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I'm trying to open up about my situation with other people, but it's difficult to find a way where they don't spit the typical meme arguments about confidence and shit, so I wrote what I think. In my case, it's important to be able to explain this to people close to me because it would make it easier to explain to them future decisions about my life:
My life experience has made me very skeptical of human intuitions regarding how personal relationships work, including sexual selection.
Intuitively, there's the idea that physical appearance and biology don't play a definitive role in sexual selection and how others treat you—a notion treated as unquestionable. In my case, having a distinctive physical appearance, a very narrow bone structure, and being very petite has explicitly shown me that human behavior, social relationships, and sexual selection can be more accurately understood from a biological and evolutionary perspective. The role of culture, morality, and personality is important, but the limits of their influence are marked by the biological component.
The intuition that sexual selection works in a less harsh and more romantic way is natural if your life experience has been different, where you can truly draw a connection between your actions and your success in the romantic sphere. The problem arises when you try to impose that intuition as an absolute truth that applies to people in a different situation. There's a concept called "survivorship bias," where we only know the experiences and testimonies of those who succeed, not those who, having tried similar actions, failed. The stories and testimonies of those who failed are forgotten, unheard, and silenced; we simply don't want to hear them.
Why treat intuition as something to be set aside in this discussion? Because when it comes to serious issues with consequences that are not anecdotal, the most appropriate way to approach the conversation is through reason. If we were to handle important issues based on intuition rather than reason, we would still be living in the Stone Age.
The idea of analyzing and understanding human behavior and sexual selection from a biological and evolutionary standpoint may seem extremely cold and cynical, challenging the human notion that we are not just animals but possess something divine. However, that's an emotional response, not a valid argument to evade the conversation about human behavior from a rational, as unbiased as possible perspective.
My life experience has made me very skeptical of human intuitions regarding how personal relationships work, including sexual selection.
Intuitively, there's the idea that physical appearance and biology don't play a definitive role in sexual selection and how others treat you—a notion treated as unquestionable. In my case, having a distinctive physical appearance, a very narrow bone structure, and being very petite has explicitly shown me that human behavior, social relationships, and sexual selection can be more accurately understood from a biological and evolutionary perspective. The role of culture, morality, and personality is important, but the limits of their influence are marked by the biological component.
The intuition that sexual selection works in a less harsh and more romantic way is natural if your life experience has been different, where you can truly draw a connection between your actions and your success in the romantic sphere. The problem arises when you try to impose that intuition as an absolute truth that applies to people in a different situation. There's a concept called "survivorship bias," where we only know the experiences and testimonies of those who succeed, not those who, having tried similar actions, failed. The stories and testimonies of those who failed are forgotten, unheard, and silenced; we simply don't want to hear them.
Why treat intuition as something to be set aside in this discussion? Because when it comes to serious issues with consequences that are not anecdotal, the most appropriate way to approach the conversation is through reason. If we were to handle important issues based on intuition rather than reason, we would still be living in the Stone Age.
The idea of analyzing and understanding human behavior and sexual selection from a biological and evolutionary standpoint may seem extremely cold and cynical, challenging the human notion that we are not just animals but possess something divine. However, that's an emotional response, not a valid argument to evade the conversation about human behavior from a rational, as unbiased as possible perspective.
