From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Oct 07 1999 - 09:20:04 MDT
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
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:05:26 MST