I've actually had an idea to do stuff like this for a while now (posting my reactions to articles that I stumble across on Facebook here, rather than just real-lifey stuff), but ended up never getting around to posting my first one a while back when I originally got the idea.
But anyway... this is a pretty long ranty post, and may not be "Mormon safe" (in the sense that sexual stuff is discussed, though not explicitly or anything, and a blogger who some of my Mormon friends seem to frequently share posts from is called out as being full of crap... though for the most part, this post isn't about him. It's about a really awful misconception that's taken root across much of society, which both he and the person he's arguing with both somehow agree on.) So those who are easily offended and prone to posting angry, insulting comments on anything you disagree with, run away and never look back.
Anyway... those of you who are still reading, this post refers to this blog post. All that you really need to know, though, is that both of the people who say some stuff in said post agree that "monogamy is unnatural" and humans (especially male humans) are naturally predisposed toward screwing everything that moves. The difference being, one of them is a college professor who you've probably never heard of unless you're in one of his classes (taking the "we're all naturally non-monogamous so let's go ahead and mindlessly screw everything that moves!" stance) and the other being a religious/political-ish blogger that you've probably never heard of unless you've seen your religious/political-ish friends share his posts on Facebook (and his stance, of course, is something along the lines of "monogamy isn't natural, it's a commandment from the Old Man in the Sky and his son White Jesus to test our righteousness by making us do something hard!")
And now that you have that much information, there is no longer any reason to read that article I linked, so you can continue on to the rest of my rant. XD
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Okay, a lot of this Matt Walsh guy's blog posts are full of crap from what I've seen (this one included, honestly; I only included a link to the article for context purposes, not because I'd actually recommend it! XD)... but this professor claiming that "monogamy is unnatural" and trying to say that all men are just inherently geared toward wanting to have sex with as many people as possible might be even worse.
...Actually, scratch that--Professor Widespread McMisinformation is definitely worse. The "all guys are pre-programmed to be ravenous sexmonsters" line of thinking is probably one of the most horrible untruths to become accepted "fact" by a depressingly large segment of society in a loooong time.
If monogamy is "not natural," how the heck do either of these guys (who somehow agree that it is "not natural" even if they don't agree on anything else) explain ME?
I'm only interested in monogamy when it comes to relationships. I've only ever been interested in monogamy. There was no "party phase" earlier in my life that I've since grown out of--I just have never seen any appeal in the typical "go out (drunkenness optional but encouraged) and have sex with as many people as possible" thing a lot of people (especially guys) get into starting around high school. When other guys would brag about stuff like that, it always seemed so strange to me that they would think that was a GOOD thing. While other guys were being all "aw man, when will I lose my virginity?" my concern was always something more like "when will I find a girl who actually likes me?" instead--losing my virginity is something that'd be more of a nice bonus that would ideally come along with finding someone who actually felt as strongly about me as I do about her, not an end goal in and of itself (even now, the only concern related to that is "if I DO actually find someone, will she reject me just because I'm still a virgin at age 28 or will she actually be a decent person and try to understand and work with me on that instead?")
Oh, and that's not all. Just having strong feelings for one person (even if they're one-sided feelings which that person doesn't share at all!) basically blinds me to all others, to the point where I'm pretty sure by now that I've missed a few people who may have actually liked me because I just couldn't turn my attention away from someone else long enough to notice. Even on the rare occasion that I start to like multiple people at once, that only lasts until one of them manages to push ahead of the others in my mind and become the lone person that I end up mildly obsessed with. I can't imagine how much MORE focused I would be on that one person if I actually was in a relationship with someone, rather than just an "I like her but she doesn't feel the same way" situation. This is literally the exact opposite of the supposedly "natural" walking stereotype guy who can't help but have his eyes drawn to any nice-looking girl he stumbles across, even if he's already taken.
And I'm pretty sure at this point this is something that's built in for me, not something I've learned. I haven't gone to church (occasional visits alongside friends at SVU aside) since I was 12, and even then I barely believed most of what they said in church, so I definitely didn't pick it up from religion. My old church rarely (if ever) talked about what they thought was right or wrong in relationships anyway from what I remember, so that makes it an even less likely source. And I'm not a "traditional" person at all, either... so it's not like I was taught that monogamy was the only way or anything (I wasn't taught hardly anything about relationships, actually--I didn't even have a clear concept of what a date was until I was in my 20s.) And it's not even likely that I just sort of unconsciously absorbed it at a young age, because I remember hearing a lot of stories about historical figures who had both a wife and mistress, or wives and concubines, or various other "more than one person" sorts of situations for at least as long as I've been hearing about monogamous relationships.
Maybe it's not the same way for everyone else; maybe some people are "programmed" to tend toward some polyamorous sort of thing and have difficulty only being seriously attracted to one person at a time. But it seems to me that, for me anyway, monogamy is indeed "natural." Am I just this rare weird sort of person that's "programmed" for monogamy? Or are a lot of us like that to start with, before society manages to reprogram the majority with that "as many as possible, as often as possible, as early as possible" mindset when it comes to sex/relationships?
It's hard for me to even guess about how it is for other people... but I know how I work, at least, and that alone blows the "all guys are like this naturally" nonsense out of the water. I mean, what are the chances that I'm literally the only one like this, out of 7 billion humans? I'd say not that high.
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