I’ve left San Sebastian behind, crossed the Spanish/French border which splits the Basque nation in two, and am now walking along the sandy beach of surfer’s paradise Biarritz.  As I search for somewhere to sit down with my Kindle, I notice a pair of bikini clad young blonde girls, around the just legal age, sunbathing in my path. One of them sits up and fixes her hair as she sees me approaching, virtually beckoning me to lay down my sun towel next to hers.  Unfortunately several aggressive looking arab youths are sitting close to them.  I don’t think they are with the girls, but their menacing glares, as they see the attention the girl is giving me, deters me even more than the fact they might both be jail bait.  I decide that I’ve come here to read and relax, and walk on past.

But there doesn’t seem to be many nice relaxing spots to lie down on here today.  All I can see is row after row of Moroccan and Turkish flagged beach towels, marking the territory of hundreds of equally menacing and aggressive looking youths.

I decide that if I’m going to feel like I’m on Istanbul pleasure beach, I may as well sit myself next to some Muslim eye candy, and so I plonk myself down next to a huge group of dusky skinned girls. They look in their late teens, and are all wearing extremely skimpy bikinis, some with tops that are fighting to conceal and constrain their huge breasts.  At least they seemed integrated well enough into French society.

Almost immediately a football lands next to my head.  A tall and muscular Arab youth waves and shouts aggressively for me to throw it back.  Go f*** yourself, I think to myself.  One of the girls gets up and returns it, and I get a good look at her ass too.

About 50 meters in front of us on the crowded beach, I notice a Frenchman and his wife sitting near a trio of Basque jailbait.  While his wife lies sunbathing with her head facing the other way, the husband seems unable to take his eyes off of the butt of one of the girls, who clearly notices and appears to enjoy the attention.  Every time she sees him staring, she lifts it in the air, as well as untying her bikini top, but each time stops just shy of taking it off.

Suddenly, the wife sits up, and as I expected, the husband immediately stops staring at the jailbait, and no doubt tells his wife how disgraceful it is that young girls wear such skimpy outfits on the beach these days.  Hey, wait a minute.  This is France.  Re-wind.  Suddenly, the wife sits up, and the man doesn’t appear to give a f*** and continues staring at the jailbait.  The wife doesn’t look too happy, but c’est la vie, and I still turn my head away in disgust anyway.

But if he had been a hypocrite, it would have served as a much better intro for the book I was reading on my Kindle that day :

Why Everybody (else) is a Hypocrite (Robert Kurzban).

Father’s have been sequestering daughters and older women have been curbing younger women’s sexual expression and behaviour for millenia.  From an evolutionary point of view, sex is fundamental..         (Robert Kurzban)

I’m not going to write much of a review here, actually, because the extreme radical masculist Human-Stupidity has already written an extensive piece (in fact, he recommended it to me).  But essentially, it’s an excellent Evo Pop Psy book that explains how the human brain is hardwired for hypocrisy. The mind has evolved to be ’modular’, which means different bits of the brain can perform their specialised functions almost in complete ignorance (or denial) of each other.  Not only that, but whereas ‘truth’ might be an essential feature of the algorithm running in one part of the brain, it might actually be a hindrance for another part.  This is why male anti-pornography feminists like Kyle Payne can film themselves violating sleeping college girls, only ending their white knight activism when they get arrested for downloading child pornography whilst on parole.  This is why male feminists who scream paedophile at others are most likely simply deflecting internal and external attention away from their own boy rape fantasies or girl guide fetishes.

As I switch off my Kindle and begin walking out of the beach and back to my hotel, a football flies at speed within inches of my face, hitting instead the head of an elderly Basque lady walking hand in hand with her husband, almost knocking her over.  I turn to see the same muscular Arab youth as earlier, staring menacingly and with an evil grin on his face, and with a dozen or so of his equally threatening compatriots at his side.  I once asked an old Basque Gentleman in San Sebastian why there is no trouble from immigrant youths on his side of the border.  ‘ETA would quickly re-home them at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean’ was his reply.  ‘Where the hell are ETA when you need them?’, I thought to myself, as I continued walking back to my hotel.