Chapter 6

Welcome to a Natural Harmony Workshop. You all know why we offer these workshops. Our world can operate most efficiently and harmoniously if women are prepared to submit to the sexual advances of a man cheerfully, and then continue with what they had been doing without lingering negative feelings.

We women are the result of a long chain of evolution, and a vital part of our reproductive success has been control over who starts our babies. One thing we are programmed to desire is an especially good genetic specimen of a man, to help our genes flourish in the next generation. Another thing we are programmed to want even more is a man who will provide resources for our children. For us human females, pregnancy has a high metabolic cost and, compared to other animals, has a significant risk of killing us. So there is a lot at stake.

We have historically disliked arranged marriages, but at least there we typically got a lifetime partner who would provide resources for our children. What we have always disliked intensely is rape, where typically the genes of the rapist are not especially good and the rapist will certainly not stay around to provide resources for offspring.

Our society has now turned all men into insistent inseminators, with an extremely strong desire for sex, and men will in fact get sick and die if they don’t get it. We women are under constant pressure from men to have sex. Whatever conscious thoughts we may form about it, deep down it feels to us like coercion if not outright rape, and sets off all of our inborn predispositions to hate it. There is no shame in this revulsion at forced sex. Evolution has programmed us that way, and we never need to feel ashamed of what nature has created in us. The genes that make us new people want us to set aside selfishness and think of the greater good. But there are some places where this does not work. If the greater good called upon us to forego any food, we would still suffer the anguish of starvation. It is similarly not easy to just feel that coerced sex is OK because it is in the common good.

We should pause to consider the men with whom we co-evolved. Their programming included a good bit of selfishness when it came to sex. In social chaos, where the normal bonds of community could not protect women, men frequently resorted to rape. In more normal circumstances, they nonetheless put great effort into having sex with us one way or another, whatever trickery or false pretenses were required. However, the bulk of men had sex only when their one wife consented, and a fair number never had sex at all. Abstention posed no physical risks to them.

The genetically engineered men who are now are companions have no more choice about their ferociously strong sex desires as we do about our distaste at rape. They certainly do not choose to get sick when they are forced to abstain. It would have been convenient if the aliens had given us a corresponding genetic fix so we simply welcomed sex under any circumstances, whoever the partner. But they did not. They relied on the docility RNA to induce cooperation during the Great Insemination Event, and did not expect that insistent insemination would ever arise again.

In general, part of being a new person is to set aside personal emotional reactions for the common good. Even the old-style, selfish people had to do this a great deal, for the good of the clan or tribe, but we have to do it even more. If we work harder than our neighbor, we will likely feel a twinge of resentment at having to share the fruits of our labor with them equally, even though we know our neighbor was doing the very best they could. We feel a bit of resentment when we endure heat in summer that we know could be reduced with just a bit of energy expenditure.

So our task, in our search to be the best females of the new people that we can, is to note our momentary revulsion at coerced sex, not judge ourselves for it, but let it pass at the same time we let the sex happen.

It is a simple matter for a female to routinely lubricate her vagina at the start of every day, so that copulation will cause no physical pain. We are fortunate that the aliens eliminated STIs. We never have to bear a child we do not want to bear, or with a father we do not want. Our IUDs insure that, and on those rare occasions when we are truly fertile we can arrange to be available only to the man who we would like to father our child.

What is left? Responding to his inner nature, a man’s penis becomes erect. He inserts it into our vagina, he thrusts back and forth, and he ejaculates his semen inside of us. We surely must honor this basic male desire and behavior pattern, because on it depends all reproduction in our species. In our past, we strongly desired this with at least one man. Even if it was physically painful, we still desired it.