Psychology of Men's Honour and Women's Sexuality

#40 dr sohail: you had written "does love have to be always connected with reproduction. i know so many men and women who do not want to become parents. what do you think of such people..?"

as Bill Clinton would say - depends how you define "love".

if "love" involves sexual activity, then clearly the couple is not carrying out their part of the deal to mother nature (selfish gene?) regarding propagation of the species. Since mother nature never asked the couple to sign a contract, there is obviously nothing wrong with this.

but "love" is something else - e.g. love of learning about the the universe - then again the brain obviously did not evolve for this purpose. it evolved in response to other needs - e.g. to make up for our puny bodies by supplementing them with tools and tactics to attack other animals. so again - nothing wrong here.

Indeed - when you reflect on the above examples, it seems obvious that "misuse" of our abilities for things other than what led to their development is in fact what distinguishes humans from other animals!!

so - short answer to your question is: i think couples practicing family planning are doing a great service to mankind. and the hell with what the Pope and the neo-conservatives think.

masadi,

"I am a very handsome, desireable individual" ...... so is that why you are always making love to yourself ?

Divorce is the most civilized way to say goodbye to a dysfunctional relationship -- its increase can only means that we getting more civilized by the day -- its minimal presence in the Desi families means that we are still the self-punishing masochist and partener-torturing barbarians.

sweet Home shold be a shangrila -- not a bitter abu gharib.

Dear Dr Sohail,

You are a psychiatrist.

What needs to be done in a case where a psychiatrist needs to see a psychiatrist.

Do you think a psychiatrist will treat a psychiatrist or a board of psychiatrists will be needed.

Regards,

Re: # 97

"Your “ardour� seems to have a very long half-life. With a “peak� at five and a limit of ten years you must be an outlier – more than two standard deviations off to the side. In my humble observation the fire works last anywhere from six to eighteen months. That is the 68% aggregate around the mean, within one standard deviation."(SR)

SR -- you are brilliant as an statistician -- it is true that "the fire works last anywhere from six to eighteen months" -- but you did not integrate the "family guy" into the curve -- that wild joker may skew your standaard deviation to almost another 3 years before the handcuffs of love atart to become the chains of confinement against your will.

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Re: # 77 by Essensaur

I second Mohsin Hamid (#78) in praising your post. Excellent indeed. You have obviously given this matter a lot of thought.

The whole myth of desi marriages being more successful than western ones is crumbling before our eyes. As desi babus and bibi jees become upwardly mobile and internationalised their divorce rate sky rockets for the sames reasons as you allude to. Maybe Dr. Sohail is able to lay his hands on quantitative sociological data that describes this phenomenon. If not, this could be a good PhD thesis for some aspiring ABCD or BBCD sociologist.

...SR

Re: # 96
dear essensaur..thank you for your kind words. readers like you, nasah, hurricane and khurram make a dialogue worthwhile and inspire me to write more. sincerely sohail

Re: # 86
dear hurricane...it has been my experience that humanists belong to three groups that i call
religious humanists
spiritual humanists
and
secular humanists
all these people genuinely respect human beings. they want to decrease human suffering and raise social consciousness so that humanity can evolve...i conside martin luther king and desmund tutu religious humanists, walt whitman and other mystic poets spiritual humanists and mandela a secular humanist. for human growth and evolution religious, spiritual and secular humanists need to work together like desmund tutu and nelson mandela worked together for the betterment of blacks in south africa. sincerely sohail

Re: # 95 nash wrote:

["... (1) Islam ...allows 4 wives ... somewhere in the ... translation ... the number ... got messed up ... may have meant -- only one wife at a time -- but a new wife for every new decade --

... (2) the ardor ... peaks at five and then ... it ends at ten.

... (3) with the changing times for feminism allowing the woman also the equal access ..."]

Let’s take your three points one at a time.

(1) The limit of 4 is purely tradition and was not imposed until the Abbasi period. The Prophet and two of the “Khaufa-i-Rashideen� had 13 wives each.
The number four comes from a verse #3 in sura An-Nisa (4:3), but it is to be seen in context of the previous verse (4:2)… The context is the fiduciary responsibility towards the “orphans� under one’s trusteeship. Presumably there were minors whose inheritance was placed under trusteeship of certain people and those people are being asked not to embezzle the property of those minors but to return it to them upon their coming of age. But then, in 4:3, curiously a concession is being given. (Being practical minded the Prophet must have anticipated that some people will be rascals and will not be able to resist the temptation of misappropriating the property of those minors, so he said, okay, if you must, then at least take them in as your wives – if they are girls) Thus the trustee is asked to take as his wives, “Two, or Three, or Four� … clearly this is rhetorical and could only mean “two, or three, or four, ad infinitum�… Plus there is one more point. Even if you insist that the number Four is an absolute limit, even then the point is that an unmarried bachelor could not be appointed a trustee of orphan girls. He had to be a family man. So therefore, if you include the one wife he already has, in addition to the four that are being permitted, that still makes it AT LEAST FIVE WIVES. Not Four.

(2) Your “ardour� seems to have a very long half-life. With a “peak� at five and a limit of ten years you must be an outlier – more than two standard deviations off to the side. In my humble observation the fire works last anywhere from six to eighteen months. That is the 68% aggregate around the mean, within one standard deviation.

(3) I am all for equal access but most women seem to exhibit “nesting� behaviour, which seems to favour serial monogamy, as opposed to a man’s parallel polygamy. It must all be related to maximising the probability of genetic survival. A man releases a minimum of 50 million sperms at each ejaculation, while a woman releases only one ovum per month. Instinctively, their genetic survival strategies have to differ in order to confer survival advantage.

A man can maximise his genetic survival by spreading his DNA as far and wide as possible. It’s the short gun, or the machine gun approach. While the woman must adopt a sharp-shooter approach. Particularly, since the human gestation period is one of the longest in the animal kingdom and the period of helplessness of the new born is extraordinarily prolonged, she must try and “retain� her suitor (or suitors in some cases) for as long as possible.

Make no mistake, though, that the man is dispensable. When the sabre tooth tiger comes to the cave, he is supposed to guard the entrance while she grabs the baby and flees.

...SR

The author says: "It was ironic that many of these men felt guilty about having visited prostitutes and conducted secret liaisons with women. Some of them suffered from a Madonna-whore complex, perceiving women either as pure and angelic or impure and sexual. They could not integrate friendship, sensuality and sexuality in the same relationship. They had no experience of knowing women as fellow human beings, but only as sex objects."

On this theme, CHOWK had published a very absorbing fictional narrative by Athar Shiraz a few years back. I would recommend "Nuns and Tawaifs" and the correspondence that followed to all readers who may be interested in understanding the "complex" as well as its specific manifestation penned by a very promising writer.

http://www.chowk.com/articles/4831

I see that the correspondence only lists some of the interacts. Wonder what happened to the rest.

BTW, I was very impressed by the self-profile posted by SR on CHOWK. Very. Such a comprehensive and honest understanding of the self is necessary if we males from the subcontinent are to permit our society to progress from centuries-old intolerance and frequent resort to the defense mechanisms of Denial and Projection to an enlightened society with potential. And yes, a sense of humor helps too.

Having said that, I must say that I too remain optimistic about our future like Dr Sohail mentioned simewhere. For, "Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage". We will break the shackles of traditions that are not relevant anymore, and the key is to take small steps in understanding ourselves better. CHOWK and many of its its authors like Shiraz and Dr Sohail help in that direction, and so do the contrarian interactors who voice their opposition in their own interesting way.

Essensaur

Re: # 92

As a traditional family man I would have to say I love Islam as a religion of nature and natural instincts for romance and procreation because it allows 4 wives -- even though a little too few and a little too crowded -- may be because of short life expectancy of the times -- 14 hundred years ago.

I am sure somewhere in the compilation and translation of Qoran by a non Arabic scholar hazrat Salman Farsi -- the only intellectual sahabi whose mother tongue was Persian not Arabic -- the number and sequence got messed up.

What the God of the Natural religion may have meant for the 'mankind' may have been -- only one wife at a time -- but a new wife for every new decade -- because truly the ardor, the romance, the love the fun peaks at five and then decline downhill till it ends at ten.

Now that the life expectancy has almost doubled -- the number of wives could also be doubled to 8 -- with the changing times for feminism allowing the woman also the equal access to 8 husbands.

What a happy world it would have been without war without pestilence, and without religion except Islam -- Agar Firdaus burr rooay zameeN ust -- hameeN usto hameenusto hameen ust

-- instead of becoming : "agar dauzakh tu burr rooay zameeN ust....

.....and then and then only people wouldn't have to run away before women make them vacuum the staircase or make them rinse the plate before putting in the dish washer -- women will gladly vacuum the staircase and rinse the plate herself before putting....for most of the decade before they start to ask at the end decade -- why?

as Faiz would say -- "youN nu tha maiN nay faqat chaha tha youN hojaaaye"

Re: # 88 M. Hamid wrote: ["... once you have been with a woman that you didn't pay for come back ..."]

One does not pay a woman to have sex... NO. "Free" sex is abundantly available to anyone who seeks it...(though what most consider "free" is actually much, much more costly, than the so-called "paid" variety)... any way, my point is that no one actually PAYS for sex. What one pays for is for them to go away and leave you alone afterwards.

Having walked down the isle a number of times myself, I have finally learnt a thing or two about Marriage and Morals.

...SR

Re: # 92 You have got right , happy marriage is concious compromise and then going sleep happily and count blessings.

Re: # 90

toofan mian,

........ i don't eat jack fruit or deal in coals .... there is nothing valid about anything masadi says - he poses a grave and immediate threat to children ....... i have been asking chowk staff to ban him ever since he reared his ugly head on this forum but instead they keep on banning you and other harmless interactors whose only sin is using an odd epithet or kalima now and then ..... don't encourage this fool who blames the american elite for his hemmaroids and sexual inadequacy .....

....... as for this marriage thing, after twenty years of matrimonial bliss i still think it is highly overated ...... mrs hamidm is a good woman but i would trade her in for nicole kidman and two sturdy cows in a minute ..... she is a good cook, but if i could marry ruth (chris's mother) or the chef at the capital grill (even though he might be a man) i would ...... and if i wanted a cleaning lady i would marry the mexican maid at the mariott .... and to be perfectly honest, she would rather be married to tom cruise or brad pitt or one of those weird guys on project runway ....... i think i will run away before she makes me vacuum the stairs or yells at me for not rinsing the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher .......

Re: # 90

Hurricane Sahib:

I am glad you have taken up where I left in legitimizing the need for Massaddi Mian less abuses. This new Massaddi Mian he has already showed.

My appeal to Hamidm Sahib is to go easy on both Massaddi Mian and Romair. Support me Hurricane, after all I used your re-incarnate Salim Sahib to make my point.