Chapter 18

(Translated from Russian. Source PDF: «18_СексСЦН.pdf».)

Translator’s note

The source PDF’s text layer is CP1251 mis-mapped to Latin-1; the Cyrillic was recovered before translating. No content was omitted.
Function notation is the author’s own: capital = extraverted, lowercase = introverted. I = extraverted intuition, i = introverted intuition, S = extraverted sensing, s = introverted sensing, L = extraverted logic, l = introverted logic, E = extraverted emotionality/ethics, e = introverted ethics. “IA” = information aspect. “TIM” = type of information metabolism.
Type abbreviations in the tables: Ки = Don Quixote (ILE), Дю = Dumas (SEI), Гю = Hugo (ESE), Ро = Robespierre (LII), Гм = Hamlet (EIE), Го = Gorky/Maxim (LSI), Жу = Zhukov (SLE), Ес = Yesenin (IEI), Др = Dreiser (ESI), Ло = London (LIE), На = Napoleon (SEE), Ба = Balzac (ILI), Ге = Huxley (IEE), Гб = Gabin (SLI), Шт = Stierlitz (LSE), До = Dostoevsky (EII).
Tables 18.03–18.05 and Fig. 18.01 lost their cell layout in the PDF text layer. Where I reconstructed a layout, I say so and give the reasoning. Two apparent errors in the original are flagged in footnotes.
The chapter contains dated gender essentialism, a homophobic slur applied to Oscar Wilde, unverified physiological claims, and a political claim about a “Third World Information War.” These are rendered as written, not softened — they are the author’s positions, not endorsements.

“Love is wicked — you could fall for a goat.” — Russian folk saying.

Nature is clever: lust in animal females reaches its greatest strength at precisely the moment most favourable for conception. In animal females this is very noticeable. A mare, for example, whose heat is approaching, flirts with the stallion and arouses him, but will not let him mount her until the exact second when the egg has taken up the position needed for fertilisation.

This is why a woman may unexpectedly find herself in bed with a man she has only just met at a party. The next day, utterly at a loss, she cannot understand how or why it happened. — Allan Pease

SEX

From a biological standpoint, sexual behaviour is aimed at the reproduction of the biological species, and is therefore rigidly programmed by nature — so that, let us say, no one can wriggle out of their biological duty. In animals this is unambiguously the case. With human beings the matter is somewhat more complicated: compared with animals, their sexual behaviour may at first glance appear excessive. But only at first glance. It is simply that conception and birth in humans are not tied to a particular time of year, and human sexual readiness — as in certain species of monkey — is universal with respect to the seasons. This is connected, in particular, with the fact that humanity presupposes the maximum diversity of characters, and this is secured by people being born in every weather season, which sets differing initial conditions at conception and during the child’s nursing. But even this does not fully explain the frequency of sexual contact in the average person.

If the mechanism of sexual need did not operate at the level of obligatory compulsion — or, what is the same thing, of a categorical imperative — then humanity would be entirely capable, out of some ideological consideration or other (and of course some “great enlightener” would be found to explain why this was necessary), of voluntarily terminating its own existence, having arrived at the “logical” conclusion that both too great a number of individual people and humanity as a whole are too bad for such a “vile” object to be necessary to nature. But Nature foresaw this possibility and took its measures.

Even so, in the sad history of humanity there have been cases where the sexual mechanisms were entirely suppressed under the influence of life circumstances. Thus, for example, in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw during the Second World War, life became so devalued and lost its meaning to such a degree that menstruation ceased in every one of the Jewish women without exception. What people had to be driven to.

From the point of view of some strict morality — Christian, say — one ought to abstain from sex if the specific sexual act does not presuppose conception. From a biological standpoint, however, such a stance is mistaken. Not everyone knows that male sperm, in a woman’s vagina, is processed by her psychophysiological structures in search of a worthy candidate for birth, and if no such candidate is detected, conception will not occur. But male sperm performs subtler work in a woman’s organism as well: it penetrates the bloodstream and is carried throughout her body, reaching, among other places, the brain, which strengthens a woman’s magical properties and affects the vitality of the female organism — and this, of course, is of no small importance for the survival of the line.

I shall not go into detail here, but I want to draw readers’ attention to the fact that not everything in the psychophysiology of sex has yet been discovered, and that there are mysteries without knowledge of which one should not draw unambiguous conclusions or pronounce categorical judgements about the sexual behaviour of individual people and whole nations, accusing them of hypocrisy or, conversely, of licentiousness. Therefore it would be incorrect, for example, to assert that sexual behaviour in nature has one single function — procreation.

Among marmoset monkeys, for instance, the female chooses a male who, as we understand it, corresponds to her species standards for securing optimal offspring. Having made such a choice, the female enters into reproductive contact with the male, aimed at obtaining offspring. But — lo and behold! — after this she returns with him to the common troop and enters into sexual contact with all the males who desire it. This mating is not aimed at obtaining offspring. Why, then, did the species need such an adaptation? Biologists call such mating reward mating. Among marmosets it pursues two goals: 1) males who have undergone reward mating will consider this female’s young to be their own offspring and will treat them accordingly; 2) among marmosets, males will share food with the female after reward mating. Clearly this is far from unimportant for a pregnant female. Let us note that the species adaptation of sharing food between adult individuals is encountered extremely rarely in the animal world. Chimpanzees and gorillas, humanity’s closest relatives, for example, do not do it. Women — the females of homo sapiens — also make wide use of reward mating, which does not pursue immediate procreation but is directed at keeping a man — the male of homo sapiens — near them. For humans, however, reward mating has other aspects as well, connected with the social character of the human being and, in particular, with the presence of culture in human society. One of the cultural projections of sexual behaviour in humans is the aesthetics of the sexual act, which finds quite concrete reflection in works of art.

A preliminary conclusion can be drawn here: people are compelled, in an imperative and coercive order, to engage in sex and, so to speak, to bear their sexual cross, but Nature took care that it should sometimes seem pleasant to them. Yet it is precisely here that danger lies in wait: the striving to replace natural satisfaction with pleasure, with enjoyment, and finally with bliss, is a dead-end option and leads to degeneration. The extreme variants of such a choice are sexual perversions — but, alas, perversion begins with the shift of emphasis from satisfaction to pleasure.

Here we approach the subtle question of the sinfulness of sex. Unfortunately, in certain religious confessions the concept of sin is cultivated as a manipulative bogey aimed at holding the flock within the rigid frame of dogma. Yet the concept of sin may also have an entirely constructive character, if one defines it as that which hinders spiritual development. From such a point of view, sex becomes sinful only when it distracts a person from striving toward the higher ideals of spirituality. But it may also be used as a training-technological means for advancing along the path of spiritual development.

In this chapter I want to show that sexual behaviour is subject to fairly rigid regularities not only in animals but in the human being too. In some cases it is connected with love, and in others not. Of course here, as always in science, definitions, distinctions and explications are necessary. To carry out such work, let us introduce — without claiming a final resolution of the question — the concept of the imperative state, or psychic imperative. By psychic imperative we shall mean a psychic mobilisation, independent of the will of the living being, directed at the satisfaction of a definite need. Mobilisation, in turn, is the physiological readiness and orientation of all systems of the organism toward the solution of a concrete task connected with the survival of the species. Mobilisation is, in fact, will in its physiological manifestation.

Relying on the concepts introduced, the following distinctions can be made. Sexual behaviour is part of reproductive behaviour, which in different animal species may include the search for a partner, attracting the partner’s attention, fertilisation, obtaining offspring and rearing it. Reproductive behaviour in all animals has an imperative character. Reproductive behaviour is secured by the work of the energy centre which in the Hindu tradition bears the name svadhisthana. Hindu energy terms have a right to scientific status, since they reflect a definite side of reality. Svadhisthana also secures the entire phenomenology of emotion. As is becoming clear in our time, the svadhisthana system has, as its projection at the level of physiology, the endocrine system of the organism. One sometimes encounters the opinion that the projection of svadhisthana onto the physical body falls on the sacral nerve plexus, plexus lumbalis, but this opinion reflects only part of the truth, since it does not take into account the whole structure of the endocrine system and, in particular, its representation in the brain. In socionics, the endocrine system corresponds to the mobilisational-motivational function.

The imperative state which people call love has an entirely different energy provision. Love offers an example of the difference between an emotion and a relation. Of course, an abundance of opinions is possible here, and therefore serious scientific research is required. The system of relations is secured by the energy of anahata. The centre of anahata’s physical projection is the cardiac nerve plexus, plexus cardialis. Such reasoning may appear highly superficial — which, strictly speaking, it is, since it is not accompanied by the necessary explications. We shall give here only a few, very limited clarifications. The cardiovascular system is linked with anahata, and it of course includes the blood. Anahata secures connection, at a minimum, between individuals of one species. This connection manifests in attachment and care, one projection of which is the work the blood performs in the organism — supplying all systems of the organism with vital resource, taking care that all of them receive everything necessary for their functioning. What has been said allows us to assert that love is not an emotion but a relation. Such an approach may at first glance seem strange, since people are accustomed to associating love above all with emotions. But the distinctions introduced permit the conclusion that emotions are secured by the endocrine system, and relations by the cardiovascular system. In socionics, the cardiovascular system corresponds to the conservative-critical function. In the key proposed, however, it is not hard to understand the connection between emotions and relations. For this it is enough to note that the blood carries the hormonal mediators which secure emotional reactions. Yet from the standpoint proposed it becomes clear that imperative states no less powerful than those connected with emotions may be connected with relations. In the terms considered, love may be defined as an imperative state resting on the energy of anahata. It is now not hard to understand that in various animal species, humans included, love, sex and reproductive behaviour as a whole may accompany one another in various proportions, but as imperative states these are different processes. In particular, even within the species homo sapiens, the balance between love and sex has quite definite differences in the female and male “genders.” In women the emphasis is shifted toward love, in men toward sex, which in many cases leads to mutual misunderstanding and conflict.

To understand human sexual behaviour better, let us turn to biology. The sexual behaviour of every biological species is a species adaptation and, as such, has its own peculiarities. An oyster has no need to love its “oysterlings” individually. First, it does not need to feed them, raise them or care for them at all: in this respect they are entirely self-sufficient. And if a predator-enemy does not eat one of them, a young growing oyster will have no problems with sustenance. And second, there are so many of them — an oyster produces about half a billion eggs — that communicating with each of its descendants is simply unrealistic, yet the survival of the species is guaranteed.

Other species have worked out more economical mechanisms of self-reproduction, in which a pair of individuals gives birth to only one or two young, but surrounds them with care, feeds them, loves them, teaches them useful skills. It is precisely this mechanism that is inherent in humans as a biological species. Hence individual love as the consolidation of this mode of species self-reproduction. Therefore, from a scientific point of view, love — including love for children — is not the result of the moralising side of culture but exists as a biological adaptation of the species, and is therefore irrational and imperative.

The human being, like other animals, is enclosed within the psychophysiological triangle: sex > hunger > fear > sex. This means that sex, directed at the continuation of the line, proves stronger than hunger, and hunger in its turn overcomes fear, but fear suppresses sexual attraction. It is precisely this rigid regularity that explains the cruel fact concerning the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw during the fascist occupation.

In the sphere of sexual behaviour, in animals and in humans alike, there are quite definite regularities identified by biologists. Every individual of every concrete biological species is held rigidly within the limits set by such regularities. In many animal species, humans included, males make the primary choice — that is, they display their preference for the female most attractive to them in their immediate surroundings. This, in particular, explains the difference in the aesthetic features of the appearance of males and females. Attractiveness, from a biological standpoint, is an indicator of the given individual’s genetic merits, not simply a chance aesthetic characteristic. Therefore, if a female is distinguished by heightened attractiveness, several males may lay claim to her at once, and this can easily be observed during the spring heat in bitches, when several dogs run after one of them. From this one can also understand the struggle for attractiveness among women. One might say that women like to be liked. To be liked means to demonstrate one’s genome, and this is an imperative state — that is, one may say that women are compelled to do everything to be liked. This is one side of the biological adaptation of the species homo sapiens. Men, meanwhile, regardless of their personal convictions, must demonstrate their genotype by showing what they are capable of, which not infrequently spills over into outright boasting.

At times the courtship scenes of dogs, say, can look highly comic, despite the generally dramatic character of the whole mating ceremony. Sometimes a mongrel bitch — often hungry and, by human standards, not particularly aesthetic — is followed by several (sometimes up to ten) dogs of various breeds: large, medium, small and very small indeed. Among them one can observe true beauties, strong and maned; amusing middling types, unproud and accommodating; and genuine little freaks, small, strange and sometimes vicious. A natural hierarchy is established among them in accordance with the law of the “pecking order,” but all of them, in their striving to fulfil the biological programme laid down in them, look purposeful and submissive, since their state has an imperative character. The tragicomic effect manifests in the fact that many of these “applicants” do not suit “the lady of their heart” in size: some, on attempting to occupy the key position, turn out to be considerably above, and others considerably below, the optimal position. Be that as it may, they have carried out the primary choice. Now it is up to the female — she must carry out the secondary choice and, from the diversity offered her, single out and reward the one who, from the point of view of her biological programme, is the most promising genetically. In a less demonstrative but no less dramatic, and sometimes tragicomic, form, all this can be observed in humans as well. In literature one may find descriptions of every side of this process. And one more thing. On the male’s side (in the case of an animal) one may still speak of some form of infatuation — at least in the shape of a situational desire to possess a specific female, which corresponds to an imperative relation toward her. But the female demonstrates a frank readiness to leave with the winner of the tournament, as happens, for instance, with deer, when the doe simply waits, observing the duel of the horned suitors and awaiting which of them will prove his right to possess her. Then she will give herself to him alone. But biologically this simply means that the offspring of the winner is preferable for the species to the offspring of the loser. Projected onto the human race, this may be understood to mean that the love of men and of women is qualitatively different — men and women love differently, although they use identical words to denote their state and relation. This is an example of a homonymic shift in the use of words.

Observing animals, biologists have found, for instance, that male dogs prefer to meet new bitches each time, whereas bitches, having chosen a partner, prefer to deal only with him each time. Behind this too, strange as it may seem, stands a wholly mathematical regularity: within the species as a system, the male is responsible for quality and diversity, and the female for the quantity of offspring. Put more simply: if a stockbreeder wants, in the course of selection, to achieve maximum qualitative differences between, say, cows of a single breed, he needs fifty breeding bulls for fifty cows. But if he needs to increase the herd of an already established breed as quickly as possible, it is enough to have one breeding bull for 99 cows. He will manage.

Another fundamental difference between females and males is that Nature uses males first and foremost for the selection of the fittest individuals. More of them are born and more perish, and their lifespan is shorter, but genetic productivity is preserved longer; whereas females act as accumulators of genetic material, live longer, but lose productivity earlier.

Incidentally, about nightingales. People often think that the nightingale’s song is purely romantic in character and aimed at charming the female nightingale. But here too matters are more complex. Besides, we do not know what actually charms the female nightingale. And the anthropocentric identification of what happens with animals with what happens with humans has long been exposed by science as a false methodological stance. With its song, as biologists have established, the nightingale designates and marks the territory it has chosen, and thus this song is addressed first and foremost to male nightingales, with a frank warning that they should look for a nesting place somewhere else. It turns out that in nightingale society song is sufficient to forestall physical showdowns. But the nightingale’s song also contains a message for the female: from it she learns the size and food security of the nightingale’s holding, which is fundamentally important for rearing future offspring. It is precisely this that “charms” the female. Therefore it sometimes happens that if a plot is distinguished by heightened attractiveness in respect of size and food supply, then besides the “principal” female, another settles somewhere on its periphery and there raises several more offspring of the fortunate “entrepreneur” who has occupied such a splendid territory. So the marriage of convenience receives, in this example, a comprehensible justification: not personal caprice, not personal preference, but the interests of the offspring first and foremost. Therefore it is better not to hurry in condemning pragmatically unromantic women in human society too, who select a partner with material parameters foremost in mind. This is nothing other than care for the offspring. However, owing to typological diversity, not all people relate to this phenomenon in the same way, which not infrequently becomes a source of dramatic collisions.

Social hypocrisy represents one of the forms of cultural perversion and manifests as the demonstrative condemnation of what “is considered” unacceptable in society. The main objects of the problem of social hypocrisy are the limitation of the individual’s personal freedom by moral dogmas and by the manipulative positions and strategies of associated social agents based on them. Such agents may be individual people as well as various social subsets in the form of formal and informal groups, organisations and classes, up to and including the state as a whole. The state, in the person of its bureaucratic apparatus, restricts, humiliates and combats by every means the independent manifestations of personality, stopping at no form of violence, including the destruction of people. Well, we have seen enough of that under totalitarian regimes and in the troubled times of revolutions and perestroikas.

Reference groups hold their members through constant “brainwashing,” in which any “heretical” thoughts are cut off, suppressed and driven out. And even in the atomic cell of society, the family, the personality may turn out — and this is by no means a rarity — to be unfree.

From childhood the child is told what to do, when to go to bed, when to wake up, until what hour it is permitted to spend time with friends…

There once lived Petya the Little Cockerel Who sat on his potty on time…

Prince Ivan went to bed early — Follow the example of Prince Ivan.

No, not everything here is bad, but a fine line exists at which freedom in the choice of behavioural models turns into an abuse of one’s social position and self-assertion at another’s expense. There are parents who assert themselves at the expense of their children, oppressing and crippling their souls, and there are children who assert themselves at the expense of their parents, humiliating them and destroying the values the latter have created. These are extreme forms, but, alas, they exist.

There are spouses who continue to live together although they long ago ceased to love one another and, moreover, quietly or stormily hate each other. Of course, there is a large percentage of cases where one or other of the spouses fights furiously, at the level of animal instinct, against the sexual freedom of their partner. An extensive body of literature is devoted to all of this, reflecting well the broad spectrum of manifestations of social hypocrisy, but by no means always uncovering the psychological, social and ethical means of resolving these collisions — resolutions rising to the level of a spiritual feat.

On one television programme (Nagiyev, the show Okna), a certain mother (an ethical-sensory extravert close to pension age) speaks out against a young man she knows dating her daughter, because she has concluded that he is a pederast.¹ This young man — a tall, well-built logical-intuitive extravert, present on the programme — denies it, but the mother explains to the audience that she arrived at this conclusion, unbearable for her, because she saw in the bedroom of the flat where her daughter supposedly lives with the said young man another young man lying completely naked on the bed at a time when her daughter was absent. At this point, according to the script, the daughter appears on the programme (a slender, beautiful intuitive-ethical extravert) and tells her mother that the young man in question is no pederast at all and that she lives with him, just as her mother had recommended, the mother having earlier approved of the liaison. To this the mother replies that she approved of their contacts before she reached her sad conclusion, having seen, in her daughter’s absence, a second — and this one completely naked — young man lying on the bed in her bedroom. And then the daughter declares that this second young man is her husband, and that the three of them live together. The mother is, “naturally,” in complete shock — it could never have entered her head that her (!) daughter, and with two men at once!! At this point, again according to the script, the second young man appears, also tall and well-built, also a logical-intuitive extravert, embraces and kisses this daughter — his wife — and sits down beside her. The mother, by virtue of the concepts of social hypocrisy, demands explanations, and the daughter says that the three of them are fine together, they are all content, there are no contradictions between them, but that in order for everything to be legal she registered her marriage with one of them, since two marriages are not permitted by law. There it is, social hypocrisy — enshrined in legislation! The mother begins to shout (social hypocrisy in action) that this is terrible, that this is depravity, and that in her day… well, you understand, and so on. The daughter answers her mother that she lived thirty years without a man for the sake of incomprehensible ideals, and what can she possibly understand about it. Well, in short, two dissimilar points of view on one and the same subject are graphically demonstrated, together with a typical manifestation of one aspect of the problem of fathers and children.

The overwhelming majority of people relate to what happens to them within the framework of the instincts inherent in the human being. And in this sense people differ little from animals and automata, if we take it that for automata the programmes installed in them replace instincts. Animals and automata answer a standard stimulus with a standard reaction. That is, such behaviour is entirely predictable, and there is naturally no question of any freedom whatever here. What has been said applies to the sexual behaviour of the majority of people too. People as biological automata love, are jealous and suffer, because the corresponding programmes have been inserted into them evolutionarily, and when they find themselves in imperative states they are, since they have not been trained, incapable of acting alternatively. And this means that in such states they are not free.

But other bioautomata — hens, for example — do not envy their cockerels their harem, and the cockerels may use it without hindrance for the good of the continuation of their line. So why is it that the hen is not jealous, while the swallow, say, cannot permit her partner to have a harem? The answer is to be found in the biological features of these two species. The point is that swallows belong to the altricial species and hens to the precocial. A chick, having hatched from the egg, can immediately move about independently and peck at food. So in this case no help in caring for the offspring is required from the “spouse,” and the entire positive emotional potential connected with rearing and teaching the offspring falls wholly to the hen. Altricial young, by contrast, hatch blind, weak and defenceless, but with an enormous appetite that a female swallow cannot satisfy alone. Therefore the male of this species is bound to the female by the programmes of feeding the offspring.

From this, by analogy, it is not hard to understand that a woman, in the general case, will try to keep her husband beside her, because a child is born helpless and requires maximum attention, which sharply limits a woman’s capacity to withstand the hostile side of the world in which we live. And she unquestionably needs support and protection. This is, so to speak, the biological side of “social hypocrisy.” But there is a social side here too. A growing child, for effective socialisation — that is, for entry into society — needs models of behaviour of both female and male type. Of course, the family does not live in a vacuum, but the image and example of the father are important both for a boy and for a girl. Unsuccessful relations with the father may reflect negatively on the future woman’s relations with her potential partners. For a boy, a model of male behaviour is necessary, otherwise his socialisation may prove defective. And this model must be provided to him not at some time or other, but during the period of his readiness to receive the corresponding imprint. This period begins at about three years, from the moment when the boy suddenly realises that he is not the same as his mother, and ends at about fourteen, when the adolescent becomes dependent on the opinion of his age reference group and his psyche is preoccupied with the formation of new imprints. Therefore, if the moment for introducing the programmes of male behaviour for a boy is missed, he will compensate for this deficiency by other means. Of course, let us not forget that models of “male” behaviour may be repellent, but that is already a consequence of stepping outside the framework of cultural tradition.

It is interesting to note that fighters against social hypocrisy see only one pole of the problem — only the restriction of personal freedom within the family — but as a rule pay no attention to the irresponsibility of many representatives of the human race in entering into sexual contact. As a result of such irresponsibility, children are born who grow up without fathers, and not infrequently a helpless and irresponsible mother hands them over to a children’s home, where they grow up as complete orphans. For humanity it ought simply to have been written into the biological code of honour, into the moral and ethical rules, that if you are not capable of providing your offspring with a worthy level of existence, then you simply have no right to have any. But here too everything is more complex than dogmatic moralising. “There are more things in this world than are dreamt of in our sages’ philosophy…” Official science has still not investigated the hypothesis of reincarnation and karma. And yet if a corresponding reality stands behind these concepts, then the assessment of many social phenomena acquires an entirely different character. It then becomes clear that a soul preparing for incarnation chooses its future parents in accordance with its karma. And whether the newly incarnated person will live a happy or an unhappy life depends not on his parents but on himself. And here pity is inappropriate, although sympathy is necessary. And the sufferings of the parents are determined by the features of their own karma.

And nevertheless, one must exercise extreme caution in dealing with the current “anti-hypocritical” aphorisms. When a maxim of the sort “Love, as soon as Hymen is with it, loses its savour, being deprived of its aroma; thus sour vinegar was once wine” is pronounced by Don Juan, mythical or real, then to socionists everything is clear — what can you expect from Don Juan, an intuitive-ethical extravert (Ie)? Don Juan is Don Juan even in Africa. In accordance with his typological features he uses his male charm, his unique magical capacities, worthy of better application, only in order to bewitch frivolous women. And they, in their turn, may consider that “even a fleeting liaison is more poetic than the loveless kisses of vulgar spouses,” and then torment themselves and suffer for the whole of the rest of their lives, trying to raise a child without a father.

Of course, if the kiss is loveless and the spouses vulgar… then all the same, a fleeting liaison ending in AIDS is not one bit less vulgar, even if it took place — which is also doubtful — in the aura of “great and pure love.”

And as for the aphorisms of the talented, perhaps even brilliant pederast (this is a universally known fact) O. Wilde, they are hardly likely to enjoy any particular authority among the majority of humanity’s representatives. Therefore, if he says something of the sort: “Women marry out of curiosity. Men marry out of weariness. And both are quickly disappointed,” then most likely this is merely a reflection of his limited life experience, burdened by homosexuality. Presumably there may be women who marry out of curiosity, and sometimes men turn up who marry out of weariness, and then it is not at all surprising that such a couple should quickly become disappointed in each other. Well, serves them right — do not marry out of curiosity and do not wed out of weariness, and then you will not be disappointed.

Any marriage, long or very short, may turn out to be “some form of sophisticated mockery of one another” (from an interview with the film director S. Solovyov), but it may also turn out to be a Path of joint creativity, joint searching and astonishing discoveries that fill life with endless joy. Cynics and creators have different reference points.

Many people think they are freely choosing freedom in sex, but alas, this is the result of ideological processing. Here a person is dealing merely with the illusion of freedom, because he has been skilfully led to the narrow passage of an unambiguous choice and provided with the appearance of making that choice himself — but this is only what in NLP is called “choice without choice.” “Will you do it now, or later, when you get home?” It is assumed that you will do it anyway, and when is, in this case, unimportant to the manipulator. If he needs to establish firm deadlines, he will apply a different formula of suggestion for that.

The sexual revolution, gradually unfolding in the countries of the West, reached the post-Soviet space by the mid-1990s. But of course it did not immediately seize all strata of our society and all age groups. In the Soviet Union, as is well known, “there was no sex.” But since it did exist after all, this may be understood to mean that by means of ideological tabooing it was driven into the depths of the social subconscious.

We, the inhabitants of the post-Soviet space, remember perfectly well how a person can be persuaded that he lives in the freest and most democratic country, although later, from other sources, he learns that he lived in a cruel totalitarian state.

It is impossible to speak of freedom in a manipulative society…

In the remarkable documentary film Women of the East (1976), several forms of marriage existing in human society right now are shown. The first two episodes are devoted to Muslim polygyny and Nepalese polyandry. In the first episode a fellah, an Egyptian peasant, celebrates his wedding to a fourth wife. The bride is at that moment in a special yurt where the first three wives are dressing her and doing her hair. From the point of view of European social hypocrisy — horror! — but for Muslims (they have a different variety of social hypocrisy) this is normal. The second episode shows the opposite form of polygamy — polyandry, practised in Nepal. A young man and a girl met, fell in love and registered their marriage, but by local law a young woman, on entering a family in which there are several brothers — four in the film — automatically becomes the wife of all of them.

The struggle for sexual freedom by no means necessarily signifies licentiousness, but sometimes licentiousness and depravity may cloak themselves in the banner of freedom, and then licentiousness will inevitably begin to accuse the capacity to control one’s actions of hypocrisy or asceticism… The sexual revolution brings a person not freedom but merely a new variety of informational and physiological dependence, as happens, for example, in the case of fashion.

The natural path to attaining inner freedom is awareness of the mechanisms organising one’s own behaviour. If a person succeeds in understanding what inner forces compel him to act one way or another, then the possibility arises of consciously intervening in their operation. Of course this is not safe if done unprofessionally, but as a possibility it is interesting. And here we approach what, by definition, freedom is — that is, the possibility of real choice. Alas, having attained such a possibility, people often feel the bitter aftertaste inherent in genuine freedom, which demands of a person a high degree of responsibility, and this responsibility marks out quite definite frameworks of new restrictions — although, perhaps, ones relating to a broader operational space.

In the middle of what is now the century before last, the American scholar de Morgan,² studying the way of life and customs of the Indians, shed light on the transient, historical character of the concepts of marriage, family and kinship relations. These concepts are not given to humanity for all time but are filled with concrete content from epoch to epoch, from people to people.

In modern terms, marriage may be defined as the condition for the meeting of the opposite sexes, and, as we know, these conditions may differ greatly not only from epoch to epoch and from people to people, but also from person to person. Thus the custom current in Kievan Rus of entering into sexual relations on the night of Ivan Kupala by free choice, all with all without restriction, was a survival of one of the primitive forms of marriage designated in the scholarly literature by the term promiscuity. This term denotes the absence of any prohibitions or restrictions on sexual intimacy between representatives of the opposite sexes. Even irrespective of age and degree of kinship. At present a survival of this form of marriage is group sex, but in it restrictions are nevertheless presupposed.

The family, unlike marriage, represents the conditions for raising the rising generation. Not all people — poor and rich, high-placed and otherwise — succeed in raising a quality generation. To raise an effective successor generation is a great feat, but far from everyone succeeds in accomplishing it. Some people, men and women alike, are so preoccupied with their sexual urges, so dependent on alcohol and nicotine, that raising children becomes something secondary for them — and therefore the result will be of the same order.

The Third World Information War, unleashed by the American special services against the Soviet Union in 1948, in the course of which one of the results set in advance was achieved — the collapse of the communist empire — showed that a professionally organised “brainwashing” service, suppressing and restricting personal freedom, is able to create the illusion of attaining freedom. Here the removal of “sexual brakes” plays no small role, when sexual freedom is played up which represents merely a variety of enslavement, since programmes of behaviour are imposed on you which increase dependence on the “sexual way of life,” displacing the need for spiritual self-perfection. And that, after all, does not necessarily renounce sex, but uses it not as a source of narcotic enjoyment but as a variety of training leading to spiritual enlightenment: see tantra. But that is quite another story.

Un-spiritualised sexual entertainments are in essence perversions of human nature — but perversions which social morality is capable of partially justifying. In any case, there will always be people capable of adducing a mass of arguments in favour of sexual freedom, and some of these arguments have an entirely spiritual and highly moral basis. But alas, some of them simply pander to primitive instincts.

In conclusion to this section one may say that women — the females of homo sapiens — are, in comparison with animals, highly intellectual beings, whatever certain not-very-reasonable men may say about it. Women have managed to bring to a high level of perfection many forms of behaviour connected with the relations of the sexes. Women have learned to be exceptionally attractive to men — attractive biologically, physically, psychically and psychologically. Moreover, thanks to typological differences, the possibility arose of selective preference in the choice of women by men and vice versa, which to some degree reduced — but by no means eliminated — the struggle for the female-woman between male-men, and along with it such an atavistic element as jealousy. The female “gender” invented such a sexual device as flirtation, the sexual-aesthetic styling of clothing, hairstyle and make-up. But of course this was done first and foremost and exclusively for the good of the preservation of the human race. Presumably it was the species that did this and not individual people; but whether it was done only by the female gender, the female half of the human race, requires investigation.

The interaction of the sexes is connected with a specific material-energy-informational exchange. Without female energy replenishment, men as an intraspecific subset would always have remained crude and cruel animals. Femininity, beauty, tenderness, softness, submissiveness — these are all female symbols of energy replenishment. They are realised as the capacity to inspire, to relax a man and to realise his instinct of his own importance, and this corresponds to the experience of the value of one’s own genome.

The male resource — provider and defender — is demonstrated through the symbols (releasers) of masculinity, which in a more developed society become more varied, manifesting not only in physical strength but also in a particular male intellect and creative potency that expands the boundaries of the human race’s existence, and also in other diverse parameters of male character.

SOCIONICS

Socionics identifies areas of specific automatisms inherent in people and divides them into sixteen groups characterising the typological determinacy of human behaviour. However, these sixteen groups may be broken down into two groups, or four groups, of still more generalised automatisms, in which the behaviour of every concrete person is necessarily described by one of them. One such division into four groups of generalised behavioural automatisms is the division into quadras. In particular, as has been established in socionics, types belonging to one quadra have more features in common in sexual behaviour than types belonging to different quadras. So what suits representatives of one quadra may evoke hidden or open rejection in representatives of another. Therefore, if someone, by way of combating family hypocrisy, preaches sexual freedom (most likely this will be a representative of the third quadra), then this may be perceived by representatives of other quadras as a sermon of licentiousness.

In polemical zeal, fighters for sexual freedom may lose sight of the fine spectra of meanings that organise human life. Part of these meanings is connected with the semantic spectrum of the concept of love.

The ancient Greeks discovered several shades of meaning connected with the concept of love. Contemporary psychologists [2] call these shades the colours of love — perhaps not an entirely scientific term, but it sounds beautiful. In psychology this is spoken of as three primary and three secondary colours of love.

Some psychologists consider the following three colours to be the primary forms of love.

Eros — passionate love, a passionate desire for closeness, a demand for and expectation of devotion. It is preserved as long as both partners experience satisfaction from the liaison. Here love has an intense, bold, risky character, and considerable Ego strength is required of the lovers. The degree of attachment may vary, but is often very strong.
Ludus — this is love as a game with different partners. The depth of feeling here may vary greatly, but in particular cultural milieus it may be very great. Not infrequently this form of love denies or limits intense emotions, but this is by no means obligatory. Sometimes this form is chosen by those who evade attachment.
Storge — a very subtle and advanced type of love, in which the proportion between love and friendship tends toward equilibrium. This form of love is distinguished by durability and reliability. Here “great deeds” await the partners, and such a couple, as a rule, becomes a remarkable “combat unit,” capable of solving life’s tasks of any complexity.

To the secondary forms of love some psychologists assign the following three varieties.

Mania — this type of love represents an orientation toward a higher ideal, for the sake of which a person is prepared for any sacrifice or feat. In primitive cases it degenerates into possessiveness or, correspondingly, dependence. Remember? “There is no slave who has not dreamed of becoming a master.” If a person subconsciously rates himself poorly, then a lack of self-confidence may be hidden behind this. If your relation to your partner is determined by this form, then it is worth working on yourself thoroughly and, if possible, even seeing a psychologist.
Pragma — this is the type of sober love, without any clouding or excess. In its high-quality variant it is not accessible to everyone, only to those who have perfect command of their emotionality. In the primitive case it looks like love by calculation. Sometimes it may take on a patronising, philanthropic character, when, for example, a woman selects a man whom she regards it as her duty to “bring out into the world,” and he in the end (or perhaps sooner) attains the heights of an administrative or political career, while the “patroness” experiences deep satisfaction and social recognition.
Agape — this is the type of selfless, often altruistic love, ready for any sacrifice. It may appear in both primitive and elevated guises. At the low level it is slavish attachment, submitting to the partner in everything and indulging all his whims. At the high level it is readiness to give the partner everything, even life itself, so that he may attain a high goal, fulfil his duty.

The secondary colours of love are formed, as some psychologists consider, by combining the primary ones. Thus it turns out that Mania = 1+2, that is, Eros + Ludus; Pragma = 2+3, that is, Ludus + Storge; Agape = 1+3, that is, Eros + Storge. Perhaps this may be so, but I personally am inclined to evaluate them as independent forms, since arithmetic permits the equations presented above to be solved in the reverse order too, in which case the “primary” colours may be expressed through the secondary ones. Tests have even been devised with the help of which you can establish exactly which colour of love is present in your relations with your partner. This is all very well, but from the socionic point of view (and here the methodological aspect of socionics comes into play) there are heuristic grounds for considering that the colours of love should number not six but at least eight, or even sixteen. Then every dual pair, or even every socionic type, will have its own shade of this enigmatic feeling. Of course, this requires special investigation.

In this direction interesting work has been carried out by the Kyiv socionists V. Meged and A. Ovcharov [3]. They supplemented the “Greek” spectrum with two further varieties of what they call emotional behaviour — analita and victoria — and, assigning two such forms to each type, obtained the result presented in Table 18.01.

Table 18.01. Combinations of forms of love by type

Type	Combination of forms of love	Type	Combination of forms of love
Ки — Don Quixote (ILE)	Philia, Analita	Ло — London (LIE)	Pragma, Agape
Дю — Dumas (SEI)	Eros, Mania	Др — Dreiser (ESI)	Storge, Victoria
Гю — Hugo (ESE)	Analita, Philia	На — Napoleon (SEE)	Victoria, Storge
Ро — Robespierre (LII)	Mania, Eros	Ба — Balzac (ILI)	Agape, Pragma
Гм — Hamlet (EIE)	Mania, Agape	Ге — Huxley (IEE)	Philia, Storge
Го — Gorky/Maxim (LSI)	Analita, Victoria	Гб — Gabin (SLI)	Eros, Pragma
Жу — Zhukov (SLE)	Victoria, Analita	Шт — Stierlitz (LSE)	Pragma, Eros
Ес — Yesenin (IEI)	Agape, Mania	До — Dostoevsky (EII)	Storge, Philia

Translator’s note: the table uses “Philia,” whereas the author’s six-colour list above names the second form “Ludus.” The discrepancy is in the original — Meged and Ovcharov’s own scheme uses Philia.

Of course, one may argue about how precisely such a distribution corresponds to reality. For example, doubt is raised by the fact that combinations of identical forms, but with reversed order of succession, are assigned in one case to activators and in another to mirror partners. This unquestionably requires careful theoretical elaboration, and further research is needed here, which of course will be carried out; but the idea in itself is a good one.

As a hypothesis, I suppose that the generalised characteristics of the emotional and sexual behaviour of each type have their own unrepeatable features, and, as a working device, I designate them with the same symbols as the type itself, but with a corresponding mark. The result is presented in Table 18.02.

Table 18.02. Emotional parameter (EP) by type

Type	Emotional parameter	Brief semantic description
Ки — Don Quixote (ILE)	EP (Il)	A high degree of self-absorption
Дю — Dumas (SEI)	EP (sE)	Dependence on sensory impressions
Гю — Hugo (ESE)	EP (Es)	Vivid, passionate emotionality
Ро — Robespierre (LII)	EP (lI)	Modest readiness to help
Гм — Hamlet (EIE)	EP (Ei)	Viscous, dramatised emotionality
Го — Gorky/Maxim (LSI)	EP (lS)	Daring and readiness for a feat
Жу — Zhukov (SLE)	EP (Sl)	Directness and pragmatism
Ес — Yesenin (IEI)	EP (iE)	Tenacious and manipulative emotionality
Др — Dreiser (ESI)	EP (Li)³	Undemonstrative, subtle and deep emotions
Ло — London (LIE)	EP (eS)³	Enterprise, readiness to play
На — Napoleon (SEE)	EP (Se)	Domineering and egoistic emotionality
Ба — Balzac (ILI)	EP (iL)	Subtle, slightly gloomy humour
Ге — Huxley (IEE)	EP (Ie)	Playful-artistic emotionality
Гб — Gabin (SLI)	EP (sL)	Sincere, hard-to-control emotions
Шт — Stierlitz (LSE)	EP (Ls)	Emotional responsibility and tact
До — Dostoevsky (EII)	EP (eI)	Yielding and very subtle emotionality

I do not insist on the unambiguous correctness of the characteristics given — this is only a preliminary sketch. I should merely like to emphasise that, given the typological differences that exist, one must be cautious when attempting to propose recommendations uniform for all. What for some types will pass naturally, “with a bang” and as their own, may for others prove a dramatic temptation, or even an insidious trap entailing grave life consequences.

The problem of the gender fractal

Gender means pertaining to sex. A fractal is a structure which is a subset of a more general structure and homologous to it. The gender fractal is the set of basic properties by which men differ from women or, in a more general sense, males differ from females. Can these properties be derived from the initial assumptions already made in this book? Let us examine this problem more closely.

Sex is a fundamental biological feature of multicellular living beings. Sex may also be regarded as a biological adaptation permitting the problem of reproduction to be solved with one or another degree of effectiveness. Other mechanisms of reproduction are known: direct division in unicellular organisms and budding in primitive animals and plants. Cases are also known in which a species abandons two-sex reproduction, retaining only one gender half — the females — and shifts to parthenogenesis, that is, the self-reproduction of individuals from unfertilised eggs. In this case the variability of the species becomes minimal, which under exceptionally stable conditions of existence entirely suits the species. It may be supposed — and such ideas exist in biology — that as soon as a species’ conditions of existence attain a high level of stability, its need for two-sexedness falls away and a tendency toward parthenogenesis appears. Zoology has described a species of lizard inhabiting certain slopes of the Caucasus mountains, where the temperature range is small, which has shifted to parthenogenesis. This species is represented by females alone, who reproduce themselves with high precision. It is quite plausible that the same prospect awaits humanity — but of course only on condition that its conditions of existence become exceptionally stable. Some hint of such a possibility is the slightly greater number of women on earth and their greater life expectancy.

Biologists even speak of the asynchronous evolution of the human being, meaning that the female and male halves of humanity have their own evolutionary trajectories, and that particular kinds of evolutionary process proceed in them at different speeds. Such an assertion may seem paradoxical, but partial confirmation of this idea is the fact that certain professions are first mastered by men, and only in their footsteps do women enter the profession. Incidentally, the more comfortable the workplace in a given profession, the more attractive it is to women and the sooner women begin to master the corresponding profession. Unfortunately, in exactly the same way women follow in men’s footsteps in the “mastery” of bad habits.

In his time the remarkable Soviet biologist V. Geodakyan proposed an extremely generalised model of humanity in which the female gender is represented by the core and the male by the shell. The core accumulates and preserves the genetic potential, while the shell guards the core and, so far as possible, secures its viability. The shell takes upon itself the aggressive pressure of the environment, and therefore mortality in the male gender is higher; while the core maintains the shell’s capacity for resistance and accumulates acquisitions in the gene pool. This can explain why somewhat more boys are born than girls, but with age the number of individuals in each generation first evens out and then the female gender begins to predominate, and on average women live longer than men.

Between males and females there exists a gender division of labour with respect to offspring at different stages of their existence — from conception to the age at which the young becomes capable of fighting for survival on a par, or almost on a par, with adults. In humans care for one’s children may be maintained for a whole lifetime, but men and women do this differently. That men and women differ from one another is something people have been discussing for many centuries. These differences are reflected to one degree or another in folklore and in a great quantity of sayings by well-known people. Psychologists, for their part, have applied considerable effort to fixing such differences professionally. And this has long needed doing not at all for the satisfaction of curiosity, but because the emancipated woman becomes competitive in almost any sphere of activity, including those traditionally considered male. Woman businessman, woman police officer, woman investigator, woman soldier, woman officer, woman cosmonaut, woman contract killer, woman sniper, woman boxer, woman footballer… How is a woman’s effectiveness in such professions to be assessed? Assessed, of course, not with the aim of discrimination — that is already impossible — but with the aim of determining the specific parameters that must be taken into account and can be used in order to help women solve their occupational problems. And women cope with men’s work not at all badly, and sometimes even better than men. But they do it in their own way. Women drivers, for instance, are according to statistics more cautious than men.

Psychologists know that if one and the same new creative task is offered to a young man and a young woman, the reaction will be different. The young man, even if he is objectively not ready or not fully ready for such work, will most likely take the risk and accept the challenge, will start working and will in fact achieve his aim. The young woman, on the other hand, even if she is entirely ready for the work proposed, will most likely display indecision and caution, will try to hedge, and will experience the proposal acutely. Both the young man and the young woman need help in this case — but different help, taking gender differences into account. So from a theoretical standpoint (and of course from a practical one too) it would be good to know precisely what differences exist between men and women, how many such differences there are, and what their primary, fundamental cause is. And so that this should not be merely an empirical list — for there can always be doubts about its completeness — but a list whose completeness is guaranteed by theoretical constructions. Socionics offers such a possibility.

As was shown earlier, the eight information aspects and the eight generalised psychic functions stand in one-to-one correspondence and are the result, on the one hand, of the combinatorics of the three fundamental essences of the world — energy, matter and information — and, on the other hand, of the adaptation of the psyche to the conditions of its existence. This result, obtained in socionics, finds its correspondence in the results of such spiritual practices as took place, for example, in Indian and Chinese culture. In India this result corresponds to the conception of energy centres, obtained empirically in spiritual practices. In China it took the form of conceptions of the ba gua — the eight trigrams. These trigrams were obtained deductively as a development of the yin–yang theme. Moreover, this result not only does not contradict contemporary scientific conceptions in the sphere of physics, the physiology of the organism’s functional systems, and the anatomical structures of the nervous system, but on the contrary proves to be their natural synthesis. It is also important that the theoretical scheme proposed can be used directly for strict laboratory verification.

Comparing the primary semantics of the energy centres with the anatomical structure of the nervous system and the positional semantics of the socionic functions, one may propose an answer to the key question of gender psychology — “How do men differ from women?” In form this answer is extremely simple: “In men the odd-numbered centres are energetically stronger, and in women the even-numbered ones.”

However, it is not very clear here what “energetically stronger” means and, above all, how to prove it. Still, let us not hurry, but turn our attention to the obvious facts. The first centre — muladhara — in accordance with its primary semantics, is responsible for the integrity of the organism and secures the functioning of the musculoskeletal apparatus. Connected with it too is the individual’s direct defence of himself, which may manifest in passive forms — flight from danger — and active ones — aggression. Empirical knowledge about men and women indicates that the first energy centre is stronger in men, although at this stage it is still difficult to formulate a precise definition regarding the strength of the energy centres. The second centre — svadhisthana — according to its primary semantics is responsible for reproduction, secures the work of the sexual system and, among other things, governs the emotional sphere. It is not hard to understand how important this is for the process of reproduction and for the relation to offspring. Obviously this centre is in some sense stronger in women. Direct proof of this is the comparison of the female uterus with the male prostate gland. This gland in men is a homologue of the uterus in its underdeveloped variant. If the logic proposed is correct, then the third energy centre — manipura — should be stronger in men, and the fourth energy centre — anahata — should be stronger in women. For anahata this is obvious. Its semantics corresponds in part to feeding the child, and the corresponding organ — the female breasts — is in women more powerful than its analogue in men. Analogous reasoning confirms the supposition advanced with respect to the remaining centres as well. Vishuddha — in men the voice is coarser and breaks at puberty. To this belongs also such an anatomical formation as the Adam’s apple, which appears in men as a secondary sexual characteristic during puberty. Ajna — the aesthetic component and the ability to create comfort, which is important for rearing the young, is stronger in females. Intellect in men is on average stronger, which was trained and selected for by the necessity of orienting oneself rapidly in space (logic) during the hunt. To this belongs also participation in coordinated actions — understanding the spatial mutual positioning of partners, the object of the hunt, and elements of the environment. Women had a different predominant gender practice — tracking the young and acute concern for its safety, which promoted the activation of the eighth energy centre, connected with tracking the situation across time and space. As a result of this, women have a more strongly developed capacity for presentiment and an orientation toward forming the future. Manipura — endurance in physical labour and technological creativity — is on average stronger in men. Assertions of this kind are entirely amenable to experimental verification.

The widely known spiritual literature speaks of only seven basic centres, although variants exist with a doubling and even a tripling of this number, which should be assigned to secondary processes. At the same time, socionics has confidently demonstrated the existence of eight generalised psychic functions and their corresponding functional systems, and between the energy centres and the corresponding socionic functions an entirely comprehensible semantic correspondence is established. But one system, the system of introverted intuition, remains without a correspondence. However, some sources indicate the existence of an extra-corporeal energy centre located somewhat above the head, which connects the energetics of the physical organism with the energetics of the surrounding environment. This centre has the Sanskrit name “Brahma-randhra,” or, in Russian, the hole of Brahma.

Table 18.03 presents the fractals of the male and female genders in the codes of the energy centres, with the strengthened centres marked in bold. We see that the basis of these fractals is common, but they are accented complementarily — that is, they complement each other in every centre. At this level we have a “key–lock” type of correspondence, which is an entirely effective scheme for interaction. In the end, the sexual organs of males and females fit this scheme. The mutual complementarity of the centres can apparently be regarded as an energetic and psychological division of labour, in which each side complements the other into a whole.

Table 18.03. Gender fractals in the codes of the energy centres

№	Male	Female	Semantics
8	br	br	Clairvoyance
7	sh	sh	Modelling
6	aj	aj	Discrimination
5	vs	vs	Reasoning
4	ah	ah	Relation
3	mp	mp	Working capacity, technology
2	sv	sv	Continuation of the line and emotionality
1	mh	mh	Resistance

Centre codes: mh = muladhara, sv = svadhisthana, mp = manipura, ah = anahata, vs = vishuddha, aj = ajna, sh = sahasrara, br = Brahma-randhra. The bolding was lost in the PDF text layer and has been restored here from the author’s own rule — odd centres strengthened in men, even in women.

In the codes of the socionic functions the gender fractals look as follows:

fractal of the male gender: S, E, L, e, l, s, I, i (odd centres strengthened)
fractal of the female gender: S, E, L, e, l, s, I, i (even centres strengthened)

This means that in men, on average, extraverted sensing is stronger (the capacity to exert direct forceful pressure), as are extraverted logic (technology), introverted logic (the striving toward ordering) and extraverted intuition — the capacity to build an internal model of the external environment. In women, extraverted emotionality is stronger, that is, the direct energetic demonstration of one’s relation to what is happening; introverted emotionality, or the concealed experience of connection with a partner, including with a child; introverted sensing — the capacity for fine discrimination of the details of the environment and for the direct transmission of one’s own attractiveness, which is of primary importance for attracting the male and continuing the line; and introverted intuition — the capacity for direct perception of the future. At present open scientific research does not confirm this and does not indicate the existence in nature of the corresponding mechanisms. However, the integral experience of humanity indicates the reality of such mechanisms.

Projected onto model “A,” the gender fractals are presented in Fig. 18.01.

Fig. 18.01. Gender fractals in the cells of model A

	Male		Female
Ego (1, 2)	I	l	I	l
Super-Ego (4, 3)	e	S	e	S
Super-Id (6, 5)	E	s	E	s
Id (8, 7)	i	L	i	L

The figure uses the model-A skeleton of Don Quixote (ILE) as its frame, in the conventional layout 1–2 / 4–3 / 6–5 / 8–7; bold marks the cells strengthened in each gender.

These schemes give grounds for specifying with full confidence the basic qualities of the male and female genders.

Men (on average) possess a more powerful musculoskeletal apparatus and are capable of attaining higher results in work and sport where will (S) and capacity for work (L) are required. Men are instinctively drawn to such things as martial arts and weapons — this is the concentrated expression of the information aspect of extraverted sensing.

Men (on average) possess a more powerful intellect and capacity for logical reasoning and attain higher results in science and technology (I, l) and in spheres where a high level of order and discipline is required (l, S).

The EGO of men (Il) is stronger than that of women, and for men external self-assertion is more important than for women. Women accept a position in “secondary roles” more easily. Individualism is inherent in men to a greater degree, and among men the scatter of individual qualities is considerably greater than among women. In particular, there exists a considerably greater gap between men both in intellectual and in physical indices than among women. In women the dependency complex (sE) is more strongly developed and they more readily accept having their material provision depend on a man. In many cases this occurs demonstratively and insistently. Men, correspondingly, find it harder than women to ask for help. The emotionality (E) of women differs substantially from that of men in its heightened acuteness. The same may be said of the aesthetic complex (s), which in women manifests not only in a heightened striving for comfort and the ability to create it, but also in an instinctive desire to be liked, for which such external devices as clothing and make-up are used. The predominance of the energetics of ajna in women as compared with men is also expressed in the fact that through this centre women transmit charm, which represents the female variant of hypnotic influence, manifesting in infatuation and love.

SUPER-EGO and ID in men and women are close in quantitative expression, but are accented differently. In men’s SUPER-EGO an orientation toward a forceful (S) solution of problems predominates, and in women’s toward an ethical one (e). In men’s ID an orientation toward productive labour (L) predominates, and in women’s toward foreseeing possible events (i), and this capacity is encountered more often in women. In particular, women take the practice of fortune-telling more seriously and place greater trust in mystical concepts. The totality of mystical experiences should first and foremost be correlated with the energy centre Brahma-randhra and the functional system of introverted intuition corresponding to it.

Socionics offers additional divisions of TIMs according to functional subgroups, from which theoretical information about the male and female genders can also be extracted. In concentrated form this information is presented in Table 18.04.

Table 18.04. Aspect predominance by functional subgroup

Group	Male	Female	Group	Male	Female
Mental	IlS	e	Vital	L	sEi
Programme	IlL	i	Potential	S	eEs
Inert	I	eEi	Contact	lSL	s
Accepting	IS	si	Productive	lL	eE
Verbal	Il	sE	Labour	SL	ei
Evaluative	IL	es	Situational	lS	Ei
Object	ISL	E	Relative	l	esi

The mental qualities of men predominate over those of women, and the vital qualities of women predominate over those of men. Men more often think about how the world is arranged and what laws govern it (I). Men are to a greater degree inclined toward rational order (l) and devote more time to strength training (S). Women, however, are to a considerably greater degree interested in the observance of ethical norms (e). Men are to a greater degree adapted to performing large-scale and purposeful productive work (L). Women, on the other hand, are set on the creation of comfort (s) with the maximum aesthetic (s) effect possible in the given situation. Aesthetics (s) here is a signal of well-being and promotes emotional stabilisation. Women are also powerful generators of positive and negative emotions (E), actively influencing the stabilisation or alteration of the development of a situation. It is highly plausible that female emotionality is connected with their capacity to sense future events in advance (i). This potency of theirs also manifests in a heightened interest in all signals connected with the future, in mystical themes, in fortune-telling and in fortune-tellers, of whom, incidentally, there are more among women. On the whole, the mental predominance of men is expressed in the fact that they form worldviews and ideologies, while the vital predominance of women manifests in the creation and maintenance of the emotional and aesthetic environment.

Men predominate in the programme group of functions, and women in the potential group. The male gender predominates in the programme group of functions, which secures the predominance of programmes along the aspects IlL. This may be understood as meaning that society as a whole is oriented toward scientific-technical progress, defined by these information aspects: the aspects Il are the archetype of science, L the archetype of technology. The female gender in the main generates only one type of programme, but it is directed at securing the future (i).

The potential group of functions forms the leading gender needs. Here the female gender predominates, forming needs connected with the information aspects eEs — that is, needs for stable relations (e), a high level of positive emotions (E) and comfort (s), including aesthetic components (s). The male gender predominantly forms only one group of needs, connected with forceful domination (S).

The inert group of functions indicates the dominant values, and the contact group the dynamic means of interaction with the environment. In the inert group the female gender predominates, and it is precisely this gender that sets the greater volume of values, which are connected with the information aspects eEi. This means that for women the most important values are stability of relations, a high level of positive emotions, and confidence in the future. For the male gender the dominant value is knowledge of the laws of nature (I). In the contact group the male gender predominates, and this accords well with Geodakyan’s model, in which the male component of society acts as a protective shell and the female as the value core.

The basic groups of contact means of the male gender are ordering, the establishment of order (l), the use of forceful pressure (S) and the technological transformation of the environment (L). As for the female gender, and this may appear paradoxical, its leading contact means is comfort, aesthetics, charm (s). After some reflection, however, a multitude of arguments in favour of this can be found; and nevertheless it is very important that the theoretical formula shows precisely such accents of gender orientation. Even so, the assertions formulated here are subject to experimental verification.

The functions of the accepting group accumulate the potential which is used by the productive functions to create an intermediate or final product. In these groups the male and female genders are represented quantitatively evenly, but their qualitative presence here differs. The basis of male potential is knowledge (I) and power (S); the basis of female potential is aesthetics, beauty (s), the striving for happiness and hope (i).

The basis of the male gender’s productivity is the development of algorithms (l), including technological schemes, and the technological materialisation (L) of these algorithms, or production. The basis of the female gender’s productivity is the formation and maintenance of relations (e), and also the creation of an emotional background (E) in its positive and negative variants.

The verbal group of functions determines the subject matter of what is to be discussed and talked through in various aspects — this promotes the all-round elaboration of the subject matter. The labour group of functions determines the subject matter of what must be done, but about which one must speak very cautiously, so as not to substitute words for deeds. For the male gender the verbal themes are those connected with science and philosophy (Il), and for the female gender everything concerning consumption (sE). Conversely, for men power (S) and technology (L) are of the labour kind, and for women the system of relations (e) and the parameters of the future (i).

The evaluative group of functions determines the subject matter of what concrete people recognise as leading values, while the situational group of functions indicates what people relate to as secondary and optional, of which there may be more or less, but which is not a dominant and is not required in the first instance.

For the male gender the dominants are cognition (I) and technology (L), and for the female the system of relations (e) and the comfort-aesthetic circumstances of life (s). Subdominant themes for the male gender are questions of order (l) and power (S), and for the female the emotional (E) accompaniment of life and the assessment of the future (i). This last assertion is not a denial of the importance of the subject matter listed, but indicates the degree of its priority.

The object and relative groups of functions determine the orientation of the male and female genders toward objects and relations. As we see, the male gender is to a greater degree oriented toward objects and the female toward relations. For women the central object is emotionality (E). The central relation for the male gender is order (l). This correlation of accents indicates that the male gender is more extraverted and the female more introverted, although, as follows from the symbolic formulas, there is no question here of complete extraversion or introversion. The male gender is oriented toward cognition (I), power (S) and technology (L). The dominant interest of the male gender in the introverted area is ordering (l) in all its manifestations. The leading interests of the female gender are the maintenance of relations (e), the creation of comfort and personal aesthetics (s), and also the formation of an image of the future (i). The dominant interest of the female gender in the extraverted area is the formation of an emotional background (E), which transforms the value aspect of situational attitudes.

Comparing the generalised description of the dominants of the male and female genders, one may notice that many meanings from different functional groups intersect. This is connected with the fact that the seven groups of concepts considered here are not independent, and concretely this is expressed in the fact that any two of the concepts considered have four features in common. The correlation of the functional systems and their secondary groupings is presented in Table 18.05.

Table 18.05. Functional systems and their secondary groupings

	0	ob/re	ev/st	pr/pt	vb/lb	in/ct	ac/pd	m/v
I	+	+	+	+	+	+	+	+
s	+		+		+		+
E	+	+			+	+
l	+			+	+			+
L	+	+	+	+
e	+		+			+		+
S	+	+					+	+
i	+			+		+	+

Column keys: ob/re = object/relative, ev/st = evaluative/situational, pr/pt = programme/potential, vb/lb = verbal/labour, in/ct = inert/contact, ac/pd = accepting/productive, m/v = mental/vital. A ”+” marks membership of the first-named group of each pair.

Translator’s note: the plus-marks lost their column positions in the PDF text layer. The placement above was reconstructed from the group memberships given in Table 18.04, taking ”+” to mark the first pole of each pair and taking I as the reference element. The reconstruction is self-checking: every row other than I comes out with exactly four plus-marks, which is precisely the author’s claim in the paragraph above that any two of the concepts share four common features.

Here one may ask: “Could the concepts used here not be examined at a more elementary level, where their interdependence could be eliminated?” There is no need for this, since here we are dealing with the representative level, at which these concepts are merely detected and enumerated, while their integral meanings are confirmed by empirical use.

Synthesising the preceding reasoning and returning to Geodakyan’s model, one may speak of gender evolutionary strategies, of those informational components which, by virtue of gender features, are generated and controlled predominantly by one of the halves of humanity.

According to Geodakyan, men are characterised by active influence on the environment, manifesting in resourcefulness, inventiveness and search behaviour, and supported by abstract thinking and spatial imagination. In the partial evolution of men this led to the formation of right-hemisphere asymmetry of the brain, which also indicates a relative strengthening of the functional system of extraverted intuition. Active influence on the environment is the integral manifestation of generalised male extraversion and of such statistically strengthened dominants of the male gender as extraverted intuition (I), extraverted sensing (S) and extraverted logic (L). On the other hand, women are characterised by adaptivity and relative passivity, manifesting in educability, trainability and conformity, which are supported by concrete thinking and emotionality. In the partial evolution of women this was expressed in a relatively weak asymmetry of the cerebral hemispheres, which also indicates a relative weakening of the functional system of extraverted intuition. Adaptivity and relative passivity are the integral manifestation of generalised female introversion and of such statistically strengthened dominants of the female gender as introverted ethics (e), introverted sensing (s) and introverted intuition (i).

Let us note that while the two genders may be opposed with full confidence by the sign of “vertness,” the opposition of men and women by the sign of “nality” (rationality/irrationality) can have only a qualitative and not a quantitative character. If we recall Jung’s four basic categories — the female static: emotionality; the male dynamic: volitional pressure; the male static: logic; the female dynamic: intuition — then it becomes clear that the rational and irrational components are distributed equally between the male and female principles, but differ qualitatively. However, after the analysis carried out, we may specify that the female dynamic is to be understood not simply as intuition, but as introverted intuition, as the capacity, to one degree or another, to sense in advance and to model the course of processes in time, including the future.

Speaking of maximally generalised gender strategies, one may pose the question of their typological identification. This question can be approached as follows. If we take the summary aspect dominant of the male gender — IlSL — it is not hard to see that it corresponds to the greatest degree to the TIM of Don Quixote. On the other hand, the summary aspect dominant of the female gender is sEie, which corresponds to the greatest degree to the TIM of Dumas. From this one may conclude that the forebears of humanity — Adam and Eve, even if mythical and symbolic figures — must have had the types of Don Quixote and Dumas respectively. Of course, other opinions are possible, but a good argument in favour of the variant proposed is that cognition (Il) and consumption (sE) are dual, and that cognition and the intellect connected with it are the basic distinction between the human being and the animal.

Conclusions to Chapter Eighteen

Sexual behaviour is part of the species’ strategy; its biological goal is the reproduction of the species. Sexual behaviour is subject to fairly rigid regularities not only in animals but in the human being too. For each species it has the character of a ritual, any deviation from which impedes mating.
The socionic type imposes its own features on sexual behaviour, which may result in comfortable or, conversely, uncomfortable sexual contact.
It has been established in socionics that types belonging to one quadra have more features in common in sexual behaviour than types belonging to different quadras. So what suits representatives of one quadra may evoke hidden or open rejection in representatives of another. Therefore, if someone, by way of combating family hypocrisy, in preaching sexual freedom subconsciously projects his own typological attitudes onto other people, then this may be perceived by representatives of other types as a sermon of licentiousness.
It may be supposed that every TIM has a special emotional parameter inherent in it alone, realised in personal contacts.
Every person has a TIM which does not depend on sex, but in order to understand how a specific person behaves, the corresponding gender fractal must be superimposed on the TIM.

References

Augustinavichute A., The Dual Nature of Man, Vilnius, 1983.
Colors of Love, Psychology Today 12, 1993.
Meged V., Ovcharov A., Characters and Relations, Moscow, 2002.
Engels F., The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Moscow, 1975.
Women of the East, film, Italy, 1976.
Carrighar S., Wild Heritage, Moscow, 1985.
Dolnik V., On Marital Relations, article, ZS, 1998.
Geodakyan V., The Evolutionary Nature of Sex, journal Priroda, No. 8, 1991.

Russian педераст, used here in the colloquial sense as a derogatory term for a homosexual man. Rendered literally to preserve the register of the original. ↩
Almost certainly Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), the American anthropologist who studied the Iroquois and whose kinship work underlies Engels’s Origin of the Family (reference 4). The author appears to have conflated him with the British mathematician Augustus De Morgan. ↩
The aspect codes for Dreiser and London appear to be transposed in the original: Dreiser (ESI) has the ego block e, S, and London (LIE) has L, I. The semantic descriptions in the third column match the type labels correctly; only the codes are swapped. ↩ ↩²

Socion Archive

Explorer

Chapter 18

Translator’s note

SEX

SOCIONICS

The problem of the gender fractal

Conclusions to Chapter Eighteen

References

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Table of Contents

Socion Archive

Explorer

Chapter 18

Chapter 18. Sex, Love, Social Hypocrisy, and Socionics

Translator’s note

SEX

SOCIAL HYPOCRISY

SOCIONICS

The problem of the gender fractal

Conclusions to Chapter Eighteen

References

Footnotes

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Table of Contents