More to the point, why do women as a group tend to find distasteful the idea that men like casual sex without making financial contribution to any resulting offspring? Well it’s obvious, isn’t? There is a direct conflict of interest as between male and female in this case. Nor is it a matter of “gender”: women don’t have babies as a matter of gender, they have them as a matter of sex. These women want the privilege, backed by brute force, to treat men as machines for paying women for the babies they have. Otherwise they’d have no objection to repealing the laws forcing men to pay for women’s babies, wouldn’t they?

Women *would * talk of men having ‘responsibility’ to pay the women, wouldn’t they? But they deny that they have any reciprocal ‘responsibility’, or obligation, to provide whatever the man may require in exchange in order for him to consent. To bully and threaten women into providing services that men typically want is a serious crime; but to bully and threaten men into providing services that women typically want is a human right. Thus their argument is sexist hypocrisy, and when confronted with this fact, all we get is childish facile snivelling in reply.

I'm afraid PH is right. Social norms and rules are enforced because without them men would act according to appetite and whim. However men 'represent' themselves, according to custom, if you were privy to the visceral drives that seethe beneath the surface, immanent and threatening to erupt, you'd discard what I call "the white picket fence mentality". Hence Freud's model I mentioned above, wherein the ego is perennially conflicted with the vicious demands of the id and the hyperbolic morality of the superego. Do the ladies really imagine their husbands are perfectly contented? As Vidal amusingly says, the vast majority of men settle "into an acceptable if dull social role where the husband [fantasises] while pounding the old wife", who lies their fantasising herself.
To subscribe to genteel cultural norms, as though they were more than pretence, or came naturally from within, is childish--much as I might wish I could argue otherwise.
Man must be tempered by civilising concepts, but these are 'never' unconflicted; and sex is without doubt the most demeaning (culturally) drive we possess. I've urged people before to read Shakespeare's 129th sonnet, it's a wonderful illustration of the fraught position the ego finds itself in.

Of course I've only talked about men; women are just as tormented! Ah, God works in mysterious ways.

Peter
You talk about making financial contributions to any offspring as though the offspring only come from one set of genes.

There is really no such thing as casual sex - in that there is always a risk of pregnancy. If you enter into a that relationship you also make a contract to accept risk as well as responsibility.

I may have misunderstood the following:
"Women *would * talk of men having ‘responsibility’ to pay the women, wouldn’t they? But they deny that they have any reciprocal ‘responsibility’, or obligation, to provide whatever the man may require in exchange in order for him to consent."

But, what are you suggesting is reciprocated in return for a father's financial contribution to raise his own child?

Do you mean sex on tap?

Men have no more or less responsibility than a woman for raising a child. The desire to see progeny raised is not related to the amount of sex one receives in return. Both women and men have the same desire to ensure children are raised appropriately without attaching conditions to that goal.

The way you wrote this implies that only women have responsibility for raising a child - men only if they get some sex into the bargain - but I may have misinterpreted.

Squeers, good thing you added:

>> Of course I've only talked about men; women are just as tormented! <<

Else Antiseptic, Rstuart, Formersnag and Vanna would be out gunning for your blood.

As for the idea that men (and women) are only civil due to such artificial abstracts as law - that is quite a generalisation you and PH are making.

Given the size of our populations compared to the percentage of those who do behave like savages, where is your evidence that if rape (for example) was not illegal, all men would be rapists?

Maybe some people are held in check from their personal 'Hydes'; I don't hold such a dismal view. Most people are actually naturally decent and civil - it is only the minority, be they religious fundamentalists through to the garden variety bigot, who make our lives fraught. The rest (the majority) muddle through without committing murder or robbing banks.

Most people are inherently good.

Severin: <Most people are inherently good.>

I don't disagree with your comments, but the point of my post is that common decency is artificial rather than inherent. We are all held in check, more or less, by our compliance to social norms, not only actually, but 'ideologically'. We believe in them despite all the evidence! This is so patently obvious, to me, that I'm surprised anyone wishes to contest the issue. I'm not evil or anything; I just prefer to recognise how things are.

Pelican,
if I may respond to your comments to PH. The matter of parentage is far from equal, indeed it's stacked in women's favour (which is fair enough since this is a recent phenomenon).
If a couple engages in casual sex and she falls pregnant, she can say "I'm having this baby and you're going to pay" (though she's under no obligation to form an alliance). Conversely, she's at liberty to say "I'm going to terminate this pregnancy", and she need not ask his permission. Supposing it was real casual sex, in a car park. He reaches for a condom and she says, "it's cool; I'm on the pill". But she's not and gets pregnant. The same rule applies: "I'm having this baby and you're going to pay". Or, despite his protests, "I'm getting an abortion".
The man has no say; her body and his responsibility, whatever state her morals are in.
I'm playing devil's advocate here. Men had the running for far to long.
There's a great line in Scott's 'Rob Roy', put in the mouth of the villain of course: "Love is a dung heap, and I am but a cock who climbs atop to crow"

Dear Squeers,

We all get it. Certainly, some people are
quite happy having sex for sex's sake
with nothing else to it. That may be how
they are "built" or how they are "wired."
Other people, though, are more sensitive or
they have their genital centre connected
to their heart centre, so sex and emotions
go together.

Some people like frequent sex while others have
a lower libido. Some people are happy to "bonk"
while others like to "make love." It's just
that the people with higher libidos who are happy
simply to have physical sex fit the current
culturally accepted sexual stereotype. They then
think it's OK to bully others into thinking there's
something wrong with them if they don't want the same
type of sex.

It takes two to tango as the saying goes. If a child
is the result of the sex act - it should be up to
the two consenting adults involved to work out
what they're going to do next. Most women I know
would never pressure the father for any sort of
"maintenance" if he was unwilling to do so.
However one would hope that if he was happy to "go in"
he would be equally happy to support whatever "comes
out." After all nobody forced him to "go in" in the
first place - right?