The Game
by John Constantine

I call that a bargain
The best I ever had
    -The Who

I typed in the web address in at random.

Don't know why.  Just was wondering if the domain was taken, I suppose.  It was.  Maybe it was a Freudian slip, I don't know.  I tend to let my mind wander and do the web equivalent of automatic writing in a desperate attempt to keep entertained at times.

And it is a very entertaining site.  I highly recommend it.

The guy has not had ye happy time with the fairer sex.  I thought I had it bad, but this guy is blue balled beyond belief.

So I typed in "chicks suck" into Google, and found the men suck "sister" site.  Naturally, they tip their hat to the CSG and even list him as one of the men they'd like to sleep with.

But of course they all have boyfriends, so we know he's simply out of luck.

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But it fits in nicely with our theme here at Hellblazer.  The guy is nice, honest and incredibly interesting.

And he still can't get laid.  It just cracks me up.

Because I can sympathize.

I've been there.  In many ways, I'm still there.  Certainly, all the men I know tell the same stories when we're commiserating over beers at our local watering holes.

And I can also sympathize with the female viewpoint.  Men are pigs and we suck just as bad.  Naturally, this understanding doesn't increase my chances with the fairer sex one bit, though.

It makes a wicked symmetry.  And it is truly delicious.  I mean, humans are arguably the most advanced species on the earth, and all we really are is just characters in some screwed up Sartre play.

After all, sex is really just the way that genes reproduce.  And fundamentally, genes just don't give a damn about how happy you are.  Certainly, my genes don't give a whit about my happiness.

I recently read a paper theorizing that the reason human civilization arose is entirely due to the females of our fine species losing estrus.  Men consequently lost the ability to know when females were fertile, and thus they were forced to cooperate on a more fundamental level with the fairer sex.

Thus civilization was born when females figured out that they could lead us around by the nose if they just kept us guessing.

Behavioral scientists have long ago discovered that one of the most effective reinforcement strategy is one of intermittently rewarding good behavior.  Basically, any reward that is consistently given will eventually result in extinction of the desired behavior.

Basically, if you want to make someone your slave for life:

1. get them hooked

2. then randomly reinforce the behavior

Need I say that women have this strategy encoded in their genes?

From our friends, the evolutionary biologists, we find the male and female strategies for mating are quite different.  This is immediately obvious to children at a very young age, but it is nice to see that the scientists are hard at work proving what we all know to be true.

Males are mating specialists.  And mating specialists really have a limited number of possible strategies to secure mates:

1. They can try to control females

2. They can control and gather resources that are useful to females

3. They can display for females, independent of any resources

And chicks wonder why men suck.

And it just gets worse.  Since women  get pregnant and men don't, our genes have blessed men with the almost uncontrollable urge to fool around.

Men will always suck because the underlying strategy for the small gamete (that's the sperm) is to breed with just about any available female.

Even the most honorable men will be led astray by an available female living close by.  Naturally, all this fooling around just leaves the door open for the mate left at home, and men often return from their wild flings to find another kid in their house.  Hmmmmm....

Men are also driven by this same reproductive urge to control resources important to females.  This is the fundamental problem that feminists have with the males of the species.  Men want women to be dependent on them for resources for the same reason women want men to be dependent on them for sex.

And religions seem to think there's a need to create a hell?  Again I repeat:  This is the hell where we don't realize we're in hell yet.

Unfortunately, the arise of the conscious mind happened pretty late in the evolutionary game.  What I find truly delicious is the belief structure I find almost universal: We're better than our biology.  The idea that we're above our genes.  That somehow, even though our genes are fundamentally driving our sexual behavior, that because we have big brains we should be above succumbing to the siren call of our genes.

Some evidence suggests that falling in love is phenylethylamine addiction, heartbreak is phenylethylamine withdrawal. the person you are in love with is only an artifice in the ritual you use to cause your brain to manufacture this drug.

So is this belief structure just a lie we made up?  Could it really be that the only purpose of the conscious mind is to just provide a comforting blanket of convenient explanations and homey homilies to keep us from going insane?  At least long enough for our genes to reproduce?

I mean, it's entirely possible that most of our world structure and our dominate beliefs about "how things should be" is just an evolutionary adaptation to the shock and horror we felt when we developed the capability to understand how truly we've being fucked over by our genes.

The society of the mind and the society of our genes have contradictory goals.  There is a fundamental tension between the two, and there always will be.  The problems between men and women and our mutual belief that the other sex sucks would seem to only get worse as time progresses.

Sure, we'll make some progress and invent new lies to tell ourselves.  If we're lucky, we'll instill these into our children at a young age, and when enough generations pass, we won't even be able to imagine reality any other way.

We'll continue to weave these webs of explanations and continue to both love and hate the opposite sex.

Certainly, we'll have plenty of stories cooked up to tell the wife and hubby.

I.

But at least I don't care.  I mean, I care but I've also learned not to care.  My caring or not caring is merely a product of that evolutionary late comer to the party.  It doesn't have to make sense in the same way that chemicals interact according to fundamental laws of physics.

My emotions, needs and desires are just an overlay over the signals I've interpreted and integrated with the limited mind that I have.

On numerous levels, I simply love the fact that chicks suck, and probably wouldn't have it any other way.

But then again...