Let’s imagine, a world where 10 month a year, men and women don’t care about each other. However, twice a year, during 2-3 weeks, non pregnant women produce pheromone that men can’t resist and start calling every boy around to breed with them.
How would this impact the civilisation ?
I know about David Brin’s *glory season * but not sure whether any other writer explored that idea.
Lots more people would have the same birthdays.
I had the discussion the other day of how civilization would be different if humans followed the ‘have loads of babies at once and see which ones survive’ style of reproduction.
“Oh hi Sarah! How’re the kids?”
“Oh, little Jeremy wasn’t eating as much as the others so I threw him outside onto the road.”
We probably wouldn’t name them until they had reached a certain age
“Number 5 and Number 7 ate Number 3 last night.”
Missed opportunity there mate:
7 8 9
6 now lives in fear of his younger sibling.
MTV’s Spring Break would be a lot crazier.
unless mating season was like, autumn
Oktoberfest it is, then.
Still hosted by MTV’s Dan Cortese.
They would have rescheduled for that.
Maybe my wife would actually have sex with me?
Huh then what’s the point of having wife if you don’t/can’t have sex with her.
Found the unmarried person.
🤣
It would be a very large undertaking to describe the changes since hidden breeding cycles are one of the things that separates humans from other apes.
Human women being able to choose when and with whom to mate, secretly, is one of the most significant aspects of what it means to be human.
Humanity is one of the few species whose evolution is primarily driven by sexual selection and not just the “I survived long enough to find a female so I reproduced” strategy we know of as natural selection.
Username checks out,
But nice answer
I’ll point out that many creatures that have seasonal mating still mate for life.
Does it happen en masse or does each woman have their own heat season? Say, does everyone go crazy during the same 2-3 weeks or does it vary per person like it happens with periods?
In the masse heat I think there would be some obvious differences in stuff like festivities and each culture would adapt to these seasons. There would be a need to gather and store resources before the rut, and also to be prepared for the inevitable birthing en masse to come. We would probably have public holidays for the mating seasons and festivities for birthing season. In contemporary times, hospitals would need to do some heavy work planning and preparing maternity ward space to accommodate the seasonal influx. That’s just what pops to mind.
Not too sure about the differences in the second case though. One option is, women would be allowed to retreat from society and become hermits during heat if they want to avoid pregnancy and this would be totally normal. Or, some cultures would lock them to prevent them getting pregnant. Coming to think of it, I think having women randomly in some kind of irresistible heat like this would be very disruptive and impossible to prepare for so I don’t see much happening in the way of gender equality and women’s rights sadly. I’m inclined to think the re would be a lot of gender based extreme segregation.
Option #2 is basically werewolves.
Sexual crimes would increase.
Not just SA crimes. Fighting between males would be insane.
I imagine it would look a lot like how Zoidberg’s home world is depicted on Futurama
We sortof do, there’s a huge cluster of birthdays roughly july to september
here’s a chart!
what’s fascinating to me about this is how people are clearly using medical science to avoid giving birth on certain holidays.
Doctors also influence the avoidance of holidays there
that’s a good point! nobody wants to do labor of either kind on xmas.
Fascinating stuff but is this a global chart or is it limited to a single country? Or hemisphere?
judging from the weird void on july 4th, i am guessing it is based on data from the US. probably based on census records.
So Christmas?
Or just winter, I think. Lots of people indoors with nothing better to do.
Edit: actually, I’m curious how this chart looks for just the southern hemisphere.
first two things come to mind:
water-cooler conversations at work would be different. telecommuting may be an important option during the season.
My shiny seashell collection may be in jeopardy. the ladies love seashells 🐚.
Post nut clarity for most of the year sounds peaceful, but I’m guessing people in heat would think with their genitals and wouldn’t care about STDs or pregnancy.
Everyone wound have some STD and birth control would be a side note. Human reproduction would work like clockwork and without neutering world would have exploded long time ago.
Reminds me of how the Vulkans have it in Star Trek. I’m no expert but there was an episode where Spock went into his horny craze :)
O.O
Do you want to read this part again slowly, out loud, then consider this from a female point of view.
non pregnant women produce pheromone that men can’t resist and start calling every boy around to breed with them.
Women have enough problems with unwanted male interaction, not to mention so many lies about women’s anatomy. This makes it so much worse.
What, are you above biology? The guy is asking how things would be different if we were biologically similar to other animals thar have mating seasons.
Maybe sex wouldn’t have the same stigmas. Maybe we wouldn’t care who a child’s father was and would raise our partners children as our own.
Maybe there would be less creepy aggressive people since presumably it would be easier for them to have their sexual needs met. Maybe the ones that still act aggressively are quickly delta with and somehow excluded or punished.
Maybe maybe maybe. Thought experiment. Hypothetical. Relax.
Are you just off-put assuming that this is some guys sexual fantasy?
its a hypothetical situation
That’s a fair point, and indeed, it looks like pretty awful, you’re right that I could have phrased it better.
The worst, is that the question came when reading stuff like Being a cat girl must be cool and I was thinking about how cat reproduce making being a cat girl pretty uncool
Read again
Women have enough problems with unwanted male interaction, not to mention so many lies about women’s anatomy. This makes it so much worse.
In this hypothetical, men switch from having a sexual interest in women 52/52 weeks a year to 4/52 weeks a year. I would expect a >92% reduction in “unwanted male interaction”.
