I think the most astute comment about the whole religion-and-sex debate came via email from my mother:

I interpret this latest debate as coming from the fact that you’re essentially standing on Mars, looking at the human species from a long distance. Most of your readers are looking at their own personal experiences of sex and stating what it does for them as individuals. …

I think your newest post closes with an excellent question that makes your point clear, but most people still want to tell the stories that they have developed about their own sexual behavior (I don’t mean this in a critical way; we all have to develop stories about what we do so we make sense to ourselves). As complex beings, we have complex feelings, behavior, and stories about sex.

Yeah. I’m from the sort of background that is accustomed to looking at people as if they were lab specimens — in fact, I think I first learned that from my mother! — but I realize that for most people that is very disquieting. At the same time, though, my whole foray into religion has arisen from the limitations of that sort of viewpoint. And I’ve been hanging around these pomo Christians long enough to know that I am not, in fact, a Martian, and my own subjective experience is no doubt influencing me as much as everybody else.

Which is a long way of leading up to the fact that although my opinion hasn’t really changed I’m not interested in fighting this battle endlessly. I never really meant for it to blow up this way in the first place, when I left the brief comment on Hugo’s blog. And you all seem to be having a good time chattering amongst yourselves, so carry on without me.

So I dashed off a pretty snippy post Friday evening after a stressful day at work, went off to a very nice weekend of not thinking about the blog at all, and came back today thinking, “What have I done?” I’ve been visited by a whole bunch of the Hugo comment posse and I’m not going to have time to respond to them all today, or tomorrow either actually, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to put everybody off. (I only have a bit of time now because our office computer system just crashed.) But glancing over some of the comments it seems that I’m not adequately communicating what I’m trying to say, which is not very surprising since I’m kind of discovering what I’m trying to say as I’m trying to say it.

One thing I’m not saying is that, because the main purpose of sex is reproduction, the emotional and sensational aspects of it are therefore trivial. In fact I think that they’re very important, but they’re important because of their connection to reproduction. I am, in fact, not trying to pit the one against the other, but to argue that they’re organically connected.

It’s pretty common in our society to think that “sex is for reproduction” means taking a dry clinical approach to it. I remember some years ago someone wrote to Cecil Adams asking, “Do animals ever have sex just for fun?” To which Cecil replied, “Strictly speaking, animals always do it for fun.” It was an obvious answer, but I know why the question was asked: when we look at animals and see they’re mating in order to reproduce, it’s easy to think that they look at themselves the same way, and their sex is all business. But in fact, there’s abundant reason to believe that animals, especially ones with complex social lives like our own, experience sex subjectively much the same way we do, complete with affection, jealousy, turn-offs, and so on. (Nor are we the only animals who have nonprocreative sex.) And seeing as humans may have only really figured out the connection between sex and childbearing at the dawn of agriculture, reproduction went along quite well for humanity for quite a while on subjective emotions alone.

So, does all this really make a difference then? If it worked for the entire paleolithic, why can’t we keep going on instinct? Certainly a lot of people lump along fine that way, and really, I’d rather my parents had me because they found it emotionally fulfilling than that they thought it was their genetic destiny. But I think the reason this bothers me is that a lot of what passes for sexual liberation these days isn’t so much a freeing of primal instincts as an imposition of the conscious assumption that sex will not lead to reproduction unless we want it to. If you think about a hypothetical Stone Age society that didn’t understand conception, babies would have appeared more or less unpredictably at any time, so society had to be prepared to receive them at any time. Our own society is essentially the opposite: we assume we have control, so much of our environment is structured in such a way that the sudden arrival of a baby would range from massive disruption to disaster.

The number of unplanned pregnancies out there shows that our control is not really that perfect. But beyond the practical problems this causes, it also indicates to me that the reproductive system’s old agenda is still marching along, despite the fact that the conscious mind keeps thinking it’s in charge. And the reproductive system consists not just of the pelvic organs but large parts of the brain, without which the pelvic organs would never get used. The agenda is part of you, of course, but it’s not really in your interest as an individual, but as a link in a chain that began long before you and will continue long afterwards. Which is, I think, why people’s own sexual feelings and behavior keep surprising them.

So to get back to Hugo’s original topic, which is whether “genital expression” is permissible before marriage, it puts a question in my mind: is it really about expressing your feelings through your genitals, or are your genitals expressing their own mandate through your feelings? And is that mandate, for your life right now, friendly or hostile?

Hugo is still not convinced:

I’m prepared to believe that heterosexual sexual intercourse cannot ever be fully separated from reproduction. But to say that all sex is essentially a variation on heterosexual coitus seems a huge stretch to me in a way that it doesn’t to you, apparently. Genital expression takes many forms, of which one is reproductive and most are not. To me, it seems to defy what we know about the immense diversity of the way in which people are sexual to say that all forms of sexual activity are imbued with reproductivity.

You know, this reminds me that one reason I don’t like the “genital expression” phrase is that it carries the distinct aroma of the Freudian hydraulic model of sex. Libido, in this model, is an amorphous drive that builds up within a person and must be expressed, or it will subverted to possibly bad things. There are many ways to express it. Procreative sex is one possible way, but it’s pretty much on par with the others. Hugo didn’t actually say all that, but that’s what I keep hearing in the word “expression”: the really important event here is that you’re uncorking yourself.

What’s wrong with this? Let’s start from the top. In order to have drives, feelings or experiences of any kind, first you have to exist. And you would not exist if it weren’t for a sex act. Not just any sex act, but that sex act. I suppose you’d say you owe your existence to God ultimately, but if he was ever really in the business of creating people from clay, he is no longer. He chooses to create people by way of a sex act. So since you can’t do or be anything without existing, it does not seem like a stretch to say that existence — i.e. reproduction — is the most important purpose of sex. Without existence, nothing else would matter.

I guess in today’s overcrowded world, bringing in new people may not seem very important or even desirable. But we were not created for an overcrowded world. And even now, all eight billion of us who live here are doomed to die. There’s only one thing that will keep humanity going from now till Judgment Day, and it ain’t a good blow job.

That’s why I can’t accept the idea that sex is somehow “bigger” than just procreation. What could be bigger, anyway? If God or evolution or whatever created a system where existence itself depends on a particular sex act, I’m taking that as a pretty big sign that that’s the reason sex exists. The fact that there are other ways to get off doesn’t mean that sex is therefore bigger than reproduction; it seems more likely that reproduction is actually big enough to encompass an awful lot.

I have more to say, and I’m still pondering the homosexuality issue, but I think I’ve done enough damage for one day.

I’ve been debating semantics with Hugo, and as is often the case when you start debating semantics, the conversation has expanded to rather larger subjects. The disputed phrase itself needs a certain amount of unpacking, but first I feel I should clarify my assertion that sex exists for reproduction. I know that claim has been used by others for a lot of weird logic, so it tends to get people’s hackles up.

I think it’s possible to say that sex performs a reproductive function for the species as a whole, without saying every single organ and act is reproductive. Hugo points out that the clitoris has no reproductive function, and on an individual level, he’s right. There are, after all, societies in Africa where women’s clitorises are chopped off and yet they manage to reproduce. But if women did not have clitorises and their accompanying orgasms, would there have been as much sex in human history, and as many of us now? Maybe not.(I’m reminded here of a Renaissance-era doctor’s assertion that if women didn’t have orgasms they’d never put up with the pains of childbirth.)

Or think of two hypothetical birds. They meet, do a mating dance, mate, build a nest, and raise chicks together. Not all of that behavior relates directly to conception, and I’m sure their little bird-brains aren’t actually thinking about conception. But we have no trouble saying it is all in the service of reproduction. Yet when it comes to ourselves, we are strangely reluctant to admit that our analogous behavior — dancing in nightclubs, having sex, marrying, buying a house together, etc. — is also in that service. The fact that it doesn’t always end up with children doesn’t undermine this. I’m sure the birds aren’t always fertile either. But it’s that sort of behavior that propagates the species, and if that were not so, we would not want to do it.

By the same token, I am perfectly happy to say that some people are born sterile or gay or asexual, and that there may be nothing wrong with this. I think this only disturbs the sex-is-for-reproduction thesis if you assume that God meant to create the world either in platonically regular forms, or without any pattern at all. But I do think, at risk of alienating some readers perhaps, that homosexuality is derived from heterosexuality, and not vice versa. A gay man who has sex goes through the same orgasm that usually inseminates a woman, and presumably enjoys it in the same way. Gay couples can only raise children that were heterosexually conceived. This is not to diminish their feelings for each other, but just to point out that their existence doesn’t remove the basic purpose of human sexuality.

What difference does all this make? I’m somewhat at variance here with both sides of the argument here as it’s usually presented, which is about whether sex and reproduction should be linked. From my point of view, they are linked. A bit of technological monkeying isn’t going to change us into a type of organism that’s never existed before, one for whom sex is not fundamentally about reproduction. The question is whether we’re going to deal with it in a reasonable way, or be in denial about it.

That does not mean it’s going to be reproductive in every particular case. But I think there’s a world of difference between a couple saying, we don’t want a baby now, but if one comes along we’re prepared to accept it, and a swinging single woman who’d greet a baby as enthusiastically as an invasion of Huns. Am I too optimistic in thinking that most people can make that distinction?