Shark Enlightenment

Image source: Stockcake

The mating behavior of reef sharks is rather nasty, by human moral standards. Males bite females and drag them to the bottom of the sea, where they forcibly copulate. There is no romance among reef sharks.

This is a story about a group of reef sharks that evolved a higher level of intelligence, and created an enlightened utopia on a reef, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

For some reason, the sharks living on a certain reef evolved much bigger brains, until they were as intelligent as humans. Their intelligence allowed them to prosper. They increased in numbers. Capable of language, they formed a society, which banned violence between its members.

However, there was a catch. The society was created by male sharks. They embraced the principle of individual freedom and non-violence among themselves, but they had an exception for the females. “After all,” said one of their leading conservative orators, “the great god Jawbiter created females to serve the needs of males. It is natural and good that males should dominate females.”

Many sharks, both males and females, saw this as unfair. Why should females be forced to mate with males? Why should they not have equal rights and freedoms within society? Some sharks, who were more enlightened than the rest, claimed that all sharks have inalienable shark rights, bestowed upon them by Jawbiter. It would be immoral and unfair to deny female sharks their bodily autonomy. They demanded that the system be reformed to make all sharks equal.

The proposal was put to a vote in the assembly, and it passed by a fin. The male sharks voted to allow female sharks into the assembly, and to give them equal shark rights.

Male sharks could no longer grab females, drag them to bottom of the sea, and copulate with them. Now, to copulate with a female, a male shark had to get her consent. He could only copulate if she agreed.

At first, many sharks expected a utopia to emerge. They assumed that male and female sharks would make cooperative arrangements to their mutual benefit. Many songs and poems were written about the romantic paradise that would naturally arise.

But there was a problem with this paradise. The female sharks had no interest in sex.

For millions of years, the impetus to mate had come from the males. The males put in the effort to make it happen, while the females simply endured it. Only males had evolved a sex drive. The females had no sex drive at all. Given their freedom, they simply swam around, unmolested and unmated.

Some females sold their mating rights to the highest bidder. They would permit males to copulate in exchange for food. A few copulated out of boredom or kindness. Some swam out to the edge of the reef, to tease the unenlightened sharks in the deeper waters, who would then chase them back to the safety of the reef. Some of these adventures resulted in copulation. But most of the females simply didn’t mate at all.

Some sharks saw the problem with their society, but those who spoke out were punished for heresy. Equality and shark rights had become moral absolutes, which could not be questioned. Those who dared to question them were called “fishists” and cast out of the reef into the deep water.

The shark population got older, and it shrank. Some males drifted away, to seek females outside the reef. There were few young sharks. Many of the young had smaller brains, because their fathers were from outside the reef. The society began to lose its intelligence, coherence and prosperity. It went into a deep decline.

After a few generations, the enlightened sharks were gone. The reef was still populated by sharks, but they were not intelligent, and they had no concept of shark rights. The males grabbed the females and dragged them to the bottom of the sea to copulate, as they had done in the past.

Could the enlightened sharks have transformed their doomed utopia into a stable pragmatopia?

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