I have a couple of long posts ready, but I take it that everyone's attention is on Trump and Super Tuesday, so I'll post something lighter for today.
As per my last post, it's amusing that while Genghis Khan and his pals were banging the daughters of kings and utmost beauties of all the kingdoms from China to Iran, the great romanticist Bertrand Russell was singing the sublime pleasures of romantic love while banging this:
Now, Russell was no fool. Some of you will remember my being shocked at Scott Alexander and other MIRI cultists being "polyamorists", which is a thing I didn't even know existed. It didn't took long for me to realize that "polyamory" such as it is, can only make sense if the people involved are unattractive, such as that sharing sexual partners doesn't feel so bad. Nobody wants to share a good thing, but sharing a lousy thing, having the vague chance of trading up, is not such a bad deal. And variety itself is appealing to men. Apparently the whole idea goes back to Bertrand Russell himself:
As for Dora Russell, the story is incredibly perverse. Their marriage was, at first, designed by both of them, to allow for liberal bouts of adultery. Bertie became infamous, in the 1920s, for various writings, promoting their concept of the “marriage of the future.” The problem is, when Dora took the matter to heart, and started having children with another man, Bertie went berserk, and began a lifelong campaign of hatred and revenge against her, the which included an about-face, against his former “liberal” views on marriage. Monk’s descriptions, of how he dealt with Dora, from the late 1920s, on through the rest of his life, make for gruesome reading.
Read as: get a homely broad, with the advantage that she will let you screw other women, which he of course was eminently able as a celebrity aristocrat. He didn't feel so bad about his homely broad banging outside, or perhaps he thought she wouldn't be able to. But oh, that's only male projection. Women are always able to find a mate, and she did, so much that he cuckolded him 2 children! Then Russell stopped finding the whole thing so amusing, and went total asshole on her and his children with her.
Gengis Khan on the other side, was attacked by a rival tribe on his young days, and his wife kidnapped. He eventually raised an army and beat the rival tribe, recovering his dear wife after 8 months or so. She was pregnant, and soon gave birth to a boy, Jochi. He owned the boy, as the timing was barely plausible, but doubts about the boy's parentage never disappeared. He didn't allow them, though, he owned the boy as his eldest son, and he grew to be a great general, his house eventually founding the Golden Horde. As fond as he was of the kid, though, he didn't have him named his heir; his other children just wouldn't have accepted that. But he did care and respect his first wife as his empress for all his life. You can see there he was a better man than Russell.
That sex is about power, and not about pleasure, is an old feminist trope, but there's a nugget of truth in there. The pleasure of sex is fleeting, and women generally just aren't that interesting. Sex is a natural urge, just as hunger, but the same way hunger can be satisfied properly, or can be indulged with gluttony, sex can be satisfied properly inside marriage, an institution which sanctions power of men over women, or it can be indulged with lust. Gluttony produces sick and disgusting fat people, and lust produces vapid and evil men.
