Apparently, even monkeys pay for sex.
There’s been quite a bit of buzz about this article.
It basically summarizes findings that certain male monkeys had to groom the females monkeys for a certain amount of time before they got sex.
Now I think there are two ways you can spin this.
On the one hand, you could wonder why this seems to be such a big shock to people. After all aren’t we, according to the evolutionists, descended from monkeys? And anyone can observe similar behavior amongst humans.
Human males pay for sex all the time. Some females charge a steeper price than others to be sure, but inevitably we all charge and men always pay.
We use sex as currency in exchange for affection, attention, self-esteem, respect, better jobs, citizenship, I mean fill in the blank here.
And, just like the monkeys, the more competition there is in the form of other women, the lower we drop our rates.
This emotional prostitution may even be older than the oldest profession.
We use sex as a negotiating tool oftentimes counterfeiting the passion that is supposed to go along with it.
Or, on the other hand, maybe we as women should take a cue from the monkeys and more carefully evaluate what a man has to offer before opening the candy shop? There’s something to be said for it I think.
But for the most part, I’m not a fan of this sort of deliberate calculation. I think a woman should just have sex when she wants to because she wants to and with no hidden motives. Granted for most of us, it’s a long, hard road in order to get to that place and some of us never make it there.
Maybe we are just a bunch of monkeys after all.
Conversely, men seem to be more comfortable with (and are expected to be) just wanting sex for sex’s sake.
I remember watching Oprah one afternoon. Felicity Huffman was on talking about her book A Practical Handbook for the Boyfriend. There were funny clips of interviews with men. One in particular stood out. It was with one of her Desperate Housewives co-stars. He asks her how many chapters are in the book and then asks her how many chapters deal with sex. She answers one. He replies “See. If a man wrote this book, there’s only be one chapter and it would be about sex.”
Telling.
