Platonic Procreation, Ctd

A reader remarks on a recent post:

Long before Michael Woodley theorized it, the link between asexuality and genius was covered on Seinfeld, when George Costanza’s girlfriend had mononucleosis and couldn’t have sex with him for six weeks. The result, as you may recall, was that George dedicated all of that time and energy once used to think about women and sex to thinking about other things and became … a genius!

Another goes on a bit of a rant:

I’m going to call BS on the evolutionary psychology idea that asexuals devote more of their brain away from sex. That is an incredibly self-serving idea; it simultaneously flatters the person who says they are too smart for sex and absolves them from having to engage with the cognitive complexities (and potential failures) of an intimate relationship or coupling.

I am certain there are asexuals, but I don’t think they are asexual because their brains are eugenically superior by dent of conscious intervention on the part of the asexual in question. There are definitely a few geniuses who are asexual, but the idea that most geniuses are asexual is absurd. There are probably an equal number of dumb asexuals and smart asexuals. Humans simply do not have that granular level of control over their own hormones – and if you think you do, that’s just a sad cognitive illusion and you are deluding yourself.

Geniuses are just the extreme end example of this. Their brain is so great and everyone else’s brains are so puny their ineptness in relationships must be because their brain is so great, omg, in fact, their ineptness is actually EVIDENCE their brain is greater! It’s a beautiful unbreakable feedback loop of self-serving delusion. Like Fox News.

I dated a very brilliant woman in college whom as best I can tell from Facebook now identifies as asexual. She had her own set of background and baggage she prefers to believe she is above, and she would love the theory that she was just so smart her body wasn’t interested in sex. Her body was interested in sex, but as she would often assert she would eventually mentally clamp down hard on any sexual response she felt when we were making out because she didn’t want to lose control (and she would get scared at her own non-conscious responses to physical intimacy, in my opinion).

I respected her boundaries, and while we explored each other moderately, we never went very far – which was fine, considering we were eighteen and it was a first relationship for both of us. I think our relationship was a positive growing experience for both of us, but she never got comfortable with the idea that her body had a mind of its own.

Personally, I think this whole evo-psyche explanation is an extension of Smart Kid Syndrome. Smart Kids have everything relating to school come so easily to them that they never learn how to struggle through something that is new and initially incomprehensible and requires a long time investment of repeatedly failing before its no longer impossible. On top of that, Smart Kids are subjected to an unending geyser of addictive exclamatory over-the-top praise about how SMART and brilliant they are. Every time they make a minor achievement, they’re given a hit of that addictive praise for something that required a minimal input of effort; this has a huge downside, when something is not effortless their output is not amazing and they don’t get praised and they don’t get the endorphin rush they’re used to getting every time they complete something. And when they try hard and put in tons of effort the praise they get is not commensurate to their immense effort, it’s the same praise they get for doing something that took minimal effort.

The natural response to this is anything that does not come as easily as schooling is derided and diminished as “stupid”. This is exacerbated when the “stupid” thing is widespread or popular and the Smart Kid feels that they are missing out on something or being deliberately excluded. But the fault cannot be the self, no, it must be the “other” exterior to the self that is at fault.

Do you see how seductive this line of thinking is? “I’m smarter than everybody else therefore I’m better than everybody else, how come they can get dates or play sports when I am so much better and smarter? It’s because X are so stupid or X are so shallow” etc.

No it is not. It is because X made the effort, X tried to have a relationship, X invested years in learning sports skills. It isn’t that asking a girl out is hard, or taking that long anxiety ridden path towards a first kiss is difficult, nope, according to the smart kid it is the entirety of society being stupid. How dare they achieve success in something and win praise for something the smart kid is scared of confronting and failing at? There’s nothing worse than failing, you don’t get your hit of endorphins from a geyser of praise when you fail, so the best strategy is to avoid at all costs situations where failure is likely to recur.

Previous Dish on asexuality here.