Men cheating is an old topic. There is no need to look for evidence from the hotly debated articles about cheating in the entertainment industry and the incident of Wang Quanan soliciting prostitutes. The endless news of wives fighting mistresses on various portal websites every day, or the incidents around us where couples have fallen out because of men cheating, are enough to give us the impression that it is the nature of men to get tired of the old and like the new, and the so-called “loyalty” is just the opportunity not coming, which is just a man’s appearance.
No wonder many discussions about men like to portray men as “desire animals” driven by sexual instinct. For example, the late actor Robin Williams said: “God gave men a brain and a penis, but did not give men enough blood to use them at the same time.” According to the theory of evolutionary psychology, men love to cheat because their reproductive costs are extremely low, so they always hope to create more offspring through mating. Anyway, sperm is abundant and cheap, and children do not need to be raised by themselves. Therefore, it is superficial and inhumane to ask men to be loyal to any spouse. On the contrary, women not only have limited reproductive resources, but also have to endure the pain of pregnancy and childbirth and the hardship of raising children. Naturally, they have to look for men who can provide enough resources for them and their children. The current marriage system completely protects women’s interests by restraining men’s impulses and confining men to the family.
In this way, men seem to have been wronged under the marriage system, and even soliciting prostitutes for affairs has become “understandable.” When Zhang Yixing cheated, Jack Ma commented that he just made “a mistake that all men would make.” Economist Jin Yanshi, who was recently exposed for walking hand in hand with a young woman in a bathrobe on the beach in Sanya, did not forget to defend himself with a sentence after shyly expressing his apology to his family: “The desire for an affair flows in every man’s blood.”
But why don’t humans develop more casual sex? Because for humans, sex has never been just sex. Sex is sometimes a symbol of power, representing the relationship between the sexes of possession, domination and submission. Sometimes it is a symbol of life, and people use sex to fight the fear of aging and death. More often, sex is an intimate relationship, which is connected with love. In a sexual relationship, two people reveal and share each other’s deepest secrets, and form the closest psychological attachment relationship starting from the body, which cannot be easily separated. This attachment relationship is both psychological and physiological. Sexual activity will secrete a large amount of oxytocin, which will make two people have an exclusive connection. When oxytocin is secreted in large quantities, people feel tender and can’t do without her, which is gentle “love”.
Only in love can sex become complete and meaningful. Without ear-to-ear contact, affectionate gaze, and the desire to establish a long-term connection in accordance with nature, sex becomes a simple desire to vent, and the object of sex becomes a tool of “dehumanization”. The meaning and value of sex are therefore devalued.
There is such a story: A policeman saw a drunk man circling around a street lamp, as if he was looking for something. He approached and asked, “What are you looking for?” The drunk said, “I’m looking for my car keys.” The policeman helped him look for a while, but couldn’t find it. He asked again, “Where did you lose it?” The drunk said, “I lost it in the park next door.” The policeman laughed, “Why are you looking for it here if you lost it in the park?” The drunk looked at the policeman and laughed, “Silly, didn’t you find that this is the brightest place?”
I found that most men are really looking for the wrong place when they are looking for casual sex.
Perhaps evolution has indeed engraved the seeds of lust in our genes. Desire expands in our imagination, driving us to run forward, and always inducing us that once we get something, we will be happy. But this kind of happiness is either a fleeting glimpse or it takes a long time to come. The direction guided by desire is never true happiness. There is no shortcut to happiness. Whether it is prostitution or drug abuse, those so-called shortcuts are often proved to be traps in the end. It seems to be more difficult for these celebrities who have social resources to understand that they will grow old, be bound by society, be depressed and bored, and have failed marriages just like ordinary people.
Even sex is not what men really need. Contrary to our common sense, when most men seek extramarital relationships, what they really need is friendship, support, respect, intimacy and love, which should be provided by marriage. A study shows that 48% of men seek pleasure outside just because they are emotionally unsatisfied, and only 8% of them are because of sexual dissatisfaction. So why do men go to prostitutes? It’s not because sex can provide these, but because sex is the simplest and easiest to get, and it can be bought with money. When they went around looking for the key to the street lamp of “sex”, they didn’t expect that sex not only did not relieve their loneliness, but deepened it.
After learning that Wang Quanan was arrested for prostitution, his wife Zhang Yuqi said on Weibo that she felt very complicated and said that as a family, she would share the responsibility with Director Wang. When Wang’s ex-girlfriend Yu Nan was interviewed by the media and talked about her impression of Wang Quan’an, she not only did not add insult to injury, but instead said: “I am especially grateful to him. When I was useless and when no one agreed with me, he saw the extraordinary thing about me. Without him, there would be no me today.” Perhaps the warmth that one can feel when down and out is what every man wants, but such warmth is a hundred times harder to find than sex, and most people go around in circles but don’t know where to find it.