The great question that sex as a feature of the world raises is, why not have just one kind of thing? What is the value, if there is any, of having divergent roles? And what are they and how deep do they go? How flexible are they, and what are the costs and benefits of either embracing or rejecting them?
The first and most obvious matter to note is that we do indeed have two kinds of things that make up the human race, and in fact the vast majority of all species above single-celled organisms. The two sexes exist as a monolithic dyad across billions of years of biological history. And that’s been plainly obvious to all species from the lowliest insects to the great oceangoing cetaceans since time began.
But why have more than one kind of thing? After all, it’s possible to have just one sex (or rather, no sex). And there’s a great reproductive advantage to doing so. You don’t need some other thing to be able to reproduce. That’s the main advantage. Each individual organism is reproductively self-sufficient. The cost of finding a mate is very high. For some species, mating itself is a fairly costly and dangerous affair, and in other species competition for mating is also costly and dangerous. Many species expend enormous amounts of effort upon either proving their worthiness as a mate (bower birds come to mind) or engaging in dangerous and exhausting displays to get attention (loud calls, colorful and outrageous physical features, scent displays, flamboyant behavioral displays).
If you were smart and just trying to stay alive, pretty much all of this would be a really dumb idea. Prarie chickens strut around like they’re on Broadway, rays compete to see who can jump the furthest out of the water (yes, that thing they live in and need to breathe), whales race each other to exhaustion, beetles try to throw each other off trees, deer grow horns (depleting their bodies of essential nutrients) and bang their heads against one another, while giraffes try to knock each other down with their heads. It’s pretty nuts. If you aren’t familiar with the kind of things animals do and have purely to get the attention of the other sex, you should spend some time studying it. If the goal was to stay alive, especially for males, they’re doing a pretty terrible job of it.
Females generally display a much more reasonable set of physical features and behaviors clearly optimized for actual survival, rather than mating. Their success in that arena seems to be more easily assured, so they prioritize practical viability. As a general rule, they don’t make loud calls, don’t engage in absurd behavioral displays trying to be seen, don’t aggressively confront and battle sexual competitors, and don’t have outrageous plumage that makes them easy to spot. Female peafowl, unlike peacocks, are pretty smart. They aren’t painted like a sports car, don’t have a huge costly tail dragging behind them, and don’t walk around shaking their tail and squawking all the time. Instead, they do the business of being a peafowl. Eat, grow, reproduce, don’t get eaten.
So why have two things? It’s almost an absurd handicap to take on, reproductively, even at its most basic level. And in practice it often results in huge extra disadvantages and costs, as we’ve seen. The collective cost of life that comes from being male is, for mammals at least, around a 20% survival penalty. And that’s a massive penalty, considering that the other mammals, the females, are paying an enormous investment to the detriment of their own biological efficiency and survival by having to give live birth to and suckle their young (these being mammals and that being what they do).
If you could factor out the risks and costs attendant to giving birth and suckling young you would have a clearer comparison of the survival differential between the sexes. Comparing males who have never given birth or suckled young and females who have never given birth or suckled young, how much greater is that divide? Especially considering that male animals can’t really get rid of their silly tails or less stable chromosomal structure (females benefit from X gene mosaicism) or horns, or even their loudness, aggression, or territorial protectiveness. Significantly bigger, is the obvious answer.
Pregnancy, birth, and lactation are enormously high-cost endeavors. Basically the highest cost things you could possibly do (apart from the crazy things males do that get them eaten and beaten), as they use up an enormous amount of physical resources and greatly inhibit your ability to survive (basic behaviors like feeding, hiding, and escape become absurdly more difficult). But they are at least in theory, voluntary. And women’s bodies are designed to help them survive them and conserve their lives.
What we think of as sex is largely tangential to the fact of it, or an addendum to it, an outgrowth from the main body. When people think of sex they think of excitement and pleasure. But those aren’t sex, those are the motivational structures we have that drive us to pursue sex and make use of it.
Sex itself, in itself, is the differentiation of genetic, reproductive, and morphological identity into two distinct, complimentary, interdependent, strategic identities. It isn’t merely an increase in the quantity of a species from one to two, but the redefinition of a species as something that is not singular but rather interrelational. We aren’t exactly one thing, we are one larger thing composed out of two distinct, interrelated parts. It’s less like having two fingers and more like having two dimensions. Sex exists, not in parallel, but intersectionally.
But humans think in terms of motivations. We, like all mammals (and many others), are given sex as a fact of existence. The question of motivation, what we do with it, is on our minds quite a bit. We don’t really think that much about the cart we’re pulling behind us, how it got there or where it is going. Nature doesn’t need us to. We’re focused on that juicy carrot. Our desire to make use of the fact of sex. We think of sex as something we do or want, an act we engage in. But it’s clearly nothing of the kind. Sex is something we are, something that engages us and expresses itself through us.
When we inhabit that role most distinctly, when we are most specially focused on chasing the outworkings of our natures, when we stand at the closest point of that intersection between the dimensions of our species, we call that sex. But it is a strange way to talk. As if the mere stimulation of some body part in one way or another constituted sex. That’s a bit like saying that the honking of a car’s horn as it speeds at you is the approaching car. It draws your attention, it engages you, it becomes the means by which your senses relate your mind to it. But pleasure isn’t sex any more than hunger is food.
P. S. By the way, I apologize, this entry was much less exciting that the title would lead you to think. But the answer you might give to the question does relate to this discussion. One answer you could give is “Because it feels great!” But that is, as Aristotle would say, an insufficient causal explanation. It explains your motivations, but not the actual teleology behind them. What are you really being motivated toward? Why is it the case that you are designed to be motivated toward such things, motivated to engage relationally with this other entity, with difference? Those are the really interesting answers.
It’s obvious that friction feels good on the old penis, and the boobs feel soft and pleasant. But to what end? Why bother with all these things we think of as “sex”? Not all other creatures do. Plants don’t feel pleasure, as far as we can tell. Fish don’t seem to, or insects, or protozoa. But they have sex, in the deepest sense. They are possessed of it and by it. They live and survive through and by the intersection of sex in their species. They have the motivation appropriate to rule the kind of creature that they are.
Mammals get extra fancy motivational mechanisms for a host of complex behaviors. But nature doesn’t demand that we understand its goals, only that we respond to them with some degree of consistency. Nature is perfectly happy if you misunderstood the question I posed in the title. That’s the idea, to keep you motivated. Whether you truly recognize to what end you are motivated is beside the point and above your individual pay grade.
Making Nobody Happy 