| Version 0.5 (1998) Proofed, 1/28/1998, subject to revision |
I've been meaning to get to sex for a while now; everyone should, at least once in a while. (Let's just get the snickering out of our system right up front).
First I pose the question: What is the Purpose of Sex? I think almost all of my gentle readers will with the best of intentions give answers which at best miss the point. One will quite... not to say "naturally", but in accord with one's normal mental-egoic perspective, give answers having to do with pleasure, love, fulfillment, spiritual growth, etc. Don't feel bad: it is sort of a trick question. Let me illustrate this with another: What is the Purpose of Eating? Again, any answers based on affective states or sensations betray from the biological perspective a sort of pre-Galilean Geocentrism.
Organisms that have no nervous system, presumably no self-awareness, and only chemotaxis and perhaps photophobia as evidence of sensation nonetheless consume and reproduce: in fact they do little else. And lest you object that these single-celled brethren of ours reproduce by fission and are asexual, let me point out that even bacteria are known to slip off and swap the odd gene (randy little buggers!), and that viruses, which are not even technically alive, nevertheless are outright pimps and panderers, carrying genetic material not only between individuals but between species (a Moral Outrage!). Plants stay put, consume, have sex without even meeting their partners (making the one-night stand look like a lifelong commitment), and then often drop dead. We can infer that food and sex came first, long before anything capable of entertaining delusions of grandeur slithered out of the Primordial Soup.
My point is that the pleasure of sex exists to trick us into doing it when the risks of disease, pregnancy, child-support payments and bad relationships might dissuade us, causing our kind to Perish from the Earth. As the Tao says (#5, tr. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English):
Heaven and Earth are impartial;The Species, in its primordial wisdom, also sees the people as straw dogs. Individuals are ephemeral. As far as the species is concerned, sex is clearly about reproduction; likewise, sexual love would appear to have a purpose in furthering pair-bonding and thus increasing the likelihood of two-parent child-care.
They see the Ten Thousand Things as straw dogs.
The wise are impartial;
They see the people as straw dogs.
It is not my intention to suggest that we are identical interchangeable biological units, nor to assert that layers of reality more subtle than the physical do not exist. Indeed, it is my belief that they do, and my hope that their existence may someday be proven by demonstrating their effect on the physical: the non-material will by definition not be directly manifest and material. It is my personal belief that such non-material layers of reality are where the explanation of the individual qualities involved in romance are to be sought, but this is quite outside the scope of the present discussion. My purpose here is to restore the biological, species-centric perspective to the debate, without denigrating the other equally significant dimensions involved.
The Mental-Ego or Talking-Head mind which we normally inhabit and mostly think of as our real individual selves is habitually arrogant and (unsurprisingly) ego-centric. We feel that our bodies exist to carry us around and do stuff for us and give us pleasure: we rarely consider that we are perhaps merely a very clever 'getting-thing' elaborated by the body in order to have more food and sex. We assert that we come from Above and predate and survive the world and the body, all without a shred of evidence. I do not deny the possibility of some sort of non-corporeal soul, but suggest that should such exist, it would not be closely connected with the egoic self, which is ephemeral and rather generic.
The deracination of the mental-egoic perspective seems to be leading to a tendency, at least among those most deracinated and civilized of beings, the Urban Intelligentsia (apologies, but can one dispute this?), to feel that sex, like everything else, should be covered by anti-discrimination and health-and-safety laws, perhaps even affirmative action. Certainly seat-belts and other safety restraints should be employed [You! In the back! Hush now!]. Having lost touch with the Species, only those of us who use science to try to intellectually reconstruct some of this lost instinctual wisdom realise that it is not whim or cultural conditioning that causes men to favor youth and beauty in women or women to favor strength and power in men: it is the species, valiantly trying to keep its genetic soul from slouching into mere anarchy. One imagines that if the well-intentioned liberals had their way, Janet Reno would arrange all of our assignations, making sure the elderly, infirm, malodorous, socially challenged and totally-impaired received the preference they no doubt deserve after countless generations of neglect and blatant discrimination at the hands of those unjustly advantaged with health, beauty, youth, intelligence and power. This kinder, gentler breeding pattern would have the added benefit of giving aid and comfort to that most oppressed of species, the Cockroach: for they would know that their days of scuttling about underfoot in our shadow were short indeed: it should take no more than a handful of generations of such a sexual welfare-state to finally do our kind in.
But let us return from this bizarre mixture of Fantasy Island and Assisted Living (or Love Boat meets General Hospital?) to the allegedly-real world. Sex is not fair. It existed long before the idea of fairness, is still not fair and hopefully never will be. It is perhaps fair in a sort of unfettered free-market capitalist sort of way (which is almost as fair as a State of Nature, except that Lions and Tigers don't have police and armies protecting their advantage): let us hope that this unhindered competition continues unabated, as the alternative is a sort of genetic entropy and heat-death.
While all is fair in love and war, there are accepted rules of warfare, and a Geneva Convention d'Amore might be a good idea. While I am not prepared at this time to venture a guess as to what such a thing should legislate, I will make some general comments about society. It would be sensible and fair if women received more social compensation than they presently do for the hard work which they are uniquely suited to perform in the bearing and raising of children. Oppressive as the old social order was, it generally allowed mothers to stay home and take care of their young children. The present allegedly "liberated" industriocentric order of the day not only "frees" women from the house and children, it more or less throws them out of it, forcing them to attempt to become good little yuppie work-units like their similarly processed-and-packaged mates, leaving their young to industrial child-care. This no doubt benefits stockholders, since twice as much work is now obtained for about the same amount of money, but it clearly is detrimental to young children, thus eventually to us all.
It would be a good thing of society was kinder to women who eventually reach the age when they become, as a woman-friend of mine put it, "invisible to men" (tho' she herself was in fact quite fetching at 51, due to some unusual combination of personal and physical magnetism [Hi Sandy!]), and perhaps also to those legions of the masculine gender commonly referred to as "losers". "Losers", "dogs", and those unfortunate enough to outlive their reproductive prime should probably be treated more kindly than they are, as long as we do not thereby encourage them to reproduce. Conversely, those whom the Cherokee referred to as 'Beloved Women of the Tribe' and who in my little corner of the subculture are called 'Hippie Queens' should be encouraged to have kids early and often, for the benefit of future generations.
As the Iroquois Confederation wisely held, every decision should be judged based on its effect on the seventh generation. This was an extremely sage, species-centric point of view, and one wishes Jefferson had adopted this idea along with the various others that made their way from them into his thinking and our Constitution. From this species-centric long-horizon view, one can readily see that a social policy that revoked not only the right to vote but the right to reproduce from career criminals might be a good thing, and that those recognized for altruism, kindness, community activism and so forth should be encouraged to reproduce. Likewise those who use public assistance not as a temporary helping hand in hard times but as a lifestyle should be discouraged from breeding, whereas those who demonstrate exceptional artistic, scientific or athletic ability should be encouraged to sacrifice some of the time they might otherwise devote to their talent for the good of the species and have some kids. Of course all such measures, like most sensible things, would be politically impossible: the liberals would insist that everyone have an equal chance to reproduce, perhaps with the adjustments outlined above, and the conservatives would insist that only Fundamentalist Christians, preferably wealthy ones, be allowed to. The species would as usual get lost in the shuffle.
Sexual dimorphism is an ingenious strategy whereby a species can effectively expand its adaptation and behavioral range. There are constraints on the degree of differentiation: the sexes must not become so alien that they are unable to find, recognize and mate with each other. Also one can only do so much with differential expression of what is basically the same DNA. Still, a master developmental hormone switching some genes on or off and modulating the rate of expression of others can do quite a bit.
In addition to the obvious primary and secondary sexual characteristics, much differentiation is possible which has no bearing on reproduction but which expands the ecological options of a species. One of the most obvious is size. It is quite common for one sex to be generally larger than the other: usually the male is larger, but sometimes the reverse is true. The advantages of size need not be enumerated, and may be somewhat overrated. The disadvantages are less obvious. A larger organism must in general consume more than a smaller one: a smaller one might better survive a time of famine. Also physiological things do not always scale well: an increase in size could easily produce an exponential increase in stress on some key point while merely doubling its capacity.
Consider hunter-gatherer primates. The males are larger, more muscular, and carry less body-fat. They are generally more aggressive and adventurous and less risk-aversive than the females. There is some suggestion that they have improved hand-eye coordination and long-distance visual acuity, and possibly enhanced spatial cognition. All of these features are highly adaptive for hunting, which is primarily pursued by them.
The females are smaller, carrying more body-fat. In the event of famine, they can out-last the males. Males are highly expendable: as long as there is a male child or two in the care of the females, there is more than enough 'seed-corn' to continue the species even if all the adult males never come back from the hunt. There is evidence that females are advantaged in fine-motor coordination and sense of smell, perhaps useful in the slow but sure gathering of plant foods while the menfolk are off on their all-or-nothing gamble. Females also may be gifted in language processing and social skills, which would be useful both in dealing with children and other females and in taming the larger, more dangerous but socially relatively moronic males.
Sexual differentiation suggests a sort of 'implied social contract' between the different forms of the species produced thereby. Neither sex can be said to be complete in itself; each is carrying the DNA of both sexual forms, but only expressing part of it.
This cannot be said to imply continuous contact between the sexes, tho' such does seem to be more common. There are less-social species such as bears and orangutans where adults generally go their separate ways. Here male and female have contact during mating and while the mother raises the young males, and otherwise keep apart.
Humans are clearly among the social primates. Separatist revanchists of both sexes would do well to reevaluate their positions in light of the history and biology of sexual differentiation and the contract implicit therein.
The evolutionary processes that produce physical sexual dimorphism in support of sexual functional divergence should be expected to produce behavioral differentiation appropriate to support this functional divergence. These processes should have become apparent fairly early in evolution: once sexual dimorphism developed, evolutionary searching should have quickly discovered the advantages of expanding the functional repertoire of the species by sexual differentiation of characteristics having to relation to reproduction itself. From that point onward, one would expect to see not only the ongoing adaptation of the species, but within that process the ongoing adaptation of sexual specialization within the species. Thus what we now refer to as 'sex roles' would be expected to be not fixed but in continual flux. Characteristics closely linked to reproduction would be expected to be highly conserved; those not tied to core sexual functions should vary more freely in response to selective pressures.
The physical component of sexual dimorphism would be expected to change at an evolutionary rate. This rate could be considerably accelerated by a pronounced trend in mate selection: assuming that mate selection is made by females, if they should as a whole develop a marked preference for some trait in the males and mate exclusively with such males, the trait should display rapid amplification.
Sexually divergent behaviors would be expected to change in the same manner as physical characteristics, except in cultural species, meaning humans (and possibly aquatic mammals?). In higher primates, behavior reaches a peak of plasticity and distance from preprogrammed instinctual patterns. Once language, culture and an individual mental-egoic sense of self develop, behavior is the end result of hyper-complex processes and meta-processes which create a large distance between primal drive and expressed behavior. The individual psyche and the social process create not only distance but frequently considerable tension between primal drive, self concept, social role and expressed behavior.
To jump to a concrete example of considerable topicality, let us consider the current ongoing reevaluation of sex roles in human society. Basic concepts that underpin the debate are distributive justice, fairness, equality and so forth. These are noble and laudable values, but they are quite new. They may appear self-evident to mental-egoic rational consciousness, and can possibly be shown to arise naturally from a rational perspective. However, they have no place in "Nature Red in Tooth and Claw" and seem to have developed into their modern form only within the last few hundred years. I am not proposing that they are not valid or pertinent to the debate, only that it should be remembered that the sex roles in question have ancient roots in evolution, and even the more plastic behavioral and psychosocial components developed long before anything like the modern idea of fairness existed. Human sexual differentiation is in continual flux, and the cultural and behavioral components have recently been changing rapidly and can be expected to continue doing so.
Those who write on this topic, and particularly those who advocate particular changes in human sex roles, should consider the history and development of sexual differentiation, and consider the potential dangers of increasing the already substantial distance between the primal, historical and physical roots of the human psyche and the prevailing cultural concepts of how the psychic contents and expressed behavior should be structured. Change should continue, but a sense of history and hopefully an idea of re-racination should enter the discussion. Psychosocial changes that decrease the tension between the evolutionary history of humans and their present highly artificial mode of existence, and do so without being a regression to pre-rational fundamentalism or pre-ethical barbarism, could be expected to be beneficial. Changes tending to increase the already dangerous degree of deracination, alienation and artificiality in modern culture risk pushing an already brittle situation to the point of breakdown and collapse.
These are some notes I scribbled down, just an outline so far.