The Middle-Aged Genius’s Guide to Almost Everything 22 – Modern American Men and Women (1)
October 22, 2018
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are the situations for modern men and modern women in America?
Rick Rosner: The MeToo movement has been going on for about a year now, being more vocal about their accusations of sexual harassment and rape. In the last week or so, we have seen a sexual assaulter get closer and closer to being put on the Supreme Court.
Women’s anger and the men who support women’s anger has been growing. It looks like women are really making strides. What this disguises is that, no, in statistical terms, things will continue on as they have been.
Spikes n anger are temporary. The changes are, statistically, that women are at a disadvantage and will continue to be harassed and sexually assaulted; men will still get away with it.
The overall landscape changes only gradually. It is similar to the rate at which women get paid relative to men changes. 30 years ago, it was 71 cents on the dollar. Now, it might be 80 cents. It doesn’t even rise a penny a year.
When the new statistics come out, there is a spike in anger and, maybe, some companies pledge to try to equalize pay. But the rate at which real change happens across the entire population remains glacial.
Whether or not Kavanaugh gets on, anger will subside and change in the rate at which women are sexually assaulted will only decline gradually. We can look at long-term trends. In the super long-term, we are not even human anymore, more than 200 years from now.
You and I briefly talked about the empty world of the future, where there will be many more virtual conscious beings than conscious beings in the flesh – particularly human flesh. Right now, the population is about 7.5 billion humans.
That will go, over the next few years, to about 12 and maybe even 14 billion humans. As it becomes possible to move consciousness out of the human body, increasing numbers of people will choose to disconnect themselves from the frailty of the flesh, by 200 years from now, we will have many more conscious entities; both human-based and combinations of humans and other things in various levels of connectedness to each other.
By whatever criteria that you decide to apply, you will have more conscious beings by a factor of 10 or 100 without bodies than humans. As a result, the population will decline from a peak of 14 or 15 billion to, maybe, 6 billion 2 and a half or 3 centuries from now.
Those populations will be living with less impact on the natural world. The Earth will be Disneyfied or made parklike by the conscious beings of the future. There will still be pockets of traditional human life.
There will be pockets of squalor and of war. Both traditional war and various levels of cyberwar. But in this transformed future, most of the beings of the 23rd century will not primarily be driven by sex.
They will not be limited in terms of gender or sexual orientation. Right now, ever since the beginning of sexual reproduction, sex has been associated with the most intense pleasure, because it is the drive that doesn’t immediately benefit the individual organism.
With the drive to enjoy food or drink, or continue breathing, the pleasure associated with satisfying each of those drives is not as intense as the pleasure associated with sex, because satisfying each of those drives is linked to not dying.
So, you have that push already. The push for eating, drinking, and breathing is already tied into not wanting to die and, in the case of breathing at least, that is a deeply ingrained function that you can’t not do.
If you stop breathing, you will pass out. At which point, you will begin breathing again. It is not pleasure inasmuch as it is relief that you started breathing again or stopped holding your breath. But it is not a rush of pleasure that you get with sex.
Since sex is not connected to individual well-being, it has to offer more tokens, more of a reward. So, sex is our most pleasurable experience. It is not in our self-interest. Also, it is what you have to do to get sex.
Breathing is so simple. It is not automatic. Getting laid is complicated, you need a huge reward to propel people to get laid. In the future, over the next couple of centuries, we will rewire ourselves.
It will be convenient to rewire ourselves in our new vessels to whatever we feel is reasonable to associated pleasure with. Sex will no longer be conscious beings’ most pleasurable drive related experience.
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Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
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