We as animals, and no I don't mean that derogatorily, thrive on touching and being touched and I don't mean 'touch' in a sexual sense. It is part of social grooming that many animals engage in. Many people enjoy petting cats and dogs and other animals or hugging other humans, a hand shake starts a business relationship or closes a deal. Touch is fundamental to us as human beings. Human babies need it for development. Research shows that teams that touch the most win more often, waitresses that casually touch customers get bigger tips, touch can give us confidence, makes us feel better, calm us... These articles all recommend we touch, or hug loved ones several times a day. Indeed, we should touch each other way more often than we do.

Again I need to reiterate that this is non-sexual touching.

There are safe places on unfamiliar people's bodies we can touch them socially which is non-sexual, such as hands, arms, shoulders and upper back. Any where else is unwanted touching unless there is appropriate intimacy, such as with an adult partner you consensually engage in sex with.

Despite all the benefits of non-sexual touching, we need to be reminded to do it, kind of like being reminded to eat our vegetables I suppose. But one of the things humans are very good at is confusing sensory signals, or, one thing for another.

For example, most of what makes food delicious is its smell. We anthropomorphize rocks and volcanoes into gods, we develop systems of rules and artificial structures and call them laws in religion, superstition, alchemy, language, law, and even algebra. We even lie to ourselves and call it rationalization. Sorting our way through the mess of mental constructions and coming to a truth will probably only make us eventually come to new realization of more self-deception. This is how knowledge evolves, and this is also another blog entry entirely.

Anyway this is where I come to the hypothesis that people who inappropriately touch others are doing so because they have confused the need for human touch with the adult activity of sex. Part of the delusion of the male stereotype is that men cannot need anything from others, yet they still need to touch and be touched. It is manly to have sex. It is not manly to need affection, or the need for the touch of another person's hand.

Another example is the lie (or rationalization) someone was 'asking for it'.

Also the male stereotype dictates men cannot touch each other yet there are these male bonding rituals of gang raping women, in other words, the woman/women being raped is a/are surrogate/s for these men being intimate with each other. We are fortunate more men don't feel the need to engage in such bonding rituals.

It is also manly to be violent. It is not manly to need to be hugged by your wife and kids. But how do you get your wife and kids to hug you after you've beaten them?

It may also be possible that men need to touch and be touched more than women do.

Touch is important, but is best kept to the safe zones. And all of us should remember to touch each other more often, and let's hope feminism can get the message out that it is safe for men to touch each other.

The Blue Manakin is this bird where the alpha male bird makes other male blue manakins dance so he can 'score' with the female bird, but only if the female is sufficiently impressed by their dance. In this video we see the males performing a complicated dance all so one male bird can potentially mate with the female which is sitting there watching the display. (Originally sourced from the BBC, David Attenborough's The Life of Birds)

I think we are seeing a similar display in human society: men work in concert with each other to make sure any one man can mate by minimizing  women's access to money. Men keep women out of jobs, preferentially promote men, ensure women are paid less for the same job, and go about destroying the planet so men can show off and attract a mate.

In our society, nothing makes raising children easier than a plentiful source of money. So women are selecting for men who are rich and have a good earning capacity. As we see, the female blue manakin is bland in comparison to the male, as women tend to be in our society. Women tend to make themselves bland in our society to maximize their chances of mating - they strive for mediocrity. For instance, women strive for a generically small size, generic intelligence, generic accomplishments, and society is always downplaying the accomplishments of women. The only thing society prizes about women is their appearance and they strive to make themselves relatively indistinguishable from each other.

On the other hand, it is men who perform the great deeds and have all the great accomplishments and all of society plays along so men can stand out from each other to woo and impress women. A man who stands out maximizes his chances of attracting a female mate for breeding opportunities.

However, these days the planet doesn't need population growth and science has helped us overcome many of the illnesses that afflicted previous generations. It is ridiculous devoting half the population to the dangerous and often boring activity of bearing and raising children.

Our society should be striving for quality of life and options for everyone, not just for one gender. And while many of us still want a partner to share (part of) our life with, it doesn't necessarily need to result in or be because of reproduction.

Hierarchies are a great idea when you are hunting dangerous large animals for dinner on the Serengeti. It may also be useful in other situations, like war, when humans are engaged in dangerous activities that need human coordination and cooperation to get a job done. But when the men who are old enough to engage in these dangerous activities come home it's another matter.

Apparently hunter-gatherer societies, by far a larger portion of our genetic history, had gender equality. It wasn't until humans became agricultural did society become so hierarchical. While men were out hunting game, women remained at tribal headquarters caring for the elderly, the young, the sick and each other while gathering roots and berries in case the men were unsuccessful during their hunt, or to supplement the tribe's diet. This explains why women are better at multitasking and communicating. Women may form cliques but they are really forming equalities. They treat each other as equals as they care for those who can't care for themselves and perform their other tasks.

Boys on the hunt must be old enough to be aware of how dangerous the activity is that they are engaged in, to be strong enough to do battle, and to be self aware enough to not get in the way, be able to think for themselves and coordinate with the others also engaged in this dangerous activity. When the men return from the hunt their hierarchies dissolve into the equalities they have formed with partners and the tribal community, as men do with their wives, in our society, with what some people call women led relationships.

I think marriage is about negotiating best solutions, two minds are better than one, and finding the optimal solution for problems/issues facing the couple. In other words, neither is in complete control, both trust each other to make the right decisions independently as necessary. I think it's foolish to think men or women know what is best all of the time.

However our society has become very hierarchical. Men organize amongst themselves who has the most power and then women have to negotiate with the men in that hierarchy how much power they have. If the women don't go out of their way to seize as much power straight away they will be pushed to the bottom of the hierarchy. (Years of personal experience working with males in male dominated fields.)

Women do not learn how to seize power given they are lavished with attention when they are young and this disempowers them later in life when they don't get as much attention as men lose interest in them because either the women are married and not available or available men are looking for younger partners.

This is a serious problem with hierarchies, being at the bottom of it, such as this white supremacist website claims they are. If you are at the bottom you must fight to raise your status and that means pushing those with less power down below you. You must be superior to someone else at all costs. (We might call this behavior bullying.)

Hence there is an implied violence with hierarchies as people continually seek as much power as possible to gain higher and higher positions on the totem pole. If you are at the bottom of the hierarchy you will be used as a whipping 'boy' and used as target practice by people above you to gain ranks. You commonly see this phenomena in established hierarchies. In a male dominated Facebook group I was on, I protested about a post as being sexist, and male after male told me that the post wasn't sexist. I was assured it wasn't homophobic - which it had passed a test by a gay male, but it didn't pass my test as being sexist. Yet male after male told me I was wrong. Each man told me I was wrong and signaled to the other men in the hierarchy they were following suit and towing the line, important when hunting on the Serengeti, and a form of coordination amongst them to maintain the status quo and ensured I was definitely at the bottom of the heap. If I had rather agreed with them it likely would not have increased my status or position in the hierarchy though, because I was an unknown woman.

Many cultures have coming of age ceremonies, where the individuals prove to themselves their adulthood, especially boys. When girls come of age they become debutantes or in the US they have prom parties or something is done to them or happens to them which implies their coming of age, and in some cultures this may be female genital mutilation. Women tend to define themselves by how much attention they receive. Again this is thrust upon them rather than them achieving something or doing something to mark their coming of age.

But with boy's coming of age in tribal societies most we would consider to be inhumane in our society. But I think boys still feel the need to prove themselves to themselves and other men for their place in the hierarchy because men tend to define themselves by what they do.

No doubt Dylann Roof has proven he is no longer at the bottom of the heap. He has had his rite of passage and he is being praised for his actions by some and associates with the powerful and powerful symbols. We are fortunate that not all young men feel the need to prove their coming of age as Dylann Roof did but it is common for boys that age to act aggressively to women, or others normally low in the hierarchy. This is possibly when we excuse their bad behavior as 'boys being boys'. (I rather suspect the men most inclined to need to prove themselves come from abusive homes.)

We must start learning to treat each other as equals. In another group, I questioned a woman who used the phrase "less than white" in relation to people of color. She didn't understand why I had an issue with her saying that until I said "how do you feel about being treated as being less than someone else". This of course alarmed her, she could not stand the idea of being treated as being less than someone else but could not relate to the idea of other people not liking being considered less than someone else. It was clear to me this woman had adopted the hierarchical structure and was clearly maintaining her position in the hierarchy.

We must stop thinking of needing people to be less than us to maintain our power. We must think of each other as equals, different but equals, because while we think of needing to prove our power we must find someone to be less powerful than us to push down to make us rise up and it is implied violence. When we are all equals then no one has to push anyone down. We must change the way we view other people or we will destroy ourselves and the planet, because the quest for money is nothing other than the quest for power, it produces the unaccountability of those at the top of the hierarchy as they do more and more to teach us we are less powerful than them because we are disposable to them.

There is no real community without equality. Because we must accept we each need each other to survive and this gives us our value, that we are needed. We need others just as much as they need us. Hierarchies teach us: I don't need you because you are less important than me, that the only people worth considering are those above me in the hierarchy. The irony in hierarchies is that we need those below us to be below us otherwise we'd be at the bottom again.

Recently I realized that there are all kinds of feminism, but to me there is really only one feminism.

My thesis is basically I don't know what a "real woman" or "real man" is. We are all just people. We all need each other.

What suits you, may not suit me, and vice versa, we must tolerate each others difference and this is a fundamental tenet of my feminism.

We are all of equal value and I don't mean that in a monetary sense, I mean it as no one is intrinsically more important than anyone else.

That doesn't mean that some people aren't better at some things than others, it just means that we are all different and this is why our society works so well because we all do different things. Not all people want to be exceptional, not all people want to be leaders, some genuinely want to be followers.

It doesn't mean that everyone must be paid the same amount for their work but some work is more valued than others and some work is considered worthless, like being a mother - a job most mothers perform for free, despite turning each of her children into members of our society.

Currently we live in a world where some people have more power than others and until we learn how to fix this power ratio, there will always be problems with unaccountability. This is where we really fix our society.

It recently occurred to me to shame some assholes by implying they have little dicks.

You see women have their bodies scrutinized all the time. Are women ugly, too fat/thin, uteruses/vaginas, breasts, legs, asses and their sizes are constantly in the news and up for discussion and whats good for the goose is good for the gander right? If my body is up for discussion, why can't we discuss men's bodies and how well they are endowed.

This was so utterly distressing to these men that I got threats. Sure I am not worried, we have guns, my lawyer has been informed and he's contacted the authorities and we're in the NRA.

Even my male friends said of this picture things like: "hey that's really a girl you know" and "oh that's a girl who's taken steroids". How did they get so experienced with women? I assume its from years of examining porn? But why were they so keen to make it about women?

You know the reality is, I never even thought the picture was real. I thought it was photoshopped. Perhaps I am too inexperienced with men or I need to up my porn quotient?

Okay so why is it okay in our society to make statements about the size of women's butts, breasts, talk about vaginas and uteruses in the news constantly yet a guy's penis size is beyond questioning? If you don't like it, how do you think we feel? Stop it.

But then women do it too. Sometimes women say and do awful things to each other because they think that men will like them? Either this is straight from the Milgram experiment, where women defer to men who they see as the authority or its Stockholm syndrome. Many women seem to be displaying symptoms where they give men a pass and blame the victims, such as in the Steubenville rape where these girls threatened the victim on twitter. Either way it appears they are cowering to men and the patriarchy.

As I have said often we see so many images on TV of women, men and how they interact. They are turning us into stereotypes so they can sell us stuff. TV tells us women's only job is to be a house wife and mother. Its kind of like saying all men should be toll booth operators. TV doesn't tell us women joined convents more often 75 years ago or about Boston marriages. TV told us women living together was bad. TV tells us women need men. Such as this story about a town in Brazil which was made up with only women were after men. It was quickly reported that this was not so and no such town exists. In modern culture it seems that men are absolutely sure women cannot exist without men - hmmm. TV tells us all kinds of rubbish.

The other thing is men generalize about women. She's upset because its her period or she's crazy or some shit. Men never think a woman could be upset with them because the man's behaviour is bad.

However women are not allowed the privilege of generalizing about men.  If you look around at who causes all of societies problems, it is men. Men are the presidents, men are the CEOs, men run the banks, men are the diplomats, men start the wars, men foreclose on homes, men do all the violence and when men complain that men are the victims of violence, it is usually at the hands of other men, men do the raping, men do most of the crime...

There are so very few women in positions of power that women's influence on the world stage that our direct impact could only be considered marginal, women are still getting used to power. There are so few women committing crime that our jails are 93% full of men.

If men want privacy, then I think women should be entitled to privacy too. Men must stop interfering in anonymous women's decisions. If a man doesn't know her, he has no say in the matter.

Dear Mrs Hall,

Years ago I went out to grab some coffee with a guy I knew and while we were out we bumped into a friend of his.

His friend was about the most charming women I had ever met. She was an artist, she was/is a sculptor and she had lived the most fascinating life.

She was gracious. She was a vegetarian, however if you served her meat, she'd eat it because she thought if someone went to the trouble to prepare a meal for you, you should have the good grace to eat it. This was particularly salient to me at the time because I took someone to a meal where the host prepared some dessert and this person refused to eat it because it had sugar in it. Not that this person was diabetic or anything, he'd eat chocolate mousse all the time, he just wanted to be rude/ungracious. I was so ashamed and embarrassed that I brought this person to this meal.

Anyway, this lovely lady, was/is kind, well-mannered, well travelled, educated, sophisticated, the kind of woman any man should count himself extremely lucky to know - I know I thought I was lucky to meet her. She was the kind of person who'd experienced much in her life and survived to become a brilliantly cut diamond.

As we got to know each other I found out she'd worked as a prostitute.

The person who I met her through, who had asked me several times to sleep with him and was often going to Thailand where he was quite able to afford to rent prostitutes for a week at a time, said to me after he found out she'd worked as a prostitute, "I am so glad she told us that because I was thinking she would have made an excellent girlfriend." (In other words, she wasn't good enough to be his girlfriend.)

I turned around and stared at him. My gut reaction was, "She is too good for you".

No I am not a lesbian, but she was someone I was proud to think of as my friend. Unfortunately I lost touch with her but I think of her often.

Now Mrs Hall, what are your sons going to be like? Will they be good enough for my friend? However, Mrs Hall I do know I would never consider you my friend because your attitude is disgusting.

I had a conversation a few days back about order in society. Little did the person realize he was talking to a reformed material scientist (cue maniacal laughter).

I like modeling things and society is of great interest for me. One of the things I have noticed is men form hierarchies and women form equalities to perform tasks.

one-on-one women being slotted into hierarchies just does not work. If one woman suspects the other woman thinks she's better than another there will be war, better for them to just cooperate as equals. Women are also territorial. If a woman has a man and the other women don't, the woman with the man has the most status. As she has the most resources at her disposal.

A woman who knows about male hierarchies knows she is prime status material. she pretty much slots herself under alpha males arm and she is the most powerful creature in the room. If she doesn't position herself promptly she'll be at the bottom of the hierarchy.

So in our society we have nearly equal numbers of women and men, so people pair bond. And the hierarchies of men are in place. And the society is more or less stable.

Think of it as a crystalline lattice, like diamond, are male hierarchies. when you add women, you have individual households where there is a husband and wife. think of this society like the nucleus of an atom, neutrons and protons co-existing in a nucleus. the neutrons shielding the protons from their mutually repulsive fields.

Now you can have an extremely stable society if its a stable isotope of some element. it'll be come unstable when the ratio of neutrons to protons is too low or if there are too many neutrons.

When a society breaks down as in revolution, the male hierarchies break down. however if you have enough neutrons insulating the protons (I haven't assigned either gender to being protons or neutrons - and in the nucleus, last i checked, the nucleides are all exchanging particles anyway, which may result in the 'strong' force.)

The reason for this piece of hypothesis, and thats all this is - although i think its a fascinating field of research, is because i would joke at libertarians and anarchist friends - why didn't Afghanistan, Libya or Iraq form stable societies when their govts were taken out? They'd all mutter something about oh the society was a mess already.

Society is made up of interactions between men and women. My point is, yes laboring the point again, if you raise the power of women during your revolution, you may avert producing an unstable society.

There's no doubt human beings are primarily social. Our strength is in our ability to cooperate to get things done. And this is why we live in houses, have lots of technology and understanding, we are social beings who love communicating & cooperating.

This is also true when it comes to finding a partner. We say we fall in love and there is no point in dissecting the relationship further. But really what we are mainly looking for is companionship, someone who can and will work with us, help us, to communicate with, someone who is on our side, someone who will make our lives happier by giving us meaning and a reason for living.

Not all relationships will fulfill all those things and people draw on a whole lot of other attributes when picking a partner, like appearance, sexual attractiveness, wealth, occupation, age, education, interests, intelligence, whether they have a criminal past, gambling, or other addictions, whether they'd been married before... When I was picking a partner I had a list longer than both arms.

Yes and we get married to reproduce too, but these days we mainly want a companion to love and to be loved by us, especially in western countries.

The function of marriage, in all cultures, has always been the commitment to someone for the purposes of raising children. And of course children also give those same things that we find in a partner, a reason for living. Children make our lives meaningful too.

Originally marriage was a form of cementing alliances amongst the wealthy. But the idea of marrying for love has been something that has developed more recently. And even more recently, the idea of marrying not for the purposes of raising children at all has been admitted into the concept of marriage with gay marriage acceptable in many western countries and US states.

Love is far more important than money and the importance of love is placed at naught when compared to something like the economy. My point is love is way more important than money. Love gives us a reason to live, purpose and happiness.

If we were all chasing happiness rather than money, the 1% would give up their miserly pursuits and adopt generosity in an attempt to be happier.

Until very recently, the only function a woman really had was to get her MRS degree with her education. Women either become wives and hence mothers or nuns. I remember the despair I felt as a teenager at the prospect. My mother sent me to a prestigious private schools where she thought I would learn deportment and the kinds of things young women learn at Swiss finishing schools. Instead I learned critical thinking, that in ancient Sparta they left new born babies on hillsides to see if they survived a night in the wild. If the baby survived it was deemed fit enough to be a Spartan. We also were told to question what a day is to God. And I also learned that women could choose their own path in life.

When my mother married her only requirement in a partner was that he was wealthy and was good at making money. The only thing she wanted from marriage was children. She got everything she wanted.

She worried I would never find a husband because I was too smart and men don't like smart women. I was worried I'd end up a boring old housewife like her.

Don't marry men for money, but have a good heart, who you enjoy being with and who will help you. Of course these were some of my requirements. Yours may be different. Of course I am in the rare position of never having lived in poverty so my perspective may be skewed and perhaps I have my mothers determination to thank for that state.

Similarly, I have found men have never been put off by my brain. If anything its been an asset in separating the chaff from the wheat. If a man is daunted by my brain, he'd soon bore me anyway.

What I've found though doing research, the best men to marry are no older than perhaps 30 or 32 at the most. If they've not married and they're older than that, they either are mommy's boy, gay (not that there's anything wrong with that, it just means they prefer a different gender), or think they are too cool to marry. Check if he's been married before or had a significant relationship already. Of the two genders, men are way more monogamous, men mate once and you'll always be a comparison to his first. Men pair bond with a woman in their mid to late 20s but before their mid 30s and will be attached to her for the rest of their life.

One guy I met on his third marriage said 'our first is 40 years old this year'. 'Our' as in he and his first wife. Their marriage has been over for over 18 years, yet he doesn't refer to his kids as 'his' kids, but 'our' kids. And this is the most recent example I've seen.

Whether a man is faithful in his marriage or not, he mates for life.

When you find a suitable man, make sure he has been lightly hurt before. Why? He won't appreciate what he's got otherwise, but listen to him to make sure he hasn't already pair bonded already. If you marry a man who is older, no doubt he thinks he loves you, but once he gets you, he'll no doubt be looking for his next wife as soon as he gets you. For example Newt Gingrich or any number of Hollywood marriages.

While women are always portrayed as the major pair-bonders, not so much. They pair-bond when they are raising children, but they will move onto other men without difficulty.

Men have always been portrayed as the ones with all the advantages in a relationship and this is also been their strength. The true advantage is to women who live longer when they are not married. It is men who live longer when they are married and remain so.

While women may go onto to lose their ability to reproduce, they will always be a desirable partner because they offer companionship. They make men's lives meaningful.

Men without women are often portrayed as foot loose and fancy free are often the ones who are the big losers when it comes to divorce. Homeless people are primarily men, people who go on to get off the street are primarily women, the best employees are married men, men who are married are least likely to get involved in crime.

Don't be fooled, men need women more than women need men.