It’s 2 pm. I’m walking home from a firm. Behind a car, in a shadowy spot in broiling Bratislava some typical blonde in skimpy shorts is leaning against a wall. Her friend, a less typical, less sexually provocative woman is taking pictures of her back, her legs, her butt. The sexually provocative one has hellish red lipstick. Even though I do not wish to have sexual thoughts, her pose, her naked, tanned thighs, the blonde long hair and the flashy lipstick invade me. This is invasive, even from afar. I do not need to be bombarded with these images. I do not need to feel my body pump its toxic, debilitating and completely useless, obnoxious, disruptive hormones.

The sexual stereotype is clearly the dominant force of the two. There is a hierarchy. The one that looks plain is the servant of the wannabe porn star.

I suppose these images will be posted on instagram. Her sexualized antics are to serve as currency to get external validation. The bar is continually being raised. Shorts are losing at least half an inch (anout a centimeter) per year.

They make my superfluous hormones install a thumbscrew on my balls, like it or not, and they make women who do not have this commercialized body form deeply insecure, even if they are highly educated and have tons more skills than this 30 something stuck in her teenage years, still using her sexuality as her only calling card, possibly her only excuse for being alive. We all fight for our excuse to be alive. My excuse for taking up space on this earth is that I have a talent for language and in face to face conversations I can dwarf a person’s emotional tumors, if I want to. That’s pretty much it. I have the body type that would see a big return on investment if I would seriously invest my time in working out at the gym. I have chosen not to, and have worked out my brain. I am moderately succesful at that, yes, only moderately.

Seeing that woman, only one tiny example, clashes with what I feel should be humanity’s priorities. My sister in law writes me that in Sardinia she saw so many hot women it would make my balls explode. I understand that this is about surival. In ancient times a sexually unattractive woman was less prized, more likely to die, be abandoned, get less proteins, get impregnated by only the lowest males, giving her offspring less survival chance. I understand women are so obsessed with their looks because it’s a case of life or death for them, it’s how their brains our wired. For the same reason men’s identities often are mostly reduced to their careers, their social worth, usually expressed in money or popularity or other privileges.

It makes me feel like we are more like dogs and at all like these exalted creatures we pretend to be. I don’t know where humanity is headed, but it seems morality is not our guiding principle, egocentricity is.

Maybe am too pessimistic, but it seems our culture is rushing towards spiritual bankrupcy.

These patterns are of course in no way limited to or specific to the culture of Zoovakia, a small economically blossoming nation in the middle of Europe.