Liquor Is Quicker

Have you ever heard of this?

It is a book (I think?) which purports to prove that women can't truly enjoy "hooking up" (ugh) because of our unique brain chemistry. No, really. The idea here, I guess, is that women are meant for lifelong, partnered domesticity because we excrete some sort of post-coital neurological chemical that causes us — as long as we're getting laid regularly? — to love cuddling and babies, and to have an IQ of 10. Stepp isn't the only idiot suggesting that an atrociously reductive description of chemical reactions in the brain explains all human behavior, of course; I've even seen tangentially-related garbage squatting in the BBC newsfeed. But the entire idea is, needless to say, preposterous. For one thing: I don’t excrete that chemical. I excrete a different post-coital brain chemical that causes me to want to eat pancakes I didn’t make. Secondly, people do stupid things because they’re stupid, up to and especially including embroiling themselves in sexual relationships they can't handle. Lots of women cling to men who use them for sex or who treat them badly because they're delusional and emotionally codependent (I mean the women) (I also mean the men). So let's not conflate the romantic demands of a lifelong Cosmo devotee and the evolutionary impulses that motived our australopithecine ancestresses, please. Our australopithecine ancestresses had hard enough lives without our needing to interpolate into their quest for survival the break from Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).

This, as far as I can tell, seems to be the "scientific" justification for an odious and mysteriously popular school of thought which suggests that, somehow, ladies are fundamentally different from and better than men — specifically, that we're magical, empathetic mater dolorosa whose onboard baby ovens prevent us from being flushed down the mortal coil alongside the vapid, sex-obsessed dick-wielders. Which is, you know, utterly repulsive. Among many other equally-legitimate objections, I particularly resent the idea that women — that I, a woman — own some sort of inherent personal mystery or divinity related to the enigma of life because of, like, ovaries. Or whatever. My boobs and uterus aren’t sacred relics which I use to communicate with future generations, I hate to tell you. They’re just body parts, like my elbows or my earlobes. Not symbols. Organs! I’m not hiding any of the secrets of eternity in my crotch, I promise. (Although I suppose might have a couple of old Milk Duds in my pocket, if you want those.)

Identifying women as a group (HINT: women are not really a group) with anatomical or biological traits that we can't help possessing is not only materially useless for the purpose of proving any imaginable point, it's also deeply offensive. Even supposing this horseshit is true — which I am very far from allowing — a momentary biological compulsion shouldn’t change the way you live your life. Experiencing an urge to save someone from a burning building isn’t a signal to drop out of college and become a fireman. By the same token, I might not be able to stop myself from mooing over a random newborn, but that doesn’t mean I should ruin my life by becoming a mother. And, seeing my forever in the sleep-fogged eyes of a guy I picked up at a bar at 1:48AM the night before might be organically explicable, but it’s also thoroughly fucking ridiculous. When it comes to sexual behaviors, monogamy is a recent invention, and it’s one that contradicts most provable reproductive compulsions and is mostly harmful to women in the long run; pretending that it has some sort of biological mandate is simultaneously creepy and absurd.

No matter what your gender or sexual orientation, if you can't handle the guaranteed contractual disappointments of fucking a stranger, then don't fuck strangers. It's that simple. Denying a momentary, PMS-related craving for a Hershey bar doesn’t cause lifelong cognitive dissonance, so why should we assume that denying a momentary, post-sex craving for a cuddle might? I don't see why that model shouldn't extrapolate symmetrically to collective social behavior, too (that's science!). Don’t blame your perceived romantic disappointments on involuntary surges of brain chemicals, all my single ladies. The human mind is not a pharmaceutical factory. Shit gets a little more complicated than that. Or, if you find that you can’t divorce yourself from your protean animal impulse to make terrible life decisions based on your mood, at least have the decency to go live in a tree at the zoo so nobody mistakes you for a real human being. It’s just polite.

(I found this again @ Kittywampus, which is a nice, well-thought-out blog. So: Thanks?)

NOTE #1: No, I did not hop all over this woman's stupid book and the demoralizing 'theory' which powers its sales based on a ten-minute perusal of her badly-made website. I have been seeing this shit represented as science over and over in my lady magazines for the last five years — as well as getting further exposure on the news, on talk shows, and again, I repeat: in the BBC newsfeed. If that doesn't horrify you, you need to go download a newsreader and watch this kind of illegitimate fuckery scroll past on a list next to an article about Wikileaks or something.

NOTE #2: Here is a far more thoughtful exegesis of the oxytocin (non-)issue. It actually contains citations! I got the link from Alexa's blog, by the way; the devil may have the best tunes, but Alexa has the best links.

NOTE #3: I live in the boondocks, where the bars close at two in the morning :[

NOTE #4: All right, yes, probably I am according to the BBC World News service a little more respect than it deserves. It is obsessed with cricket, and with many other monotonous demeaning British sports, for one thing, and also it embarrassed itself with its tireless/pointless coverage of the conjugal machinations of that one bald bucktoothed English prince and his incredibly skinny, aggressively chin-forward wife. Still, it does sometimes contain excerpts from actual news stories. For which it should be commended. I guess.