Jillian : Trying to understand "why men get into fights with men who did nothing more than flirt with the woman they're with" is actually a very useful exercise. You've again hit on a key point and perhaps a difference between Left and right.
But ... I hesitate to reply. Because right on page 1 of my
Men's Field Manual for Tactics and Strategy in the War Between the Sexes (FM100-1), it says in bold type: DO NOT LET THEM KNOW THEIR OWN POWER OVER US.
But what the hell, your side never believes it anyway, so here I go:
The answer is basically simple: we fight because
--
(1) there is some genetically-shaped impulse in us which shapes our behavior in the my-mate-is-being-propositioned situation, and this gene or gene-complex has alleles which range over a variety of strengths, and
---
(2) in the past, males who had the stronger alleles, i.e. who kept other males away from their women more successfully, had more descendants than those males who didn't object very strongly. It's the same reason there are so few slow gazelles, or slow lions.
And women's choices played a big role in this: look into your heart and ask how you would respond if your husband was not jealous at all, and responded to other male come-ons to you (which among the intelligentsia are usually more subtle than wolf-whistles) with indifference. Your female ancestors chose the strong guys over the nicer guys, and it was a wise decision on their part. The same "Whut you lookin' at?" belligerence was better at protecting the cubs in a Hobbsean world.
What but the wolf's tooth whittled so fine The fleet limbs of the antelope? What but fear winged the birds, and hunger Jeweled with such eyes the great goshawk's head? Violence has been the sire of all the world's values...
This also explains the difference in male and female sexuality, and also even the differences in what makes them jealous.
One of the most powerful memories I have of a certain ex-wife, IQ 160 plus, a university graduate at 18, an intellectual's intellectual, was her response to a very mild apparent flirtation-signal directed towards me by another woman. She said , "I'll scratch her eyes out!"
Women are jealous, then, for sure, but there is a difference.
I will go out on a limb here, and assert: women fear losing their male permanently, more than they fear that he will be on rare occasions unfaithful. Whereas men react much more violently to the possibility of even a single infidelity.
And there are obvious biological reasons for this, which it would make this post too long to go into here, but anyone interested can read up on
Evolutionary Psychology. (A demurral here: I think the EP people may sometimes go too far in trying to explain all human behavior as evolutionary adaptations. But they are clearly on to something.)
But to put it in a nutshell: one single wayward liaison on the part of a female can leave the male raising a cuckoo's egg. A similar extra-marital encounter on the part of the male, provided it goes nowhere, does not threaten your ability to raise your descendants. You
know that your children are yours. He doesn't know with the same certainty that they are his (and some studies of biological as opposed to legal fatherhood have shown that he actually has reason to worry. Widespread DNA testing is going to cause social havoc).
These same reasons explain why the amount of porn produced for males far outweighs the amount of porn produced for females, roughly in the ratio of their respective lifetime gamete production counts (400 for you, umpty-zillion for us). And also in respect of its subtlety.
And it's why any reasonable-looking female, if she wants to, can get almost any normal male running around in front of her with one wing on the ground.
And why we have, therefore -- given the potentiallity of permanent warfare among the males in colonies of the human chimpanzee -- seen the evolution of a whole raft of social institutions, laws and customs, to try to curb this powerful male impulse and divert it into channels where it can be constructive.
(Another book suggestion here, to balance my previous feminist one: Steven Rhoads' [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Taking-Differences-Seriously-Steven-Rhoads/dp/159403091X/ref=sr_1_1/103-9655811-7155832?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192439258&sr=1-1]
Taking Sex Differences Seriously[/ame]. Please feel free to retaliate.)
It's why Dr Johnson said, "Nature having given woman so much power, the law wisely allows her but little." (Or something similar.) (Of course his observation is now obsolete, which is why, if civilization survives so long, women will be the dominant sex within a few generations: you will have the power of both the law
and Nature on your side.)
And why Socrates is supposed to have said, having reached the age of sexual indifference, "At last I have been set free from a cruel and insane master."
This powerful drive, expressed in different ways among male and female, provides the theme for half if not more of the world's great literature. (And its awful literature too.)
And now we come to the political bit.
In the last few decades, in the West, we have seen the progressive dismantling of these laws, customs and institutions. This makes us conservatives uneasy.
Of course, few conservatives base their unease at things like growing single-parenthood and casual sex among young people and the dismantling of various sexual taboos, on Darwinism. (A [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Darwinian-Conservatism-Societas-S/dp/0907845991/ref=pd_sim_b_3/103-9655811-7155832]
few[/ame] do, but we are regarded with suspicion by the rest of the tribe, and probably with good reason. Even a conservative-friendly rationalism is probably insufficient to sustain a good society. Nonetheless the hostility of many conservatives toward Darwinism is ironic, given that it supports a conservative approach to society.)
Rationalist liberals of the educated middle classes look at the religious and just-plain-prejudice driven arguments of many conservatives defending traditional morality, and laugh, or get indignant.
And indeed there is something there to laugh at, especially the delicious hypocrisy of many male conservatives. (I personally got intense enjoyment out of all the Republican Congressmen standing up to piously denounce Bill Clinton, knowing what an aphrodesiac male power is, as Henry Kissinger observed, and knowing all the opportunties that a Congressman has for testing the efficacy of that aphrodesiac .. It was noble, how they put the interests of their Party, as they saw it, above the interests of their Sex.)
But the hypocrisy is necessary. A society based on Pure Reason will not last.
We are now dismantling anything that cannot be defended in terms other than, Does it cause displeasure to a non-consenting adult? If not, have at it! A dangerous experiment.
And I know that all these changes are subtly intertwined with that great and historic advance in human progress out of the slime, the emancipation of women, and are driven not by some homosexual or communist conspiracy, but by the prosperity and increasing individual autonomy that the free market has brought us. Hoist by our own petard!
So we conservatives grumble and look fearfully into the future, and shake our heads at each new set of statistics documenting what we see as progressive social decay, and at each new advance of the "If it feels good, do it!" philosophy, but we know we cannot do much to even slow the tide, much less stop or reverse it.
) but there are lot of other jobs more physically dangerous - mining for example.
