If you track women through their
Ovulation cycle and you show them a picture of a man same man, and you do nothing
But vary his jaw width when they're ovulating the guy with the wider jaw is more attractive and when they're not
ovulating and the farthest away from that the guy with the thinner jaw is more attractive and that's associated with
testosterone levels and so women who are fertile like more masculine men and basically if you're on the pill then you're never in that
Ovulation phase and so one thing that may have happened, and I don't know this for sure
But it's it's interesting to consider is that since women have been taking the birth control pill their preference for less
Masculine men has become more pronounced and that could easily be one of the things that's fueling at least some of the tension
That's existed and exists now politically between men and women, but the point is is that you just cannot ignore ..
The massive consequences of a biological revolution like that and to make any other factor causal when you're trying to understand
The political movement.. movements especially in the last say 40 years. It's you're putting the cart before the horse, now..
It's reasonable to point out that the pill wouldn't have been accepted as a technology if certain
political changes with regards to the emancipation of women
Hadn't already been in place, right?
No one would have even been allowed to do something like investigate contraception
So you can't separate the biological from the political entirely
but it's still it's still very useful to organize your organizing your thinking to realize just how profound a
Revolution that was but now back in the Victorian times
There's another thing about sexuality
Modern people like to think that there's nothing dangerous about sex and that is like the stupidest thing you could possibly ever
Hypothesize because everything about it is dangerous. It's dangerous
Emotionally, it's dangerous socially. It's dangerous because of the possibility of unwanted pregnancy
And it's dangerous because of the possibility of sickness, and that's a major one
I mean.. so when AIDS emerged in the 1980s that could have easily killed all of us now the fact that it didn't was
Wonderful, but it did kill hundreds of millions of people, so it was no joke it was a big deal and AIDS...
mutated to take advantage of promiscuity and so the relation between sexual behavior and the transmission of disease is
Actually mediated at the biological level, but anyways back in the 1890s
They had the same problem, right? They had the problem with Syphilis and Syphilis is one nasty disease
It's.. it can mimic almost any other disease, and it's devastating to your nervous system
And you can pass it on to your children and so
part of the reason that sexuality was heavily repressed in the Victorian period was not only because of the
Possibility of unwanted pregnancy the relative poverty of people you know back in
1895 in Europe the average person lived on less than a dollar a day in in modern terms
You know it's almost impossible to understand how poor people were and so
Sex in a poverty-stricken place is also a lot more dangerous than it is in a rich place because especially if you were you know
given the lack of employment opportunities
for women back in the Victorian period if you happen to get pregnant out of wedlock you were... you were in serious trouble
And so... the fact that sexuality was repressed is hardly
It's hardly a surprise because it was so difficult to integrate into the full fledged personality
You know and as it as it still is.. so...
Sexual repression
supposedly characteristic feature of the Victorian period was often merely the expression of two facts the lack of diffusion of
Contraceptives and the fear of venereal disease. It was all the more dangerous because of the great spread of prostitution and because prostitutes were almost
Invariably contaminated and therefore potential sources of infection. We can hardly imagine today
How monstrous silithus... syphilis appeared to people of that time... well we can imagine that a little bit better than they could in 1970s?
because it hasn't you know AIDS is still with us, although it's nowhere near the plague that it was say...
25 years ago.