Anyone attentive to our society in our times, or familiar with various historical cultures, should know that human sexuality – in addition to all the good it brings into people’s lives – has been beset by social tensions, cultural taboos, and personal troubles.
Why is that?
Here are some pieces of an answer.
1) Sex originated to achieve an indispensable task for all living things: perpetuating one’s kind. Some organisms achieve that differently, but humans are one of a huge number of species – plants as well as animals – who reproduce sexually. The next generation of each of those species is created by combining two packets of DNA, each containing half a blueprint for that lifeform. It’s a task that all such creatures must accomplish.
2) We humans are mammals, whose reproductive strategy involves the young developing inside the body of the mother-to-be, then being born when they are sufficiently fully formed. Mammalian sexual reproduction, therefore, requires the packet of DNA from one parent to get inside the body of the other to combine with the other necessary packet of DNA.
Accomplishing that requires behavior that is unlike anything else in the mammalian behavioral repertoire, in requiring a blurring of boundaries of different bodies.
(A pregnancy does involve mixed boundaries, but neither the mother nor the growing child need choose to create that situation. Pregnancy happens to the mother, as a result of sex. And life just happens to the offspring. No choice means no motivation is required for that merging.)
To make mammals do something so unique, the motivational force behind sexual behavior has to be exceptionally powerful. The great power of that motivational force -- crafted into our species because that’s what it took to perpetuate one’s kind -- means the task of managing that force will be challenging.
3) More than with other mammals, we human beings have had reason to complicate sexuality by putting it to additional important uses. We developed into creatures that had need – for the sake of survival -- for that reproductive sexual bond to carry a lot more freight.
We developed into a creature whose success in perpetuating its kind required that the young be given more support for a longer time than with our mammalian cousins.
- Our babies are born “premature” compared with other primate infants. The tripling of the size of our ancestors brains, over several million years, required human newborns to be born less fully developed to enable the females to bear such big-brained offspring. Humans becoming more intelligent imposed a cost: mothers and babies became more vulnerable for longer.
- Then, after infancy, human children need many more years – compared to other mammalian and primate young -- to emerge into full adulthood.
Both those factors create the need for the human young, and their mothers, to have an environment that is more reliably protective for longer.And a major way of meeting that need is for the fathers to remain more present and more committed to their mates and their children.
One important way of keeping the father in the picture is fortifying the sexual connection between mother and father.
Which may explain why the human female is (I believe) unique in being sexually receptive throughout the cycle, not only – as with mammals generally – when conception is possible. The powerful motivation of sexuality can thereby be harnessed to keep fathers and mothers together, fortifying a bond that helps the family unit to remain stable enough for the young to flourish.
The building of that bond was further advanced by making human sexuality more complex—adding some powerful emotional elements. The connection that keeps the family adaptively intact goes beyond the basic animal fire of the sexual impulse by using things in the realm of “love” to make the bond stronger and longer-lasting.
(We are not the only primates who can love, but I believe we’re the only ones who have combined love with reproduction.)
This task of melding two different dimensions of sexuality – the ancient mammalian dimension and the more newly human – has complicated human sexuality. Humans have to integrate
- that primitive dimension of animal desire and passion (the dimension we share with stallions and mares, with bulls and cows)
- with a more recent dimension, bringing in a heart-based set of emotions, making family connection more enduring.
(Some psychologists have talked about the fulfillment from meeting the challenge of bringing “heart” and “genitals” together into a unified sexual connection.)
All these complications of human sexuality, with the changing requirements for the perpetuation of our species, are connected with humankind’s most important distinguishing characteristic: culture. These are consequences of our being the creatures who put culture at the center of our strategy for survival.
- It is the increasing use of culture that has made bigger brains valuable; more to learn means that having better equipment for learning is rewarded.
- It is culture, too – by giving our young more to learn, meaning that adulthood requires a longer training period -- that has made it advantageous for our young to stay longer in their formative stage.
Thus it is humankind’s specialization in culture that required the development of a more multidimensional sexual bond -- to stabilize family relationships to better protect our vulnerable offspring.
Culture made sexuality complicated, but it was when culture took off into “Civilization” that human sexuality became downright problematic. Civilization, which has itself been so problematic because – to meet altogether new requirements for social survival – it has demanded the rechanneling of human energies, including that powerful motivational force of sexuality that for eons had perpetuated our kind.
But that’s “a whole nother story.”
**************
For more about that deeper sexual bond – explored in a more heartful spirit – see “The Sacred Space of Lovers.”
Anyone interested in more about how Civilization has demanded the “rechanneling of human energies” can find other dimensions of that explored in Chapter 5 – “Power and the Psychological Evolution of Civilized Man” – of my book, The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution.
Finally, I will soon be posting here a series that presents an integrated way of understanding the Human Story, founded on seeing that story in an evolutionary perspective, i.e. on some major but hitherto unrecognized consequences of human culture taking off into Civilization (defined as “societies created by a creature that extricates itself from the niche in which it evolved biologically by inventing its own way of life”). That series is already available here.