Skip to main content

More Equal Men

Loved this article on mathematical modeling of courtship and parallels between animals and humans. Extravagant and useless gifts do make an impression - indelible ones if well personalized. The underlying theory for why that is the case makes perfect sense too.

While gift giving and courtship is gender-unequal, men may become more equal than women in relationships should male contraception turn popular. Where a woman is in a relationship only to have a child, a man can withhold that favor unless she is willing to invest more in return. Casual encounters would become easier with the man in control too. Risk would be replaced by sterility.

That is definitely empowerment for men as long as they buy into the idea of contraception psychologically and are willing to suffer the side-effects. For both sexes the shift in the balance of power would take getting used to and there could be new relationship issues that neither knows how to deal with.

Comments

Anonymous said…
crossings..
i read yer blog as n when u post it :) ..part of my daily must-do's.
the link doesnt seem to work..(the one on courtship).
Heartcrossings said…
Anon : Check the link to the post now. The article is in the PDF doc
Anonymous said…
crossings :) me again..the link works perfectly..but it seems one shud have a member login id..

the link merely shows a page of various royal soc journals :)

river.

um..they jus wanted me to register..phew..
Heartcrossings said…
Anon: Not sure what's the deal with that. I have the link to the abstract of the article now. You can find your way to the main publication. It is a a good read :-)

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...