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Notes -
BDSM relationships are rational and adaptive for (some? many?) modern women
[Epimistic Status: Might just be the girls I date]
Oh boy! Another post on gender and romantic dynamics. Discussions on this topic here tend to go in a few predictable ways, and unfortunately there's a frequent vibe of posters here just not liking women. Leaving aside the whole hypergamy bit, there's frequent sneers about girls being attracted to partners that will mistreat them. This attraction is attributed to two evo psych explanations:
Men with aggressive and dark triad traits are more likely to succeed in gathering resources and accruing power. This makes them valuable mates, but also makes them high risks for physical abuse, infidelity, etc. There's something good correlated with something bad.
Females evolutionarily were frequently coerced by mates. They often didn't get to even choose their mates at all. This goes back all the way to chimps and monkeys. The ones that tolerated the abuse better were more likely to survive and reproduce. One of the pathways to tolerate abuse better is to enjoy it at some level. If you can't really control whether you get hit or not, it's more adaptive to get off on it than have a mental breakdown. The same goes for submissive behavior. Once you're wired deep down to enjoy something, you're going to start seeking it out.
I broadly think these two points are true, and I still like women. I think given submissive and masochistic impulses are wired in, the rational move is satify them while minimizing damage. BDSM relationships (which I'm using here as a catchall for everything from hard power dynamics to good 'ole slapping and choking in bed) are a social technology that fills that role.
Women want things in a partner. They also have different reproductive strategies that don't always neatly coincide. Pretty boys will make pretty daughters. Kind and caring partners are more likely to invest in you and your offspring. Dark triad partners are more likely to be disproportionately successful, but they might hurt you in the process. Straight up abusive partners just need to be survived, and some level of massochism helps.
Some of these reproductive strategies clearly work out a lot better than others. It's much better to end up with a pretty boy than an abusive one, but instincts were evolved when mate choice was much more constrained. Leaving a bad partner is much more of an option now, rendering some of the survival instincts counter produtive. So what's a gal to do with that masochistic drive? Get with a decent partner than have them do BDSM. Much better to be choked by the pretty boy that loves you than the dark triad guy that will actually kill you.
Backdoor on Feminism?
So here's my fringe, underdeveloped thought. Feminism and "womens liberation" broadly decreased the amount women had to submit to their partners. A lot of women liked that change. Some more reactionary ones didn't and explicitly volunteer for more trad lifestyles. I think a lot of women have mixed feelings. They really value the practical gains in freedom in some areas. But in others they didn't really want to stop being submissive. Western blue tribe women are seeped in the idea that feminism is good, and wanting to roll things back is bad. BDSM offers a figleaf for that. It's culture is soaked in the language of consent, so it doesn't contradict feminism. Yep, wearing a collar and being your man's slave is empowering. BDSM offers a framework for picking and choosing what bits of power to keep and return. You can still have your own job, but do everything you husband says at home.
My anecdotes
I had an ex who I was keeping on a leash. She really liked being given orders. One day I asked her to fetch me food a few too many times and she said "I wanted to be your girlfriend, not your servant!" I learned then when girls want to be submissive it's more like they want to be your pet than your maid.
I had two separate exes who ran away from abusive partners and then ended up with me. They were sensible enough to flee at the first sign of trouble. They liked me a fair amount at first, but when I introduced them to BDSM they became enthralled with me. I think early in the relationship were satisfying the Pretty/Caring strategy. Once BDSM hit the mix they felt like they were satisfying Pretty/Caring/Dominant. I think the BDSM community downplays the relationship with domestic violence for PR reasons. There's definitely something there.
I'm unclear to what degree it's PR and to what degree it's willful blindness. BDSM is obviously connected to some dark human impulses but people online seem incredibly desperate to deny it.
I'm actually not sure what to make of humanity's dark impulses in the sexual realm, especially when they get tied up in weird fetish stuff beyond BDSM.
For example, there's an entire niche erotica category of downgrade transformation fetishes. It's people getting turned on by the idea of someone magically transforming into a lesser version of themselves. Popular cheerleader to shy nerd, fitness trainer to fat slob, that sort of thing. It's dark, but it is also goofy because it can never happen in real life.
Psychologically, I think it mirrors a lot of what is happening with BDSM, at least as far as D/s dynamics go. A person's relative status is being lowered, so that other people's relative status is increased.
However, I'm not even sure why we have these kinds of kinks and fetishes from an evopsych perspective. Like, I kind of get the idea of the monkey brain fantasizing about seeing someone getting taken down a peg, but how did magical transformations become a part of it? Is this just where the idea of cursing someone comes from? How many Greek curse tablets were secretly someone acting out a psychosexual fetish of theirs?
Perhaps it is just one of those happy accidents with profound downstream effects, like human's love of gold.
I have no idea how it comes about, but I can say that as a boy I had conceived of very weird kinks despite not even having reached puberty and never having been involved in sexual activity. Puberty was less of a sexual awakening for me and much more of an "oh shit, I can ejaculate now, what is this crap?" moment.
Wherever kink comes from, my personal experience suggests to me that it has to be deep, deep down.
Same, I knew my kinks before I even understood how sex happened, without having seen anything even vaguely pornographic at all, without any internet access. It was incredibly natural.
For better or worse, i feel like humans have a bias for believing that their environment shapes them far more than it actually does.
Of course, having rich parents getting nutrition etc does significantly affect your life but I think personality and mental traits are less affected by environment (provided it's an typical environment and not an extreme case). Maybe how they are expressed is affected by environment.
It's not entirely genetics, it might be stochastic random process of how neurons happened to develop in someone's brain.
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I think a quick review of the Facebook profiles of acquaintances from 10 years ago tends to beg to differ on this one.
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