SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES, AGAIN PT. 1

I style this essay "again" because it's not a "Part 2" to the original SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES, which was simply a review of a non-fiction book based in bad pseudo-feminist ideology. It recently occurred to me that the same phrase would apply much better to the cultural "blues" that come about as a result of real and perceived issues stemming from sexual dimorphism. If anything, this post might be a loose sequel to the following statements from SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE, PART 2.                                                                                    

   

My re-interpretation of Nietzsche's "will and willingness" would not quite fall into the trap of viewing men as entirely active and women as entirely passive. Yet Nietzsche's dichotomy does apply in a more specific biological sense: male humans are biologically positioned to specialize in violence (a rough analogue to Nietzsche's "will") , and female humans are biological positioned to specialize in sexuality (an analogue to "willingness," up to a point).

I specify "humans" here since my main concern is human expression of its own propensities and limitations. Yet the biology doesn't start with human beings, but applies to the majority of humankind's nearest simian relations. With some exceptions, the so-called "great apes" follow the example set by a majority of birds and other mammals in that most male apes possess greater size, about 25 percent larger than the females. This gives the biggest ones a generally greater capacity for imposing their will, either on females or on other males. Meanwhile our nearest DNA-relations, the common chimpanzees, seem to have stolen a march on their earlier relatives by becoming experts in sexual promiscuity, in a "willingness" to indulge in sex for purposes not entirely defined by procreation.                                                     

Now, the purpose of the SACRED AND PROFANE series was to explore male and female archetypes rather than the sociological stresses of culture, but I'm still seeking to build on the dissonance created between the sexes when one of the two incarnates "will" and the other "willingness." At least this Nietzschean metaphor applies to all species in which the male is bigger and the female smaller, thus excluding outliers like the black widow spider and the blue whale. To be more specific, though, only human females, with their control of the estrus cycle, can be deemed "masters of sex" as all the big male creatures are "masters of violence." These metaphors for evolutionary abundance are, I admit, not in line with the dominant evolutionary dogma. As I am a Gene myself, I do not approve of Richard Dawkins' theory of a bunch of selfish genes that just want to keep making copies of themselves. I much prefer the Stuart Kauffman concept of coevolution.                                                 

   "...at the high risk of saying something that might be related to the subject of consciousness, the persistent decoherence of persistently propagating superpositions of quantum possibility amplitudes such that the decoherent alternative becomes actualized as the now classical choice does have at least the feel of mind acting on matter. Perhaps cells "prehend" their adjacent possible quantum mechanically, decohere, and act classically. Perhaps there is an internal perspective from which cells know their world."-- Stuart Kauffman, INVESTIGATIONS, p. 150.                                                                                                                                                            Kauffman here is speaking only of evolutionary alterations at the cellular level, and so I do not know if he endorsed the notion I'm loosely stumping for here: that fully formed organisms might "prehend" the need to change to suit a particular physical challenge. The relevant challenge here would be the response of both males and females to females' diminishing outward signs of the estrus cycle, which in turn came about once human females needed to bond males to them for the purpose of nursing children, which in turn became more neotenous than many mammalian offspring in reaction to bipedal evolution. Males' greater propensity for body mass might have been genetically encoded by their anthropoid precursors, but said propensity may also have been reinforced once males were more regularly competing with one another for sexual opportunities.                                                                                                                                                                                                                     And that's enough on sexual dimorphism theory. Part 2 gets into the "Blues" part.