Imagine, for a moment, an alternate reality.
In this alternate reality, monogamy does not exist. No couples. Instead, sex and partnership work like this:
Women decide early on which men in their community appeal to them, and each forms her own small, fluid group of partners;
Any particular man can be part of several groups;
Partnership is universal; everyone helps everyone, when it comes to the business of daily living;
Nobody ever asks ‘Who’s yer daddy?’ because it doesn’t matter; all children are the top priority of all adults in the community.
Put another way, everybody’s getting laid all the time, there’s as much variety as anyone could ever want, patriarchy is impossible under such conditions, and no child goes unloved.
Win-win-win-win?
Can you imagine such a world? A world where jealousy is unnecessary, misogyny has no soil in which to grow, and everyone is honest and open about their needs?
And that’s before we even get to how loved all the children are.
It’s not a great leap to imagine this wonderful system. It has already existed. It is how men and women co-existed for more than 200,000 years – and only recently have we been practicing the art of mating in the twisted, dysfunctional, destructive manner with which we are all so familiar.
So what went wrong?
Well, we stopped roaming the world, for one thing. About 120 centuries ago, give or take, the most recent ice age ended, and we humans figured out how to grow food rather than chase it.
And then everything changed.
For a quarter of a million years, human clans had been living off the land - using our big brains to bring down mighty meatsacks, scowering the hedges for a wide array of fruits and veggies. This system worked wonderfully, but it left us harnessed to tomorrow’s labor; there was no way to warehouse food. We had to keep moving, century in and century out, to keep our bellies full.
Agriculture begat food storage.
Food storage begat wealth.
Wealth begat personal property.
Personal property begat conflict.
Conflict begat power.
And power shattered the wonderful system we’d enjoyed for so many tens of thousands of years. Once we started settling down next to the river in our new little villages, Haves and Have Nots became possible.
In other words, power begat civilization!
And that wonderful system, where everybody had everybody else’s back and there was plenty to go around, including nookie, and the kids were alright – that system went to hell.
The females had been the choosers – wise, since they’re considerably smarter than the males – and had seen to it that the wonderful system provided what it needed to provide.
Well, now we had males accumulating personal material wealth – and suddenly ‘who’s yer daddy?’ began to matter. Wealth that didn’t belong to the clan opened the door to a new concept – inheritance. And civilization was structured to accommodate it.
Civilization begat patriarchy.
And patriarchy begat misogyny.
And misogyny begat religion – or, more precisely, the Sexual Regulatory Commission.
The females ceased to be the nookie managers. The males usurped the role, and the females went from being the guiding hand of human coexistence to property themselves.
The Sexual Regulatory Commission’s task was to put governance and administrative process in place around the dispensation of this new property, the female. Several initiatives were implemented:
Each female became the property of one male – monogamy was born; in this way, the male could monitor the female’s reproductive output, so he’d know which babies were his (or so he thought);
Statutory protocols were devised and implemented to regulate female sexual activity and administer punitive measures to ensure compliance;
The SRC contrived a supreme authority to justify the regulatory system, placing the emerging tiered economy, public policy, and social contracts under its purview;
In their new role as property, females had no more rights over their bodies; their reproductive activity, their social roles and the protocols by which they were permitted to interact with others were now overseen in toto by the SRC.
What impact did these SRC initiatives have on this new thing called civilization?
Prior to the commission’s imposition of regulation on human sexual activity, males had little impetus for conflict and none for competition; cooperation was the default, as they needed to be a band of brothers for the safety of all. The SRC overturned this default, minimizing cooperation and optimizing competition. Sex ceased to be sustenance and became a currency, carefully regulated, upon which all other social transactions were based.
Prior to the establishment of regulation, females lived, loved and worked alongside males in full parity; there was nothing in the human social gestalt to suggest that things should be otherwise. Gender equality was of universal benefit. Once the SRC regulated sex, females became a traded commodity, and gender equality is certainly too unwieldy to be practical under such conditions.
Strict regulation of sexual choices and decisions within the community created a framework of subservience. Placing the population in relative sexual poverty, after millennia of plenty, generated a subsistence mentality, wherein everyone is grateful to be getting any at all. Eventually, sexual poverty normalized, and the result was a docile population, rather than an angry mob.
Before SRC oversight, mating was joyous and fun and free-spirited, like a Sunday picnic in the park. SRC put a stop to those shenanigans! Under regulation, mating became as formal as a state banquet.
Before SRC rules were implemented, physical human contact – any physical touch, not just sexual – was plentiful, within and between genders; all clans were extended-family-close, and touch was a form of communication. Under the new regulations, physical touch was forced to fade, as it clouded the signals required to keep sex firmly regulated. This new hands-off way of living also curtailed the deepest and most effective human communication, making it easier to rule through words alone.
The take-home point - the emerging patriarchy grasped the core of the authoritarian dynamic immediately: Control who can have sex with whom, and how, and when, and you control everything and everyone. Hence the Sexual Regulatory Commission.
I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking it’s time to start seriously considering deregulation, as ironically conservative as that might sound; to me, the wonderful system we started with is looking better and better...
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