In a recent class, I made the ballsy teacher decision to invite serious discourse on sexuality into the classroom. One of my students, a friendly and intelligent Russian, argued that homosexuality was unnatural, contending that homosexual coupling didn’t result in babies. To that, I was like, “but we’re not done evolving!” Mostly, that comment was supposed to make her harrumph (I’m not usually in the business of changing opinions), but it actually got me thinking about evolution and sex. An article in Salon about the mysteries of female ejaculation sent me sniffing about the Internet even more, and I came to a weird and awesome conclusion.
Our future lies in what we erroneously connote unconventional booty.
For now, my ideas are little more than science fiction conceit, but they derive from the world of published sex science research. And there’s a lot of research, none of it definitive. For example, the aforementioned article stated that there’s no 100% known evolutionary reason why females orgasm; some researchers say it’s a byproduct of humans having the same genitalia in the first two months of being a fetus, others wax empirical lyrical about oxytocin, and a few others mention the search for a viable life mate. What’s cool is that none of these are totally proven.
Also, science is confused by sexy times with creatures of the same gender that won’t result in more progeny. But some interesting theories have come out of wondering why a zero baby yield would be viable evolutionarily; one that sounds kinda cool is the idea, culled from a BBC article about evolution and homosexuality, that homosexual creatures have a protective and nurturing role in the development of more offspring from animals in the pack. It’s not as cut and dry as having children or not having children, or whether that child came directly from the parent animal. As well, there’s the whole problem with gay and lesbian animals being in the societal shadows, therefore messing with scientific discovery. It’s all confusing, but there’s a good side to that.
One really excellent Huffington Post article on why humans even bother orgasming in the first place cites how complex the orgasm is in evolution. Setting aside female orgasm for a second, it turns out that male orgasm is super strange and complicated; the whole “absence makes the heart grow fonder” may come from the fact that males away from mates produce more sperm. Sperm competition inspires bigger armies of sperm, and a dude that’s been away from a partner for longer, according to the article, is more likely to give a hoot if their mate achieves orgasm as well.
And now back to female orgasm. Apparently, says another Huffington Post article about orgasm statistics in heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual females, lesbians have more fulfilling sex than the other types of sexualities of the same human animal. This is not surprising, seeing as a member of the same gender will probably know the intricate sexual mechanics of the partner’s body better than any other gender sexing about. But better orgasms and no babies? Seems kinda strange if you dig on evolutionary benefits and such, but actually this kind of occurrence, like the others above, reveal that evolution is far weirder than we could possibly imagine. If sex having was only for pumping out more little critters to inherit the earth, then so many different kinds of carnal pleasure would probably be edited out by now (really, we haven’t been what we are all that long, and evolution seems to be a long and lazy process).
What we can posit is that anyone who believes that any one type of sexuality is more natural is probably talking out of their bloated windbag, and not with their logical brain. Evolution doesn’t have a vendetta, it just kinda happens.
The future of the human race is probably going to look a whole lot weirder than we think now. Not every single human needs to breed, quite the contrary in fact, so maybe when a catastrophe wipes out a steaming pile of folks, we’ll be left with many different types of sexuality, all still serving an important evolutionary role in the species propagation. Having varied sexual preferences may be what keeps humans so adaptable in the first place; we’re a community animal after all. Pleasure behaviors that are taboo are telling us that our evolution is set to be a wacky and, best of all, unexpected production, and one that foretells the eventual dominance of all manner of different sexualities. I sure hope I live long enough to see a bisexual emperor of the planet. That’d be swell.
