SEX

Sex has evolved with such relentless power because organisms are generally too dumb to reproduce upon philosophical retrospection alone. The point of sex is to reassort the genetic material and to aid the continuing self-replication of a long double helical molecule called DNA. Our lives are significantly determined by the need to provide convenient reproduction of a molecule few of us have ever seen.

Carl Sagan, Other Worlds

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Sex is the biggest nothing of all time.

Andy Warhol

The sex I'm talking about in this essay is severalfold. I mean sex as "sexual congress or intercourse," but I also mean "sexual difference", that is, the difference in bodies and chemistry between males and females.

Despite Dr. Sagan, it is not that our bodies are too dumb to reproduce without philosophy. It is that they are so intelligent, that is, so ready-wired in their DNA, that most of us don't have to "think" in order to reproduce. It just . . . happens, without our conscious intervention, when most of us are thinking of something else. We just . . . let go, and babies get made.

One of the uses of philosophy, on the other hand -- perhaps its most important use -- may be to help us decide when it is not necessary to reproduce; that is, when it is necessary for us to interfere with our regular programming, and not let go . . .

This will not be always, I imagine, for most of us. Most of us are driven to reproduce ourselves -- with genetic variations, of course -- by our automatic programming, our "natural drives." We're built that way. We fall in love, or lie down in hungry lust. We get pregnant, or get someone else pregnant. Maybe we take steps to end the pregnancy, or -- probably -- we don't.

Because women getting pregnant is what the human race is all about.

The human race exists to get women pregnant and reproduce the species. Most of the rest of why we're here settles around raising children properly so that they will reproduce in turn.

The rest -- culture, struggle, love -- it's all elaboration around this theme. (So I think, anyway.)

Mystiques Around Sex

Around sex, in the sense of mating, hangs many a mystique: the great, exciting, disillusioning mystique of love, for one, which may be just a matter of hormones; the mystique of marriage, for another. Love: "The perfect union of souls . . ." Sounds great, doesn't it?

But as we all know, love isn't simple.

And harder than love is marriage, the attempt, at least nowadays, in most countries, to prolong romantic attraction through a (usually) monogamous relationship. That isn't simple at all. In North America, one-third to one-half of all marriages "fail;" that is, end in divorce.

But others marriages . . . continue though the spark of love is gone. (Cue John Cougar Mellencamp's song "Jack and Diane": "Life goes on / Long after the thrill of living is gone.") For the sake of the children. For the sake of the neighbours. For the sake of parents.

A mathematician once calculated that he could improve the chance of successful marriages. He weighed statistics, and found that if people chose the so-and-soth eligible person, their chances of a successful coupling would increase to about 38%. I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like a very successful rate, improvement though it may be.

So. How do we know whether to marry? How do we know whether this one is The One For Me?

One way has been for males to pick fertile-seeming younger females, and for females to pick wealthy, stable-seeming powerful older males. (Wealth has only entered into the equation in recent centuries; before that, nearly everyone was dirt-poor so the question of marrying up didn't arise.) The average female mates with a male two years older than she; this is a pattern so common it must be hard-wired. (In case it isn't obvious to this point, I believe that human beings are largely wired -- that is, programmed -- animals, like the other animals in nature.)

[To Be Continued and Revised]

Sources

Sagan, Carl. Other Worlds. Toronto, New York, London: Bantam Books, 1975.

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Last modified: 5:46 PM 8/12/2002