7 Reasons So Many Guys Don?t Understand Sexual Consent
Interesting piece on how we're socially conditioned to think about sex and consent. Amongst other things, it takes a look at some of the most famous movies in history and shows how sexual assault is normalized in them.
Here are the 'lessons':
I know it's cracked, but it's not a typical cracked article. Interested in hearing dissenting thoughts, and to see whether people agree whether certain cultural icons do give children the wrong impression of consent.
I request that if you do see something wrong you point out the specifics, rather than just dismissing the entire article. There are separate points in there. Thanks.
The earliest fossils of anatomically modern humans are about 200,000 years old.
Immediate previous was neanderthals, with brains not to dissimilar from ours.
Before that, similar-brained homo heidelbergensis ...
For hundreds of thousands of years, maybe even a couple million years, we have been evolving from neuropsychologically closely related ancestors .. all of us procreating as we biologically do now.
And, our brain's archetypes have been forming and genetically passing throughout all of this time, basically forming the foundation of how we experience each other.
Our higher brain's psychological archetypes are unconsciously coupled with our lower brain's cerebellum survival mechanisms.
It is only more recently that very higher cognitive functions have developed to where we are both individually and collectively conscious about ethics and the like.
However, our basic brain's historical ancestral functions are still there .. and we are understandably often in whole psychological conflict when survival drives are at play.
Today, we revile such archetype-lower brain "instinct" and revel in higher cognitive conscious "choice".
But .. we are both.
Dismissing our more ancient drives and methods as "bad" and emphasizing superegoistic societal norms as "good" brings a lot of thereby dysfunctional people into my office for counseling.
And though I would advise everyone to respect our laws, I understand the whole of who and what we are .. and why "sexual assault" still occurs.
So, keep in mind, that there's a significant part of our psyche that is still very "old school", so to speak, and that in that old school "curriculum", men were to go out and grab a woman, or two, and "mate" with them and women were "drawn" to both the fear and desire to be a part of that human pro-creation drive.
That's still existent in our unconscious drives today .. and
both men and women put out "signals" of this in their encounters, even while they may be "compelled" by societal norms to exercise restraint.
Since men are historically the initiators, perhaps the "aggressors", they, when their superegos of societal norms "fail" them, are likely to commit what today we call "assault" .. and if it's on a woman who is more or less governed by her superego's societal norms, it is completely understandable that she and those like her, women and men alike, will be outraged.
Evolution is a messy business.
Bu reality is what it is.
We're probably dealing the best we can.
