Sex-positive feminism and rates of violence

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I was watching a YouTube video about fungi, as one does, and thinking about how trees communicate with each other over great distances through mycelium, or the bodies of fungi.

And, for the second time in a short while, I thought about how fungi relate to liberalism. What is liberalism, if not worldwide communication and cooperation for the good of the species?

Why do humans kill each other while fungi cooperate? How is murdering your own species evolutionarily advantageous? How many species kill each other?

It turns out just 352 of the ~6,500 existing species of mammals kill adult members of their own species. So it’s not super common.

As for the why, resources are scarce. Ensuring they only go to the fittest means only they survive and reproduce. This can help ensure the species survives. “Killing a rival takes them out of contention for good,” said Joseph Feldblum, a primatologist and chimpanzee expert at the University of Michigan.

The thing about circumstances is that they change. The thing about animals is that we adapt, move, or die in response. Humans have already adapted. Homo sapiens is way less murder-y than we were when we arrived on the scene.

What if we… just kept going.

Tools are circumstance changers. The plow showed up, and where we used it, our populations exploded.

Liberalism is a tool. Where it’s adopted, violence declines. Feminism is a tool. Countries with more gender equality are less violent.

Sex-positive feminism is also a tool. It might be a tool societies use to become less violent.

I’d heard once that countries with less sexual repression were less violent. I couldn’t find a good source, so I looked at the Cato Institute’s 2021 Human Freedom Index, which ranks countries based on their freedom in several areas.

What I found is that freedom in relationships (which measures the extent to which the country allows same-sex relationships, divorce, women to inherit property, and female genital mutilation) correlates more closely with violence than the strength of their rule of law.

I have no idea how this works, or if it’s even true. It feels intuitively true to me that countries with less sexual repression would be less violent. As for the how, the only thing I can imagine right now is that sexual permissiveness and lower levels of violence are both hallmarks of a country being more developed. I’d imagine these societies are also wealthier than countries with more violence and sexual repression. Maybe it’s all tied together. We believe animals, perhaps including us, kill each other to prevent the less-fit among us from consuming scarce resources and reproducing. Why do societies repress sexuality? Is it simply to support a male-dominated hierarchy? Is to prevent the less-fit from reproducing? Does material abundance reduce the incentive to commit violence and repress sexuality?

Either way, the path forward seems obvious to me. Use the tools at our disposal to create the conditions under which humanity will adapt, move, or die. In this case, use sex-positive feminism and liberalism to incentivize lower rates of violence. Let’s continue to evolve to be more like fungi.