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?
One problem with this argument to bring the clitoris into your functional theory of human sexuality–it doesn’t track all that well with human history. For much of human history, women have been both dependent on and under the control of men such that their sexual satisfation and degree of stimulation was rather beside the point.
Comment by djw — May 6, 2005 @ 9:55 am
Actually, 90% of human history was the Stone Age. Since it’s unrecorded we don’t know a huge amount about it, but societies of that type that have survived into the modern era usually have more female autonomy than the agrarian societies that came later. (And it’s questionable whether women even in those societies were really as powerless as all that, but that’s another subject.)
Comment by Camassia — May 6, 2005 @ 10:00 am
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 write: “A gay man who has sex goes through the same orgasm that usually inseminates a woman, and presumably enjoys it in the same way.”
And a lesbian who orgasms with her partner? Analogy doesn’t seem to hold as well.
Comment by Hugo — May 6, 2005 @ 11:50 am
Am I too optimistic in thinking that most people can make that distinction?
I’m afraid so. I think people can make the distinction, but that they are unwilling to do so. People think that we can re-make the world to be what we want to believe that it ought to be. So they believe that the invention of the birth-control pill changed everything, and they believe that we can change abortion from being wrong to being right simply by changing our minds about it.
But that doesn’t change what sex is for, and it doesn’t change the psychic makeup of men and women which defines what sex means to us and what makes for healthy or unhealthy ways of dealing with it. But people don’t want to be told that the “modern” way of thinking about and living our sexuality is a bunch of hooey; so they refuse to make the sorts of distinctions that you are being too optimistic about.
Comment by Chris Jones — May 7, 2005 @ 12:41 pm
My hair was designed to keep my head warm, and yet i use it for decoration.
Hair on my legs again was used to keep me warm, but I scrape that off to be beautiful.
Point being? I don’t care what it was “designed” for (even though I don’t particularily like the susage of that word), it’s not what I’m using it for now.
Sex may have been designed to propogate the species. I use my reproductive organs to enjoy sex, and NOT have kids.
Comment by Antigone — May 8, 2005 @ 1:48 pm
Camassia, I’m not sure how you mean the term “swinging” in your last paragraph. If you intend it to mean “freewheeling” or “unencumbered”, as opposed to “ready to have sex with anyone with a pulse” (which is how I understand the usual meaning of ’swinging’, but perhaps that isn’t the universal meaning of the term), I gotta say as a “swinging single woman” who took the attitude of “don’t want a baby right now, but if I get pregnant I accept it”, I take issue with the direction of your assumptions.
Is reproduction linked to sex? Unquestionably. Is reproduction the main function of sex in human beings? No. If sexual desire in human beings were limited to periods of “heat”, or fertiliy, then I would say yes. Human beings have emotional and psychological needs above and beyond that of other mammals, and our sex drives are a part of meeting those needs as well, as messy, incomplete, or fraught with drama as that may be. Our sexual desire and drive is not limited to times of fertility, which leads me to believe that in the Grand Scheme of things, sex is about far more than reproduction.
Which brings me to another point. To say that the main point of sex is reproduction, that anything else is just a side order, seems to me to take an implicit assumption of women’s role(s), and inherent limitations. Translation? Throw the old broads on the scrap heap; trade the “forty” in on “two twenties” as the common mid-life crisis phrase around here puts it. I’m a woman. I have no intention of being dead from the waist on down during or after menopause. It is not in my interests as a woman to take a view of sex that inherently puts me in the back seat, or the trunk, or by the side of the road. There is a historically negative view of women, our bodies, and our sexuality…and especially our sexual desire. We ignore that at our own peril. That female orgasm isn’t essential for successful reproduction has and is still seen by certain men as being unnecessary, or even a sign that the clitoris is a mere vestigial organ, or worse.
I am not well read on biblical or theological matters, I’ll admit. But I can’t help but wonder how much of the negative view of female sexuality that became entrenched among Christians actually comes from pre-Christian Greek and Roman sources? Not thinking here of the pagan eaerth-mother spirituality practiced by peasants in the Mediterranean (i.e., my people!), but of the ceremonial, official State-sponsored paganism of the Roman empire. Thoughts?
Comment by La Lubu — May 8, 2005 @ 3:27 pm
Sorry for the typos; only two-thirds of the comment screen shows up in my browser, so I couldn’t correct them! (and yes, when I enlarge the window, the same proportions remain, so I still can’t access the screen arrows).
Comment by La Lubu — May 8, 2005 @ 3:31 pm