ESTRUS AND THE STRUCTURE AND EXPERIENCE OF HUMANITY

It’s my aim here to reveal something you’ve never known before. I don’t know whether I’ll succeed or not. I guess it would be very presumptuous to assume that I’ll actually succeed, since almost certainly what I’m about to write is either out there somewhere in the literature or already thoroughly ingrained in the public consciousness and I just do not see it for some reason. Alternatively, I won’t succeed because what I’m about to say is just wrong, false despite my confidence that it is true. Nevertheless, I feel it is so important that I am going to describe this “reality” the way I see it.

Let’s jump right in. ESTRUS may be the most important principle of all needed to understand humanity, what causes our social and sexual reality on this planet, and what is at the root of so much of our suffering as a species. But, you may ask, why do I say that, what am I talking about, and how do I reconcile that with the seeming reality that humans no longer even experience estrus?

Well, first, estrus is a deep heritage from our evolutionary history. Analogy: We may no longer have tails, but we still have tailbones. I contend that the deep residual structures in human nature “left over” from this evolutionary history of estrus are ABSOLUTELY INDISPENSABLE to consider if we wish to understand the human experience and the nature of human sexuality. Estrus is, after all, a complicated system with many possible residual effects beyond the obvious ones.

ESTRUS seems to be the fundamental structure of the sexual system which evolved in mammals in general. As far as I know, all mammals exhibit the phenomenon or principle of estrus. I don’t know how much non-mammals may exhibit similar features in this regard, but the reality and clarity of the estrus structure in mammals seems universal. So, for now, please allow me to use elephants as a “strawman” to explain what I want to highlight about the features of the general mammalian “system of estrus.”

Estrus in elephants means that the female experiences, as best we can tell, e.g., from behavior, NO sexual desire (I repeat: NO) during almost ALL of her adult life. No, nada, NOTHING. During this entire time she not only does not pursue males in search of sexual satisfaction, but will actually REBUFF and REFUSE to admit or engage in any form of sexual activity with any males in her herd or whom she may come across. Why would Nature or evolution design things this way? Well, we (I) can argue that sexual activity during these “off” times would be a waste of precious energy needed for all the other aspects of survival, simply because the female does not have a prepared womb and an ovum or ova ready to be fertilized by a male.

HOWEVER, during this entire time when the female is virtually impervious to sexual advances, all the adult males are nevertheless ALWAYS in something LIKE (but not identical to) estrus. Their nature, or sexual nature, is to be ALWAYS in a state of sexual desire. This desire has no relation to the calendar, whether to their own calendars or to the calendars of the female. The ONLY thing needed for this desire to act out and for sexual activity to occur, is, to anthropomorphize it for a moment, for a nearby (or not nearby?) female to suddenly say “YES!” when she has been saying “NO” all along. We may ask, why does Nature arrange things in this seemingly unbalanced way? Why are the males all made to suffer this “fully on” sexual desire all the time when there is no hope for them to satisfy their desire? One might say it even seems cruel and wasteful.

In any case, when a female finally does say YES, which for female elephants happens only two weeks out of every two years, then the already intense male desire is perhaps raised BY HER PRESENCE (e.g., perhaps by olfactory signals in part?) to an even higher fever pitch, to the point that he is willing to FIGHT for his very life against other males to have the chance to mate with her while she says “YES.” In other words, apparently the nature of the desire for mating in the male is so strong that he’s ready to risk his life and limb to be able to fulfill it. We might thus even refer to the specifically MALE version of sexual desire in this system as a “REWARD-PUNISHMENT SYSTEM” which provides a great REWARD if he succeeds in mating, but also a correspondingly great PUNISHMENT if he does NOT succeed. That is to say, if he does NOT succeed in mating, he will experience a form of SUFFERING analogous to physical pain, which is itself the PUNISHMENT for the unfulfilled desire. It’s not neutral for the male to fail to mate; no; in fact for the male, it hurts. Otherwise, why would he be willing to do something so dangerous as to fight with other males with big tusks, and risk injury or even death, not to mention the great unpleasantness and exhausting nature of the fight itself?

Now the adult female, on the other hand, is almost always not willing to mate, as we said. BUT, for these two weeks out of every two years, she goes, as we say, into ESTRUS. During this time only, she signals, NOT a desperation like that of the males, but perhaps a casual, simple WILLINGNESS to mate. If the female’s sexual desire is also a reward-punishment system, then we may say that the PUNISHMENT aspect of her system is probably considerably milder, and so may be the reward aspect as well. (One wonders if, in the animal kingdom, the female EVER gets to have an orgasm.) Certainly, we may infer this comparative “mildness” from her actual observed behavior, but also, from another angle, we may ask, why should she experience the same urgency as the male (presence of the strong “punishment” aspect of a reward-punishment system) when SATISFACTION of her intent to mate always almost GUARANTEED, because she is suddenly SURROUNDED by an entire group of males who are all COMPETING AND FIGHTING FOR A CHANCE TO MATE WITH HER. So, her probability of mating is essentially 100%, unlike that probability for any individual male.

But, wait a minute. Where did all those males come from, to suddenly surround her with mating opportunities, when she finally goes into estrus and says “yes”? After all, are there not roughly equal numbers of males and females born into elephant society? Yes, of course there are. So where do all these extra males come from? Of course the ESTRUS principle here again explains everything: The 2 weeks of “yes” every 2 years for any individual female means, that, on a timeline, she is only “willing” 2% of the TIME. But what does that temporal 2% mean AT ANY PARTICULAR TIME for a local herd of females?

The answer is simple: If an individual female is only a “yes” 2% of the time, then it follows by an equivalence of a TIME average to an ENSEMBLE average, that in a local herd of 50 females, ONLY 2%, or exactly ONE, female will be a “YES” at any given present moment in time. But, in the corresponding male herd of 50 elephants, ALL 50 are ALWAYS in a state of intense desire. Why? We may argue that they must ALWAYS be in a full-desire state of “yes” because there is no way for any of them to know when any individual female might come to a time when she is a “yes,” and at that time, the male, ANY male around, must be ready and more than willing, again at a time unknown ahead of time and NOT at all dependent on HIS calendar, to provide his sperm to fertilize her at that critical time when her ovum and womb are ready. If this were not the case, matings would not or might not take place exactly when they are most needed, i.e., when the female CAN actually conceive, and thus the species would obviously die out due to diminishing or zeroing out of the birthrate.

Hmm…..so, we see a drastic imbalance here. We always have 50 males fighting each other for a chance to mate with only 1 female. This “always” may be almost literal: There may be a DIFFERENT lone female ready to mate for almost all periods of two weeks, and so the 50 males may spend most of their lives collecting at the site of the next female in order to engage in deadly fights. What a ruthless fate! The demand:supply ratio here is literally nearly always 50:1! It seems that Nature is quite the Capitalist, in a way. In fact, we may infer things are in practice much worse, because the female also has no desire to mate when she is pregnant, or when she is raising the new calves to a certain point, when presumably estrus is switched off for even longer periods. For the male, thus, it seems that winning a chance to mate is something like winning the lottery.

I’ve read that in elephant society, the adult males live individually, or in separate smaller herds, away from the female herds. (Why, from an evolutionary perspective?) But, when a single female goes into estrus, she trumpets a certain low frequency signal, or stomps on the ground in a certain way, and broadcasts pheromones, which then somehow communicate with all the males within up to a 100 mile radius. These 50 males thus all come RUNNING, converge on her, and start fighting. Meanwhile, she casually sits back and waits for a victor to be chosen, apparently during all this waiting, while likely not unduly burdened with the punishment aspect of her reward punishment system, since again she is only being incentivized to go after what is nearly 100% guaranteed for her. Note: In a certain kind of rare “mercy” Nature offers a certain respite for some males: Most of the males probably eliminate themselves without even a fight, I’d imagine, simply by noticing that they are too small to even dream of entering the contest. Fights break out only when something close to equality between the contestants appears.

I’ll try to summarize now: Nature does not seem to care that almost all of the time, male desire is to be wasted in futility, or that almost all the males all the time are suffering the strong “punishment” side of their reward-punishment system. When the rare and precious opportunity for a genuine mating occurs, the males are SIGNALED for a potential mating opportunity NOT AT ALL by their own internal calendar, but by the physical presence of ANY female, and in particular, of any female who will say “YES.” But even then, the males are NOT out of the woods: They will have to fight to the death to actually fulfill that mating desire. So the males must ALWAYS carry intense desire, and the fulfillment of that desire always depends on a willing female, a vanishingly rare event which requires dangerous fighting. The females, on the other hand, are not even burdened with a sexual desire most of the time, or any need to ever fight, even while in estrus. Only 2% of the time, an adult female will go into a “yes” mode, but NOT a desperate mode, since she is more than guaranteed to have potential mates ready to accommodate her. Analogy: I don’t generally experience a desperate need for air, since it’s always so readily available to me ordinarily. Furthermore, her “change” to a perhaps moderate level of sexual desire or willingness, that “yes,” is signaled or created NOT by the presence or absence of a physical male at all. She is probably made to be IMMUNE to the form or presence or absence of any particular male, no matter how “handsome” he may be, even during her 2% time in estrus. For her after all, it ALL depends ONLY on her own “calendar.” Is it the CORRECT two weeks? Then “yes.” Is it NOT the CORRECT two weeks? Then “no.” All that switching, whether high or low voltage (and here I’ve argued for low voltage for HER) has nothing to do with HIM. There is literally NOTHING he can ever do to activate her desire, since it is totally independent of him.

We can now see that the “form” of the sexual desire in a male is so drastically different from the “form” of the sexual desire in a female, that we really should NOT even call them by the same NAME. They are two DRASTICALLY DIFFERENT forms of what we might call a “drive” or “reward-punishment system,” and really should be called by two totally different names. In view of this total evolutionary DIVERGENCE or RADIATION into TWO DISTINCT desire systems, perhaps we should always use the terms “MALE SEXUAL DESIRE” AND “FEMALE SEXUAL DESIRE,” in order to remind us that we are talking about two VASTLY DIFFERENT THINGS ALTOGETHER.

Pivot now to humans: We are evolutionary heirs to this SAME universal mammalian system of estrus. It takes different forms in different mammals, but the essential characteristics are shared by all mammals. It is this evolutionary heritage of the estrus system that truly explains the difference in human male and female sexual desire. As we just said, under the estrus system, “male sexual desire” and “female sexual desire” become two almost totally different things, and there is no reason to assume that this evolutionary RADIATION converges back to ONE thing just because the obviousness of an estrus temporal cycle disappears. SHE, now a human female, a WOMAN or a GIRL, is the evolutionary heir of the form of female desire described above. HE, the human male (me for example), is the evolutionary heir of the form of male desire described above. It does NOT even MATTER whether she experiences a conscious estrus cycle now. SHE is still the heir to a calendar-driven system, perhaps more damped down now and evened out over monthly intervals, while HE is the heir to a system with a stronger punishment, which must be READY at ALL times to respond to the PRESENCE, visually and otherwise, of ANY HUMAN female, and which thus has nothing at all to do with any kind of calendar cycles of his own: It is always “on” and will take place when there’s a willing female around. He is thus triggered and his desire is fully activated by the mere physical and visual presence of a female and her “yes.” It is THIS EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY which is behind his greater susceptibility to the “visual” aspect of a female; NOT his nature to sow his seed far and wide, though that may also contribute an evolutionary component, if my thinking is correct. ESTRUS history itself explains more than the other aspects of evolutionary biology, such as parental investment, in my opinion, even though these too must play a role.

BUT NOW, there’s still a very curious wrinkle here. If I’m not mistaken, when we talk about elephants, ANY female in estrus will be mated with immediately by ANY male who can get to her. There is no judgment or selection on the part of the males. No male elephant says, “Well, this female elephant in estrus is ugly and I don’t want to have sex with her!” Likewise, the female elephant accepts for mating whichever male has won the fight. But this is now RADICALLY different from what I’ve noticed in humans. Humans, both male and female, but especially male, are EXTREMELY physically discriminating, to the point that most MALES simply will NOT mate, and will NOT EVEN WANT TO MATE, with, oh, perhaps 99% of ALL the females around at any given time. Curiously, I’ve noticed this exact feature in myself. What the hell is going on here?

If you doubt what I am saying and you are a male, then simply perform an honest experiment for a few days. You tend to think of your sexual desire as a universal phenomenon, “on” all the time and you are “always in heat.” In fact, some say you think about sex every 10 seconds. (I no longer do now, at age 73!) But actually you are VERY selective. It’s a huge fallacy to say that the human female is more selective than the human male, which biologists love to do; but I would argue that in fact the human females are probably just more immune to the “punishment” side of their sexual reward-punishment system, again as part of their evolutionary estrus heritage. So now males, for your experiment, OBSERVE honestly EVERY female you are able to see over 24 hours, or 48, or 72, for however long you feel like conducting the experiment, and evaluate whether you would be willing to have sex with her. You will be shocked to realize IF YOU REALLY INCLUDE ALL OF THEM, that you would literally RESIST and FIGHT to AVOID mating with almost ALL of these randomly selected females. One is the old woman walking down the block. Another is the old fat woman waiting for the bus. Another is behind the counter at the mall and downright repulsive to you. Another one looks like a stick and has awful pimples all over her face. You will very quickly see that only a small percentage of women are the right age and have the right physical form, such as “good shape,” “good skin,” “pleasing face,” and so on, which will make you want to mate with them. These features almost always correlate with her being young, true, but even most young women simply do NOT pass this “above threshold” criterion if you are honest. For example, even when you were in high school, think back to how FEW of the girls around you you actually wanted to have sex with. True, you desperately wanted to have sex with that minority, but most of the others were actually downright repulsive to you: They looked like sticks, or they were fat, or things about their faces were intolerable. And that was the age when women were the most likely to be attractive to you. So, whence comes this tremendous selectivity from us males?

Now, that’s one question to which I really wish I knew the answer. I don’t understand it yet. I can’t imagine that these minor physical distinctions really convey THAT MUCH INFORMATION about the likelihood that a woman will produce and successfully real healthy, reproducing children. But this selective “funneling” only INCREASES THE VALUE dramatically of the young, well-formed female above all others. She is “hot,” as we say, “above threshold.” We almost desperately want sex with the “above threshold” female, but not at all with the majority of females who are “below threshold.” She is truly in a privileged position, not burdened by the same “punishment” as her suitors.

On the other hand, a woman is truly in a DISADVANTAGED position for her own survival and that of her children, when she has children. To put it in highly technical and impressive scientific terms, she NEEDS HELP. Thus we may argue, independently of the estrus phenomenon, SHE is probably implanted with a stronger reward-punishment system organized around her finding and securing male help and commitment in aiding her survival and that of her children. What are the implications of all THAT?

Well, what does this all mean for humanity? What does it have to do, if anything, with the world’s oldest profession? Why is there this “translation” in humans to so much emphasis on selection by physical form, especially when males are selecting females? Are these imbalances and supply-demand ratios in any way connected with the horrible human phenomenon of WAR? If, as I’ve thought to myself, we have NOT yet adequately understood human sexuality in terms of our evolutionary estrus history, then we do not yet understand the true architecture of our own sexuality, and we do not yet understand its MANY potential consequences in our species. It follows that we have not yet created any social structures to accommodate these not yet understand realities. For starters, I would be delighted if this essay were to become standard teaching material for reading and discussion by our high school boys and girls. Give them a leg up on life! Why not? I now leave it to my readers to figure all of this out!