My recent comment over at Tracy Renee Jones‘s post “Village Voice Exposes R. Kelly and Our Willingness to Ignore The Sexual Assault of Black Females” went over rather well, so I have made it into a post.

Perhaps in this environment I am not telling anyone anything they do not already know, but here is the inside scoop on men’s sexual instinct. The base impulse for all men, the crude urge that even civilized men have at their sexual core, is consumption and control. Not love, affection, play, shared pleasure, wonder or bonding, though many men have all that as part of their sexuality, just not at the sexual core — those are developed attributes, sewn onto a sexual foundation of consumption and control.

Sure, lots of guys are not exploitative, but civilized sexual behavior is a developmental achievement, not an adherence to pure nature. Nature is a thug.

Psychologically underdeveloped men simply are acting out the natural unadorned male sexual id.

Consumption of the natural sexual target for men, very young women. That is what turns the crank at the reptile level.

Control of said target. Which is not to be confused with accommodation of said target.

For an underdeveloped man, a “natural” thug, that is use and abuse of the most vulnerable.

All men are not pigs, but all men have a pig inside them. The trick is to govern that piggishness through discipline and empathy. Discipline and empathy are acquired (developed) characteristics. Not everyone acquires them. Some just learn how to fake them.

To elaborate, I believe a lot of misunderstanding of men’s behavior comes from the assumption that DBR behavior must be an acquired condition. We ask, “What happened to these men to make them this way?” More often though, the better question would be, “What did not happen to these men to make them this way?” What developmental milestones were never met?

An alternate theory: development kills the pig. Plausible … but I think it is wishful thinking.