Taboo

Of Nicknames, Neural Circuits, and the Perverse Abstractions of Society

In the first company I ever worked for in my life—harking back to a time in the early history of the world, or so it feels—it was the year 2000, and I was in Austin, Texas. There were four of us who always hung out together: Alex McCarrier, John Dodson, Russell Meyers, and yours faithfully. It was common in those days, depending on what nonsense happened to be in our heads, to give each other ad-hoc nicknames. Because Bin Laden was constantly in the news, and John Dodson was our group’s de facto spokes-spigot when it came to expressive irreverence (Russell came second, I was third, and Alex mostly spoke in his mind), I sometimes called him “John bin Dod.” My nickname, meanwhile, was “Suvrotica.” I think it was John who christened me that, although it might well have been Russman.

If you’ve seen the movie Office Space, ClinZen Office was a bit like that—superficially trendy and open, as open as it could be in that era. I remember adult DVD megastores opening up next to supermarkets. But this was still Texas, and so it was a menagerie of people and their idiosyncratic opinions. We even had an Indian CEO, Nagi Rao, who, oddly enough, seemed to have the same urinary bladder timing as I did. My supervisor was Chinese, went by Charles, and was clearly frustrated at having a defiant Indian under him. Later, they hired an older Chinese gentleman who never, not once, left his cubicle—even to pee, I suspect.

But all that is background. I’m recalling it now because of that nickname, “Suvrotica,” and what I’m about to say next. It was apparent even to open-minded Americans at the time that I was a peculiar sort of Indian—one who didn’t herd with other Indians, didn’t smell of Indian food (my dietary preferences were more American), and spoke as if he were from some liberal-erotic quadrant of the United States—which I was not. I’d simply grown up well-read and never felt the need to treat sexual or provocative topics as taboo. Indians, like many other colonized indigenous cultures, had shame stapled into them by Christian missionaries, by Islamic reformers, and by the disfiguring of native traditions that once held sex to be sacred, straightforward, or at the very least, unremarkable.

The entire purpose of sex is reproduction, but by concealing certain body parts, muzzling speech, and attempting to interrupt the irrepressible evolutionary imperatives encoded in neural circuitry via euphemism (American English being a global super-spreader of such euphemisms), we’ve created a distortion. Artificial linguistic regimes and symbolic cultures have inflated a biological act into an engineered and commodified fantasy. What is just neuroendocrine and anatomical has been hijacked by psychosocial overlays, reinterpreted through layers of moralism and market logic. Sex is no longer just reproductive strategy or social bonding—it’s performance, it’s spectacle, it’s economy, it’s pathology.

Of course, this isn’t just true for sex. The same abstract inflation applies to food. It too has been exalted, demonized, aestheticized, until our neuroaffective responses to it are so unhinged that a sandwich can make someone feel spiritually complete or, conversely, contaminated. These are not states a food item ought naturally to induce—but they do, thanks to the cumulative layering of semiotic, social, and ideological packaging.

Societies governed by symbolic abstractions, rather than real needs, are inevitably distorted. In such environments, laws and norms do not reflect evolved imperatives but moral fictions with political utility. So when we consider something like the Trump–pedophilia allegations, the problem is not Trump in isolation; it is the species-wide structure of male sexual preference under cultural suppression. All males exhibit a neurobiological bias toward younger females—this is a feature observed across mammalian species and strongly expressed in humans. The “optimal age” preference is shaped by reproductive fitness heuristics embedded in evolved cognitive modules, then distorted or inhibited by cultural conditioning, legal framing, and narrative taboos. Inhibition, paradoxically, can act not as a brake but as an accelerant—a psychological intensifier.

If you plotted the age of women preferred by men on the x-axis and the age of those men on the y-axis, the result would not be a diagonal line y = x, but something closer to a horizontal band clustered around early-to-mid twenties, regardless of male age. This is a well-documented trend in evolutionary psychology literature, sometimes referred to as the “age-attractiveness asymmetry.” What’s telling is how narrow and consistent that band remains, even as men age—though of course most will deny it, owing to social prohibitions against admitting attraction to women perceived as too young. Legal and moral codes obscure the biobehavioral substrate.

This is not a defense of misuse of power mind you, nor is this a license to break a marriage to marry a teen intern—it’s a deconstruction. The challenge is not to excuse, but to understand what scaffolding—neural, hormonal, cultural—is holding the edifice up—plus anyway I’m not attracted to any humans of any age at fifty, just a good book and travel is what I look forward to—and although I am divorced, I am penny less, smell bad, and can’t get it up—nothing to entice a ravishing belle with fractured attention span with. People at my age need a paid nurse—because time will come when like the geriatric Charles hired I wouldn’t be able to leave my cubicle, so someone’s got to take care of me. But seriously now, if we’re going to confront taboos honestly, we must disaggregate criminality, pathology, social panic, and evolved impulse. Otherwise, we just pile more abstraction on top of the abstractions already causing harm.

Trump is a bad president, and an evil man, but certain vices are common to all males, and we ought to be man enough to own up to that onus.