The Rawness

Part 1 over here. I originally said it would be two parts. Screw it, it’s gonna be three instead. This installment is going to discuss why people who don’t grow up suffering from madonna/whore complexes tend to be more naturally good with women and sexual relationships. The next installment will be about why men who do have extreme madonna/whore complex anxieties are often horrible with women. And in case you’re wondering, I’m not a fan of either extreme. Ideally I think one should be somewhere in the middle. A man should be somewhat cynical and skeptical and screen against sluts to avoid cuckolding and raising kids that aren’t his, but neither should he be so cynical that he thinks that all women are untrustworthy at best and whores at worst, as that leads to its own set of problems.

In the last installment we had two womanizers who appeared on the Tyra Banks show, Ahmed the superstar and Shawn the Slumdog Hundredaire. Two ladies’ men who were as different as darkest night and brightest day. As I was watching the show, I figured out that Ahmed, who came off as a guy who was effortlessly natural at wooing and attracting women, had detachment issues with his mom. And I came to the conclusion the Shawn was more of a momma’s boy. Shawn mentioned calling his mom every day earlier on, so I had no doubts about him, but I figured I’d never find out what Ahmed’s situation, but luckily near the end of the show the following exchange happened:

Tyra: So you say that marriage is not biological for a man and x,y,z, but tell me?there?s a reason why you think in your life with your childhood as to why you are a womanizer??

Ahmed: I think there is a detachment with me and my feelings when it comes to women, based off of maybe feeling a void I did what i did. At a young age me and my mother were tight, she was a single parent, and she was independent and I looked up to her. She was my mother and my father. She did what she had to do, masters? degree, blahblahblah. Then she got married, then put her career and herself on the back burner for a man, had his kids and he just broke out on her. So misery loves company, and I didn?t like that, and I was neglected in the situation, so ever since then, I was like ?You know what, I might do what I do, but?

Tyra: Did you become detached from your mother?

Ahmed: Yes, me and my mother didn?t get along. So I left at a young age and ever since then my attitude was like ?[Fuck] women??

Tyra: If you had a different childhood, do you think you?d be a different man?

Ahmed: I think so. I think all my friends that are cool with their mothers and respect their moms have a different outlook when it comes to dealing with women.

So how did I predict Ahmed had problems with his mother? Well first let me make something clear. I don’t think that everyone who is good with women has problems with their mother. Some people are good with women because they are late bloomers who studied hard or found good mentors as adults to cure themselves of politically correct reassuring fictions and undo a lot of counterproductive conditioning they had growing up. Some are good with women because they had the rare type of mother who was not politically correct and was willing to tell them some ugly truths about men and women. So I’m not trying to say every good womanizer has mother issues. But what I do believe is that people like Ahmed, the true naturals who don’t get emotionally hung up on chicks no matter how hot they are, who are effortless in their confidence and game, tend to have some emotional distance with their mothers, whether it’s just some aloofness to all-out rage.

I first stumbled on this notion in world-famous master pimp Robert Beck AKA Iceberg Slim’s autobiography Pimp. In it, the young Iceberg Slim grows up with a loving mother and his nice guy stepfather. It is the happiest time in his life. His mother has just been left by his philandering, unreliable father and times are initially hard for young Iceberg and his mother.

There were no jobs in Indianapolis for Mama and for six months we barely made it on the meager savings. We were pennisless and with hardly any food when a tall black angel visiting relatives in Indianapolis came into our lives.

He instantly fell in love with my lissome beautiful mother. His name was Henry Upshaw, and I guess I fell as hard for him as he fell for Mama.

He took us back to Rockford, Illinois with him where he owned a cleaning and pressing shop, the only Negro business in downtown Rockford.

In those tough depression times a Negro in his position was the envy of most Negro men.

Henry was religious, ambitious, good and kind. I often wonder what would have happened to my life if I had not been torn from him.

He treated Mama like she was a princess, anything she wanted he got for her. She was a fashion plate all right.

Every Sunday when we all three went to church in the gleaming black Dodge we were an outstanding sight as we walked down the aisle in our fresh neat clothing.

Only the few Negro lawyers and physicians lived as well, looked as well. Mama was president of several civic clubs. For the first time we were living the good life.

Mama had a dream. She told it to Henry. Like the genie of the lamp he made it a reality.

It was a four stall, opulent beauty shop. Its chrome gleamed in the black-and-gold motif. It was located in the heart of the Negro business section and it flourished from the moment its doors opened.

Her clientele was for the most part whores, pimps and hustlers from the sprawling “red light” district in Rockford. They were the only ones who always had the money to spend on their appearance.

The first time I saw Steve he was sitting getting his nails manicured in the shop. Mama was smiling into his handsome olive-tinted face as she buffed his nails.

I didn’t know when I first saw him that he was the pin-striped snake who would poison the core of our lives…

There was really nothing out of the ordinary that day. Nothing during that day that I heard or saw that prepared me for the swift, confusing events that over the weekend would slam my life away from all that was good to all that was bad.

Now looking back remembering that last day in the shop as clearly as if it were yesterday my stepfather, Henry, was unusually quiet. My young mind couldn’t grasp his worry, his heart break.

Even I, a ten year old, however, knew that this huge, ugly black men who had rescued Mama and me from actual starvation back in Indianapolis loved us with all of his great, sensitive heart.

I loved Henry with all my heart. He was the only father I had ever really known.

He could have saved himself an early death from a broken heart if instead of falling so madly in love with Mama he had run as fast as he could away from her. For him she was brown-skin murder in a size-twelve dress.

Steve was a sleazy, sneaky low-level pimp that had Iceberg’s mother dripping wet with lust and eating out of his hands.

Yes, poor Henry’s fears had foundation. Mama had never loved my stepfather. This kind wonderful man had only been a tool of convenience. She had fallen in love with the snake all right…

One scene in my life I can never forget and that was that morning when Mama had finished packing out clothes and Henry lost his inner fight for his pride and dignity.

He fell down on his knees and bawled like a scalded child pleading with Mama not to leave him, begging her to stay. He had welded his arms around her legs, his voice hoarse in anguish as he whimpered his love for us.

His agonized eyes walled up at her as he wailed, “Please don’t leave me. You are sure to kill me if you do. I ain’t done nothing. If I have, forgive me.”

I will never forget her face as cold as an executioner’s, which she was, as she kicked and struggled loose from him.

Then with an awful grin on her face she lied and said, “Henry, Honey, I just want to get away for a while. Darling, we’ll be back.”…

As the cab drove us away to the secret rendezvous with Steve sitting in his old Model T, I looked back at Henry on the porch, his chest heaving as tears rolled down his tortured face.

I’m sure it surprises no one to hear that things just got worse and worse from there. Steve convinced Iceberg’s mom to search out and reunite with Iceberg’s dad under the pretense of reconciliation, so that they could set him up to be robbed. Iceberg’s dad had straightened up and gotten a good job and was in a nice house and had accumulated belongings worth stealing. She not only double-crossed his dad, she acted as if she didn’t have anything to do with the double-cross, and cried hysterically when she “discovered” the robbery alongside Beck’s dad, who had no suspicion of her involvement. Iceberg AKA Beck recalled

For many tortured years she would suffer her guilt. She had made that terrible decision on that long ago weekend.

I know my lousy old man deserved what happened to his goods. I know Mama got her revenge and it was sweet. I am sure, but it was bitter for a kid like me to know that Mama was part of it.

Perhaps if Mama had kept that burglary cross a secret from me, in some tiny way I might have been stronger to fight off that pimping disease. I don’t know but somehow after that cross mama just didn’t seem like the same honest sweet Mama that I had prayed in church with back in Rockford.

Can you picture a child going through such experiences and still growing up to put women on a pedestal and seeking their approval? Me neither. Late in his life, long after he left pimping, Robert “Iceberg” Beck gave an interview reminiscing on his life and career:

Koblin: Do pimps hate their whores?

Beck: Well, not necessarily consciously. The best pimps that I have known, that is the career pimps, the ones who could do twenty, maybe thirty years as a pimp, were utterly ruthless and brutal without compassion. They certainly had a basic hatred for women.

My theory is, and I can’t prove it, if we are to use the criteria of utter ruthlessness as a guide, that all of them hated their mothers. Perhaps more accurately, I would say that they’ve never known love and affection, maternal love and affection. I’ve known several dozen in fact that were dumped into the trash bins when they were what?…. only four or five days old.

Koblin: You say you loved your mother in your book.

Beck: Of course, but underneath the threshold of consciousness, I know that I must have hated her, as demonstrated by my neglect of her through the years.

In reading Robert “Iceberg” Beck’s autobiography, you notice that long before he became a pimp, he was already an effortless, smooth-talking “natural” with women. Since reading the book and Iceberg’s interviews, I began looking at naturals and many of them had dysfunctional relationships with their mothers. In the case of some of these naturals, they had good relationships with their mothers but had even stronger relationships with a very alpha male father. This helps one become a natural as well, but by and large the somewhat dysfunctional or distant relationship with the mother seemed to be the biggest factor in creating naturals, especially if it was interspersed with periods of pampering (Iceberg also claimed that his mother, for all his faults, pampered him as best she could and that this also contributed to his becoming a pimp). The power of this combo is that they dysfunction keeps the man from growing up putting women on a pedestal because he’s sees his mom as weak and flawed, meaning he doesn’t have some ideal maternal model as an example for his mates to aspire to, but the pampering and coddling aspects train him to expect favors from women without any guilt, hesitation, shame or repentance. In fact, a natural doesn’t even view it as a favor so much as something he’s entitled to.

The extreme natural like Iceberg can turn off his emotions at will like a faucet because he has no mental division between the Madonna and Whore archetypes. The Madonna and Whore archetypes became one and the same for him at a young age. Sometimes even when I see brothers who handle women very differently despite growing up in the same family, I can look at their birth orders and examine how their relationships with their mother differed and see reinforcement that the one with the more natural skills with women is the one with a more complicated or less warm relationship to the mother, making him less likely to deify the feminine mystique.

What is the mechanism at work here? Well, do you remember way back when I discussed the Mystery/Mastery Paradox? That’s where I described how something is a mystery to you, which makes you love it and drives you to master it. However once you master it, it loses it’s mystery and you start to fall out of love with it. This boredom and frustration drives you to reframe the challenge in a way to make it interesting to you again or to chase a whole new challenge. Well that can also work in reverse. Sometimes something gets demystified to you first, and then the fact that it’s no longer a mystery to you allows you to fall out of love with it and master it easily. To people like Iceberg Slim and Ahmed, women were demystified to them at an early age, which made them fall out of love with them as a noble ideal and allowed them to master them.

It was my readings of Iceberg Slim that first made me notice this dynamic. This is they dynamic I immediately noticed when watching Ahmed and Shawn on Tyra’s show. It’s no surprise then that one of the first things Shawn, obvious late bloomer with horrible game, mentioned was he was close to his mom. And it’s no surprise that Ahmed, super natural with his arms around both his ex-fling and his current squeeze, said losing respect for his mom is exactly what made him great with women. And if you notice in the clip above, when Ahmed makes the same observation that Iceberg made about men and their mothers, Shawn immediately protests. Very telling.

Recommended Reading:

This post is the first in a two-part series on madonna/whore complexes, both parts going up today, and it’s going to be video heavy, with five, yes five, 6-8 minute clips. So let me warn you up front, it’s going to be time-intensive, but it’s so worth it. Watch every video. Then read the analysis.

I was watching the Tyra Banks show a while back (don’t ask) and saw an episode on womanizers. In particular, it was about women confronting the womanizers who wronged them. It turned out to be a lot more interesting than I expected, as the two womanizers they showcased were actually night and day in terms of approaches.

The first womanizer is named Ahmed, and the woman “confronting” him had little bad to say about him:

This kind of surprised me. This is Tyra’s show, which is pretty feminist and “You Go, Girl!” so I thought they’d be totally setting up the guy to get punked and embarrassed and shamed. But the girl has no hard feelings and has nothing bad to say about them. A lot of the women in the audience seem to be disgusted and are shaking their heads in shame when they hear the woman saying nothing but nice things about Ahmed before he actually comes out, but once he does come out the audience and Tyra seem to warm up to him. He seems to be a guy who is very naturally good with them, and is brutally honest about who he is and what he wants. The most impressive thing about the whole exchange is the intellectual honesty of the girl. She doesn’t try to remake what happened into a narrative that makes her into a victim, makes him into a manipulative predator or excuses her from responsibility. She doesn’t seem to be lying to herself or the audience.

Then it got more interesting. They brought out the dude’s current girlfriend, to make her sit there on the couch with Ahmed and one of his past flings.

This guy is really master of his domain. Pretty unflappable, doesn’t seem to get unhinged or made nervous easily. Even Tyra’s relationship expert, whose job it probably was to bash the womanizers to score points with the audience, says he thinks the guy is a “good guy.” This is even after the details of his past cheating has been revealed.

The next womanizer is Shawn. The clips speak for themselves. First the intro to Shawn:

Shawn “out on the prowl:”

I’m not going to spend time dissecting Shawn’s approach and pointing out specific mistakes he makes, because honestly there are just so many in that short clip that it would require a whole separate post (if the commenters want to go ahead and dissect his awful game, go to town on it). But the guy is cheesy, kind of like a broke Bollywood Fabio. I’m talking cringe-inducing cheese. He’s playing a numbers game, and not very well to boot, and he does finally get some interest, but from a girl who seems somewhat cheesy and desperate too. Honestly, I think she’d be game for any half-decent guy who showed interest. She doesn’t really strike me as a very challenging target. And unlike Ahmed, he is horrible at handling Tyra, the crowd, the women on the panel, and Tyra’s relationship expert. He also gets defensive, which just digs his hole deeper.

So I’m watching the fucking Tyra Banks show and shockingly it’s intrigued me way more than I ever expected to be intrigued by a Tyra Banks show. I felt a real mystery here: why were these two guys so night and day in their approaches and the responses they got from the crowd? What was the X-factor that allowed Ahmed to excel that Shawn lacked? My guess, based on some preexisting theories of mine about men and women, was that Ahmed was probably a guy who was a “natural,” someone who is naturally good with women, while Shawn was a late bloomer who tried to teach himself to be a player later in life, did a bad job and ended up with creepy, cheesy results. But because he’s articulate, shameless and probably approaches a LOT of women, he’s gotten his share of successes and thinks he’s better than he actually is. But if you compared the number of women he hooked u with to the number of women he approached, you’d see he probably gets a low return on investment. Plus the quality is probably not as good as it could be because he seems to be doing more of a numbers game than trying to go for quality. Most importantly, I figured like most naturals Ahmed had some issues with his mother, while I figured Shawn the cheeseball was a mama’s boy. This is a theory of mine, that men who are naturally good with women usually have some sort of mother issues that creates an emotional detachment in the mother-son link, while most late bloomers are mama’s boys who are very emotionally attuned to their mothers and put them on pedestal.

I figures this would just remain speculation, as I couldn’t imagine Tyra digging deep enough to find out about Ahmed’s relationship with his mother. After all, this is daytime fluff TV. But to her credit, then came the next part, which touched on exactly that. You can watch all of the following clip if you want to see the shenanigans of Dick Masterson, professional chauvinist, but the key part for the purposes of this blog post starts at 4:45:

Tyra: So you say that marriage is not biological for a man and x,y,z, but tell me…there’s a reason why you think in your life with your childhood as to why you are a womanizer…?

Ahmed: I think there is a detachment with me and my feelings when it comes to women, based off of maybe feeling a void I did what i did. At a young age me and my mother were tight, she was a single parent, and she was independent and I looked up to her. She was my mother and my father. She did what she had to do, masters’ degree, blahblahblah. Then she got married, then put her career and herself on the back burner for a man, had his kids and he just broke out on her. So misery loves company, and I didn’t like that, and I was neglected in the situation, so ever since then, I was like “You know what, I might do what I do, but–

Tyra: Did you become detached from your mother?

Ahmed: Yes, me and my mother didn’t get along. So I left at a young age and ever since then my attitude was like “[Fuck] women”…

Tyra: If you had a different childhood, do you think you’d be a different man?

Ahmed: I think so. I think all my friends that are cool with their mothers and respect their moms have a different outlook when it comes to dealing with women.

BIN-fucking-GO.

I’m going to post part 2 to this series later on tonight, where I discuss naturals, late bloomers, and their relationships with mothers, and what it all has to do with the madonna/whore complex.

Every now and then I come across something that I wish I wrote. This piece from Craiglist’s “Best Of” section is a perfect example. It’s called “Myths and Truths,” and I’ve reproduced it in full below. I’m sure a few people will call it jaded and cynical, and it probably is, but that in no way negates how astute and accurate it is:

Myths and Truths

——————————————————————————–

Date: 2006-04-18, 11:09PM PDT

Some rants and accumulated experience about women. Men in happy marriages or stable relationships don’t need to read this; neither do men who get laid every week (or even every month). The “truth” I’m putting out here is for all of those men who, like me, worship women and can’t figure out why they keep getting screwed over and dumped. The myths are things that I used to believe before I wised up.

MYTH: Women want love and affection. Women want to be treated well. If you treat a woman well, she’ll treat you well.

I heard an interesting theory a few years back when I first got into evolutionary psychology about how the cuteness of babies is a trait that helps babies to survive to adulthood.

According to the theory, at some point in human history there were both ugly babies, who instinctively repulse us, and cute babies, who instinctively draw us in. Since infants are totally helpless and utterly dependent on the kindness of older people to eat, drink and survive, it was and still is in a baby’s utmost advantage to appeal to the nurturing instincts of adults. This is especially true early on in human history where infant mortality rates were really high due to scarcity of resources, harsh living conditions and lack of medical knowledge. The cute babies trigger the nurturing instinct in humans automatically, in almost an involuntary fashion, which is what helped them thrive and dominate the population of babies. The ugly babies didn’t trigger this nurturing instinct, and as a result, they were less likely to survive into adulthood and pass their ugly baby genes on to the next generation.

This leads us to our current situation, where just about everyone in the population has the “cute baby” gene, because the “ugly baby” gene was weeded out by natural selection long, long ago. People usually don’t turn ugly until they get older and become more self-sufficient. At that point it’s safer to be ugly because they don’t have total dependence on others anymore and can fend for themselves. Plus their caretakers have emotional rapport and spiritual attachment to them, meaning they will still love and care for them regardless of what type of mutant they may have turned into once the cuteness wears off.

Here’s a snippet from an article about the same topic:

“We are inherently attracted to a specific set of characteristics, including large, symmetrical heads, large eyes, small mouths and small noses,” according to Jeffrey Kurland, associate professor of biological anthropology and human development. But why do almost all humans find this particular set of features so appealing?.

Reading this description of the type of babies people find cute made me think about a few things. Whenever you see someone, whether they have huge lips, a big nose, or tiny eyes as an adult, when you see their baby pictures they had small eyes, small noses and small lips. Their features changed when they got older and it was “safe” for their features to change. I have a big nose and lips for example, but it didn’t happen until closer to my teenage years, and it was a gradual process.

But what I wonder is, does this list of traits that we are instinctively drawn to in babies play any role in what we find attractive in adults? I mean, sure you have the Angelina Jolies and Mick Jaggers of the world who have huge lips and are considered sex symbols, but for the most part when looking at models the big eyes, small nose and small lips thing is a consistent draw. Even in cultures that traditionally have a lot of small eyes, big noses or big lips, a premium is still placed on people with big eyes, small noses and small lips. Look at black sex symbols like Beyonce and Halle Berry and they often fit this mold of having these overall features. In Asia, tons of actors and actresses get eye widening surgery to increase marketability, including Jackie Chan.

Another disturbing point of these features is that they are all typically associated with being Caucasian. Nowadays the popular line of thought is that the media brainwashes people to find “white” features attractive, but what does it mean for the rest of us non-Caucasians if it actually turns out that it’s an evolutionary preference?

Now keep in mind that there’s still a lot of evidence to the contrary, as there are lots of traits that make for a cute baby yet are not considered attractive in adults, like round faces and pudgy baby fat. And there are many sex symbols that don’t have the cute baby traits yet are considered universally gorgeous, like Angelina Jolie and her huge lips. Or maybe it’s that Angelina Jolie has other features that compensate for the lips like extra huge eyes and an extra small nose, so that the big lips are just considered an exotic quirk to help her stand out?

More from the article:

According to Kurland, infants who displayed cute features actually may have been healthier, and as adults more sexually attractive. They would have been more likely to survive and reproduce. Cuteness, in this case, is an indicator of good genes…

At some point in the distant past, it would seem, babies were not all cute. Their particular physical characteristics attracted no special attention. But once the “cuteness” preference took hold in the genes, babies had no choice but to become cuter over the generations. In effect, they had to wage a kind of cuteness war to get attention — and to this day people seemingly are helpless against the onslaught.

Which leads me to end on this somewhat disturbing video. If you have any doubt that we are hardwired to nurture babies, what it. It erased any doubts I had. It’s about a woman who created a lucrative business of making ultra-realistic baby dolls. I mean really realistic, to the point that you can’t tell they’re fake unless told. It’s in 5 parts, but I’m just including part 1. Unfortunately the Youtube user disable embedding so here’s the link: FAKE BABY VIDEO PART 1 (If you’re interested in seeing the remaining 4 parts, the links should be on the right side of the video).

What’s cool to see in this video is how these baby dolls are crafted so realistically that they are able to actually trigger this nurture gene, even after people are told the babies are fake. You have grown ass men being shown these babies after being told they’re fake, yet their voices still soften, their body language becomes nurturing and their whole demeanor shifts into a quivering mess of goo goo eyes and cooing. The video is also cool to watch because it’s really fucking disturbing and discomforting in other ways too when you see how attached seemingly sane people actually get to these dolls.

When I say that the tendency to stereotype isn’t all bad, and in fact is often a good thing, I get a lot of grief. The first thing people think is that I’m somehow anti-minority or pro-white, but everyone from a straight WASP male to a Wiccan black butch lesbian can be a victim of stereotypes. Stereotypes are not a problem exclusive to minorities, nor are minorities exempt from doing the stereotyping themselves.

Like it or not, the tendency to stereotype is a part of human nature, and my view is that if a behavior or biological response is part of our human nature, it must be because it traditionally gives people an evolutionary advantage. When we say that a trait gives us an evolutionary advantage, what we’re saying is that it satisfies our two fundamental biological drives: the drive for self-preservation and the drive to spread genes through reproduction. Let me clarify, anything that falls under the human nature category satisfies one or both of those fundamental drives.

Take gossip for example. On the surface it may seem like a petty and ugly part of our human nature with little to no redeeming qualities. But there are many plausible theories out there that convincingly suggest the opposite, that the tendency to gossip is a tool that gives humans a huge evolutionary advantage over those who never gossip. Robin Dunbar in his book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language discusses the development of language and the evolutionary benefits of gossip, for example. According to Dunbar, in the days before credit reports and background checks, gossip traditionally benefited communities by spreading the word about dangerous and untrustworthy people. If you were unreliable, a thief or violent, word spread around about you and people avoided you. In this way gossip satisfied the self-preservation drive. Also, say a woman was a slut. As a man looking to carry your genes into the next generation, you would have avoided marrying a slut at all costs because in the days before DNA tests and reliable birth control, a slut can easily get pregnant by another man and tell you the baby is yours. Now you’re paying for another man’s child and not spreading your genes. So by telling you about someone’s sexual behavior, gossip helps a man with his drive to reproduce.

It’s also human nature for people to be more critical of a woman for being promiscuous and unfaithful than for a man. As I explained in this earlier post, that’s because if a man slept around and impregnated several women, it optimized the drive to reproduce in two ways. First, one man sleeping with multiple women led to multiple pregnancies whereas one woman sleeping with multiple men still only led to one pregnancy. That’s an inefficient allocation of resources. Second, if one man slept with multiple women, you’d know who the father is and who the mother is in each pregnancy. If a woman slept with multiple men, especially in the days before DNA testing and reliable birth control, you wouldn’t know which man was the father. This is an obstacle in a man’s drive to reproduce and spread genes. It’s for these reasons (and others) that we still tend to be more critical of women for promiscuity than men.

For a man, on the other hand, it’s a worse blow to his reputation to not be a provider than it is to be promiscuous. That’s why most negative gossip about men revolves around being cheap, being a deadbeat dad, and being chronically unemployed or lazy. Traditionally, the danger to women when men slept around wasn’t a threat to the drive to reproduce and spread genes. As we’ve seen, men sleeping around actually optimizes that goal. The threat to a woman when men slept around was to the other drive, the drive for self-preservation, because that man may choose to take better care of the other women and her children and send a majority of his resources their way instead. In evolutionary terms, a hardworking and responsible polygamous man who takes care of all his women and children is preferable to a lazy and irresponsible monogamous man who doesn’t take care of his one family. So when you look at human nature in evolutionary terms and focus on the two drives, the natural tendency human beings have to gossip about women’s sluttiness and men’s ambition and finances make perfect sense.

It also works in reverse, if good gossip is spread about you, it increases your reputation which in turn increases your chances of survival and reproduction. This gives people an incentive to manage their reputations, follow the rules and conform to societal norms, hence another benefit gossip provides to a community.

Take something even less obvious, like the natural urge we have to tickle people, and the built-in response we have of laughing when being tickled. It may seem like a stretch, but even tickling satisfies the two drives, as seen in this NY Times article:

Tickling and laughter are universal among humans and can even be found among chimpanzees, suggesting that they serve some serious evolutionary purpose. Researchers agree that tickling plays an important role in the bonding of infants and parents. Mother tickles baby. Baby laughs and smiles. Mother laughs and smiles. They endear themselves to each other to their mutual evolutionary advantage.

But Dr. Glenn Weisfeld, a human ethologist at Wayne State University in Detroit, suggests that tickling may do much more. Tickling, he maintains, is an educational activity.

”The structures of the body that are most vulnerable to tickling are also the ones that are most vulnerable to attack,” Dr. Weisfeld said. ”We may be responsive to tickling because it gives us practice in defending ourselves.” Children laugh, he said, to encourage adults to continue this tickle schooling, in what are typically safe, practice play attacks.

These examples reinforce the view that human nature is a collection of instinctive responses and learned behaviors that give us an evolutionary advantage by helping us either survive or reproduce. Gossip helps people avoid dangerous, unreliable and untrustworthy people. By helping us socially fit in and form bonds, laughing can help us in our drives to reproduce and spread genes. By teaching us to protect vital areas, tickling can help us with self-preservation.

So if stereotyping is a part of human nature, what evolutionary advantages does it give us? And how does it satisfy the two primal drives of self-preservation and spreading genes through reproduction? We’ll get into that in part 2.

Recommended Reading:

• I first encountered the two human drives in reading a book by the pickup artist Mystery, The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed. Pickup artists and their books often get a bad rap as being manipulative or just plain bunk, but I find them to have a lot of sound theories about evolutionary psychology in general and gender relations in particular. Mystery was the subject of the recent VH-1 show The Pickup Artist. I find his social theories to be pretty sound overall.
• This book is a great resource on the evolution and advantage of language in general and gossip in particular.
• This book is an excellent starting point for learning about evolutionary psychology, and I highly recommend it. It’s written in a really easy-breezy style and is extremely readable and layperson friendly.

Click here for Part 2 of this post.