Well, it’s been a while. I started out on this essay writing thing in January ‘24 thinking I could write forever about new stuff. Interesting stuff (to me only as it turned out … obviously.) And for a time, it seemed that I was doing just that. Then sixteen essays later, and, as irony would have it just after I had said ‘I’m now more than a quarter of the way through the year and finding no shortage of subjects to write about.’ I suddenly dried up. Ran out of things to write about. No. That’s wrong; rather I felt that I had said everything I had to say. 

But that isn’t quite right either. I usually put a book to bed by writing a review on Goodreads. Maybe that habit let the steam escape, so my creative boiler didn’t have enough oomph left to keep the old essay flywheel spinning. And now here we are, two years after my icebreaker essay and I have had my new one welling up inside me for a month or six.

It was daughters of course that pushed me over the weir. My firstborn, the forty-something, suggested that with the new chapter starting in my personal life during Summer 25, perhaps I should write something (she actually suggested a song) something more personal, more vulnerable, sounding less lecturaceous (my word not hers.) And with a not-immediately-obvious synchronicity, one of the fifteen year olds asked me whether the word ‘phallic’ was always about shape.

We were in Shrewsbury Castle grounds. It was during the 2025 Shrewsbury Summer Festival. They had a pair of vaguely flame shaped carved sculptures on the lawn. Clearly not at all phallic in any way. 

She had a second question lurking in her secret agenda of course, but I didn’t know that, so I just blundered on, answering the first one straight – ‘ Hmm, not shape so much, I think. It’s more about representation of the masculinity of the member rather than just about its shape.’ 

Then I remembered the scene from How I Met Your Mother where a ‘Seventy eight storey pink marble tower with a rounded top and two spherical entry-ways at the front’ rose from ‘wild brunette’ bushes and I thought ‘… but yeah it probably is always about shape.’ 

But before I had the chance to enlarge (!) on that, she continued … ‘So what is the female equivalent?’

The word ‘Yoni’ flashed through my mind from a discussion over a book with ex-wife No1, about three and a half decades earlier, but you know, I’m a man and I didn’t know exactly what the word meant. More to the point I didn’t want to embarrass myself by sticking my neck out into the mysterious arcane world of feminine pudendal detail with my adolescent daughter. So I just lied and said ‘I didn’t know, maybe there wasn’t one.’ 

Funny that ‘mysterious arcane’ thing, and the masculine guilt I felt, more than half a century after it was instilled in me by my mother who would habitually use her arsenal of taboo and innuendo to suppress my curiosity.  A mere male could never understand the complex secrets of women’s bodies. Peculiar then that I was still humiliated into the inability to speak more than half a century later  – by which time I had surely experienced (and probably discussed with their owners) a significantly greater variety of women’s bodies than my mother had known in her sexually repressed lifetime. Anyway, hobbled by that ancient stigma I was, and the word remained unuttered.

By that time we were on the sculpture lawn itself. Zoe pointed to the flame shaped sculptures, now visible from a different angle. With an instant laugh of realisation, it was suddenly clear what her train of thought had been. 

My first reaction then (also not stated out loud) was that the smartphone has a lot to answer for. I recall learning in that book discussion 35 years ago, that most women then had no idea what a ‘man’s eye view’ would be, and they were advised by the (female) author to use a mirror and be prepared for a big surprise. Yes that was in about 1990, not 1890: 1990. Hmm must have been the smartphone that had educated my teenager then.

It took a few weeks for me to look up that word ‘Yoni’ or maybe the quasi-phallic equivalent should have been ‘Yonic?’ Did it exist or was the whole discussion part of my imaginative memory?

And yes, it exists, and yoni of course IS more than just about shape. As we might expect, the feminine has a subtler and more layered depth to it than the masculine. I’m quoting Emma Wilkin here:

‘‘Yonic’ is derived from a Sanskrit word, ‘yoni’ (योनि), which means ‘womb’, ‘uterus’ or ‘vulva’, as well as ‘source’. In various Eastern religions and spiritual traditions, the yoni is revered as a symbol of divine feminine energy and fertility, and the origin of life. The concept of the yoni is often associated with the goddess Shakti in Hinduism, representing the creative and nurturing aspects of the universe. ‘

Hold that thought, because I’m going to take a big sidestep here. 

I buy Dawkins. Pretty much a hundred percent. Smug bugger that he is, I believe he’s got evolution absolutely right. I have no difficulty believing his thesis that we phenotypes, from fungus to sapiens, are simply supercomplex shells that give ‘our’ genes the mechanism of potential immortality – or at least, the closest that Planet Earth can offer by way of immortality.

So I always look for evolutionary mechanisms for just about anything complex, from psychoses to social culture. For example, I believe (with Randolph Nesse) that psychoses emerge under the control of genes that make us more likely to create the next generation and raise them to reproductive age, whether or not that success gives us pain and grief in the process.  And I believe that cultures emerge, as described by Joseph Henrich, from an exactly parallel process from the memes (Dawkins’ word) that survive and propagate themselves best by the simple circular metric of survival and propagation.

Now the crucial mechanism of mammalian evolution comprises mating and gestation, and considering humans, we have a situation where women carry a child for about a year before they are physically ready to start making a new one, whereas men are capable of siring a few hundred (at least) in the same span of time. Now that gender-differentiated mechanism is a simple truth that has been used (almost always by men) to justify polygamy and male sexual unrestraint. The argument for asymmetrical sexual behaviour goes like this:  ‘That’s the way we were designed, so that’s what we should do’ – in an absolutely indefensible male-centred logic.

Philosophically we can throw it out immediately.  Hume’s law says that you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’ 

And we can think immediately of other ways that human design is obviously not worthy of generating normative argument. Our eyes for example are similar to the convergently evolved eyes of cephalopods, and logically enough, their optic nerves sit behind and therefore out of the light-path of their photoreceptors. Our optic neurons form a layer sitting in front, obscuring our light sensitive cells and making our retinas functionally inferior since we come from a different ancestor. No one suggests that this means that our arrangement is superior because nature designed us that way, or that octopuses should be placed in more highly paying jobs that require visual skills.

We can also throw out the ‘men should be less sexually continent than women’ idea mathematically by pointing out that any actual living carrier of genes has two parents, one male one female. So the actual amount of progenerative mating is exactly the same on average between men and women. That means that if some men could or should sire five or six hundred children a year, then five or six hundred men aren’t going to father any. That’s an oversimplification of how statistics works, but it’s the seed of a sound counterargument against drawing out a justification of socially bad behaviour from the numerical differences of human gender. 

And I am nailing my opinion to the mast here. I do believe that judging people belonging to one gender or the other for their sexual habits is wrong.

I would rather look at this physical sexual inequality from a completely different perspective. The way that our genes alter our behaviour is by altering our desires and our mindset. Our genes make us succeed not by forcing us to ‘succeed’. That is technically impossible. 

The way evolution works in humans is by giving us emotional feelings which lead to the behaviour patterns that work empirically.  I mentioned in another essay Nesse’s example that we will typically get bored with picking fruit from a gooseberry bush, not when it is bare, but when the effort of finding another shrub becomes less than that of finding more berries on this one. The emotional feeling of boredom leads to success in nourishment and thus procreation.

There’s an old joke – Not only women have feelings, men have feelings too. For example, they can feel hungry.  

Yep I’m a man, and at the most basic level I have just two feelings. Hunger, and here I’m adding Wonder. Maybe Wonder will be another essay, but I think that most feelings that evolution has given both genders in order to optimise our successful reproductive behaviour are actually hungers. Hunger for food (because then we are more likely to survive to sexual maturity), hunger for sex (because then we are more likely to reproduce), and hunger for love (to encourage people to optimise the survival of our incapable infants.)

Now let’s focus specifically on woman – what does genetic evolution want her to use her one precious year for? (you know the word ‘want’ there, doesn’t mean that evolution has desires, right? It’s just a convenient form of words.) Absolutely more than anything, she should be choosy. And here contrary to Hume, I will derive a ‘should’ from an ‘is’, because this isn’t philosophy, this is the life or death scenario of a whole species in a messy competitive world. The word ‘should’ here means ‘more likely to succeed.’ Or more technically post-Dawkins it means ‘proven by thousands of generations as more likely to pass on the responsible gene.’

I know that the next paragraph will turn many people away. It would turn me away if I didn’t know what was coming next, so if you have got this far, please do me the honour of staying with me for at least the next two or three.

First, a woman should choose a mate who will help her raise a child past the first few years when pre technological humans die in disproportionately large percentages. Child mortality up to age 5 pre 1900 in the uk for example was always much higher than one in four. She should (yes should) choose a mate who will feather her nest, feed her, protect her and her infant, and stay alive to do these things. Now I know that ignores the possibility of family help and it also sounds very pre-feminist, and it is. The reason for that is that feminism has had just over one century since the Great War, whereas the harsh existential reality of pre-feminism had at least two million years to affect the evolution of our brains and our mindsets before that. I am not arguing here for stay-at-home mums and neanderthal dads. Today we have had the very considerable positive benefit of a century of feminism and I welcome the continuation of that and all forms of increasing human diversity. I am explaining nothing more or less than why women are hard-wired to be choosy in selecting their mates.

And what about our pre-NHS man, what should he be doing? Should he be relaxing with a good book reminding himself that one successful mating experience a year is what he should expect?  Well if he did, then he wouldn’t find himself at the head of the queue when the once-in-a-year opportunity does present itself. So what actually makes perfect evolutionary sense, is for him to get out there at every opportunity with as big a banner as he can carry, telling the eligible women of the world to ‘choose me.’ Honestly bro, that’s the only way you’re ever gonna get laid, and more to the point it’s the only way your genes are going to avoid extinction. 

So: so far – evolution ‘wants’ – (or better to say, ‘successful genes create’) –  women with complex emotional feelings that make them wise and choosy. And it creates men with simple feelings who are not in the slightest bit choosy, but who are able to show themselves to be in possession of qualities that are desirable to women.

But the human world doesn’t work like that, and probably never has done. Remember I mentioned that not only animals and humans evolve; cultures evolve too?

A couple of decades ago I heard the comedian and chat-show guest Jo Brand recalling that a journalist had described someone as ‘the type of woman who, when she entered a room, was desired by every man’ and Brand’s comment, ‘we all know that type, they have two arms, two legs and a vagina.’ It was at least twenty years ago, but it has stuck in my mind because of the force with which two reactions hit me as soon as she had said it. 

The first, kneejerk reaction was that she was being unfair to amputees, and hot on its heels, I thought ‘You have two arms and two legs, Jo Brand, but I wouldn’t touch your sardonic ass with a barge pole.’ Now as I look back on that episode I think that her line just encapsulated exactly what I have been saying. Men: not choosy at all. 

(My own thoughts on female attractiveness  are not so relevant here, but it’s my essay, so I’ll say them anyway – for me it’s a positive outlook (the opposite of Ms Brand’s brand), that attracts me to the possibilities of a woman’s vagina. Arms and legs not quite so much)

But deeper (not much deeper) in her humour was knowing she shared with her audience a sincere resentment of the culture where men, despite being ruled by their dumbsticks, were still in charge. Women at the turn of the millenium were still (maybe still are today) classified as angels or whores, and men have always been willing to pay money for sex, either in a long-term contract with an angel or a short-term one with a whore. And that is simply because men are typically more hungry than choosy, and women vice versa.

And so we arrive at the patriarchy (with or without the frequent prefix ‘toxic’) I’m not going to guess how it was that men have almost always held the levers of power in nearly all post hunter-gatherer cultures, but I believe I do know why men have historically taken ‘business’ more seriously than women and perhaps there’s a link. Actually yes, I am going to guess why men hold those levers, and I’m pretty sure I got this.

Going back to the simple logic I gave above, (recap – this one: women:choosy – men not so) then, short of literally paying on demand for sex, how does a man get laid? It strikes me he has only three options. 

• Be socially and physically attractive: give out ‘trust me I will care for you and protect your future family’ vibes.
• Be measurably attractive: give out ‘I am wealthy enough to feather our nest’ vibes.
• Rape.

Of those three, the third, like guns and knives, is for losers. And I’m truly sorry that it even has a place on the list. 

That second one has always been the one that our western culture has encouraged. ‘Get that right,’ society has said, ‘Build a nest and get some food in the fridge and drink in the sideboard and the social, trust thing will follow’ So that’s the traditional recipe for a man to get a woman to choose him, show yourself to either be successful in business or else the type of boy who will be successful in business when he’s old enough. Now, when you’re teenagers that’s not so relevant and physical and social charm is rewarded more highly, but greater social and economic power comes with age, and after a few centuries of that, men have worked themselves into believing that the business is the power and the women are flocking when actually ….

(…retrieve the previously held ‘yoni’ (divine feminine energy and fertility) concept, and combine it with the choosy/non-choosy discussion…) 

… when actually it’s the yoni that has the power – and the business that leads to wealth, aka nest-building cred, is just a necessary means for simple-brained men to pay the subscription and get their non-choosy asses laid in a socially-acceptable contract.

In other words. What has crept up on us here is a strange reversal, from female power, to male power. Date zero was the moment when the invention of business in the form of trade based on proto-agriculture created enough surplus wealth to make some non-chiefs able to feather nests better than others. From that moment society has promoted those men as better potential mates, and woman in the words of John Lennon was made to ‘paint her face and dance.’ to attract them.  When in Jo Brand’s words, all they needed were arms, legs and vaginas, and in mine, they just had to exist with a positive outlook and the potential to be fertile. 

And so it goes – a move from an idealised situation (which perhaps never existed) where woman is powerful, with the right to choose her mate from the hungry crowd using her own yonic magic, to real life where man grabs the levers to the mutually-agreed power of competitive nest building. And all of a sudden, women are in competition against women; competing for the attentions of the best nest builder.

Christopher Hitchens used this tug of war between male sexual desires and masculine resentment of yonic power in his rants against religion and in his infamous Vanity Fair essay ‘Why Women Aren’t Funny’ Personally, despite my admiration for his quick arguments and his lack of fear in negotiating hostile terrain, I think he was especially guilty of propagating gender-specific us-and-themism. 

From my perspective, the sad thing is that all of us, men and women have bought into the lie that business and the wealth it creates is something desirable in itself rather than a laughable tool used by second-rate men who are incompetent at seduction by personality. 

Women – who have so much subtler and fuller ways of feeling and evaluating to allow them to choose and create, – women have lost the magical power of the yoni and sold it – or allowed the patriarchy to sell it over their heads. We have all have bought into the lie that the power lies in the hands of those who can make money. 

Now I’m not blaming women for buying into this, any more than I’m blaming early post hunter-gatherer serfs for selling their freedom to buy into the myth of shared agricultural wealth. And actually, yes, there was a trickle down though it was a few millennia in arriving. Today’s labourers are far far better off materially than kings and emperors were just a couple of hundred years ago, and today’s women have far more power, comfort, and leisure time than their forebears too.

But it is human nature not to compare ourselves with the ancients, we compare ourselves with our neighbours, (and everyone else on the internet) and in perfectly understandable ways. 

From the late twentieth century, feminists have said, ‘actually we are just as capable as you men, all this disposable wealth has made us bored with painting our faces. And we resent that it has also put us in a position where we have to paint our faces to keep up with other women. Let us do this business thing too.’ 

And all of a sudden it’s business and moneymaking that are the objects of desire for men and women both. 

Now we are all climbing the slippery pole together. Everyone, man and woman can now aspire to be the next Elon Musk and be equally miserable in their inevitable failure. Everyone can blame that failure on each other and every possible outsider (from members of the other gender(s) to Jews to Blacks, to Boat People) they can blame them for unfair competition. And so it goes. How can we all have been so easy to manipulate? Actually I don’t think anyone is consciously manipulating us, it’s just a sad situation that has evolved.

So I say, ‘If you want it, then do it, have it.’ Man, woman, whoever. All I ask is ‘Why resent it? Why make it a battle? 

Why must everyone join a team and demonise the outsiders?’  There actually is today more than enough to go round, even if Musk and his friends have tied themselves to the wheel of ever increasing material wealth. Since the US threw away the gold standard in 1971, money really is just a number. Why can’t we just acknowledge his miserable addiction as a psychological anomaly, and let him have as many zeroes as he wants?

Now I am not suggesting any return to any golden age (spoiler alert : there never was one – or if there was we are living in it now) If women or men want the fulfillment of gaining a Nobel prize, becoming a top content generator on the socials, sitting at the steering wheel of a business empire or on top of a heap of bitcoin then that’s fine with me. 

I believe that there is a natural gender order to humanity – not by rank but by aptitude. Women are generally more subtle, and complex than men. Men, by and large, are simple creatures who are capable of enjoying wherever is put in front of us. I think both genders receive fulfillment by progressing in whatever they care about and in giving and receiving the support of other humans.  Let’s not screw it up. Celebrate the yoni. Celebrate the phallus too if that’s your thing. Celebrate all the richness of the universe.

I’m retired. At last, I am in the economic position that a random married woman would have occupied five or six decades ago. I have enough money to live reasonably comfortably. I manage and clean my house. I have time to be creative and I am creative. I don’t have the opportunity to change the world, other than by being the change I wish to see. I love it. 

By the time AGI (or maybe ASI) takes over, there won’t be much left for any of us to do that is measurable or necessary anyway. 

We live in a time of global productivity, comfort and wealth like there has never been before and likely will never be again. Care for the planet. Care for those less comfortable than ourselves. Stop bloody fighting. Be creative. Enjoy!