The Procreation Myth

Sex is "For" making Babies. Every schoolboy knows that. The idea is as ingrained in this society's consciousness as the concept of the cycle of the seasons or the inevitability of death. It is as obvious as moonrise and tide fall that sex is for reproduction. Nothing could be plainer. Man is propelled into the fevers of that splendid and ludicrous act by some basic drive wired into him by a beneficent Mother Nature bent on seeing that the species is preserved. Without the lovely fires of lust, there is no sex; without sex, there are no babies; without babies, there is no longer man. Indeed, so important is this bit of information that we call it the fact of life.

And since this fact is so central to our understanding of life, no wonder that it is the foundation stone on which all sexual thought has been built for ages. As the Christian Church puts it, in God's scheme, reproduction is the natural end and goal of that ineluctable moment. Therefore, any diversion from that natural course perverts God's law. All of Western society's basic strictures about abortion, birth control, masturbation, oral sex, pornography and the temptations of little girls, sheep, ducks and watermelons spring from the idea that sex is for reproduction and should not be used for any other purpose.

In the past couple of decades, a few people have suggested that perhaps we should not be quite so certain we know what God had in mind when He invented copulation: Perhaps He would not really care if we sometimes balled just for fun. Yet even if sex can be fun as well, surely its basic purpose must be conception.

As it happens, it isn't. The so-called facts of life are incorrect. On this point, our thinking is simply dead wrong. The Christian Church is wrong, most legal theory on sex is wrong; indeed, most secular sex theorists are wrong. In this article, I will try to show that for human beings, the main purpose of sex is not reproduction but something else. Conception--the making of babies--far from being the goal of copulation, is merely a rare, almost accidental by-product.

Sex, though it may not always seem so, is a ferociously complicated act. For most of man's existence, he has not had more than a vague inkling of what it is for and how it works. But the new science of ethology, new information about the labyrinthine dips and turnings of evolution and the new facts about sex and people turned up by Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, and their confreres are beginning to add up to a radically new picture of (continued on page 190) The Procreation Myth(continued from page 106) what our sex lives are all about.

The best place to begin is with the notion beloved by the Victorians that sex is not the same among human beings as it is among the other animals. People are higher beings; their sexual habits are of a quality different from those of pigs and baboons. And the old idea is correct: Human sexuality is different from that of the lower animals--for, unlike virtually all other forms of animal life, man is endlessly preoccupied with sex. The affliction is relentless. From the point of view of any rational pig or baboon, man must seem a creature crazed with sex, a mad animal gripped by a permanent frenzy. There is no escaping it; before anything else, man is a sexual being. Consider: The statistically average human male--assuming there is such a creature--will have sexual intercourse between 1000 and 10,000 times in his life. Extrapolating from Kinsey's figures, we can put the mean somewhere around 5000. He will masturbate in adolescence and afterward some 1000 times. He is able to have an orgasm (though not ejaculation) long before he is first conscious of the experience. He is able to have an erection from the moment of birth and will do so 50,000 to 100,000 times thereafter. In fact, he may be born with an erection and die with one. Beyond this, he kisses, hugs, engages in occasional homosexuality, reads erotic books, goes to erotic movies and fantasizes endlessly about movie actresses, the girl in skintight jeans who just came into the classroom, visionary creatures invented by his own fertile imagination, boy scouts in short pants and even those aforementioned sheep, ducks and watermelons.

The sexual activity of his female consort is less direct, more subtle, but it is equally unremitting. She will have somewhat less intercourse than he. She will masturbate a good deal less--in some cases, perhaps not more than a few dozen times. She will fantasize about sex much less often. Yet, on the other hand, she will spend a considerable portion of every day appointing and anointing her body to make herself as sexually attractive as possible--scouring her teeth with abrasives, smoothing her skin with powders, scenting the moist places of her body and fussing endlessly over the most minute details of her dress. This female obsession with appearance is unquestionably as sexual as male erection. Even when a woman chooses the lowcalorie salad plate instead of the lasagna, she is being driven by her sexual nature.

It is important to understand that man's preoccupation with sex is not socially conditioned, not something that has been beaten into us from birth nor squeezed out of us by the constrictions of our puritanical society. Our concern with sex is innate, as much a part of us as the blood and bone with which we were born. In most human societies outside the so-called civilized world, every adult member of the group normally copulates at least once every 24 hours. Our own puny rates of copulation would cause gleeful amazement in cultures such as that of the Aranda of Australia, in which people often have intercourse three to five times nightly, the Thonga of Africa, in which it is not unusual for a man to make love to each of three or four wives in a single night, or the Chagga of Tanganyika, of whom one responsible authority reports that "intercourse ten times in a single night is not unusual"--although perhaps not always with orgasm. (As a matter of fact, Kinsey turned up a number of American men who regularly average 25 sex acts a week.) It is obvious that our own comparatively dismal copulatory record is not the natural human way but the result of centuries of self-imposed punitive attitudes toward sex. In nature, sex for humans is as regular as breakfast and sometimes lunch and dinner, too. Naturally, where the act is frequent, you would guess that less attention is paid to it; but this does not alter the fact that a constant, unremitting concern with sex is as basic a part of human nature as is the normal animal concern with food, air and water.

Now, lions are not always leering at lionesses on the veld, nor are their consorts constantly fussing with their fur. An endless preoccupation with sex is rare outside of the human being. No other mammal evidences it. Man's closest relations in the animal world, the great apes, are singularly unsexual creatures. This may surprise anybody who has spent any time in zoos, but it is true, nonetheless. In zoos, monkeys are prone to antics that make mothers hustle children off to the aviary; but new studies, most of them made within the past decade, clearly indicate that the behavior of captive animals is not normal behavior.

Zoologists such as George Schaller, Jane Goodall and the pioneer C.R. Carpenter, operating on the rather plausible assumption that animals in zoos do not behave the same way they do in their natural habitats, have begun to find ways of studying them in the wild. And they have consistently found that in nature, sex for many species is a far less pressing matter than it appears to be in zoos. Consider the work of Schaller, who has studied one of man's closest relatives, the mountain gorilla. By dint of patience and perseverance, Schaller was able to watch gorilla groups from very close hand--sometimes perching on a branch directly above them. In 466 hours of observation, he saw only two acts of copulation. By comparison, a similar study made on a group of Americans would reveal considerably more copulatory acts. Gorilla females are receptive to intercourse only three or four days a month and usually not at all in later stages of pregnancy or when nursing their young. Says Schaller, "Since most females are either pregnant or lactating, the ... males in the group may on occasion spend as much as a year without sexual intercourse."

But the sex lives of human beings differ from those of other mammals in more ways than mere frequency. For example, Homo sapiens is the only known animal averse to copulation with its offspring, and he is one of very few mammals to form permanent mateships. But possibly most important of all is the mammalian process of oestrus.

All female mammals, with one exception, go through phases of sexual activity and passivity known as the oestrous cycle. (Oestrus should not be confused with menstruation, which is quite a different thing and limited to the higher primates only.) The oestrous cycle is of the utmost importance to sexuality, because it is entirely physiological--caused by the flow of various hormones alternating in sequence, which in turn are controlled by the hypothalamus, the brain's vital regulatory center. Oestrus has nothing to do with how an animal was brought up: You can produce the process in the lab with a hypodermic full of hormones.

During oestrus, the female mammal is not only willing but eager to copulate. In some species, she becomes positively nymphomaniacal during oestrus, forcing her attentions on one male after another in a way that would leave most humans gasping for relief. It all sounds rather jolly until you realize that the stretches between oestrus periods can be long, indeed. Perhaps even worse off than the poor gorilla are animals such as deer and bear, whose females come into oestrus only once a year. Even the oftmaligned cottontail rabbit is not interested in copulation six months of the year.

Few mammalian females will permit copulation when they are not in oestrus. In fact, males do not usually attempt it: Broadly speaking, mammalian males are aroused only by the physical provocation of oestrous females. Indeed, in the guinea pig and in the chinchilla, the vagina is actually covered by a flap of skin during the inactive period, making copulation physically impossible. (Exceptions occur in some primates whose females may present themselves in a copulatory position to show submissiveness in order to placate an angry dominant male or to win his favor for a bit of food.)

The oestrous cycle is a standard feature of mammalian life--so standard that one could almost use it as a definition. Almost, but not quite; because there is one species that does without it. And that species, of course, is man.

This is a fact of the utmost significance--as significant as the fact that we alone of all species make tools, have speech and can form abstract thought.

The creature we have come to call man almost certainly evolved from one of a group of jungle-dwelling apes present on earth during the Miocene era. About 13,000,000 years ago, the Miocene ended and was succeeded, according to Robert Ardrey's popular explanation, by a period of drought called the Pliocene, which lasted until 2,000,000 or so years back. With the coming of the great Pliocene drought, the forest shrank and was replaced by broad, grassy savannas. In increasing numbers, the great apes were deprived of the forest vegetation on which they had fed. Threatened with extinction, one group of beasts reacted by turning ever more to a diet of meat. Thus, there began to develop that unique creature, a carnivorous primate--man.

An ape, lacking claws, fangs and speed of foot, is poorly equipped to hunt. Indeed, even should he make a kill, he has no real means of getting at the meat inside the skin, as anybody who has tried to eat a deer whole will know. It was a question of adapt or die, and adapt he did. He evolved an erect posture that freed his hands for carrying weapons and allowed him to see over the grass, an apposable thumb for using tools and, above all, an ever-enlarging brain. And at the same time, his female began to level out her oestrous cycle. Instead of being driven periodically to intense sexual activity with long quiescent phases in between, she began to develop a pattern of steady but somewhat lowerlevel interest in sex. The male, too, changed, so that instead of being sexually aroused only by an oestrous female, he was able to be excited by a whole range of stimuli associated with women, but especially by the sight of the female genitals.

Now, there is nothing automatic about evolution. No animal has an internal mechanism that it can call on to fix it up with horns or fangs to meet some change in its environment. Evolution occurs only when some animal happens to be born better suited to the environment than its fellows. Its teeth are just a mite longer, its claws a mite sharper, its pelvis a mite more suited to upright walking. It has an edge--and in the vast range of evolutionary time, even a minute edge will win out and spread through a species.

Thus do species acquire new traits. Furthermore, it's obvious that a species can acquire only traits that have some kind of survival value--a more efficient means of feeding, better protection against predators or disease, an improved method for begetting and nurturing offspring. (According to evolutionary theory, it is possible in certain circumstances for a species to acquire traits that have no survival value, but these instances are rare.)

It is clear that any trait that appears in the whole range of life is part of nature's plan. This is true of the oestrous cycle found in most mammals and it is equally true of the absence of oestrous periods in the human female. It was not philosophy nor experience that eliminated the oestrous cycle from womankind: It was the great laws of life. And this is rather odd, for the oestrous cycle is an extremely useful device--as, indeed, it must be, since it is so nearly universal among the mammals. Consider for a moment its virtues.

First and most obvious, oestrus allows copulation to occur only when the female is actually able to conceive. It is a kind of rhythm method in reverse, which prevents sex during the safe periods and is obviously a much more efficient reproductive system than the helter-skelter breeding of humans. Second, the oestrous system permits the strongest males to do most of the breeding. When all the females in the tribe are available constantly, the harem is too extensive for the jealous leader to guard successfully; but when the females come into oestrus only one or two at a time, the stronger animals can better dominate the sexual activity--for the general good of the species. Third, the oestrous system limits the amount of time the members of the group spend quarreling over their females, courting and breeding, and thus enables them to devote most of their energies to more important pursuits, such as the search for food and the care of the young.

Oestrus, then, is an effective system. But man does not use it. He has evolved in a different way. In other mammals, each act of copulation has a very high chance of leading to conception. In man, the ratio is reversed: Each act of intercourse has very nearly the minimum chance of ending in reproduction. Indeed, man has put oestrus so far behind him that it is most difficult, even with modern medical techniques, for him to tell with any real accuracy when the ripe egg is moving through the Fallopian tube and the female will be able to conceive. It is as if nature had deliberately gone out of her way to hinder man from obtaining maximum procreative efficiency. There is no way around it: The human reproductive method is extraordinarily wasteful and inefficient. And unless we are to abandon all we know about evolution, we are driven to admit that it has been designed that way by the laws of life. The plan--God's plan, if you wish--is that men should copulate at will, with no thought of reproduction.

This is not to say, of course, that sex has nothing to do with breeding. Nature is conservative: It likes to make one mechanism serve many functions when it can, like the clock on my desk that also serves as a paperweight. For man's precursors, those dimly seen apes hidden in the shadows of 10,000,000 years, sex was no doubt basically reproductive. But through those millions of years, the element of pleasure increased by infinitesimal degrees, until we can say today that reproduction is only a secondary function of sex. The original mammalian brain was merely a kind of message center driving the animal through more or less automatic responses. The human brain still performs this function, but it also has the added and humanly distinctive capability of abstract thought--similarly, with human sexuality.

After all, the human race could do enough breeding in a month to perpetuate the species. Even in the bad old days, when early man, with his stone axes and small brain, was losing some 75 percent of his offspring before they reached maturity, one birth a year per woman was enough to bring about gradual population increase. Man never did need this surging, endless preoccupation with sex merely to perpetuate the species.

Let me make it clear that I do not mean something mystic--some mysterious drive or life force. When I say that as man evolved he abandoned the oestrous system, I am referring to physical facts having to do with hormone flow and pituitary functions. Man's glands, nerves and brain--the actual cells of his body--have been set, in ways we do not yet understand, by evolutionary processes to give him a constant sex life for a purpose other than reproduction.

What, then, is that purpose? At this stage in the study of the evolution of man's sexual patterns, we can do nothing more than make what are, we hope, shrewd guesses; but the answer, like so many other answers about the human being, almost certainly lies in his life as a carnivorous primate.

It is generally accepted that early man lived in groups of 30 to 80 men, women and children, which wandered about over a fairly large area of plain; the women and children gathering roots, nuts, eggs and whatever else edible they came across, while the men hunted anything there was to hunt. We know that early man was eating large animals, such as the woolly mammoth, an elephantlike beast that stood nine and one half feet tall at the shoulder. It would have taken a concerted effort by a large number of men to hunt down and dispatch a beast of this size. It has been estimated that a band of this type would have needed a range of perhaps 25 miles each way, and it follows that given the exigencies of the chase, the group would often have become scattered, with the women and children left hours, and perhaps even days, unprotected from the large cats with whom they shared the land. These cats--early versions of the leopard, among others--found the children of the two-legged beasts easy pickings. We have, in fact, the skull of a child who some 1,000,000 years ago died with the canine teeth of a leopard in his brain. But for an animal of any size, facing a group of men equipped with hand axes, sharply pointed sticks, perhaps even slings, was a different matter entirely. By perhaps 1,000,000 years ago, man had become the king of beasts, unconquerable by any living thing--as long as he worked, played, hunted, fought and died in groups. For the human being, the group was crucial. Outside it, there was no survival; fragmented, its members were picked off one by one. But drawn together into a rudimentary social system, the group became an all-conquering force, a power so mighty that within a sliver of universal time, it has turned forests into desert and back again and recklessly driven into extinction one species after another. The power of man in groups is awe-inspiring and the glue that has kept the group together is sex. The pleasure of sex is the basis of society. The key necessity, for the several million years of man's existence, has been to keep the men with the women and children. What, for example, was to stop the hunters, once they had made the kill, from camping there in the wilderness until they were replete? Who among us would look forward to dragging a ton of raw meat back home over 25 miles of rocky plain to a cave full of nattering women and squalling babies?

There must have been a reason for going home, and the one that comes to mind, of course, is sex. It follows that groups in which the women were most often available for sex had a survival edge--an adaptive advantage. That is to say, the longer that the women in the tribe were in oestrus, the bigger the survival factor. (By the opposite token, those men who decided to skip the trip home and have sex with each other did not reproduce, so in an evolutionary sense, homosexuality was a negative trait.) Accordingly, the oestrous cycle lengthened and lengthened at both ends, until it finally met at the middle. And if you want to have a little speculative fun with the theory, you can guess that the explanation for the tendency among many women to be more sexually inspired around menstruation--before and after--is simply that at these points lies the beginning of the now-vanished oestrous period.

And so, finally, we are faced with the inescapable fact that the primary function of sex in human lives is to provide pleasure. What does it all mean? Simply, that any ethical code based on the theory that the primary function of sex is reproduction is built on quicksand. Two thousand years of Judaeo-Christian effort to get human beings to copulate only to procreate has failed precisely because the dogmatists had the facts wrong. You can insist that the world is flat if you like--but you will never discover America if you do. Equally, as long as we continue to base our sexual philosophy on a scientific untruth, we will continue to plague ourselves with bad marriages, illegitimate children, mechanical and inept intercourse and all the other ills our unhappy ethic has brought us. Reason is strong; man is strong. But he cannot fly in the face of nature, because he is part of nature. The evidence points to a defensible, scientifically valid argument that in human beings, the purpose of sex is pleasure; and on that realization we must build our sex code for the next millennium.