Steven Pinker Explains Sexual Prudishness

The excerpt below is from Pinker's book The Blank Slate, which I highly recommend reading. It is an absolute breath of fresh air in today's political environment. (Read it and you will recognize that a lot of the things happening on today's college campuses are not new.)

I am no prude. But I think Pinker explains well why traditional societies have prudish attitudes about sex, and why even "modern enlightened" societies have mostly failed to completely shed these social norms. Pardon the name-drops in the following excerpts, but I don't think you have to get the reference in order to understand Pinker's point:

Even in a time when seemingly anything goes, most people do not partake in sex as casually as they partake in food or conversation. That includes today’s college campuses, which are reportedly hotbeds of the brief sexual encounters known as “hooking up.” The psychologist Elizabeth Paul sums up her research on the phenomenon: “Casual sex is not casual. Very few people are coming out unscathed.” The reasons are as deep as anything in biology. One of the hazards of sex is a baby, and a baby is not just any seven-pound object but, from an evolutionary point of view, our reason for being. Every time a woman has sex with a man she is taking a chance at sentencing herself to years of motherhood, with the additional gamble that the whims of her partner could make it single motherhood. She is committing a chunk of her finite reproductive output to the genes and intentions of that man, forging the opportunity to use it with some other man who may have better endowments of either or both. The man, for his part, may be either implicitly committing his sweat and toil to the incipient child or deceiving his partner about such intentions.

And that covers only the immediate participants. As Jong lamented elsewhere, there are never just two people in bed. They are always accompanied in their minds by parents, former lovers, and real and imagined rivals. In other words, third parties have an interest in the possible outcomes of a sexual liaison. The romantic rivals of the man or woman, who are being cuckolded or rendered celibate or bereft of their act of love, have reasons to want to be in their places. The interests of third parties help us understand why sex is almost universally conducted in private. Symons points out that because a man’s reproductive success is strictly limited by his access to women, in the minds of men sex is always a rare commodity. People may have sex in private for the same reason that people during a famine eat in private: to avoid inciting dangerous envy. 

As if the bed weren’t crowded enough, every child of a man and a woman is also the grandchild of two other men and two other women. Parents take an interest in their children’s reproduction because in the long run it is their reproduction, too... 

It goes on from there. Pinker makes several mentions of the ideal of completely casual sex with no emotional baggage or bad consequences, the "zipless fuck" as he repeatedly calls it. He appeals to evolutionary psychology to explain why it's improbable.

I remembered the presentation being slightly different. I thought he had said something like, "Mary and John have sex. Did everybody have a good time?" Then he starts to regale the reader with all the issues of single motherhood, jealous rivals, cuckoldry, etc. (Maybe he gives this alternative presentation in another book? Or did I imagine it?)

I can't find the passage at the moment, but Thomas Sowell also attempts to explain why prudishness about sex might be a practical strategy. He states quite frankly that in a society that is barely above the subsistence level, which describes the condition of pretty much everyone who ever lived up to 200 years ago, a baby that hasn't been planned for would be a disaster. The family knows that they will become the responsible guardians of their daughters' children if those daughters have sex with feckless men. You might thus begin to understand why fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles take an interest in the sexuality of related young women. It helps explain why we might have evolved a natural protectiveness of our daughters and other relatives, as well as why we have strong cultural norms doing the same. It also explains why we aren't quite as obsessed with the sexuality of related young men (and Pinker very clearly draws out this distinction).

To explain is not to forgive. None of this is trying to justify outdated instincts or traditions that brutally suppress the independence of young women. (Indeed, in a different section of Blank Slate, Pinker uses the example of female genital mutilation to demonstrate the awfulness of "cultural relativism" taken to the extreme.) I think he is simply cautioning that these evolved instincts and cultural norms are sometimes there for a reason. We should not simply carry on as if these tendencies will disappear overnight, just because we think we can prove they are irrational. If we plan to adjust our cultural norms or override our instincts, we should tread carefully. Chesterton's fence!

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At Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander sometimes posts about polyamory. My impression is that it's fairly common in the rationalist community, and many groups make it work without all the jealous rivalry mentioned above. I can believe that a group of extremely high IQ, socially aware individuals dedicated to rationalism can make this work. I'm less confident that it will "catch on" for the wider population. But I am prepared to be proven wrong.