The Illusion of Sex

May as well add to my blogs starting day my current stage of development on this most troublsome of problems.

It would be easy if my childhood dream had come true. Meet some utterly irresistable girl, fall madly and completely satisfyingly in love, have endless beautiful sex, get married and live happily ever after.

It didn't happen.

Firstly faced with the object of my hearts desire it seemed to lose all confidence in the plan. Secondly as time progressed I became rather hard to please because there are an awful lot of very nice girls and after the first few teenage crushes you realise that crushes don't mean much. So you move up a notch to real love, but there's a lot of that about too. In Susan Vega's words, its a one time thing it just happens alot. And the worst thing is that once I realise I have got the girl the fun seems to go out of it. As Kierkegaard said (and he does get a quote in Waynes World) you never have stories starting with the walking into the sunset part. Yup real love, marriage, is a whole new ball game I never got to yet, and its not as much fun as dating.

At a Chinese Wedding, where the bride and groom visit each table and people give their own personal speeches, an old gentleman gave a very considered message. Looking at his wife he said that he had given up a very great deal to get married, but after all these years in retrospect he can say that in the balance it was worth it. To me that is the truth that marriage is not a wonderland of emotion and happiness, it is - in the balance - worth it. Which means conversely that its not a must have either. Which frees me now to write of the brutal facts behind all this.

If you look at life in general, sex is almost ubiquitous. From single celled organisms, to mosses, to plants, to animals, sex can be found everywhere. Male and Female is the pattern where found, one carrying the large cell (egg) and one carrying the smaller cell which is often mobile (sperm). Ferns for example reproduce using mobile sperms which must swim to the egg although both are produced by the same parent. Marijuana plants have separate sexes in contrast. You only need to look out of the window in spring to see birds mating and then setting about making nests. Sex and reproduction are far from unique to humans, and the drives that we have inherited go back to the dawn of time and over a billion years ago. Feeling sexual impulses then is a piece of deep archaeology linking us to every organism that has reproduced to maintain the line until ourselves.

Humans have long had a problem with the relationship between themselves and their ancient inherited self. It is childishly obvious that we share almost everything with animals. We eat and defaecate, we have eyes and noses and ears, 4 limbs, 5 fingers on each limb, lungs and hearts and brain, we reproduce. What else needs to be the same before we'll accept the similarity. We chose to be different however because we are intelligent and we have freedom of action, choice and morality. And that is where sex becomes a problem. We seem to be able to accept the eating and breathing bit in common with animals. Defaecating is a bit of a problem but we can keep that private. Sex however is shared and so we have to admit that really we're an animal underneath it all.

However I do believe that humans have a higher aspect. Not so much something that separates us from animals as something that separates us from other people. There are those people who can only rise to the instructions of their biological self and there are other people who can be inspired by more subtle things, arts in their purer forms, and above that pure human relationships - what some call spirituality. Spiritual experience is free from the demands of biological existence, it is often therefore in conflict with it.

The struggle that lay within me was trying to work out how important sex was. Popular and youth culture would have us believe it was everything. But really its like eating, biologically important but its not going to change your life. Personally I don't think the world needs more kids and so its not biologically important either. If the urgency of reproduction is simply due to the evolutionary fact that organisms that didn't have that urgency were left behind by more voracious reproducers then again its a legacy thing from millions of years ago and not really relevant to my life.

So while its a damn exciting thing its an illusion that won't do anything very important for you.

The arguments can then get more detailed. Sitting on the tube once this gorgeous girl gets on in a short skirt and sits right opposite. She had fantastic legs and while I looked at them I got to thinking. Maybe she is looking at my legs and having similar thoughts. Great ;-) But then another thought came. I know my legs and I don't think they are that special what would she want with them. But! I wonder if she is thinking the same! She sleeps with her legs, caresses them in the shower, shaves them probably and I bet she has never been turned on by them. She has the 24/7 and she doesn't think they are special - so why should I? Further why am I in such a hurry to get my hands on them? That is the illusion of sex. Being a man my biological impulses (which aren't the smartest things having evolved from protozoans in ancient seas) are forcing me to see her as fantastic material to make babies with. My more inquisitive side - which is more immediate not having been billions of years in the making - and also not driven by the game of evolution has seen the way that game works, which rather gave me the upper hand.

On the social level the illusion had strange effects too. A bloke in the pub says "you look like a bloody mess mate". Its fine. The girl you want to sleep with says the same and you're immediately in front of a mirror checking yourself out. The only real difference between the two people however lies in their groin. The bloke has a penis and the girl has a vagina. On the strength of that we take what they say in completely different ways. Its like when pop singers used to talk politics - how does being a successful muscian possible qualify you for an opinion on politics? How does having a vagina possible qualify you for more opinion than having a penis. But you tell that to your sex drive when you want a shag! That is the illusion.

A further more serious reason why sex is a problem is to do with the nature of desire. When you want something you tend to want to take it. The problem with sex is that the desire is for another person. With sexual desire going back to ancient seas the idea that sometime in the future the objects of desire might not want it was missed out. The illusion of sex can make us misview a human as an object of desire and if that goes too far there is a very big problem!

They say that in loving relationships sex is something that we offer to the partner for their pleasure. However I used to do that and its spiritually enhancing but its not "horney". The other thing is that if two people are at the stage where they are offering sex to one another to make the partner happy then neither are actually taking so they may as well pack up sex and go for the full spiritual relationship (platonic). We tend to want sex so we can take what we want. A balance of give and take probably works out best, but ultimately I believe it fits the desire model of people becoming objects of the others desire - and that is basically ugly. We all become ugly when we give into the illusions of biological function, especially when you have glimpsed how beautiful we could be spiritually. But its easy to get cynical and give up ever wishing for something better.

That is exactly what I'm on this blog to discover and so its a good place to put the pen down for now.