From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Aug 25 1999 - 00:52:27 MDT
On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, phil osborn, replying to Elizabeth Childs wrote:
> Women typically start relationships by telling some dirty secret,
> to show they trust you. But that in itself tells you how they see
> their relationship to other people -
> i.e., a manipulator, allied with other manipulators.
You may wan to read "The Red Queen" (or some other related books
like "Sperm Wars"), documenting the difference in the sexual
strategies between men and women.
Women are "manipulative" due to the requirement for "Plan B".
Women (in evolutionary times) mate with a man so he can provide
resources for her and her offspring. However, being a man is
a hazardous profession, women live in fear of their mate not
coming back from the mastadon hunt or having him stolen by
a younger woman (more able to bear his children)... Given
that situation, the best strategy is "Plan B" -- have another
man that you can entice into being your mate, should mate A
suffer an accident or be lured away. To make "Plan B" work,
you have to be *very* clever (manipulative), in that you
have to make potential mate B think he has a chance without
letting mate A discover this. For if mate A discovers this
he may start to wonder whether those children he has been feeding
are his or B's. This will cause him to (a) pick a fight with
potential mate B; (b) exercise his mate B option deserting
his mate A and any children; (c) kill the children of
questionable parentage and begin again (thus negating female
mate A's large investment in previous offspring).
If this isn't a recipe for producing "manipulative" behavior
in women, then I don't know what is. So it isn't women
you should be griping about -- it is the womens' *genes*.
I have a friend who is a classic example of this. She is
an ultimate controller/manipulation entity (self-admitting).
In looking at her background, I can't find much that would
have "trained" her for this (her parents were both well
educated, engineer/scientist types and very laid-back).
I can only suspect that she is homozygous for the "manipulation"
genes.
> Not that I'm accusing you of any of this. With the billions of women out
> there, there will always be some who buck the trend. Just not enough. Most
> of the values and goals that extropians and libertarians are working for are
> opposed primarily by women, who have the inherited money and the additional
> years of life, giving them the political majority to use the state's gun to
> force their "progressive." anti-futurist views down all our throats.
I was surprised a few years ago, when when I stood up in a
meeting of the Gerontological Society of America in a session
that I believe was on Health Care Economics, and announced
that as the president of a biotechnology company that was
working on the molecular biology of aging, we had one fundamental
goal -- to *eliminate it* and that *only* this approach would solve
the problem of health care economics (due to the fact that
a large drain on the health care system is to individuals
in the last year of their lives).
That comment drew cries and protests from the audience. The
net of the feedback I got, was -- how could I consider
elimintating aging? If I recall correctly, the session was
part of the "sociological" division of the GSA (which has
3 divisions: biological, medical and sociological).
One has to wonder if most of the protests were from women
(who I would argue, are probably in greater numbers in
the sociological, than the medical, than the biological
divisions [of course with no evidence to confirm this]),
who view lifespan extension (and/or the elimination of
aging) as a fundamental threat to one of their
self-perceived "values" to the race (i.e., their
ability to bear children). Women who identify themselves with
child-bearing may inherently be anti-longevity because
if one can live forever, there is less desire/drive
to leave behind a memory (as offspring) and an inherent
problem that eventually non-dying individuals will consume
all of the resources and eliminate the possibility of
reproduction.
So recontextualizing, the "progressive, anti-futurist" argument --
these women are simply fighting (tooth and nail) for the survival
of their genetic design function -- to bear offspring.
Robert
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