4 Votes
RE: reasons for not having children
Sex? … Most of us can avoid raping women we find very attractive.
Rape is less about sex and more about control and power. Sex is one of the impulses we have difficulty controlling. In marketing sex sells. There has been prostitution for a long time. There are plenty of ways to have sex and not have children, but despite that fact, our foster care system is overloaded (article was published in 1987, I don’t think it’s getting any better with time).
Overeating is another impulse that seems to be a problem. I posted a link to the obesity plague sweeping the nation.
Anger has roots in biological factors and is another impulse we have difficulty controlling. The MSG lady that was mentioned briefly in the links section I believe falls into this category.
Jealousy
One possible explanation of the origin of jealousy in evolutionary psychology is that the emotion evolved in order to maximize the success of our genes: it is a biologically based emotion (Prinz after Buss and Larsen, 2004, p. 120) selected to foster the certainty about the paternity of one’s own offspring. ~Wikipedia
There are quite a few crimes which are committed because someone was jealous of another. Jealousy also drives people to buy things that they don’t need, “keeping up with the Jones”, and potentiates debt. It’s an impulse we have difficulty managing.
RE: reasons for not having children by Occams
Accepting Jyro and some of BCA’s comments I come back to the point we were trying to discuss, which is why is the biological imperative of having children is generally less well controlled than other similar human desires and needs.
I still say it isn’t. Those other things are controlled also, up until the point where it is convenient to indulge them, or the ability to control them is taken away. That is why we rarely take a dump in the middle of the street, or have sex in a bar, or eat a meal in church. No, we wait until the time is appropriate and convenient, just as most of us do when having children.
RE: reasons for not having children by Occams
Rape is less about sex and more about control and power.
We hear that all the time, but is it true. No doubt there are many sickos who do it with a power motive, but I think it is wrong to ignore virulence of the sexual motive.
It is a human tragedy for any woman to suffer rape, so it is tempting to comfort her by insisting that it had nothing to do with sexual desire or her tendency, intentional or unintentional, to provoke it.
Rape is never the woman’s fault, but her vulnerability is influenced by her clothing and behavior. That is not fair, but ignoring it is dangerous. I believe that there are a lot of pathetic men out there who can’t achieve sexual satisfaction in any other way. They don’t only want power they want sex.
I realize that this is a very non PC thing to say but I maintain that if we want to really protect our loved ones we need to consider the full spectrum od motivation for rape.