Sperm Count: Goodbye to Eden

"The Garden of Earthly Delights" by Hieronymus Bosch

Will mankind be condemned to an existence of loving sex? Is that the next rung on the evolutionary ladder. Taking a Darwinian survival of the fittest point of view, it would seem that those men and women who fit the guidelines of the affirmative consent statutes recently passed in both California and New York will find that their genes are naturally selective, while those who aren’t turned on to reciprocity in sex and prefer S&M, B&D, humiliation and a thousand other paraphilias, and have read the Story of O and Return to the Chateau so many times that they can reiterate the hot passages in their sleep not to speak of The 120 Days of Sodom (which was the basis for Pasolini’s masterpiece of degradation Salo) and jerk off to the scene in Eyes Wide Shut where Nicole Kidman is sitting on the toilet, will find that their brand of barbaric Animal House sexuality, with its worn copies of Adam, Sir, Hustler and Club International is shunted to the side. There's a even a mathematical formula for altruism famously offered by the evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton which has added one more nail to the coffin of sexual inequity with its labyrinth of delicious Catholic shame, documented so amply in the recent blockbuster hit Spotlight. Gone are the days when it was as Mel Brooks elegantly said “good to be the king” or better yet an archbishop! There are no more bunnies wearing tails and as of its March issue Playboy will do away with nudity and before long neither girls nor guys will cover their whoosy whatsis with fig leaves. Yes a certain innocence seems like it’s creeping into the bedroom, like a slow metastasizing cancer, but don’t worry. Once a pickle no more a cucumber. There'll never be another Eden.

The Eternal Recurrence of a Spotless Mind

Everyone is always told that you have to love your significant other warts and all. But what if he or she or it could journey to a parallel universe where none of their positive attributes would be marred by human foibles. Both Nietzsche and the mathematician Poincare believed in the notion of Eternal Recurrence which states that over the infinite expanse of time literally everything and all its mutations would appear as a succession of possibilities. It’s another iteration of the idea that if you put a monkey in front of a typewriter, over infinite time it will spew forth Hamlet. The idea of parallel universes presents a science fiction version of this idea in which chinks in time make it possible to travel to other dimensions where we can be melded into more perfected forms of ourselves. What a savings of time and money. If they could be accessed, parallel universes would prove to be a lot more reliable than therapy. Therapy rarely offers a cure. All that’s being offered the patient is an ability to accept and understand dysfunctional and maladaptive parts of the self—with the dreary hope that under optimal conditions serial murderers, for example, might recognize that they are acting out. If only scientists could find a way of identifying wormholes and other means of accessing the multiverse then we would be able to select from a number of possibilities. Let’s say there had been knowledge of parallel universes back in the day of Adam and Eve. Eve might have been able to find another form of herself which didn’t give in to the temptation to take the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. There would have been no fall or original sin and earth would have been paradise.