I’ve never been less horny in my post-puberty life than I was the week after Donald Trump won the presidency. Like most progressive people, I felt a lot of things that week: sorrow, terror, rage, disbelief, hopelessness. I had so many feelings that it was like I was playing an unwinnable game of Frogger against all the many and varied ways in which a person can feel like total garbage. Amid all those emotions, though, one that’s almost always with me was conspicuously absent: the desire to be in some sort of sexual contact with a human man, or even with myself.
My sudden will toward abstinence was not out of a Lysistrata-style crusade to bend men to my will for the horrors visited on us and those yet to come. It also wasn’t out of principle, or out of some misplaced sense of self-righteous solidarity. (I will not X unless and until everyone can X safely!) Instead, the very concept of horniness seemed alien and impossible to me, as if creeping fascism had zapped the part of my brain that sometimes thinks sweaty men on the subway smell fantastic. Frankly, I had thought the end of the world would be sexier.
The change was immediate. I called out of work the day after the election, and, while racking my brain for ways I might improve my mood without leaving my apartment, masturbation occurred to me. It’s been my preferred source of quick-fix brain chemicals since the age of 12 because, at the very least, it forces you to think about something you enjoy for a solid five minutes — even if that thing is just, like, getting railed by Joe Manganiello inside your own mind. I peered down at the $200 impulse-purchase vibrator in the top drawer of my bedside table and felt nothing.
Voting rights, reproductive rights, and the various other rights the Trump administration plans to burn to the ground are obviously graver concerns than whether one is more or less horned up than normal. That’s probably why it took a few days for any of my friends to mention their own newly nonexistent sex drives to me. Until then, I gave little thought to whether or not my body’s post-Trump numbness might be a shared reaction. Eventually, though, people started to move from abject horror to abject horror mixed with the occasional dry, grim joke, and that’s when people started admitting (both privately and in the semi-public space of social media) how intimately the election had affected them.
There is a lot there. She spent $200 on impulse for a vibrator. She knows she uses sex/masturbation to alter her brain chemistry. There is even an element of the depressive in her description of thinking about something she likes for five minutes. But the most amazing part is what happened to her brain once her amygdala bumped up into unavoidable reality.
As you read it, bear in mind, this is is just the faintest taste of what happens when K becomes unavoidable, and the rabbit’s usual denial mechanisms become insufficient to produce amygdala relaxation. Then think about how this psychological shift would alter reproductive strategy, from just churning out babies with whatever man she caught a whiff of on a subway train, to not mating as she sought out a single highly-fit male who made her feel safe again, at which point she would only have his kids, at a slower rate. Indeed, the only way she would be driven to have sex would be if a single highly-fit man was protecting her from reality, and assuaging her amygdala. The mechanism itself would be a promiscuity-killer and a monogamy-inducer.
Now extrapolate out how the entire reduction in blind, spontaneous, short-term hedonistic drive would change outlooks and outcomes in other areas. These are people who are probably seeing reduced drive for delicious foods, easy success, and immediate satisfaction, as well as a reduced need for pleasurable stimuli of all sorts. That will free them to pursue mindless drone-work they couldn’t tolerate in times of r – work which itself will distract their amygdalae from the stresses of the onset of K-selection. They will shift from reflexively seeking denial and immediate satisfaction to reflexively seeking arduous work and ultimate success as amygdala relaxants.
Then continue on to picture how as sex becomes less of a pure, reflexive driver in her life, her issue positions on leftist reproductive issues would change, and her tolerance for others who were partaking of such, when she could not, would change as well.
Now imagine further, if the unavoidability wasn’t just seeing Trump on TV, but if it was outright violence, inflicted wantonly by the strong upon the weak liberal rabbits. Imagine how much greater that effect on the amygdala would be.
People don’t even realize these changes occur. But this is the flawlessly molded machine that is the human brain, adapting itself on the fly to changing environmental conditions based on subtle cues it is designed to tease out, focus on, and change its programming in response to. Urges that are uncontrollable in one environment evaporate and disappear in response to environmental changes people barely notice. It is r/K selection theory, it is all related to politics, it has molded the entire history of humanity’s civilization, and it is the biggest idea ever in both history and political science.
Tell other people about r/K Theory, because it, by itself, has this effect on liberals