6 Reader Responses

1. pete Says:
   May 4th, 2006 at 3:54 am

   I really like this idea. Then again, I find myself incredibly intrigued by most of your posts . . and I doubt I’m alone in saying that. But it seems like when truth is in abundance and interesting ideas circulate freely throughout the ether (as it does on your site regularly), we start to take it for granted and don’t appreciate just how important places like these our on the net. I guess what I’m getting at is that I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say that I’m really grateful this page exists. Also, I guess I personally appreciate, as ze frank says, “you thinking so I don’t have to.”

2. Gnomely Says:
   May 4th, 2006 at 1:13 pm

   Do you think self-gratification i.e masturbation could possibly be an interference to spiritual reception? I went almost 7 weeks with out self-gratification and my head almost exploded and my dreams were so freaking sexually weird- it was far out.

   I know if Jesus was in my presence I would not want to do anything sexual in front of him. I guess what I am trying to also say is sexual desire something to be overcome if one wants to connect to the mystical source?

3. Tim Boucher Says:
   May 4th, 2006 at 1:39 pm

   I think that’s a great question, although I think it could probably be broken into two parts in terms of masturbation, versus sex with a partner. Honestly, I don’t know the answer, but I’d love to hear people’s thoughts and experiences with celibacy, etc. Obviously, some mystical traditions totally deny all of this stuff (monastic, asceticism, etc) while others completely indulge in it (wilhelm reich, tantra, and other forms of sex magick). Heck, I mean, “connecting to the source” itself has completely sexual overtones, so who knows.

   Anybody else have thoughts on this?

4. JK Says:
   May 5th, 2006 at 12:30 am

   I wonder why it is that contemplations of all things sex, both lude and serious, arouses so much spectulation as to: “should I be doing this or not?”. I am not trying to argue, but why did the speculative fear of doing something sexual in front of Jesus come up in your mind Gnomely? I ask only because, how possibly could the creator of the universe possibly care whether our mortal shells were encased in clothing or not for that matter or where we place our hands when we are alone or where the mind wanders when the idea dawns upon it? Perhaps were our livers on the outside of our bodies, or lungs, as our genitalia or large openings therein are, we would be expressing the same shame and fear about those organs. Yet they are not and by the same token we feel no shame about other functions that are just as natural as “doing something sexual”. The organs are there for a purpose are they not?

   Sometimes I wonder where the pure visual fascination of the female body for the male comes from. I also wonder from where we get the idea that sex is a kind of a moral gray area, sacred from birth, but for the woman, ultimately debauched as “age and use” set in. Why are girls so intensely and usefully graceful at one point in their lives, usually when their innocence is still young and intact, yet as they go along in life and in far more dramatic fashion than what happens to a male, leaves them in relative barren destitution? Why do human males treat their sisters so?

   Yet it comes upon us as an instinct. Even the most egalitarian and compassionate among us boys cannot help but be inflicted with lust for some and revulsion for another — depending on how aged the human vessel is. Why? Why is sexuality, beauty, only just so skin deep? To Jesus wouldn’t it be infinitely more deep?

   Frankly, I think that “sin” as we know it is another three letter word: LIE. Which is what Jesus came here, as he maintained, to save us from whiling away our days worrying about. In many ways, I wonder whether Jesus just wasn’t the first evolutionary psychologist/biologist:

   THE QUESTION ARISES: Why is sexual fidelity so rare, even among animals that are socially monogamous? For most evolutionary biologists, the real question is: Why do socially mated females have E.P.C.’s? There has never been much doubt about why males do. Males make sperm, which are extraordinarily small, are produced in amazingly large numbers, and require essentially no biologically mandated follow-through in order for reproduction to succeed. As a result, the optimal tactic for males is typically to be easily stimulated, not terribly discriminating as to sexual partners, and generally willing — indeed eager — to fertilize as many eggs as possible.

   As the sociobiologist Robert Trivers first pointed out in 1972, and as subsequent theoretical and empirical research has shown, males tend to follow a “mixed reproductive strategy,” whereby they establish a mateship with a designated female (and perhaps assist in nest building, territorial defense, care of the young, and so forth insofar as those activities increase their reproductive success) while also making themselves available for E.P.C.’s with other females, whom they will not assist.

   To be sure, males can be expected to be at least minimally discriminating, because there may be costs associated with too much sexual gallivanting: A careless Lothario might be attacked, for example, by an outraged “husband.” Or, while seeking his own E.P.C.’s, a philanderer might be cuckolded by other males having similar designs on his mate, unavoidably left unguarded.

   But on balance, it seems likely that the payoff to males engaging in successful E.P.C.’s would be great. That is especially true in species in which the males do some child care, because the successful philanderer thus uses other males’ energy to raise his offspring.

   When it comes to females, on the other hand, the evolutionary advantage of E.P.C.’s is much less clear. After all, although eggs are fewer and more costly to produce than sperm, most eggs are fertilized while most sperm is wasted. (Evolution has produced males who make lots of sperm for just that reason.)

   If a female already has a mate to fertilize her eggs, what does she gain from an E.P.C.? In species where the male helps care for the young, the unfaithful female might risk the loss of her mate’s help. Yet the DNA data are unequivocal: Female animals, in species after species, are sexual adventurers in their own right. Why?

   It appears that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. For some species, notably certain lizards and insects, there appears to be a payoff in increasing the genetic diversity of one’s offspring by copulating with multiple partners. For some birds, there may be an immediate benefit –such as being fed by one’s lover. In many cases, the payoff appears to be more indirect, via genetic benefits accruing to the “out-of-wedlock” offspring. By mating with males who are especially fit and/or who possess secondary sexual traits that are particularly appealing to other females, would-be mothers apparently can increase the fitness as well as the eventual sexual attractiveness of their offspring. (Among barn swallows, for example, a deeply forked tail is a sexually desirable male trait. Females paired to males whose tails are not especially impressive in this regard are prone to mate on the sly with those neighboring males whose tails have been made more forked by researchers.)

   The anthropologist Sarah Hrdy has suggested that among primates in particular, females solicit E.P.C.’s in order to buy a kind of tolerance from their extra-pair sexual partners: Males of many species (including langurs, chimpanzees, and certain macaques) often kill offspring they have not fathered. By copulating with males from outside the troop, females could well be bribing them to avoid such violence toward offspring that might be their own.

   NEXT STOP, Homo sapiens. Social conservatives like to point out what they see as threats to “family values.” But they don’t have the slightest idea how great that real threat is, or where it comes from. Monogamy is definitely under siege, not by government, declining morals, or some vast homosexual conspiracy — but by our own evolutionary biology. Infants have their infancy. And adults? Adultery.

   To begin with, we probably never occupied an Edenic paradise of one-to-one fidelity. The evidence is as follows: First, men are significantly larger than females, a pattern consistently found among polygynous species. From deer to seals to primates, the harem-keeping sex is the larger one, because competition among harem keepers rewards those who are larger and brawnier. Second, around the world, men are more violent than women (see Evidence No. 1; it avails little in acquiring a large number of mates for a male to be physically intimidating unless he is also inclined to make use of his assets). Third, girls become sexually mature earlier than do boys — another tell-tale sign of polygyny, because the intense competition among harem keepers conveys an evolutionary payoff for the “keeping” sex to delay maturation until individuals are large, strong, and possibly canny enough to have some chance of success. And fourth, before the cultural homogenization that came with Western colonialism, more than three-quarters of all human societies were polygynous.

   But it’s one thing to conclude that our biology favors polygyny, and quite another to decide that most people, most of the time, were either keepers or members of harems. The likelihood is that only a few succeeded at polygyny, just as only a small proportion of females were chosen (or coerced). The great majority of people — of both sexes –undoubtedly practiced monogamy, at least its social variety. As to sexual monogamy, the situation is obscure, but — given the high frequency of E.P.C.’s among ostensibly monogamous animals — it is hard not to suspect something similar among Homo sapiens. Certainly, the intense sexual jealousy and competitiveness among human beings strongly suggest that adultery has a long history in our species. (Why would our biology have outfitted us with such traits if utter fidelity were the rule?) In this regard, moreover, testicles have a tale to tell.

   Gorillas, despite their large bodies, have comparatively tiny testicles. Those of chimpanzees, by contrast, are immense. The reason for the difference seems clear: Gorilla males compete with their bodies, not their sperm. Once a dominant silverback male has achieved control over a harem of females, he is pretty much guaranteed to be the only male who copulates with them. Chimps, by contrast, experience a sexual free-for-all, with many different males often copulating in succession with the same adult female. As a result, male chimpanzees compete with their sperm, and they have evolved big testicles to produce large quantities of it. In most species, the ratio of testicle size to body size is a good predictor of how many sexual partners an animal is likely to have.

   How, then, do human beings rate in this regard? The testicles of Homo sapiens are, relatively speaking, larger than those of gorillas but smaller than those of the champion chimpanzees. The most likely interpretation? Human beings are less certain of sexual monopoly than are gorillas, but are not as promiscuous as chimps. Another way of putting it: We are (somewhat) biologically primed to form mateships, but at the same time, adultery is no stranger in our evolutionary past.

   Given how much we have been learning about extra-pair matings among animals, and considering the current availability of DNA testimony, it is remarkable how rarely genetic paternity tests have been run on human beings. On the other hand, considering the inflammatory potential of the results — as well as, perhaps, a hesitancy to open such a Pandora’s box — Homo sapiens’ reluctance to test for paternity may be sapient indeed. Even before DNA fingerprinting, blood-group studies in England found that the purported father of a child is the real father about 94 percent of the time; that means that in six out of every hundred cases, someone else is. In response to surveys, 25 to 50 percent of American men report having had at least one episode of extramarital sex. The numbers for women are perhaps a bit lower, but in the same ballpark.

   Many people already know quite a lot — probably more than they would choose — about the disruptive effects of extramarital sex. It wouldn’t be surprising if a majority would rather not be informed about its possible genetic consequence, extramarital fatherhood. Maybe ignorance is bliss.

   The poet Ezra Pound once observed (somewhat self-servingly) that artists are the “antennae of the race.” Those antennae have long been twitching about extramarital affairs. If literature is any reflection of human concerns, infidelity has been one of humankind’s most compelling interests, long before biologists had anything to say about it. The first great work of Western literature, Homer’s Iliad, recounts the consequences of Helen’s adultery. And in the Odyssey, we learn of Ulysses’ return from the Trojan War, whereupon he slays a virtual army of suitors, each of whom was trying to seduce his faithful wife, Penelope. (By contrast, incidentally, Ulysses himself had dallied with Circe the sorceress, but was not considered an adulterer as a result. The double standard is ancient and by definition unfair; yet it, too, seems firmly rooted in biology.)

   Monogamy’s failures are recorded in many great works of literature: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. More recently, John Updike’s marriage novels — not to mention scores of soap operas and movies — describe a succession of affairs. And then there is the small matter of real life.

   As G. K. Chesterton once observed about Christianity, the ideal of monogamy hasn’t so much been tried and found wanting; rather, it has been found difficult and often left untried. Or at least, not tried for very long.

   There is no question about monogamy’s being natural. It isn’t. But at the same time, there is no reason to conclude that adultery is unavoidable, or that it is good. “Smallpox is natural,” wrote Ogden Nash. “Vaccine ain’t.” Animals, most likely, can’t help “doing what comes naturally.” But humans can. A strong case can even be made that we are never so human as when we behave contrary to our natural inclinations, those most in tune with our biological impulses.

   In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud argued that civilization is founded on the repression of instincts. It now seems clear that one of those instincts leads us away from monogamy. Whether we choose to follow, on the other hand, is up to us.

   (source)

5. slomo Says:
   May 5th, 2006 at 7:46 am

   The subject of sex is caught up in issues of libido or chi or whatever other word you have for something like “life force”. Even in tantra and sex magick there is an effort to channel the energies that sex releases, and in doing so the gratification received from the sex is somewhat (or entirely) circumscribed.

   So, it would seem, in all religious or spiritual traditions (ranging across the spectrum) there is something to be said about how one uses sex energy. My casual observations suggest that state-sponsored religions across the globe seem to prohibit most forms of sexual expression, probably both for the mundane purpose of reducing the chaotic consequences of “free sex” but also to channel libido into forms of energy that can be used for the state. On the other hand, the secret and/or illicit spiritual traditions try to harness the energy to be put to use for personal ends.

6. Tim Boucher Says:
   May 5th, 2006 at 12:21 pm

   Really interesting point, Slomo - the whole thing about channeling sex energy. I remember somewhere seeing an old health poster or something from several decades ago that was talking about getting boys involved in building and craft projects to keep them from masturbating…