GYNOPESSIMISM

Gamete Value Inversion in Novel Technological Environments

In mammals, the female sex produces a finite number of large, non-motile gametes, and the male produces an almost infinite number of small, motile gametes. Parental investment after conception is also highly asymmetrical: the female gestates the infant for 9 months, undergoes labour which in ancestral conditions is extremeley dangerous, and lactates for up to 3 further years. Producing offpsring then, is very cheap for the male and very costly for the female. Large male die-off does not have a significant effect on the fertility rate of a group in the way that a large female die-off certainly would. Women are therefore the 'limiting factor' in sexual reproduction, and have gained a degree of social status by this fact.

8th March 2023: Kyushu University, Japan anounce the succesful production of a live mouse without the use of any genetic information from a female. Ova were created by deleting the Y chromosome of a male cell and duplicating the X chromosome. "Male skin cells were reprogrammed into a stem cell-like state to create so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. The Y-chromosome of these cells was then deleted and replaced by an X chromosome “borrowed” from another cell to produce iPS cells with two identical X chromosomes". This organism has two fathers, and no mother.

This is of interest because it appears to turn on its head the historical value of male and female gametes. It is much easier to duplicate an X chromosome than it is to create a Y chromosome entirely from scratch. So, in these novel technological conditions, it is now the male gamete which is scarce and valuable, and the female gamete which can be produced in almost infinite numbers.

This, coupled with technology which offers men highly appealing virtual sexual experiences accessed with little to no effort, will upset the dating market and compound the existentially threatening female status crash.

Are complaints about sexual objectification covert attempts to surpress sexual competition?

When I see a sexualised image of an attractive woman, I might feel a somewhat negative emotion. The negative emotion is particularly strong if one or more attractive men are directing attention to the woman in question. I have always cognitively interpreted this emotion as 'disapproval of/indignation at the objectifying male gaze'.

And yet I noticed recently that looking at sexualised images of women who I believe are less conventionally attractive that me is not attended by this negative emotion. If I am indignant at the objectification of women because of the harm it causes them, why isn't this feeling triggered when the woman is unattractive? I wonder now if condemning the sexualisation of other women and insisting that they are harmed by it is not just a strategy to surpress sexual competition. Viewing sexualised images of female models causes women to engage in indirect aggression - I would suggest that the negative emotion is real, but may in at least some cases just be anxiety/aggression triggered by confronting a more attractive (more successful) sexual competitor. Less attractive women do not trigger this aggression because they are not threatening competitors.

Might go as far as to say that the entire elaborate theoretical infrastructure of 'sexual objectification' may have been devised post hoc in order to obscure female intrasexual competition, and secondarily to discharge anxiety without betraying its real cause. Not 'I hate the male gaze' but 'I hate that the male gaze lands on those more attractive than me'. As others have noted, people rarely complain about sexual objectification until after they are no longer subject to it.

Not that being sexually objectified is particularly pleasant - yet it still seems preferable to being sexually invisible. Also useful to note that I'm probably >99th percentile neurotic, and therefore very sensitive to status competition in general. So plausibly this is just a 'me' thing.

Normative male sexuality

Female sexual attractiveness to men likely peaks at around 13 years of age. Female reproductive value begins to decline immediately after menarche.

"For male raters, there was significantly and strikingly greater attractiveness for the early adolescence female photos... preference for peak residual reproductive value was apparent."

Fig 1

Interestingly, pubescent girls do not actually have particularly high reproductive success, because ovulation is not yet regular. However, men seek to monopolise potential as well as actual fertility - and pubescent girls have maximal reproductive potential (ie. the most childbearing years ahead of them).

This pedophilic aspect of male sexuality is highly stigmatised. Therefore it is unsurprising that men make significant attempts to self-censure when asked to evaluate the attractiveness of underage women. However, men who seek to deny their pedophilic attraction are ultimately belied by the results of phallometric testing - 'the greater the attraction, the higher the inhibition'. [Source]

Fig 1:Sexual arousal and arousability to pedophilic stimuli in a community sample of normal men, Gordon C. Nagayama Hall, Richard Hirschman, Lori L. Oliver, Kent State University, USA, 1995

Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, David M. Buss, 2015

Some reasons to be bearish on the future of sex dolls

- It's difficult to determine just what percentage of men own a gynoid doll. Approx 56,000 sex robots wer sold per year worldwide (2017-2022). This would appear to put the number of owners at about 0.1% of the adult male population (not accouning for men who buy multiple dolls, who may make up a significant proportion of sales).
- Moravec's Paradox: perhaps counter-intuitively, motor skills (such as those needed to engage in sexual intercourse) require very large amounts of computational power, compared to eg. solving differential equations. 'The things that we find hard, robots find easy. The things that we find easy, robots find hard.'
- So, the bottleneck will probably be robotics, not artificial intelligence. Robots will be able to engage us emotionally through text much sooner than they will be able to interlink fingers their fingers with ours, digitally manipulate objects, or reciprocate kisses with flesh-like lips and tongue etc. Are we anywhere close to reproducing an autonomous muscular hydrostat like the tongue in silicon?
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- “I lean more and more towards the opinion that the current hyper-realistic, hypersexualised gynoid is likely to constitute a small and niche market, most likely of interest to those currently buying companion sex dolls, and those who seek novelty,” - Kate Devlin, author of Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots, 2018.

Some reasons to be bullish on the future of sex dolls

- The greatest obstacle to wide uptake of gynoid dolls is just social stigma. The dolls themselves inherently satisfy the baseline sexual desires of the majority of men, and if social stigma didn't exist, they would be perfectly satisfactory substitutes for relationships with women. If this is the case, then we are indeed in trouble. Cultural taboos around sex can be questioned, subtly underminded, publicly challenged, decried and then destroyed fairly easily in the kind of highly atomised societies we live in. We know empirically that such changes can happen within one or two generations because they already have - see: western attitudes towards casual sex and homosexuality in the last 50 years. The acceptance of sex dolls could happen even faster than that. An active destigmatisation movement might not even be necessary; the steady creep of anomie might mean that universal social norms simply dissolve, and 'social acceptance' outside of one's little bubble ceases to be something anyone really cares about.

It could look something like this:

Antarctica: A tentative timeline

- 2018: 28% of 18- to 24-year-olds and 31% of 25- to 34-year-olds have had some form of cosmetic treatment (UK)

- 2023: 0.05-0.1% of the global adult male population own a sex doll

- March 2023: Kyushu University, Japan anounce the succesful production of a live mouse without the use of any genetic information from a female

- A high-status man (ie. minor celebrity) publicly announce their use of sex dolls

- Antarctica Starts Here

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Age Gaps in Heterosexual Relationships

Fig 1

Male and female desirability peaks at different stages of life. Whilst sources vary as to the specifics, it's very-well attested that peak sexual desirability occurs somewhere around age 18-25 for women, and age 30-40 for men (depending on the source, as well as on the male's ability to have accumulated resources during his twenties). This information presented graphically shows two overlapping curves, men's attractiveness curve being both flatter than women's and also 'red-shifted' - which is to say, the peak is delayed by about 10-15 years.

I think it's generally preferable that both partners experience the peak and subsequent trough of their desirability at roughly the same time because it means each member of the couple can: 1) maximally exploit their mate value and, crucially, retain that value for the rest of their lives, 2) prevent resentment as the attractiveness of one partner rises or remains stable whilst the other partner's declines, both of which 3) reduce the likelihood of infidelity and/or divorce. So, I've estimated 10-15 years to be the ideal M-F age gap in romantic relationships.

Age-dissimilar relationships are associated with an elevated risk of divorce, however, I believe it's possible to hedge against this risk by selecting strongly for traits that predict against divorce, such as education, conscientiousness, affinity for novelty etc etc.

Antarctica Starts Here

I. Sex Technology

II. Love, and Who Gets It

III. The Singularity

III. Antarctica Starts Here

If you're even marginally more intelligent than you are attractive, your intelligence feels enormous