The Five Sexes
Last year, at age 69, I added another player (agent) to my story of human male sexuality, one I had never been taught to name or think about, and so could not. But human storytellers are not the only source of information (e.g. books, talking heads, imagines, media — mainstream and social, on down to Fred who hangs at the pub when not cutting peoples hair.
Between 11 and 15 years old, humans take an interest in sex. It happens. In my day pre-internet, information was more limited. So far as I know, none of my friends got information from their parents (who having achieve at least that status, presumably knew something about it). Nor did any of them read books, i.e. go to the library. They got their information from the locker room and pornography, such as could be found in trashcans of consumers who for some reason didn’t want to be found in possession of it.
I was not impressed with my friends as sources, didn’t ask my parents of course, but I did go to the library and read ‘many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore’. I even found a book from the 1870’s among some discarded books of practical medical advice from a doctor who detailed why masturbation needed to be aggressively treated to avoid the harm (e.g. insanity) that would be caused if not treated. I had to vet my sources, including those hot off the press.
There was a magazine called ‘Popular Science’ (print version 1872 to 2020, digital 2021 to 2023, 151 years, now history), but in the 1970s I could not view it as a source (e.g. like Scientific American was then, which is now today’s Popular Science Magazine on its way down).
I soon realized that, as an autodidact, friends and popular media was not a source. Indeed, all modern humans are a questionable source, and any belief that current stories about human sexuality are better than those in the 1870s is as believed in.
I realized that I couldn’t understand my sexuality apart from the context of my culture, within the context of modernity (all other cultures of today, including subcultures) which need be viewed within a context of all prior cultures (history). So anthropology and history books were of interest.
Oh, but how could I understand human sexuality apart from primate sexuality and the evolutionary history of hominin sexuality? And why should the sexuality of mammals be of lesser interest than Playboy images and articles? I went on to go full biology, and transform my interest in my penis and other’s vaginas into wanting to know why do organisms reproduce sexually? And what about superorganisms, e.g. army ants and expansionist humans? For some reason, my penis became of lesser interest. Maybe it wasn’t even the center about which the universe spins.
I recall a friend in early high school days who was vastly smarter than I was, who read far more books, and based only on the title of a paperback I saw in his bedroom, I asked to borrow it, hoping some of his cosmopolitan vastness might rub off on me. He was reluctant, tried to discourage me, but ended up letting me borrow it.
In the first chapter I read of a putative old Chinese saying, “When rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.” There was no internet, so I couldn’t ‘google it’ and learn that in 1946 Frederic Wakeman used the claim in The Hucksters, book about modern advertising, and that Confucius says it is a 1950 imagining a British general remembered as a Spanish saying…. The book I had barrowed went on to celebrate the joys of rape (and if the woman doesn’t enjoy it, it is her fault for now taking Confucius’ advice).
It was about this time, perhaps precisely after reading the first chapter of this book (don’t recall the title) before returning it, that I stopped viewing anyone as a source.
Sex is still ‘out there’ and in need of understanding (like everything else that matters). But if no humans are sources… and then what? Well, there is this crazy idea that there really is an ‘out there’, a what-is, so-called reality. Postmodernists think they know there is nothing out there, but so far as I know (which is nothing), they could be wrong.
Yes, ‘it’ could all be a computer simulation ‘I’ am a subroutine of. It’s all (life, the universe, everything) part of Xianun’s higher school science project who lives on the planet Omicron. ‘We’ live in her computer until she gets bored by the repetition of our rise and fall fixation and mania for sex.
If you can believe such fantasies' (and who can’t in our age of post-truth?), then relax and enjoy it. And where’s that latte you ordered? That’s all you need to know, right?
But I’m still interested in sex. I knew I had a libido, a hypothalamic limbic sex drive with ejaculating as its endgame. And I had a body equipped with hormones, a prostrate, and penis the limbic subsystem knew how to use (I learned the hard way that I, the PreFrontal Cortex (PFC), couldn’t just say no, as while I could pretend to ignore a raging hard-on, and stare at the ceiling for hours late into the night, ‘I’, as PFC, would fall asleep, only to be rudely awakened after having a nocturnal emission mess ‘I’ needed to clean up.
Fortunately, the good doctor who wrote the most authoritative and best informed book in the 1870s was wrong. After ejaculating, the limbic brain (part thereof) goes to sleep (for a time). Masturbating is completely curative of the condition of having what today is called ‘blue balls’.
Of course, if you google this term, you will learn that it is a serious medical condition, an affliction that one’s sex pardner (or whomever) is obligated to treat, even if they have to be paid to. Girl friends and wives just have to understand (and put out), and if they don’t, if they can’t relax and enjoy it, then they are defective and need to be replaced.
The information has changed since 1873, but in 150 years hasn’t gotten any better, indeed, it is even more dysfunctional (ask any modern woman who hasn’t yet bought into the current consensus narratives). Alternative to listening to current or prior (or future) primate prattle is to listen to the nature of things, to the Gaian system, to the putative ‘reality’ thing no one believes in anymore (because reality is whatever you believe it to be).
Oh, but some primates tell better stories than others. Some humans endeavor to listen to Nature, who has all the answers, and they like to share their best-guess evidence-based stories in science rags like the journal Nature:
The first eukaryotes to engage in sex were single-celled protists that appeared approximately 2 billion years ago, over 1.3 billion years before development of the first animals with neurons capable of assessing pleasure.
Okay, so I know what all the words mean, how dubious claims get published in Nature, that they could not merely be wrong, but ‘not even wrong’ and still get published in Nature (and worse, claims that should be about what Mother is trying to tell us are not publish because they are outside the consensus narrative of the peer reviewers). I don’t believe anything I read in Nature (much less anywhere else), and often have occasion to wonder how I could not be wrong about everything.
But sex is, it happens, and I infer it had a beginning on Earth. In a few years someone will claim (based on evidence) that protists only started having sex 1.9 billion years ago, and some other “expert” will counter with a loud “NO!,” that they certainly were having sex 2.1 billion years ago.
It will be like arguing when the Anthropocene began. Some hominins (i.e. the last one standing) are easily distracted. The short story of “2 billion years” is more than I know or really need to. Humans probably didn’t start having sex 4.2 billion years ago (as a source on YouTube claims) or the claim of “within the last 10,000 years” (or 6026 years ago as Bishop Ussher, Primate of All Ireland, calculated and the Pope approved) is far better known and believed in (i.e. humans started having sex about 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BCE).
Science is the endeavor to tell likely stories (none of which are ‘true’), ones that iterate towards ‘truth’ as the most likely story. My current most likely story is that Homo sapiens sapiens (subspecies of Homo sapiens) started having sex about 350k to 400k years ago based on archaeogenetic evidence as interpreted by usually clothed primates when not having sex who still endeavor to tell likely stories.
So, Bishop Ussher, thanks for the story, but I don’t think it is the most likely story. Nature, the Gaian system, doesn’t care what I believe. But if what I believe makes me behave in such a way that my descendants persist, then Nature still won’t care, but posterity might.
So back to male sexuality, things that really matter. For over six million years hominins evolve alternative relationships to the patrifocal culture the common ancestor of common chimps and humans (hominins) shared, the evidence for which is the remnant of common chimp-like competition, aggression, and alpha-male dominance that persisted to be selected for over the last 75k years of human expansion.
The development of serial monogamy mediated by amphetamine-like neurochemicals (that induce focused romantic infatuation, ‘puppy love’) that allow for a focused sexual interest in The One that eventually extended to several years. This was an evolutionary innovation that allowed (selected for) cooperative child rearing as hominin childhood dependency grew longer with increasing brain size (off-spring born more immature to allow smaller heads to be birthed). My focused and serial interest in girls began about age nine and faded with the passing of adolescence.
I’ve mentioned four ‘players’ (all documented at book length by many), but I need to add a fifth:
- A body (in my case male limited information), including brain and hormones. If body ain’t happy, functioning within normal parameters, the following don’t work either.
- A pre-reptilian limbic brain sex drive that is in charge of ejaculating penetrating gametes (passing on genes to future generations, a human species’ need and therefore a want). Source of what Joseph Campbell called, “the zeal of the organs for one another.”
- A PFC (prefrontal cortex) that tells stories about seemingly everything, which are by varying degrees untrue as there are no ‘true’ stories, e.g. there are no climate models that are the climate of the third rock from Sol, i.e. our view of the world is not the world system. [Genghis Khan only needed 1, 2, and 3 to father 500–2000 children.]
- An infatuatory/romantic sexual brain evolved to enable serial monogamy needed to associate paternity of an offspring with a female’s chosen one to reinforce a male for favoring the female/child until the child is weened (at which time both can pick a new pardner). Males and females able to enter into cooperative child rearing for 3–4 years, for a time needed for an Australopithecine to gestate, birth, and nurse a child until it is able to independently forage with the band, selected for romantic, infatuatory, focused sexual pair-bonding lasting for a few years.
- A matrifocal brain sex drive in some human males that we don’t tell stories about, and so doesn’t exist (Galileo, forced to recant his crazy claim that the Earth moves, that it goes around the Sun, has long been imagined to have quietly uttered, ‘and yet it moves’, to complete his confession). As childhood came to extend to many years and dependent off-spring overlapped (more than one at a time), long-term monogamy was selected for prior to the Great Expansion (which) selected for omniscient conquerors and patrifocal culture).
Your patrifocal/patriarchal expansionist r-culture (and mine) doesn’t believe in a matrifocal sex drive, but due to compelling evidence, I can by doubting my r-culture verities. And ‘I’ don’t know anymore than Bishop Ussher about anything. But I can cite data, evidence, for telling any story I care to type about (and so do). My interest is to tell a likely story, a better story based on what is in front of my pug-nosed face (what’s in front of your suave face may differ).
I could write at book length about the first three, but many others already have, and some even tell similar stories, but so far as I know, no one (except Edgar Allen Poe) tells about real men having a matrifocal sex drive.
What is not thinkable (e.g. human overpopulation and overshoot/collapse) is not out there, even if it is (you fall out of an airplane flying high, but you don’t believe in the putative ‘ground’ thing).
The evidence that stands clear before me, that I couldn’t see before, is as clear as the claim that if I stick my wabbling finger into a fire it will get burned again. I mentioned my discovery back in October of this very last year, so if you are one of the 13 who read it in my tale of Edgar Allen Poe, skip my recounting.
The short of it is I woke up (aroused) early one morning and my PFC decided to give in, to just do it. Within a few minutes of ejaculating, my wife woke up and, I would never had guessed, was in the mood. Everything I thought I knew, or had learned about my sexual nature in 55 years, was wrong. In response to her evident interest, I became fully erectile, maintaining the same and with all my usual enthusiasm (e.g. for providing sexual breast stimulation), I allowed her to have me have her way with her, for just as long as she wanted as usual. When she evidently had had enough, my erection went away and my limbic brain was still fully satiated (refractory period for ejaculating remained as usual, so there was none of that).
Okay, that was then, a one-off freak show, but as the months go by I have repeatedly observed the same pattern, which had always been there. And now that I can tell a new to me story about what is in front of my face, I can refine the story as more evidence comes in.
First, it is obvious to my PFC that ‘I’ as PFC had nothing to do with my being erectile responsive and driven to respond to my wife’s needs. Being her slave, what can I do but tend upon the hours and times of her desire? There is no choice involved apart from my PFC’s ability to interfere, to suppress, to deny.
What I now view as a matrifocal sex drive (‘by any other name…’) is as much an evolved brain function as my limbic sex drive or the early puppy love I experienced. I don’t know or even care what part of the brain (outer layer) it is located in (likely cerebral cortex, which includes the PFC, and not in the limbic/amygdala region), but it doesn’t come from culture, especially modern culture, but is an evolved drive no different from my compulsion to breathe if I hold my breath or remain underwater too long.
I (as PFC) do have a part to play, but I’m not the only player. A better informed PFC is a happier PFC in better accord with my limbic and matrifocal sex drives and my body is happier too. But all four of us agree (know) that our happiness is incidental to mamma being happy. ’cause if mamma ain’t happy… (and as all normal, properly informed children and males know), ain’t nobody happy. This I know because the genes of my ancestors have told me so. I am their genes and such of their memes as I may recover the hard way.
And this is why I have a matrifocal sex drive. My ancestors did what worked to persist. Those that did it better made their mamma happier, and that’s how I came to exist. Without any PFC or limbic brain involvement, my matrifocal brain assesses my wife’s mood. Sometimes my PFC helps by testing the waters, but has no power or right to assess the evidence.
If convincing to the matrifocal brain, it will respond with all appropriate enthusiasm. My PFC knows that human females require (significantly benefit from) sexual breast stimulation, but my PFC is not the source of ‘my’ enthusiasm for giving it. The giving, and giver (matrifocal sex drive), is willing and able to keep on giving as long as and in any manner as my bride wishes. If the limbic drive is joining in, the matrifocal is empowered to suppress it to avoid ‘jumping the gun’ prematurely.
If the matrifocal brain assesses that my wife’s desire is to just be cuddled, then with all due enthusiasm she is. If she wants, no words needed, her neck kissed, then that too. She (her PFC) may not know that that is all she wants, but my matrifocal brain is hard to fool. If there is any evidence of “enough,” then her PFC and mine may be surprised, but the matrifocal brain will lose interest (go unresponsive) and any erection will go away.
If the limbic brain has other ideas, my PFC will get the message. My PFC may interfere. If need be, if the limbic won’t take a hint, but persists, my PFC may note my wife is asleep and quietly give the limbic sex drive what it demands (to avoid cleaning up a mess later).
But usually the limbic and matrifocal are not in conflict, and usually the limbic can stand down and hope to get lucky later. Usually sexual breast stimulation (with or without her having an orgasm) leads to coitus. My matrifocal drive naturally focuses on the hours and times of her desire, whatever it might be.
I see myself (body, limbic, PFC, matrifocal) sexually as a bow to her fiddle, apart from which there is no music. I may be compelled occasionally to take bow in hand, but there is no music. Evolution explains why. Through ‘my’ genes, I can hear the song of my ancestors.
The matrifocal sex drive is remorselessly selfless. It is driven only to ‘tend upon the hour and time’ of her sexual needs, whether to be held only, or given multiple breast, clitoral, or G-spot orgasms until she has had enough. Period. From it’s worldview, that’s why it exists. If her pleasure includes coitus, then my limbic sex drive is all onboard. But the matrifocal drive is a higher (later evolved) structure, and so can independently control erectile function (but has nothing to do with arousal/ejaculation) and can suppress ejaculation.
Of course, all brains, complex systems or parts thereof, are subject to error, ignorance, and illusion. Sometimes the matrifocal subsystem and PFC miscalculate, judge her to have had enough and ejaculating seems like the cheery on top. But oh, there is evidence she hasn’t had enough and the matrifocal drive kicks back in to maintain an erection without any discomfort, something that never happens after ejaculating by masturbation's or by nocturnal emission when any further situlation is adverse.
The limbic drive controls arousal/ejaculation and causes the discomfort that the matrifocal can cancel for entirely evolved reasons that make mama happy. The matrifocal can make a premature ejaculation seem like it never happened. To my PFC, this is not a conjecture.
Another error is that the matrifocal interferes with the limbic’s endgame too long. There may be sudden and clear evidence my bride has had enough. For the matrifocal brain, that’s it — game over. And my PFC gets the message.
My PFC can also suppress the limbic brain’s driven focus on ejaculating. Sometimes there is a so-sad-too-bad condition, and the limbic driven brain can get over it (or persist until the PFC can’t take it anymore and agrees to masturbate).
But my wife’s PFC knows that such misfortune (error) can happen. She has had enough, but may be happy to oblige my libido. I once noted that frontal coitus was favored when endeavoring to give her pleasure (a matrifocal preference), but that rear entry coitus favored the limbic such as my pre-hominin ancestors for anatomical reasons preferred. So if she turns over and invites me to have my way with her, that is my PFCs cue to not rein in the limbic brain and share with the matrifocal the news that she will be pleased to please the little guy, so the matrifocal brain is okay with letting the libido have its pleasure.
The PFC is the least evolved player, the body the most. The matrifocal may be a hominin adaptation to what worked for cooperative bands of increasingly bipedal apes on the veld.
During the Great Human Expansion over the last 55k years, leading edge patrifocal cultures (e.g. recently Māori, Arab, Indo-European, Bantu expansions) focused on omniscient conquerors favoring alpha male atavisms, would have selected for change, especially in males.