Ape and Angel

The question is this—Is man an ape or an angel?  My Lord, I am on the side of the angels.  I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence the contrary view, which is I believe, foreign to the conscience of humanity.  –  Benjamin Disraeli

Charles Darwin first proposed the theory of evolution via natural selection a little over 150 years ago, yet despite mountains of proof there are still huge numbers of insecure people who, like Disraeli, reject it out of hand because they are afraid of the implications of recognizing humans as a kind of animal, connected deeply to all other animals on Earth by the legacy we carry around in every cell of our bodies.  These are people who are unable or unwilling to recognize their own worth as individuals, and therefore require some magical proclamation of uniqueness bestowed upon them by an authority figure.  In a way, it’s the ultimate “victim politics”; none of us, these people believe, are worthy for ourselves, but rather only as members of a designated “special” group.  They therefore fear and reject their own bodies, whose earthy needs such as food, elimination and sex are no less compelling than those of every other animal.  But of those basic needs only one of them, sex, can be avoided without resulting in death; therefore it is the one which must be denied most vociferously by those who wish to believe themselves closer kin to the angels than the apes.

Not all those who deny the ape beneath our skins are members of traditional religions; as I pointed out in my column of one year ago today, neofeminists do the same thing due to their violent rejection of their own feminine biology.  “Social construction of gender” is just a more subtle version of “scientific creationism”; it recognizes that sex differences in all other animals arise from instinct encoded in their DNA, yet denies that humans are subject to the same biochemical forces.  Though some adherents of this catechism may also be creationists, most probably believe in some patchwork rationalization such as the myth that our large brains somehow make us “immune” to sexual and sex-role instincts (yet not immune to hunger, thirst, pain, fear, anger, love, sorrow, etc).  In any case, the neofeminists teach that humans, unlike every other mammal, have no innate sexual or sex-role drives whatsoever, and that all these are bestowed through the mystic force known as “social construction”, breathed into our nostrils by the omnipotent Collective.  The most deluded adherents of this cult believe in something like the Calvinist religious doctrine of predestination; once a person’s personality has been determined by the almighty Patriarchy (the collective entity which acts as both Devil and Demiurge in neofeminist myth), a “false consciousness” is established which only salvation through baptism in the Holy Spirit of Neofeminism can dispel.  If any person believes her choices to be acts of free will, but she behaves in a manner at odds with neofeminist dogma, she is said to be suffering from “false consciousness” which renders her decisions equally false.  Only actions wholly in accord with neofeminist teachings are “correct” and free of Patriarchal conditioning.

Sane, rational people understand that the mere fact of a biological drive does not compel a human (or even a dog) to act upon it; retrievers can be trained not to eat the game in their mouths, human men can suppress the urge to mate with an unwilling woman because they know it isn’t right, and I can suppress the urge to eat something right now because I want to lose two kilograms I allowed to accumulate over the holidays.  But like all prohibitionists, neofeminists believe that moderation is evil and only a total ban on the particular “sin” with which they’re obsessed (in this case, male-initiated sex) is good.  Any indulgence in an urge of the flesh is viewed as a triumph of the Dark Powers, a little taste of death to the “enlightened” consciousness.  Fortunately, this sort of black-and-white morality isn’t the norm in the rightmost portion of the IQ bell curve; as any whore or stripper can attest, many of our clients are medical doctors, scientists, engineers and other highly intelligent men who recognize that sexual drives are natural, and indulging them won’t rot their brains or cause the collapse of civilization.  Indeed, one man who is probably on nearly everyone’s list of the brainiest specimens of homo sapiens on the planet isn’t afraid to treat himself to commercial sex:

Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking spends a lot of time talking about the universe and what it might all mean but when…[he] isn’t talking to sold out crowds he can be seen spending his time in sex and strip clubs.  The Daily Mail is reporting that the 70-year-old has visited various swinger clubs, sex clubs and strip clubs over the years including a Southern California swingers party which he was brought to by his nurses and assistants…he paid for private shows with various naked dancers at the Freedom Acres Club in Devore which he visited on a “handful of occasions”…While Cambridge officials deny that Hawking has made “regular” stops at strip and sex clubs they do admit that he visited a club “once a few years ago with friends while on a visit to California.”

Stringfellow’s Gentlemen’s Club in London Owner Peter Stringfellow told the Daily Mail that he actually had a chance to meet…Hawking at his club.  “I remember asking him if he’d like to have a conversation with me about the universe, or if he’d just like to watch the girls.  The answer was quite simply:  ‘The girls’. “  So there you have it, when Stephen Hawking’s not busy trying to solve the mystery’s [sic] of our universe he’s doing what millions of other men do, he stares at naked women…

I think we can assume Hawking hires the occasional hooker as well; despite his paralysis he has been married twice and has three children.  And I also think everyone can agree that neither sex nor ogling crumpet has damaged the great scientist’s intellectual capacity in the slightest; acknowledging the ape does no harm to the angel.