Part 2
In Part 1 of The Hidden Secret For Becoming a Sexually Successful Male, I described the lessons I had learned in my life between the ages of 8 and 80 to become a sexually successful man. I said the secret was what I called Quiet Confidence or QC. Here, I want to help us understand why the secret of sexual success has been hidden from us.
I believe there are three interrelated reasons:
- Most men are taught what it means to be “sexually successful” by listening to men in our peer group and are often taught no to seriously listen to women’s wisdom.
- Evolution’s definition of sexual success focuses on survival and reproduction and is leading us in the wrong direction.
- For six to ten thousand years, humans have lived in societies where dominance, not cooperation, influenced the understanding of sexual success.
I was lucky to have a strong, yet sensitive, mother who supported my exploration of nature and the girls and young women who taught me as I grew up. Although I was influenced by a lot of negative and unhelpful male bullshit and sexist, hurtful, advice that entered my consciousness, I also met men who had a more useful and healthy understanding of sexual success.
Being part of a men’s group that has now been meeting for 45 years has been an important source of what I have learned and healthy male sexuality. That’s why the first “rule” in my book, 12 Rules for Good Menis to join a men’s group. Too much of the “Man Box” culture that so many of us grew up with separates the males from the females, is often sexist, homophobic, and creates a “battle of the sexes” instead of loving partnerships.
Learning to work through our own fears and insecurities to truly listen to the women in our lives is a challenge. Too many of us have been raised to believe that we live in two different worlds and often that girls are good, but superficial. while boys are bad, but successful. I still remember the childhood rhyme: “Little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. Little boys are made of balls and snails and puppy tails.’ We must drop our emotional armor, get in touch with our feelings, and allow ourselves to be vulnerable if we intend to be sexually successful.
Evolution helps us understand how life changes over time, adapts or fails to adapt to the environment, and how life passes on to future generations. Charles Darwin helped the world better understand how life evolved over time. In his book, Development for all, Biology and anthropology professor David Sloan Wilson says,
“Darwin’s theory of natural selection is like a recipe with three ingredients.”
- “We start with variation. People like you and I differ in almost everything that can be measured, such as height, eye color, or quickness to anger.’
- “Then we add consistency. The differences between you and me sometimes make the difference in our ability to survive and reproduce.”
- “The last ingredient, a type of yeast that makes the recipe come alive, is heredity.”
Some assume that a theory means that what is being proposed is just an ‘idea’ and not a ‘fact’. These people believe that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is just one idea among many and has yet to be “proven”. But Dr. Wilson reminds us that “a theory is just a way of organizing ideas that seem to make sense in the world. Scientific methods are simply ways of rejecting or supporting factual claims derived from theories.”
The theory of evolution through natural selection has allowed us to make accurate predictions about what we will see in the future. It explains a lot about who we are and how we can live our lives. However, when we equate evolutionary ideas about sexual success with what will make us happy or create the kinds of relationships we want, we miss the mark. Evolution describes the process of differential survival and reproductive success to make babies and grow up to make babies of their own. It is not the ultimate guide to sexual success.
Too many men have seen sexual success as “finding as many young women as possible and convincing or forcing them to have sex with them.” Most people would agree, this is not the meaning of success that is likely to bring fulfillment, mutual benefit and increased love and connection between the members of a couple.
The third area that causes us to misperceive sexual success has to do with our dysfunction in society. Evolutionary success helps organisms to successfully adapt to their environment. If the social environment is unhealthy, our adaptations to that environment will be unhealthy. Social scientist and scholar Riane Eisler he was the first person to recognize that there were two competing systems that had evolved in human societies.
In her book, The Chalice & The Blade: Our History, Our Future, was published in 1987. World-renowned anthropologist Ashley Montagu said it was “The most important book since Darwin’s Origin of the Species.” In the introduction to The Chalice & The Blade, Eisler says,
“We are all familiar with legends of an earlier, more harmonious and peaceful age. The Bible tells of a garden where woman and man lived in harmony with each other and with nature—before a male god decreed that woman would henceforth be subservient to man.”
He goes on to say,
“The Chinese Tao Te Ching it describes a time when the yin, or female principle, was not yet ruled by the male principle, or yang, a time when the mother’s wisdom was still honored and followed above all else.”
Eisler introduced a simple but profoundly useful model that allows us to understand what happened when these earlier moments of harmony and peace were lost and the masculine principle began to overshadow the feminine.
“One result of rethinking human society from a holistic gender perspective was a new theory of cultural evolution. This theory, which I have called Cultural Transformation Theory, suggests that behind the great surface diversity of human culture lie two basic models of society. The first, which I call the sovereign model — the ranking of one half of humanity against the other. The second, on which social relations are primarily based in its principle connection rather than ranking, it can best be described as the partnership model. In this model – starting from the most fundamental difference in our species, between male and female – difference is not equated with either inferiority or superiority.”
I met for the first time Riane Eisler in 1987, shortly after the publication of her book. I’ve been writing about similar gender and gender issues for quite some time. I described what I had learned in my first book, Inside Out: Becoming My Own Man, published in 1983. Riane and I met in San Francisco and compared our experiences and ideas. We quickly became friends and colleagues. Our work has evolved since then. I have written several additional books, as has Riane.
Her book, Cultivating Our Humanity: How Sovereignty and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Our Lives, and Our Future written with anthropologist Douglas P. Fry and published in 2019. They look back at human evolutionary history to examine when the dominant model was introduced into cooperative cultures.
In chapter 7, “The Original Partnership Societies,” we are told:
“A recurring pattern can be observed in archaeological sequences from different geographical locations, indicating that warfare as an element of dominance systems does not have ancient roots. It arose at different times in different locations as some, but by no means all, foraging societies underwent changes toward intensification of resource extraction and greater social complexity. Before that, for most of human evolutionary history, dominance systems simply didn’t exist. A very important conclusion emerges: human nature under the long era of corporate social organization; the human mind evolved in corporate contexts.” [emphasis mine.]
Important facts from the article
The reasons we have not recognized, fully understood, and more fully embraced sexual success practices is because the truth has been hidden from men due to three interrelated factors:
- We have been too heavily influenced by the dysfunctional myths of male peers and failed to listen to the wisdom of women.
- The evolutionary emphasis on survival and reproduction led us to think that sexual success was a competition for sexual conquest.
- Our minds, bodies, and spirits have been infected by elements of a system of domination that has disconnected us from our corporate roots.
Look forward:
In part three of this series, I’ll explore the practices that can bring about real sexual success for everyone. If you found this article useful, please share it with others. If you’d like to read more articles and stay tuned to what we’re up to at MenAlive, sign up for our free weekly newsletter. If you want to know about ours Moonshot for Mankind, you can do it here.
I am thinking of offering an online workshop for those who want to learn more about “The Hidden Secret of Becoming a Sexually Successful Man”. If you are interested, please email me at Jed@MenAlive.com and put “Sexual Success” in the subject line and I’ll send you more details (Will be open to both men and women).
