I'm a single, gay man. During two of my last major existential crises, for about two weeks following, I noticed a marked turn of my thoughts and feelings towards having (biological) children. Stuff like, "If I'd had a kid at such-and-such age, how old would they be now?", "How would I manage if a child was suddenly in my life?", and "Oh god, my line stops with me panic". For a number of reasons, I am extremely unlikely to ever have kids; it would take a change in my prospects so massive that I can't really conceive of it. For this reason, I have come to feel that there may be a common (often irrational) biological impulse to procreate.
But now that I get to the bottom of my message, it occurs to me that it might be tangential, since you're talking about sex, which is related to but encompasses a far larger category of activity than just procreation. Speaking through my lgbt lens (and again, probably tangentially) this false conflation creates at least the dual issues of the incorrect ideas that sex should only be for procreation, as well as the the incorrect idea that queer people can't (or shouldn't) be parents. Here's hoping that both get nixed as we rethink the role of sex, and the importance of family, in society.
Just some rambling, don't mind me.
For what it's worth, I'm also a single gay man and think similarly at times about the path not taken, and why I chose not to adopt as I had originally planned in my 20s. It sucks, but I'm content with being the cool Uncle to my niblings and providing external support to my siblings as needed. Society needs more than just parents in order for children to thrive, and I believe queer folk are ideally suited to fill in a lot of those roles.
As for my comments on sex specifically, I'll admit I'm speaking through the perspective of someone who A) doesn't have it in order to procreate, and B) has a healthier relationship with it than many of my own peers might. It's not solely an act of procreation or hedonism, but it can fill both roles - though I will only ever know it from the perspective of pleasure alone.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts like that. Thank you.
Disclaimer: my thought process tends to be somewhat autistic, I don’t mean any offense. As a non gay man I am just curious to hear your perspective.
From a strictly biological perspective, I think it could be argued that gay “sex” isn’t actually sex. Like, what makes it sex? Is it sex for pleasure? Or is it something adjacent to sex? That has some commonalities with sex, but isn’t actually sex. Like there is a part of sex missing from the equation. Why do we still call it sex?
I kind of assume it’s the kind of thing hardly anyone thinks about and the notion of thinking about it will just make everyone angry. Sorry!
In society an affair is still an affair even if no PV intercourse occurred. Sex comes under the category of “I’ll know it when I see it” / “just understood” things most humans do not realize has very fuzzy edges. The narrow definition is, from the autism perspective, one of the many useless definitions. You will be better served by (yet another) exhaustive list of edge cases.
Not the person you're asking, but I'm of the impression that colloquially, the verb "sex" includes more than strictly the traditional historical definition. I'll refrain from getting into specific details here, but I think the answer to this question is that many people use words in a manner that diverges from literal definitions.
There's a concept in linguistics that language is constantly evolving. As someone on the spectrum myself, with a tendency towards systemizing the world around me, I understand how frustrating this can feel. A particularly excruciating example is the transition of the intended meaning of "literally" to increasingly mean "figuratively", particularly in social contexts. Makes me want to tear the skin off my face, lol.
While this isn't strictly relegated to social concepts, I understand how frustrating it can be to struggle to navigate this phenomenon in social contexts and be misinterpreted as a bad faith actor.
At the end of the day, I try to deal with it by accepting that not everyone else experiences the world the way I do, and that it's as unfair for me to expect everyone else to modify the way they perceive, process, and utilize information (including language) to accommodate my idiosyncrasies.
Thanks for the reply. I do have similar impedance mismatches with the social consensus in a lot of areas. In everyday life I basically do what you are suggesting, but internally I end up having thoughts like this that I typically only feel safe sharing non-anonymously with people who are close.
I do sometimes wonder whether mass education and extensive media exposure from childhood have essentially brainwashed all but the most stubborn-minded of us, who are then labeled “autistic”.
On the topic, if we did take a strict definition of sex, this seems like a fruitful angle of attack for traditionalists. Like, today gay men are regarded as having lots and lots of sex, which is awesome. But if you take this other perspective, most of them are virgins, which is lame. I wonder why the traditionalists/far right haven’t taken this propaganda approach…
> internally I end up having thoughts like this that I typically only feel safe sharing non-anonymously with people who are close.
Ever tried flipping the lid on this? You'd start opening up a lot of people. Those who would try to use that against you or judge have no relevance since they are not close anyway.
> why the traditionalists/far right haven’t taken this propaganda approach ...
they have little, low quality sex and any debate about it would force them to face this, even though it barely matters to them but admitting weakness with something so brutally natural is way above their heads.
if they didn't "make" their partner orgasm, ever, are they real men or gay men in disguise? (their thoughts, not mine, I think they are gay for other reasons)
it's similar to how young people used to or still do laugh about older men needing Viagra.
b) traditionalists and far right have build a merry go round in a dead end, "Sackgasse" in German.
it's a top down dogma.
they cannot have arguments that extend established ways of reasoning before their kind has engineered context and research within which their reasoning follows proper logic (see Quillete (don't) for lots of examples, or rationalists and autistic people easily running with the magic money herd).
they end up having to face the secret life's and thoughts of their partners, realizing they were actively kept in line so that their superiors and peers can reign freely vs having to compete with them, which would extend their minds, freedom and literal happiness.
“they have little, low quality sex”
This is funny to mention, because studies on sex life show the opposite: https://www.peterhaas.org/why-church-attendees-have-the-best...
Your source is incredibly biased.
Here's a source that's less biased that your source cites: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/07/19/the_family_r...
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there's too many good licks in this one.
the issue is, of course, the lying:
from the article:
> We Don’t Participate in Pre-marital or Extra-marital Sex
Yeah, people say that a lot but if you know church people, you know that they are, on average, pretty much like all the other liars.
Except they might hope to get punished for their sins, which does make for some nice and regular kinky evenings, I guess, but that would only be true for people further to the right of the bell curve, if you believe.
Also: the suspense and excitement in fantasies definitely improves the experience. And living free of bullshit other than the classics in the Bible and the consequences of a virtuous and communal life don't sound too bad of a foreplay at all.
No offense, but I'm not particularly interested in helping wargame propaganda strategies for either side of culture war debates. I'm not particularly interested in seeing culture zealots succeed at dehumanizing people, regardless of alignment.
Edit: I understand you see the topic of discussion as an abstract strategic question. I don't, and I'm not particularly interested in embracing that framing. We seem to have different fundamental values and framing here and I'm unsure of whether it's productive for me to advocate my framing, when you may not be particularly interested in embracing my framing either. I certainly have no right to demand you must accept my framing, but if we've reached a values/framing-based impass here, then I sincerely wish you all the best in life, but I will respectfully decline to engage further - it doesn't seem productive for either of us to continue if we both come from frameworks that are mutually incompatible with one another.
Well I don’t think any influential people from any political jostling group are reading all comments on hacker news, so I doubt we are helping to war game anything.
Your second paragraph seems like ad hominem? Or are you suggesting that homosexuality emerges from lived experience, and therefore I should relate? I am confused.
I don’t really have a dog in the gay fight. The longstanding cultural view in the west going back a very long time was that it is a choice. Some political people today retain that view. The modern view is that it isn’t a choice. Some political people today hold that view. I just look at the sides in a detached game theoretic way and it just seems like the red team has a move they haven’t played.
Is that bad? I do understand not wanting to go there mentally, since it is definitely hard to hold views apart from most of society, even if the view is “things are less clear than what everyone thinks they are”. I think humans generally seem to have some preprocessing that drops view candidates that would put them in that position.
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I assure you, your thoughts on this are not unique or something hardly anyone thinks about, they're just not well reasoned. People have sex for a lot of reasons, and having children is, proportionally, almost never the primary driver. Sex is not the act of fertilization of an ovum by a sperm. If it was, we would call IVR 'sex', which obviously nobody does.
I never said sex was the act of fertilization, you are putting words in my mouth. I also never said anything about recreational sex, I of course agree that exists and is sex. You seem to be disagreeing while saying a bunch of things I agree with.
> I'm content with being the cool Uncle to my niblings and providing external support to my siblings as needed.
For what is worth, I remember when being a kid such uncles were superimportant to me and I remember them fondly.
> During two of my last major existential crises, for about two weeks following, I noticed a marked turn of my thoughts and feelings towards having (biological) children.
I have thought about this a lot over the years and your comment only enforces my opinion: we think more about procreation and having children when we are in more survivally stressful situation. That's why developed societies have less children and poor people have more: rich people or people with enough wealth to live comfortably don't have a lot of children because they don't face death every day and don't feel the need to spread their genes.
Not minded at all - I thought that was an introspective and interesting comment; especially as someone who doesn’t really want kids, but also isn’t sure, but is also aging out of that period of his life.
Sex is for procreation; even when done for sport, the biological studies show that changes happen hormonally that increase the chances of reproduction. Ergo, even when you don’t think sex is for reproduction, nature made it so that it is.
This is a strange take.
Sex is - barring IVF - required for procreation. But saying that sex has a purpose implies a creator. And once you require a creator then you're off in the land of theology and biological studies take a back seat.
This is a strange take, evolution resulted in sex as the means to creating the next set of offspring.
Evolution is a process. It can't assign a purpose to anything, because "purpose" doesn't exist outside the minds of people, similar to "justice" and "hope."
The "purpose" of sex is whatever we choose it to be.