Re: Controlling the male sex drive

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Thu, 07 Oct 1999 10:20:04 -0500

Kathryn Aegis wrote:
>
> The notion that the male sex drive is any way different or stronger than the
> female sex drive has been disproved by not-so-recent psychological and
> medical testing.

Personally, I believe that, at least in twentieth-century American culture, the male sex drive is more annoying and tends to get its victims into more trouble. But that's a side issue.

Regardless of how the relative strengths show up, you are simply not going to get me to believe that male and female sex drives don't express themselves in qualitatively different ways. For that matter, you're not going to get me to believe that they're equally strong (although you might be able to convince me that it's stronger in the female) simply because I don't see any forces balancing the two. For that matter, you're not going to get me to believe there's a unitary quantitative measure of strength. I a-priori don't trust this research.

If you're proposing that male and female sex drives can be swapped, that they're the same module programmed the same way, then you're simply wrong. Sociobiologists have found different reproductive strategies for males and females in every species where the genders play different reproductive roles, including humans.

> Therefore, the title of this thread should be: 'controlling the human
> sex drive'.

Sounds to me like there should be three threads.

-- 
           sentience@pobox.com          Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
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