Battle of the Sexes – Page 4

Being the Peacock

It is the male peacock that wears the fancy dress and struts his finery to attract the less flashy lady peahens. In the animal world it generally appears to be the male that gets all dolled up to catch the female, so why in our species are the females the disciples of Vogue? With animal courtship the males do all kinds of crazy things to show off because it’s the females who get to make the final decision. Human females also get to make our final decisions on mating, but it also appears they get to do all the gaudy displaying too? Or is that true?

Males of our species do show off by making money, showing strength, doing dashing deeds, while only using a modest amount of flashy color and huge tail feathers. Hell, suits are in by the young men again. You can’t get less flashy than a suit. Last night I saw a rock band all wearing black coats, white shirts and dark ties. Their looks were dull but they were making a big noise to attract women.

In our species it appears that the males are still the ones that show off, but somehow the role of preening was giving to our ladies. From fashion runways to Vegas shows to Miss America pageants you can see the extremes of female plumage.

I think this biological programming has had a tremendous impact on female behavior and psychology, making women very different from men. Okay, I can hear all the protests now. Yes, I know some men love to show off their costuming and some women don’t. But I think this programming subroutine goes far deeper than outfits. Women are a thousand times more concerned about their looks then men. Why is that?

Let me give an example. Among my lady friends, and I’m mostly talking about women in their fifties, I’m starting to hear the same story repeated independently from all of them that makes me worry. They all hate to see themselves naked. One friend said she holds her hand in front of her eyes when she gets out of the shower to shield her vision from the image of her naked body in the mirror. When she says this I’m thinking I’d loved to see her step out of the shower and towel off, so it’s not that she’s bad looking. But why has she become so hideous to herself that she won’t look at a mirror until she’s dressed and ready to hide her face in makeup?

If this was an isolated comment I wouldn’t have much evidence for my case, but I hear stories like this over and over again. We’ve reached an age where my women friends are horrified by their bodies but I’m not, not by mine or theirs. I still want to look up their dresses and down their blouses to catch whatever glimpses I can. And another common thing I hear from these women are gripes about men wanting younger “firmer” women.

They seemed obsessed with the word “firmer” too, because they say it with such resentment. And no matter how much I tell them I’m still physically attracted to women my age and even a bit older they don’t believe it. They say I’m an oddball and 99% of normal men only want to look at twenty-something women. Sure we like looking at younger women, but I’ve talked to my fellow boomers, and the consensus is older women can be just as hot.

Women may blame their resentment on men, but I’m starting to wonder if the problem isn’t theirs. Sure there are men obsessed with sweet young things, but none of my pals are like that. I think a lot of men have to chase younger women because as they get older the females of their generation stop wanting to be caught, forcing those guys to go further afield to hunt. But this isn’t the point of my story. I want to focus on the psychology of being the peacock.

I think both sexes are cursed by their biological programming. Personally and culturally we’re possessed by the drive to reproduce. This is understandable from a biological point of view, but why doesn’t the sex drive shut off when the baby making years are over? When women go through menopause, why don’t they suddenly wake up and think, “Gee, I feel great. I don’t have to preen anymore for those goddamn males always chasing after me.” And then relax into a new lifestyle. Why should women hate their bodies just because the sign “Great Babies Made Here!” gets turned off?

From the male side of things I wished my thoughts weren’t constantly befuddled by my cells urging me to go make babies. Obviously, the reason why I still want to see fiftyish women get out of the shower is from residual programming to reproduce. I’m already hearing all those people thinking, “Well men can make babies until they die.” Just because we can, and just because we have the drive, doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Evolution designed us to live long enough to reproduce and then die. Our brains helped us beat those plans and we live much longer than evolution planned. At a certain point in both the lives of men and women we get to an age where babies aren’t wanted. But the damn baby making programming inside of us doesn’t shut off.

Woman feel angst about losing their younger bodies and men feel angst about not getting laid as often. It appears that the women who looked the best in youth hate themselves the most while aging. Of course this is well illustrated by Hollywood starlets pursing plastic surgery till they have faces that look like rigor mortis of death. The nature of women playing the peacock was well illustrated in an old movie I saw the other night, Mr. Skeffington, with Bette Davis as a beauty obsessed woman constantly courting marriage proposals even after she was married.

I feel sorry for my women friends. Why can’t they accept wrinkles and sags? Firm tits and ass are only signs that say, “I Make Babies.” Why can’t old guys understand that the urge to chase young women is your cells tricking you into fatherhood? In the end, I think the burden of the peacock syndrome on women is far harder than left-over horniness in men. I don’t hate my body because I can’t get laid. Being a peacock when the feathers fall out must be painful and pathetic.

I have a long running argument with one of my lady friends. She says who we’re attracted to is mental, and I say it’s biological. Well honey, I think if it’s mental you would be able to rationalize yourself out of the peacock syndrome.

Jim

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer is the new YA novel that all my adult lady bookworm friends are reading. At my office four women have already read it and two have even finished the two sequels, New Moon and Eclipse, and are anxiously awaiting for August 2nd to bring them Breaking Dawn. I am more than halfway done with Twilight, but I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t be reading it. This book has a disturbing philosophical motif that isn’t suited for males. To put it bluntly guys, so far this story comes across as a manifesto against sex and pro all those qualities women wished us men had but most of us don’t. Is this the beginning of a radical movement?

I feel like a spy reading a classified document meant for her eyes only. Can women really read our thoughts from looking at our eyes? Are women’s secret desire to have their true love stay all night in bed with them without trying a damn thing? Is attention, talk and protection all what women really want from men? If Twilight is a big time fantasy for girls, then boys, all those porn fantasies you spend every waking moment on, are on such a vastly different wavelength from the object of your desires that I think maybe you ought read Twilight, just to learn what the enemy is thinking while you are picturing them without their clothes. They are picturing you in clothes. Nice clothes. Outfits you don’t take off.

Strangely enough Twilight is about vampires and werewolves, which you’d think would be full of great action and thrilling violence, but no. These vampires all belong to my sister’s Please and Thank You Club. Like I said, I haven’t finished with the first book, but so far killing and stakes through the heart are absent. This is a far cry from Van Helsing, and it’s definitely not Buffy and Spike bringing down a house.

If J. K. Rowling had used a female as her lead character instead of Harry, would the Hermione Granger series have had as many readers, and would the working of the magic unfolded as it did for a male point of view? Is Stephenie Meyer different, a writer revealing feminine secrets unlike most female writers who play along with male fantasies, or does her explosive success represent a large segment that’s pro chastity?

I have to admit that Meyer’s take on vampirism is quite cool, if intellectual, but I’ve got to wonder if it’s just one giant metaphor for male desire, where Meyer ties lust and sex to violence and death. Edward Cullen becomes the ultimate beautiful male that must control his instinct to kill, which for the average guy is the instinct to get laid. Now I could be completely off base here, and Meyer will eventually come around to the traditional values of sex and violence that all us guys enjoy and love, but I’m worried how far she will delay gratification.

This is a fun way to review a book. I can’t spoil the ending because I don’t know it. I can tell you the book is gripping, full of tension between Bella and Edward, and that women love this story. I’m not used to reading teen girl fantasies, so it may not be as much fun as seeing into the girl’s locker room, but it might be like having a secret microphone planted there.

Jim

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton’s 1920 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Age of Innocence, is a story about how people never communicate their real feelings. Wharton suggests at the end of her book, set twenty-five years after the start, that the next generation is more open, but I’m not sure even a hundred years later, in our own times, if this is true. The love triangle of Newland Archer, his fiancée May Welland, and her older cousin, Ellen Olenska is shown through the viewpoint of Newland’s mind. Edith Wharton does an excellent job of taking on a male point-of-view, considering the cultural restrictions of her time, and her consideration for the minds of people from the 1870s.

The Age of Innocence is a story of culture and manners and their impact on people. Newland Archer knows what he’s suppose to do, and how other people are suppose to act, but within his own mind he wants to be different, and imagines that maybe other people do too, but his life is frustrated by the few clues he gets to verify his theories. He thinks he has the perfect young woman lined up to be his wife and then he meets a woman who has run away from her husband, a Count no less, abandoning wealth and position, to flaunt traditional behavior.

Countess Ellen Olenska is described as looking old at thirty, and no where near as beautiful as her younger cousin May, at twenty-two. Yet, Newland Archer finds himself more attracted to Ellen. Plenty of other men do too, and readers are never sure how many men are chasing Ellen, or how many are catching her. Many men want to make her their mistress, but we’re never told the details of the relationships because we only get to know what Archer knows. He gets conflicting information from Ellen and the people who know her. Archer is never sure what May is thinking, or Ellen. He often plays games, telling himself if this happens, he’ll do this, and it means that, but they never work out like he plans.

Archer wants to tell May, sorry old sport, but you’re as dull as your society, and then run away with Ellen. We know that even in Wharton’s time, 1920, men were doing that, and readers today probably have a very hard time understanding why Newland didn’t just chuck it all for love, but then I guess that’s why Edith called her novel the age of innocence about the 1870s. In our times, we act on our impulses but do we communicate why?

People today still don’t say what they’re thinking but instead communicate with a strategy like the old Battleship game, where players try to guess the location of hidden ships on a grid. Readers following along behind Newland Archer and watch his strategic plans and waits with him to see if his remarks hit anything in the minds of May and Ellen, and then ponders along with Archer about May and Ellen’s commands back and if they offer any clues to what they are thinking. Even to the end, what May knows about Archer’s feelings for Ellen is ambiguous to the reader, but Wharton lets us know that May is no dummy and is playing her own game with as much passion as Newland’s.

We know even less about what Countess Olenska is thinking. Is Archer someone special to her, or is he just one of many men that she plays along. And does Archer really want to know? Edith Wharton has written a beautiful masterpiece about the battle between the sexes. The ending is perfect. Reading this novel makes me, and I assume other readers, wonder why people don’t just say what they are thinking. My guess is we’re afraid of shattering our fantasies. Our expectations of other people are all built on fantasy, speculation and desires. If men knew what women were thinking it would be crushing blows to our egos and sexual fantasies. If women knew what men were thinking it would be the end of romance.

I think Wharton knew this. I’m guessing Countess Olenska knew this, and from the last scene I think Newland Archer knew this, and we’re given hints that even May eventually learned this truth. But we never know anything for sure, because Wharton knew that, too.

Jim

Retirement From Sex

A better title for this essay would be Retirement From Life, but the word sex attracts more readers – don’t worry, I’ll get down to the juicy parts soon enough, just consider this intro foreplay. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about retirement from work, but I realize the word retirement can encompass far more than just that one part of life. Retiring from work is a major transformation in one’s personality, but as we get older we go through so many transformations that can also be called retirement.

For instance, I’ve long ago retired from going out to bars to hear live bands. That used to be part of my personality, listening to live music, but I’ve gotten old and can’t handle noise. Even loud restaurants feel like psychological torture. My wife hasn’t retired from live music, so she still feels youthful in that regard and I feel old. I know lots of guys who have retired from going to the movies. I haven’t yet, but only because it’s a major way to socialize with my lady friends.

Another area that I will be retiring from is heavy lifting. Guys like lifting heavy stuff because it proves they are still young and strong. A woman mentions she needs a 25″ TV carried up three flights of stairs and you volunteer, to make a point about your maleness. Women don’t need men for much, but lifting is something they seem to appreciate. So to retire from heavy lifting means checking out of the strong male club and it means you are admitting you’re weak, like a woman. And this is a big change. It’s humiliating to have to say, “Sorry, I can’t pick up something that heavy.”

Men retire from the heavy lifting club slowly. As you get older and something needs to be picked up and younger guys are around, you start letting them show off. But if you’re the only guy you keep trying to prove yourself as long as possible. George Carlin recently joked about this in his new comedy routine about turning seventy. He tells his audience, once you turn seventy you never have to lift anything again. Oh, you might pretend to try, but a younger person will rush over and do the job for you. I’m only 56, so I still have to lift things, but there are times when my wife talks about helping friends move, and I’ll remind her of my back problems. Of course, if a lovely young woman at work is in need of heavy lifting help, I don’t worry about my back so much.

Retirement from work means a huge change. Work means you are useful to other people. It’s more than just earning a living, work is social and it defines an essential part of our personality. The first thing people want to know when meeting you is what you do. Saying you’re retired is like saying you’ve stop being somebody. Of course, you solve this problem by becoming somebody new, but that’s hard to explain, especially if your hobbies are rather piddling.

Now, back to sex. Sex is a big topic, but few people express the personal details of their sex life, and neither will I. Let’s just say I’ve reach an age where I can see an end to my sex life. I feel sort of cheated by that because I remember back in the 1960s seeing documentaries about how people in their nineties could have active sex lives. I think there are some people who are still balling when their age hits three digits but they are few and far between.

Sex is not something I want to retire from, but I’m starting to see the dirty writing on the bathroom wall. I am appreciative for all the sex my wife gives me, and I do know on her part she’s doing a lot more giving than receiving, because she’s been closer to retiring from sex since menopause. (At least with me, I don’t know about her and her boyfriends.) She feels guilty about retiring from sex, which is lucky for me, but it’s not an emotion I want to play on for long. I’ve joked with her that if she doesn’t want to change the cat box then maybe I can find someone else for the job. She told me to go for it, but I think she’s confident that few women want the chore of being kindly to an overweight old bald guy. I guess she knows, it would still be changing the cat box to them too.

I don’t think I’m the only guy in this situation. I’ve gotten hints and jokes telling me the well is running dry in other marriages. Some of my friends even allude to losing interest themselves, and a couple joke like Al Bundy when he complains about having to service Peg. Although, I have heard rare reports of lucky older guys who have wives with matching libidos, but those guys might be lying, just like how some guys lied about the frequency of their sexual successes when they were younger. But statistically, I know the world is filled by all kinds, and anything is possible. Of my male friends who dine alone, they just make jokes about how happy they are they don’t have to move furniture all the time.

What surprises me about retiring from sex is how men are so much different from women. I know a lot of divorced and widowed women my age, and older, and the common consensus is they are overjoyed to be out of the sex provider business. I find this a little hurtful because it makes me wonder if they ever really liked making us guys happy. I always ask my single lady friends if they wouldn’t like to get married again, and they universally groan.

There is one common joke I hear, “Oh, I wouldn’t mind marrying a rich guy with a bad cough.” This strikes me as severely mercenary, and makes me further wonder about the motives of the women I knew when I was younger. I know books, movies and television shows are all about romance and sex, but I’m starting to wonder if pop culture hasn’t been perpetuating a long standing urban myth. I just assumed women were different before and after menopause, but now I wonder.

Retirement from sex means learning who you really are. When I was at Clarion West Writers Workshop I wrote a science fiction story about a guy who volunteered for an experimental treatment to temporarily turn off his sex drive to see what life would be like without his little slave driver. The story got a violent reaction in the critique group. The night before my older classmates, both men and women, told me how much they liked the story, so I went into the critique the next morning thinking I’d have a hit, but I was blasted by the young people. Some of the younger women called the story misogynistic, which was scary.

I spent a lot of time thinking about that. On one hand, it could have been true, on the other hand, why was the story admired by some and hated by others, and the dividing line seemed to be age? If a man turns off his sex drive does that mean he devalues women, or even hates them? Since the younger women were writing romantic stories, I could see my anti-sex story as anti-romance. What’s funny is women become anti-romantic after menopause. Well, that’s not quite true, they become anti-sex romantic.

Jane Austen is the queen philosopher of post-menopausal women. All my older women friends want a Mr. Darcy for dinner and dancing, handsome, rich, dashing – and a man who never expects the heroine to leave her Empire silhouette gown. Retiring from sex for men, means fulfilling a new role for women, one more fitting for a Jane Austen tale.

Don’t get me wrong, young women also love Jane Austen, but they either want or expect to unsnap their jeans for Mr. Darcy. Retirement from sex means changes in personality for both men and women. I think many woman are happy to go off to their little houses to live alone after their children grow up and their husbands leave them through death or indiscretion. And I think with older married couples, the concept of romance changes with them too, with women preferring their husbands to retire peacefully to their workshops or computer rooms.

In the life-long battle of the sexes I’m never sure if either sex understands the other. Women smugly claim to understand us males, thinking we live by one single motivating force, and claiming we don’t have a clue about their fairer sex. I think men have multiple drives, with sex just being the obvious one. It’s like asking little kids about going to the bathroom, inquiring if they need to go do #1 or #2. Well, there’s a lot of males hopping on one foot needing to go to #3, and that’s all women see. Sometimes it’s, “Oh, how cute,” and other times, it’s “Can’t you wait.”

I know when I go out with my women friends and the dinner check comes, they whip out their purses insisting to pay their half. I’m amused by this because I wonder if they are thinking, “I don’t want him believing I’m going to put out for $18.35 plus tip.” Like I said before, many of my lady friends have joked they would marry an old rich man with a cough. I’ve got to wonder if there is an incentive that would bring them out of retirement that falls between the price of dinner and a large inheritance.

Retirement from work means withdrawing from the complex social life of the office. Retirement from sex means withdrawing from a life of close physical contact. I don’t think men and women experience this retirement in the same way. I think the constant intense biological pull that women feel to be mothers and wives disappears after menopause, so they actually feel free and relieved to be independent. Whereas men who have always been free and independent feel psychologically cut off from people when they retire from sex. Men often die after retiring from work, and they often die when they have to live alone, and sometimes I wonder if they die when the final realization comes that the little guy is not going to have any more fun. Old women seem to thrive on independence and their retirement from sex.

What’s weird about thinking about having to retire from sex is how it changes my personal opinion about myself, and what it reveals about my personality. Gays and lesbians teach me a lot about sexual identity, in a rather round-about way. We define ourselves by who we want to get naked with, but what happens when we never take off our clothes with other people? Do we lose that identity? Do we suppress or bury it, or does it just slip away like time. Already I feel my sexual life has regressed to what it was like when I was a teenager, when I considered getting to first base a major goal. I’m back to wondering why women are so stingy with their riches.

Does retirement from sex mean a total regression, a devolution back to virginity? The phrase “old men and their toys” takes on a whole new meaning. Or will retirement from sex be the undiscovered country of my future? Or should my work retirement goal be to become an old man with money and a bad cough looking for a younger women willing to trade a few years of cat box changing duties for a long term retirement plan of her own? Or should I admit that I am not Mr. Darcy in anyone’s eyes and I should just develop a new identity, but one without sex?

Time Goes By, is my guide to getting old, and even Ronni, my elder guru, discusses the waning life of sex in, Been There, Done That. What’s Next?, although she is quick to defend that elders are having sex in, CNN: Elder Sex is a Dirty Joke, which reports 73 percent of people 57 to 64 are still having regular sex, and 53 percent of people age 64 to 75, and 26 percent for people 75 to 85, are still getting it on too. So retirement from sex, is like retirement from work, not everyone retires at the same age.

My point of this long-winded essay, is retirement is all about change, and fundamental changes, changes deep in our personality. This makes me not want to retire in any way, and keep on going the way I have been. On the other hand, I’m ready to rush into this new undiscovered country and start exploring. Escaping death is not an option, but I’d like to think everything else is, but that may not be true either. A lot of men would prefer to die at their desk, and I can understand that. And a lot of guys joke about coming and dying at the same time, and I can understand that too. The harder thing to imagine, even scary to think about, is living twenty or thirty years without work or sex or the ability to lift heavy objects.

Jim

What Motivates Science Fiction Fantasies?

Awhile back I wrote “What is Your Science Fiction Fantasy?” and I had a couple long and well thought out replies from my blogger friend Carl V of Stainless Steel Droppings that make me want to return to this subject. I’ve been a life-long science fiction fan, and my adolescence was filled with fantasies of two types. Like most guys that age, the majority of my waking thoughts back then were about sex, but between the constants T&A flicks playing in my brain I’d project fantasies about rockets and space travel. I loved science fiction books, movies, and television shows. I grew up thinking when I got older I’d have sex with lots of women and I’d be an astronaut.

As you might have guessed, things didn’t work out quite like I planned. We live in at least three worlds. The first is the unseen world of microbiology and its programming. The second is the actual reality where our bodies dwell. And third is the fantasy world of our minds where we constantly reshape reality. Most of the fantasies worlds we build are unconsciously inspired by the unseen biological world that lives inside us. We seldom examine its motivations.

I know why I had the teenage sex fantasies and where they came from. At the cellular level I am programmed to reproduce and the reptilian and mammalian parts of my brain did everything they could to keep me focused on the target of passing on my DNA. Every story about boy meets girl is our cells instructing us on how to make babies.

It’s rather hilarious, don’t you think, that the porn industry makes its billions by triggering the baby making response in males? Yeah brothers, the next time you have your hand on the joystick and you’re self-hypnotizing your mind with delicious sexual desires by drooling over images of female body parts just remember what 13.75 billion years of evolution is trying to trick you into doing.

Now ladies, don’t think y’alls lot in life is any more dignified. Guys may be slobbering monkeys playing with themselves, but women are the ones painting their faces, contorting their bodies to protrude in suggestive monkey appealing ways while acting like robotic slaves to appearance and competitive fashion. Not only that, but Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice can turn you into a swooning puddle of quivering romance. Sure in your eyes Colin is Mr. Right, but go reread the paragraph above and remember what Mr. Firth sees in his eyes.

Now you might not believe what I’m saying, but you can at least see the possible connection between the plots of most novels and biology. So where the hell did all those spaceship fantasies come from? Is there some deep urge to explore that exists in our genetic structure? Maybe my lower brain functions wanted me to be an astronaut after my neo-cortex told them that fly-boys got all the chicks. Porn and romance books make sense but what’s the logic of science fiction?

In my youth I justified my interest in trashy science fiction books by telling adults I was preparing for the future. As I got older I worried I was just reading SF to avoid growing up. When it was obvious my Heinlein training wasn’t going to pay off I felt that college years were meant for having fun before I was sentenced to the 9 to 5. Then I told myself that all those silly outer-space dreams were just as realistic as all those sex dreams were turning out to be. I wasn’t making babies or riding in rockets.

I ended up believing that fiction and fantasy was just entertaining diversions for when I had free moments from living and working. I concluded that art, fiction, stories, fantasies, were meaningless expressions of creativity.

Now that I’m older, I’m re-evaluating that. Could it be that our sense of wonder dreams are telling us something? Carl doesn’t like how I keep referring to entertainment as escapism:

Now I’m not naive enough to ignore the fact that there is some degree of escapism in watching films and reading. I don’t believe there is any way to ever get totally away from that. But I think there is a fine line between escapism and entertainment and I firmly believe that if you read something and it stays with you and you are thinking about it and mulling it over and it somehow inspires you, lifts your mood, etc. then it is making a positive contribution to your life. ‘Escapism’ as a term seems to bring up only images of negative stuff.

I tend to use escapism as a synonym for entertainment, so that’s getting me into trouble. I do this because I see entertainment as a vacation from work. But what if our entertainment desires represent a positive drive like sex? Out of all the zillions of species on planet Earth we’re the only ones with these Buck Rogers dreams. Sure, we could tie them to biology and say they are just our territorial genes on steroids. Is the human impulse to build skyscrapers really that different from ants building mounds? There seems to be no natural analog for the SF drive.

Carl’s science fiction fantasy is to be a hero like Hans Solo:

Also I love the whole hero thing. We all want to be heroes, as husbands, fathers, friends. I’m attracted to Han Solo because he represents what I think so many guys are and want to be…we are by nature somewhat independent and yet at heart we crave a few good, close, intimate friends and the love of a good woman who is our equal, not a damsel in distress. I look at my own personal life and I believe I have that. My wife is every bit the person I see in so many of the romantic movie and book roles I love.

This goes a long way to explain why entertainment fantasies are positive driving forces in our lives. My formative SF fantasies came from the Robert A. Heinlein’s young adult novels from the 1950s. Instead of wanting to be a Joseph Campbell hero like Carl, those books made me want to be an explorer or pioneer, and my fantasy was to grow up and join a team that colonized Mars. And long after it was obvious I was never going to live my fantasy I’ve wanted the same fantasy for the human race by supporting the space program.

The word “escapism” does seem negative, and in some contexts so does the word “fantasy.” We come home from a hard day at the rat race and read John Scalzi’s latest or put on a DVD of Aliens, or play Halo on the Xbox, and tune out this world. Is that a negative or a positive? We could be doing something more constructive – I’m sure our wives think so. Is the act of communing with our science fiction selves telling us something?

Most fiction involves stories about this world with slight variations. In fact, most stories are a variation of boy meets girl which is only an elaboration of the plain old sex fantasy. Other movies, like action pics are expressions of alpha male fantasies. Chick flicks show the inner motivations of females. Our entertainment reflects our biological programming. Again, I’m back asking where do these science fiction fantasies fit into biology?

Is this SF drive greater than our biology? Think about the big bang. It was a big explosion of energy that shoots out in all directions. After that for reasons hard to understand this energy reorganizes itself into matter that forms stars and planets. Visualize blowing up a building and then watching as the rubble reassembles into something new. That’s hard to imagine, isn’t it.

After the planets were formed by bits of rock clumping together we eventually get biology. Talk about an infinite army of monkeys typing away and to produce the works of Shakespeare. Is it any wonder that some religious people came up with the idea of intelligent design? Cosmologists are now explaining this odd drive to complexity by saying we live in a multiverse – an infinity of universes and we just happen to live in a universe that has accidentally acquired this organizing drive. They imagine most universes with big bangs that produce an entropy of particle haze.

Life represents replicating organisms. What is the purpose of all this reproduction? Humans have developed a rather peculiar side-effect: self-awareness. I think science fiction is aptly named. As science has expanded our awareness of the universe, science fiction has programmed us with motivation to explore it.

If you look at porn and forget why it excites you then you are in animal mode. If you watch Pride and Prejudice and forget why its pushing your buttons you are sleep walking. If the latest science fiction novel electrifies your sense of wonder and you don’t under stand why, you’re a robot without AI.

I return to Heinlein over and over again, and Carl knows the foundation of his psychic world is Star Wars, but do we know why this art we admire so much is pushing our buttons? Sex is the most powerful motivating force for humans behind survival, but we forget how it influences our art and culture. Has the academic world every psychoanalyzed the motivating power of science fiction? I do not have any answers. I am just now forming the question.

Jim