Is Sex bad ?
Reply #51 - May 24, 2016, 06:09 AM
:big whooshing noises as a huge portal opens and I ascend from it:
WHO HAS SUMMONED THE FORUM ASEXUAL!?
Now that I have been summoned here from the darkness, I must explain to you the objective truth about sexuality from the perspective you seek, but cannot attain: That of an outsider!
Sexuality has existed since epochs before mankind. For millions of years, the ancestors of humans used sexual reproduction, and they felt no shame. Looking at all of our closest living relatives will clearly demonstrate that. Adam and Eve did not exist, and so we do not know when mankind first realized that they were naked and felt ashamed. Shame seems to have developed to help us better relate to each other in our more complex social networks.
Sexuality, in itself, is not shameful. It is the driving force that has kept our species alive. Like a blind man can only understand the color blue as wavelengths of light falling within a certain numerical range and can't experience the emotions related to it, I can't fully comprehend the reasons why, but I do understand that sex is pleasurable to most of the population. I do understand that the allure of sex must be strong to have kept our species alive because for thousands of years, because there were no sanitary hospitals in which to give birth, there was no effective treatment for many of the ailments that occur during and immediately after pregnancy, and infant/mother mortality was astonishingly high. There must be something extremely powerful about the urge to have sex to have kept our ancestors doing it for so long despite the high mortality associated with reproduction.
And yet, they felt shame. Why? Perhaps because at the same time that strange forces that drove them to form complex social networks, drove them to create cities and empires, expansive trade routes and new forms of transportation, other forces drove them to want to avoid awkward social interactions and pain; perhaps they were afraid that by their own actions, they would destroy the very social order that they had spent so much effort to build. In a world where resources were scarce and famine, sickness, and death, were always looming over their heads, perhaps our ancestors feared that it would be their own strongest passions that would kill them and sought to rigidly control the one part of their lives they thought they could. Perhaps they thought that by controlling society on the smallest scale, on the scale of what two people may or may not do, they could ensure that the gods would favor them in things that were out of their control, in warding off famines and infant mortality and plague.
Sexuality is not, in itself, wrong. Sexuality is a tool used to propagate the species. We have other tools available to us now, but our ancestors didn't, and we are not far enough removed from them in the number of generations that have passed for sexuality to have diminished in the general population. I hate when people say things like "I think there are more asexuals/homosexuals today because..." (insert crazy conspiracy theory: DARPA, women's liberation, chemtrails, you name it). That's not how it works. There are more people being *open* about it today, but from what we can tell based on the populations of other mammals, homosexuality at least is fairly constant in the population. Asexuality is harder to test for because female asexuals in the populations of other species probably won't have less sex than males of their species, and male asexuals probably just ignore sex totally and therefore don't reproduce. However, I think it is wrong to term sex between two animals where one does not seem to want to be having sex as "rape", because rape implies a denial of consent, and as far as we can tell no other animals on earth have the concept of other people/animals having minds separate from their own (basically, although some understand how questions work and will answer questions, none have ever been observed to ask questions, apparently because they don't realize that other individuals have independent experience and thoughts--being able to recognize that other people have experiences, perspectives, and motives separate from one's own seems to be uniquely human).
But yet all that being said, I am openly against sexuality and think that the human race would be better off replacing it with something else. My reasons why are not based on morality or on the inherent uncleanliness of sex. They are based on the fact that humans, apparently uniquely on our planet, have the concept of consent. We have both the concept of us intending to deny consent and others being able to violate that denial of consent. We, seemingly uniquely, can experience long-term suffering as a result of our autonomy being violated. We, seemingly uniquely, feel a need to punish those who cause this harm. We also are the only species on the planet that has such dangerous childbirth--the heads of human babies are larger than the birth canal of human women and all humans who give birth experience permanent scarring, a lot of which is potentially very dangerous to long term health. And we, certainly uniquely, have the option to develop new ways of reproduction. For these reasons, I think it would be objectively better to move reproduction outside the human body into some kind of artificial womb. There are certain logistical problems in the way of that being a realistic solution (at the risk of using technobabble, we'd more than likely need some kind of "bio-mimetic" substance that would be programmable with the DNA of the at least one of the genetic donors/parents so that it wouldn't reject the fetus outright).
I also believe, although on a more subjective level, that removing sexuality would be good for the species as a whole, but I don't believe that trying to force my views on to a population that is made entirely of the descendants of those who used sexual reproduction as their exclusive reproductive strategy for millions of years would provide good results. I think the best thing to do would be to reduce the importance of sexuality by making it an optional accessory instead of a standard feature, and I don't believe that any progress will be made on that front until reproduction is moved outside the human body.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for I have a sonic screwdriver, a tricorder, and a Type 2 phaser.
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Topic: Is Sex bad ?