We have seen in Girls' Behaviour in Courtship Changing Culture that there are strong forces keeping the sexes apart (such as at dances). We appreciate that humans form couples - so some such force is expected to balance Basic Attraction - or else the species would mate randomly and leave the female to bring up the young (as with many other species). The whole issue of the Catastrophe Surface is tied up with the issues of overcoming this force. Thus we have the basis for this force being one of the Brain Areas. We call it an Inhibitor, as its function is largely to inhibit the Basic Attraction Area.
The proposition is however that this is the largest force of all operating between the sexes. We have seen in the Brief History of Courting that it appears for most of man's history that rules of the tribe or parents have arranged who young people marry - and that is still the position for most of the world's peoples today. In the advanced world people have only been left to find their own mates for little more than a century. The Basic Attraction Area has had very limited scope in the past, and its not surprising that a more powerful Area has developed to inhibit it. That this Inhibitor is largely redundant for us today makes it more important that we understand it. That it has arisen in man's early past is why we call it the Wild State Inhibitor - when man was in his wild state as food gathering tribes - and also as it mode of operation is often wild.
The red arrow indicates that it is preventing approach to the Stick Man, and the green arrow into the Inhibitor is from Basic Attraction - which causes the Inhibitor to be turned on, which will be discussed later.
The Inhibitor operates largely by switching off the girl's brain and producing a desire to withdraw. As has been discussed we all start as females, and undergo changes into males - who can experience some of these symptoms - though from the Only the Man must ask means the man must take some action for anything to happen. As an example one may go to a disco with plans to make an approach to a beautiful person - only to find that when it comes to it all these plans have been forgotten and have become irretrievable. Girls who try and buck this and make an approach to a man they are attracted to often find that if they manage to say something it turns out as abusive - and make matters worse. Complaining that they do not like him standing by her or dancing by her (when she has come and danced by him) are examples (and should be interpreted accordingly - try turning it into a joke). The Wild State Inhibitor seems to have remarkable facility to instantly barge into the mind a strategy to get away from the attractive person and enact it - while it makes the mind very slow to think up a constructive strategy to meet the occasion.
The greater the attraction, the greater is the extent of the Inhibitor. Thus if the attraction is nil or low there may not be much Inhibitor operating. Couples may be able to get together with low attraction, but the Inhibitor prevents it if attraction is high. The green arrow into the Inhibitor is from Basic Attraction which turns the Inhibitor higher the higher is the attraction.
Anthropology tells us that food gathering tribes generally have rules that people marry a cousin from their tribe or a nearby tribe. Thus the Inhibitor needs to prevent contact with anyone else. Thus the Inhibitor can be expected to be reduced for a girls' own tribe. If a man is of a related tribe so the women knows the man's antecedents and wealth producing capabilities, the Inhibitor may be reduced in strength.
Subtle differences can cause great changes in the strength of the Inhibitor - the most important being what substitutes in our society for the original tribe. Membership of a club or society or a gathering of a common friend, serve to switch the mind into the assumption of a tribal situation and the Inhibitor may be switched off - even though the situation may be identical to one perceived as non-tribal where the Inhibitor will be at full power. The work place may also be assumed to be tribal - especially your immediate work mates. This leads to another important concept - if you have reason to have contact with someone in the normal course of life the Inhibitor may be reduced, anyway to the extend of conducting such business. What clearly turns the Inhibitor on is a courting or pick-up situation. If the interaction can be contrived as not overtly courting the Inhibitor may not be triggered - a lot of couple's efforts can be devoted to contriving this. The more such interaction they can produce in this way the higher up the Catastrophe Surface they may achieve.
A Disco can be an example of these concepts. We have seen that few people get together in Discos, unless they already know each other. If however a club has an event in a disco - that is to say members of a certain club has an official event in a disco - the situation is likely to be completely different. Even if not all the members of the club know each other, they will interact with each other as they would do in other activities of the club - and people will get off together. The tribal assumption of the club is maintained in the disco environment, and the Inhibitors are much lower. Thus people get together in the disco when they may not have met each other before - but would have had little or nothing to do with each other if they had come individually to the same disco. The clubs can be sports, social, or specialist interest - who decide to celebrate special occasions in a disco. Social clubs may do this regularly as part of their activities. I spent a decade or more in a disco famous for its beautiful girls. All the girls I got together with came as clubs visiting the disco - about half I had not met before. The beautiful girls seldom got a guy from the disco - though no doubt the beautiful girls attracted beautiful guys to the disco...though two Inhibitors on at full power is likely to be impossible.
Experience in the disco environment of trying to make contact with the beautiful girls leads to the conclusion that the Inhibitor acts by
The statement that a girl is stunning is a manifestation of the Inhibitor - she stuns most men into inactivity. The Witney Houston song of falling in Love I try and phone - too shy - can't speak is another. So is Can you handle it?
A summary of the Inhibitor's actions is shown on the right, together with the link to Basic Attraction previously shown:
