Tao Te Ching
War of the Sexes
This book starts out with an age-old description of early romance/soap opera: seduction, competition, deception, jealousy, the economic strategies leading to a sexual compact. Just when this story starts seeming trite, we discover that the two partners aren't human but actually dance flies. Citing nature, evolution, anthropology and economics; Seabright paints a comprehensive picture of human sexual experience, the reasons we have so much trouble with it, and ways forward into a possibility of more understanding, harmony, and equality. After calling feminine smiles an “audacious triumph of genetic marketing,” he describes the female dance fly’s specially-evolved, abdominal air pocket to fool males and compares it to human breast implants and concludes, “sex is too rooted in deception, exaggeration, and manipulation for us ever to be entirely straightforward about it.”
Themes
Quotes from War of the Sexes
“Each of us is descended from innumerable generations of men who lied, cheated, charmed, bullied, or killed their way to sexual intercourse, and from innumerable generations of women who charmed, seduced, lied, or manipulated their way to extracting economic privileges in return for access to their bodies.”
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“Even the fact that we have nothing to hide can be something we have good reason to hide.”
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“Her 21st century rational brain wonders why sex is such a big deal to him, not understanding that to his Pleistocene emotions it's not just a big deal—it's the only deal.”
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“If an understanding of biology can sometimes make us feel we are the victims of our inheritance, an understanding of economics shows that we an adapt the inheritance to shape our future.”
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“Our emotions and desires are shortcuts that allow humans to economize on expensive brain tissue and steer us in directions that have proved advantageous for us in the past. Our taste for sugar, for instance, was a reliable guide to adaptive eating in the Pleistocene era, but in the very different conditions of modern life, it threatens us with obesity and diabetes.”
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“Self-deception may be a natural by-product of features of brain organization that help us deceive others... flourishing in precisely the areas of life where these costs matter most: in business, in politics, and in love.”
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“Sex is about danger as well as about tenderness: the two are inseparable, and they are what has made us such a tender and dangerous species.”
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“there is a startling discrepancy between the vast amounts of time and energy [we] devote to thinking, talking, and agonizing about sex and the microscopic amounts of time and energy we devote to actually engaging in it.”
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“We all want contradictory things: to be successful and to be protected, to choose our partners and to be chosen by them, to be passionate and to be reasonable, to be forceful and to be tender, to make shrewd choices and to be seduced.”
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