become so over time? I'm pretty sure that people who are physically incapable of having children still like sex, which renders your statements nonsensical.

Having a sexual attraction towards fat people is actually more of an American thing, where food is plentiful and being fat is bad. This is cultural however, fat women are actually considered highly attractive in many cultures Nate - I believe it's fairly common in Africa for instance. Think about it - a fat woman knows where the food is, so if food is scarce, finding a woman who knows how to get fat is incredible and such a woman would also have a higher chance of being able to feed your offspring.

I will admit that sex in humans isn't entirely for the purposes of reproduction - actually I believe it can be reduced to about three reasons. But when it comes to the topic of adultery, we're talking about pair-bonding and child-bearing. In this situation, one is simply a precursor to the other in order to insure that both partners will remain committed to the child born (given how large an investment a human child is).

[Davidizer13]

Pascal, the thing I've got with your posts is that they assume that humans will always follow their base, animal urges to reproduce over love and other higher levels of relationships we humans are capable of, which are fundamentally irrational things. Humans will behave irrationally: if sex really was about just continuing a species to us, like in almost all other animals, romantic love would not exist. Even the views you hold, supporting Tyler Durden, are contrary to the strict desire of continuing a species. From what I can gather, he's kind of a psychopath and the things he plans to do would reduce the fitness of the human species if they came to pass.

Love is costly - even other k-selected species*, where few strong offspring are produced, the males don't often stick around to help raise the offspring, because doing so would tie them down. Romantic love as we know it is a force that goes against forces of straight natural selection, of maximizing the fitness of your offspring while minimizing energy spent on them. Sure, technically, it does increase your childrens' fitness, having an extra provider, but if your goal is only to maximize offspring, the guy should be unattached, free to make more babies.

*(K-selected species are ones that produce small numbers of strong offspring, such as most mammals. Opposed to this is r-selected species, which produce many offspring with a low individual likelihood of survival. Incidentally, this is where the game R-Type gets its name.)