Friday, July 12, 2019

Is Culture Rather Than Biology Destiny?


Can it be assumed that in the natural world the function of sexuality is procreation? You don’t see too many ethological studies of female primates who display distress from not receiving clitoral orgasms? However, humankind is presented with a whole new host of alternatives by virtue of consciousness which acts as a filter. Idealization and the emotion of love are inventions of the mind that enable instinct to navigate the shoals of awareness.Today, only a minority of the human population associate sex with procreation, sometimes with disadvantageous results when for instance a man refuses to wear a condom or a woman forgets to take the pill. William James wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience, but what's the significance of the varieties of sexual behavior from an evolutionary point of view? Are there any fun-loving bonobos who are gay? Anecdotal evidence would seem to bend over in that direction. But let’s face it, there are no species of animal advanced enough to produce anything like SRS. Greek mythology depicts chimeras, creatures comprising multifarious forms, but there are few stallions capable of transitioning into mares. It’s probably fair to say that homo sapiens invented eroticism since before that, in nature, sex was an unselfconsciousness process occasioned by hormonal events like estrus in dogs and no different from many other bodily functions like ingestion or excretion. How are affects like romantic love to be regarded? Is the paraphernalia and paraphilia associated with human sexuality a form of meta biological process? Is it a product of evolution or merely an act of culture riding on the back of the Shavian life force?

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