Sex-specific Developmental Stages: Domains of Competence
What I'm describing, as clearly as I can, are sex-specific developmental stages and how they relate to domains of competence. It's the strong man routine, the same crude display of male competence, only our attraction display has been refined by the frontal cortex, flourishing in detailed customs and cultural history. I imagine the most vibrantly novel and forward-thinking advances of our species culture as the vibrant patterns of a peacock’s proudly displayed plumage, the full pomp of his strut, competing to take up as much of the room as possible, drawing her attention in, dazzling her with the fullness and complexity of his brightly colored patterns, he opens and, with that invitation, she is confronted by a form of a hundred eyes radiating out from his head in a broad semicircle. And what is the main difference in the males of our species, competing, vying for access to the Alpha female. Paul McCartney and Bill Gates refined that central male drive to procreate into intellectual pursuits so refined and dazzling in their vibrancy and function, all of us benefit from their display of dominance within their chosen domain. The thousands of screaming female fans fainting at the very sight and sound of his presence during Beatlemania was evidence that his competence display was truly effective. He could father many children, if he so chose, at the peak of that dominance. Bill Gates, of course, dazzled with his intellectual and creative prowess in a different way, of course, but it could be argued that Windows 95 was an incredibly impressive refinement of this same central biological drive in males to procreate. While it is a near-universal pattern, not merely in mammals, for the selective pressures of mating to drive competition in this way, being a biological drive at the most essential and primordial genetic level, much of the pattern manifests unconsciously in the man’s personality. The distinct developmental stages of male ego and identity formation can be mapped, more or less, identically across the species as a whole, with discrete biological markers demarking the characteristic stepwise stages, measurable alongside sheer cortical development, the surge of hormonal firsts spurring behavioral and cognitive changes, unseen beneath the physical changes and more visible forms of growth. 15, 16, 18, 21 and, the undeniably distinct personal peak of identity which men tend to exhibit at 24. The culmination of youthful development, focused ambition, and ability surging to be expressed alongside the surging of his genome, the peak of that biological imperative to extend his lineage into the future. I cannot imagine the elaborate forms of refinement this Peacock display will take, aided by novel forms of artifice in technology, layers upon layers of new forms of expression, virtual realities sculpted as systems within systems, all-encompassing and fully engrossing forms of dazzling displays, machines as new tools for expressing new sounds, new forms, new carriages for ideas and emotion to be shared, to win her heart. The carriage may be new, but the delicate and vulnerable emotion of that attraction will always remain the same. We feel the primacy of those two complementary roles pulling us into place, with that strange animal magnetism, by some polarity felt down radiating from the hips, tugging and throbbing up from the beat on the dance floor, for instance. Some men have never connect with or cannot establish a sense of that rhythm down in their hips and, for this reason, they can never occupy the center of the room’s attention. The animal magnetism of an Alpha in a room of dancing males is immediately apparent to the women in that same room. What is that unspoken allure of the bon vivant, it’s a force of attention seemingly intoxicating to the women who fall under the spell of his dazzling show of dominance within that space. The Betas in this study, on the other hand, avoid the center of the room's attention, often occupying the corners, lurking, often hideous in their hiding place. If they do dance, it is typically flailing their arms and extremities without that solid bass drive radiating up from their core, their hips.
"So, what of it?? These obvious sex-specific behaviors are all well and good, collecting the forms of selective pressure for every sexual species, catalogued and archived, why not?"
Sure, we can look at ourselves from a certain external perspective, to look back at ourselves as we objectively observe the displays of those other species of nature, and we can see the same proverbial butting of heads - the classic drama of the young bull as he grows and develops to prime identity to challenge the noticeably more haggard old bull, who has, perhaps, lazed on his perch for too long.