Twelve posts in six months.

It’s dead, Jim.

Your comments on the costs of clothing also struck a chord with me. I studied as an engineer, and part of the study included the technology and economics of manufacturing consumer goods. One of the few things I can remember from that aspect of my education are the contributors to the cost of manufacture. Bespoke items have the central cost as being the design time and skill/time of the maker. As production numbers go up, as the item trends to mass production, the cost of manufacturing approachs the cost of the material, regardless of packaging or wage costs or capital costs of equipment used to produce it. Any mass produced item with more material than “average” will have higher material costs, and the manufacturer will increase the price to the supply chain to maintain margin on that item. Any tailored, or low production item will have additional costs of manufacture as the major price effectors. A rock and a hard place.

I “suffer” from short legs – I always have to add $20 or so to any purchase of pants for the required alteration, because I am outside the “average” – mass production does not suit parts of my body.

M.

One seat, one ticket (though aeroplane seats can be ridiculously small, and that’s another conversation entirely).

My one surviving grandparent spent much of his life investing in four children who, genetically, weren’t his, including my father, for which I am profoundly grateful. His choice to stay with my grandmother despite her infertility was, from his genes’ point of view, a ghastly mistake, and one that would no doubt have been penalized by evolution if adoption by non-relatives had been a live option in human societies for more than a handful of generations.

But our genes are not us. Their good is not ours. Why do people report so little life satisfaction from meaningless sex? Because although our genes have an interest in our *desiring* sex, they have no interest in our being *satisfied* with it — they’re better served if it leaves a big hole in our lives which we try to fill with more sex. If we are trying to do what’s good for people, instead of what’s good for genes, we’d be well-advised to watch out for traps like this created by the disconnect between our well-being and the replication of our genes.

And one of the traps is the very competition of males for females that Brody’s plagiarism victim outlines. It may spread our genes about but it doesn’t add to our life satisfaction. We should not conclude “Biology pushes us this way, so this is how we should behave.” We should conclude “Biology pushes us this way, so we should take extra care to resist it.” Societies that succumb to this particular lure are called patriarchies. They are not, as a rule, happy places to live.

Fortunately, resisting biology is not hard. Biologically, men have large beards; I’m guessing Brody, like most men in our culture, counteracts his “essential male nature” in this regard with very little effort and no regrets at all. Biologically, humans are driven to eat sweet and oily foods, a legacy of millions of years of nut- and fruit-eating ancestors. Chocolate triggers those desires, but when was the last time you saw an adult sit on the floor by the bulk bins in the supermarket and scarf the chocolate chips by the handful? Would you call that “natural” behaviour?

Finally — although, as I say, the person Brody pinched this from does get quite a bit right, they’ve also made a basic mistake. Males and females do not have equal stakes in the reproductive game. The small amount of time, water, energy and protein it takes a male to generate a given ejaculation are trifling compared to the risks pregnancy imposes upon female eutherian mammals. Patriarchal societies of course compound those risks by penalizing women who break the rules. And pregnancy again explains why patriarchal restrictions always fall heaviest on women — the man can, if he wishes, simply deny any involvement and walk away.

Subtext: but it’d probably help.