The Biology of Sex
Dr. N. Burr Furlong (burr@artifex.org)
Sex was invented some 4 billion years ago by evolving bacteria as a means for shaking up and rearranging a cells instructions for making more cells. (Actually, it has only been known for about the last 50 years that even tiny little bacteria do it, so to speak). The process evidently had great survival value since it has been adopted by almost all life forms with, shall we say, a great deal of enthusiasm. The enthusiasm factor is not incidental. Nature seems to have evolved inducements to practice sex, presumably as incentives to keep her species involved in surviving. The most powerful and effective of these inducements in higher animals, who we surmise would otherwise be too stupid or selfish to bother to have offspring, provide for intense stimulation, during sex, of pleasure centers in the brain. These centers are located in the part of the brain known as the limbic system -- there we find neuronal activities associated with basic drives (the so called four f's): feeding, fighting, fearing et cetera. This part of the brain is dominant in reptiles; whereas, in mammals its functions are overlaid and modified by the cerebral cortex -- the reasoning center.We human beings are unique among the mammals in several ways which complicate the sex picture: Firstly, we take longer to reach sexual maturity than other species but, then, take even longer to reach intellectual maturity and social independence. Secondly, once sexually mature, we lack a mating season. Thirdly, we are capable of broadening the purpose of the sex act to social ends other than procreation. Thus, as humans reach their middle teens, they achieve the functional capability of producing children while still emotionally and mentally children themselves. The long rearing process often produces impatience with society's slow and restrictive ways before we have become sensible enough to appreciate the full consequences of imitating adult behavior. The absence of a rutting season (or rather its continuous presence) makes sexual adventurism particularly risky for teenagers, especially for those who have been kept from the knowledge or means to prevent nature's most natural outcome.
But the real focus of an adult's or a teen's attitude toward sex should be on the proper place and role of sex in the whole range of human relations. Placing the rutting behavior of lizards in a position that governs our social behavior nullifies 300,000,000 years of evolution. To look upon sex as the main reason for wanting to be with another person is really a confession that we have a severely restricted interest repertoire and an admission that we evidently have little else worth sharing.
O.K. then, suppose you've fooled yourself into thinking that when it comes to sex you're cool; take it or leave it; no big deal. Nature, however, has played an unanticipated trick on us in this regard. The pleasure stimuli that go along with the fourth f are some of the most concentrated and mind-numbing we can experience. There is a very great craving to repeat the pleasure as often as conditions permit. This helps explain why crocodiles go to the bother to have sex despite the extremely difficult anatomical problem posed by their muscular tails, and why lions, for example, may mate continuously for three or four days at a time. These animals find each other's purpose in the one pleasure that they are capable of sharing.
Here the third of our human sex peculiarities comes into play. No matter what your romantic fantasies would lead you to believe, once two people have enjoyed the intimacy and mental fireworks of intercourse, it takes center stage and represents a significant barrier to any further growth in mutual understanding, appreciation or feeling of worthiness.
This power of sex to freeze social and spiritual growth is at the core of most of society's restrictions on sexual behavior. Couples committed to live together by marriage have an opportunity and obligation to develop mutual understandings in addition to those of sexual pleasure. Failure to do so (for example, to have gotten married just to make it less complicated to have sex) is probably the cause of many divorces. Casual dating certainly does not provide stability to transform sex into love, and casual sex is a biological oxymoron.
So teenagers need to make mature decisions about their sexuality and its place in their lives. Anyone intelligent enough to have read this far in this essay is smart enough to figure out that theres a lot more to human relations than how well or how often you can hump up your limbic wow center. Don't take any chances of missing out on the joy of those 100 billion cortical cells that are responsible for creating and expressing the infinite variety of your wholeness.