The Masculine Mystique

The emotional experience of direct and renewed acquaintance with the realities of selective pressure, such as the sudden introduction of sexual jealousy into a seemingly safe relationship, has had for me an almost mystical character, as though what’s reawakened is the prehistory of my whole species, which unwinds from its reptilian recesses, ornamented with the bizarre, gemlike contingencies of thousands of howling animal triumphs and the wailing ghosts of unmutated failures, splitting my consciousness as though from underneath, a whole ocean bursting forth from the sudden shift of tectonic plates; but this alarming thing that emerges, this dark uncoiling dragon capable of incomprehensible violence, seems also dimly recognizable as simply, in some sense, my own self.