XVII - SEX

Sex. If you turned to this chapter first, go back and start reading from the beginning of the book. One thing builds on another.

Sex is associated with reproduction. It is hard to make babies without reproduction. It is hard to make babies without going through the motions. But sex is also associated with beauty, glamour, skill, fun, excitement, power, popularity, privilege, fame, fortune, style, poise, and almost any other form of attractiveness you can name. If all this is part of sex, there must be more to it than just intercourse. There must be something very basic connecting sex to the general social fabric.

If we look at commonly told stories about a man and a woman overcoming many obstacles and getting together for love and marriage, and therefore sex, we see a pattern. Typically, she is very beautiful. She may also be charming, talented or of high-status birth. He is probably both strong and handsome. He is also apt to be rich, powerful, and/or also of high-status birth. Sometimes one of them is none of that, just an apparent Nobody. If so, we soon will discover hidden virtues such as kindness, cleverness, awareness, or persistence that make that person exceptional. These qualities are then tested by all the roadblocks fate puts in the way of their love.

The couple will find each other early in the story. Classically, it’s one look and they’re goners; it’s love at first sight. Then without really knowing the other person but simply overwhelmed by consummate attraction, they risk life and limb for the rest of the story in order to get together at the end.

What is all this? What are these stories trying to tell us about love, sex and sexual attraction? Is it that physical appearance, social status, skills, and virtues are all that matter? They do matter, but they are also symbolic.

What they symbolize is alpha. Beauty, power, strength, virtue, skill, charm, talent, wealth and upper-class family background are all understood to belong to the alpha. What the story is saying is that if you want true love and great sex, you must be alpha, so you had better try to be all the alpha you can. Also, the story says that your partner must be the most alpha one you can win. The moral behind the story is that good things flow to alphas and everyone else has to make do.

Dating
The truth of it is that any two people with sufficient mythic overlap can have a wonderful loving sexual relationship. But the message of the story is the common belief. If you doubt this, go out on Saturday night and watch couples on dates. Go to restaurants, bars, ticketed entertainments and other popular dating destinations and notice how much is devoted to increasing apparent alpha.

Each person will be trying to seem more alpha in the other’s myth. On first dates, that myth is not well known yet, so the alpha appeal will be more general, with liberal use of the well known alpha symbols and behavior, such as dressing up, spending money, being charming, and being in good taste (honoring the ideals of the culture’s myth). On later dates, each has greater knowledge of the other’s personal myth, so the appeal will be more individualized, focusing on the style of alpha which most engages the other. Everything about typical dating behavior revolves around alpha.

Why would this be so? First, there may be instinctive behavior here. Many animals have mating displays featuring strength, dominance, superior anatomical features or other attributes with parallels to alpha in humans. Our behavior may be part of a long zoological tradition.

Beyond that, to begin to create a family group, the couple will need to start developing their own group myth bonding them together. They each want to have their personal myth well represented in the group myth they are forming, so it is in the interest of each to be seen as alpha as possible, to be accepted by the other as a source for that myth.

Restaurants
The alpha focus of dating couples is easy to see in restaurants. Restaurants are only secondarily in the business of satisfying hunger. What they are primarily doing is providing an alpha setting for the progression of their target clientele’s myth through a universal human activity, eating. The more expensive the restaurant, the more this is so, and the more desirable it is seen as a setting for a date.

It’s not the food. The food in an expensive restaurant is not significantly better than in a medium-priced restaurant, and there is less of it. Alphas do not want to appear hungry, because those on top are assumed to live in a world of plenty. The food is usually more fussily prepared. If the food is difficult or complicated to prepare, it will give the effect of great effort towards producing an offering worthy of a high alpha person.

Heightening the alpha fantasy is the service. Expensive restaurants are famous for the snooty behavior of the snob waiter. He is trying to accomplish two goals. The first is done with the customers who are alpha or look and act that way. He acts alpha yet is clearly serving them and subservient to them. He gives the message that even though he is high status, he is still deferring to the customer who is so much above him, reinforcing the alpha fantasy.

The second goal is to induce the common folk, those people who will not play the alpha game or play it badly, to play better or leave. The presence of obvious non-alphas spoils the alpha fantasy game, and the game, not the food, is why the expensive restaurant is there.

The setting is also important to the effect. It is more alpha. It is quieter. The décor will be an attempt at matching what is associated with the most alpha people. It will be more beautiful—beauty is seen as alpha. It will be in a part of town associated with alpha people. The restaurant will appear more expensive—money is a symbol of alpha. Alphas are assumed to have lots of money, so the high price itself says alpha.

The high price is justified because it is a high price. If the expensive perfume you are happily buying at a fancy store instead had been sold at a discount house for a dollar, would you buy it? No, you would not. You would call it cheap perfume and you wouldn’t touch it. So it is with fancy restaurants.

More modest places play the same game, but on a limited scale. They each provide an acceptable level of alpha within the myth of their target clientele.

Parties
Dating couples love to go to parties. A party is also a classic place for people to find new friends and lovers. The alpha enhancement of parties fits in with the alpha posing of dates. Equally, the coming together of the guests through the party myth to a state of tribal unity parallels the dating dynamic. See the Play chapter for a discussion of parties.

Ticketed Events
Events to which the audience buys tickets to see a performance are also popular dating destinations. In a way similar to a party, a performance draws the audience together by holding attention to the myth enacted, be it music, dance, a play or movie, a sports contest, or whatever else may be put on for the audience. Although the performers, as mythic sources, have alpha, they are catering to the audience, which thus feels alpha also.

If you and your date absorb the group myth performed, you will share more myth in common and thus feel emotionally closer. Coupling this with alpha enhancement makes for a successful date.

Alpha and Sex
Why should dating be so alpha-obsessed? First, it is part of life, and alpha is a main focus of human attention. More to the point is that alpha is central to our relationship to sex.

We are social mammals. In such species commonly the alpha male gets the most sex. The lesser males get less, down to the poor guy at the bottom who can’t get any at all. The females try to breed with the most alpha male they can get.

For us, if given a preference, we will choose the most alpha sex partners available, all other things being equal. All other things include the role possibilities for this person in our myth, the probability that we will not be left for another, the fit of this person into our social group, and the various practical aspects of the relationship.

One of the rewards of sex is the alpha validation it gives. The emotional logic is alphas get sex. I am getting sex. Therefore, I must be alpha. If one’s partner is perceived as very desirable in one’s myth, the effect is heightened. Much mythic validation and progression is happening, which feels good, too. Even though logic such as this is faulty rationally, it is credible mythically, so we feel it to be so. Sexual social posturing, portraying hints of one’s potential as a sex partner, is a key strategy in alpha jockeying. It is a major factor in the selection and use of clothing and other props for one’s role. Raising the possibility but not the reality of one’s availability as a sexual partner also is a major way people enhance their own sense of alpha while influencing and dominating the behavior of others.

Being alpha gives you sex appeal; having sex you want makes you feel alpha. Being chosen for sex where others were not is generally considered a reliable indicator of alpha. If a woman has sex with a man she knows will bed any woman he can, she will not feel her alpha enhanced. If many women want him but only she can get him, she will feel uplifted by her conquest, if his myth is meaningful to hers. Men feel the same way about women.

If the culture is one in which women refuse offers of sex more often than men, then a man will be more apt to feel alpha with any woman who will have him. The resultant willingness of men to say yes to any woman reduces or negates her alpha rise through sex, making her more likely to say no to an offer of sex. The system reinforces itself.

Much of the enormous anxiety people have about sex is really about alpha. People confident in their own alpha position are less on edge about their sex lives. It also works the other way. Having a good sex life helps release a sense of personal authority to be alpha, a mythic source.

Dirty Jokes
Why are there so many dirty jokes? Humor based on sex and, to a lesser extent, elimination is the basis of perhaps half of all jokes. What is it about the functions of our crotches that is so funny?

Humor is based on mythic discontinuity. For dirty jokes to be so universal, the discontinuity needs to be big, important, and apply to everybody. It is and it does. The discontinuity is about alpha. Sex is a major alpha validator, telling us that we are a mythic source. Yet to have sex we lose some of our mythic power as we are forced to conform to our minds’ and bodies’ need for stimuli and their patterns of response. We have to give ourselves to sex to make it happen. We lose some dominance over our myth in the process of confirming that we are the source, the alpha. We are anxious about this drop in alpha while in sex mode. Characters in sex jokes have a drop in alpha on the way to the punch line.

Similarly, elimination forces us to give up mythic control and conform to our bodies’ needs. Again, we see in elimination jokes the character’s loss of alpha.

In addition to forcing loss of mythic control, sex and elimination remind us of our animal nature, that we are mammals with flesh and blood bodies with all their weaknesses and eventual mortality. We don’t like to think of ourselves that way. Our conception of alpha is in the other direction. Our most alpha characters, our ideal alpha gods, do not have physical bodies and are immortal.

Sex and elimination are necessary to normal life but they threaten the alpha we would like to believe we are. Dirty jokes help us deal with the anxiety.

Sexual Repression
The interests of the culture are served if most people are sexually repressed because repression helps hold down the number of alpha people. The cultural myth needs just a few leaders to keep it developing. Most people need to be followers so they will all have enough mythic overlap for the society to be functional. If everyone were alpha, the progression of the cultural myth would resemble an attempt to herd snakes.

Sexual repression also serves the culture by helping to hold groups together. Sexual attraction that is not consummated but is instead sublimated is central to much human bonding, both same sex and opposite sex. It is an integral part of overlapping myth. If we are sexually malnourished, we will be subconsciously searching for sex partners, even if we have no conscious plans to do so. Such searching will cause us to emphasize those parts of our myths that we share with others, as we seek to form group myths with them as a foundation for a sexual relationship.

This will drive us toward conformity with group myth and alpha mythic creation compatible with it. We will move away from creating a unique personal myth apart from the culture. The group myth will thus be stabilized and more constant across its members. Typically, in any group the fool will have the best relation to his sexuality.

Organizations with tight myths do not suffer fools gladly. Religions and armies come to mind, and they both are strict about sex. Such a policy also helps keep would-be alphas at bay.

Family Myth
The coupling of bodies has evolved to include a coupling of myths. The incredibly long period of childhood dependency makes stable family units desirable. We are semi-monogamous and tend to stay together as couples. As couples and families, we are groups, and a group needs a myth. Where does that myth come from?

It can be copied from the culture, giving standard role models. It can be created within the family. The myth may also come from someone outside the family.

Family myths are based in their culture because the family is part of the larger society. If the myth is almost completely culturally determined the family will be very conventional. If its myth is of largely independent origin, the family will be unique.

If the source of its myth is from within, the family will be more autonomous. More often, there are strong mythic sources, older relatives, in the couple’s primary families. They act to bind the new family’s myth to the existing ones in the extended family, thus holding the larger family together. The couple will try to gain some mythic autonomy, but the forces of the extended family are hard to resist.