Sex came first. It arrived before any concept of self or other, before there was care for anyone at all. And certainly before love. Sexual reproduction first evolved 1.2 billion years ago, eventually cropping up in our lineage 500 million years ago, give or take. There are two kinds of us: male and female. These names that we have given to the sexes are human terms, but they describe a reality that is far older than any language.
The most enduring and fundamental difference comes down to our gametes. When creating new life, males contribute gametes that are stripped of almost all cellular content, and they move around. Males, in other words, have sperm (or pollen). Females have eggs instead, which are, by comparison, rich in cellular content, in cytoplasm. Eggs stay more or less in place. In the intervening eons, being male or female has become about much more than the gametes that we produce, but maleness and femaleness are evolutionary outgrowths of this basic truth.
Bringing these gametes together—having sex—feels good because feeling good is how evolution encourages sexual activity. Lizards presumably enjoy sex as well, a fact which created more lizards, who also feel good when they have sex. But in the vast majority of lizards, after egg and sperm come together and create a zygote, the father’s job is over. The mother’s work lasts a bit longer, until the eggs are laid, but then she, too, wanders away, never again to see or interact with the new life that she has created.
Some species produce hundreds, even thousands, of fertilized eggs, from which both parents walk or hop, fly or swim away, never meeting or caring for their young. The vast majority of those eggs die early, but once the few surviving eggs hatch, those hatchlings must also be capable of immediately feeding themselves. In some species, even absentee mothers manage to provide for their children. Such a mother may leave lunch—or months of lunches—for her brood: a butterfly will lay her eggs on a plant for her caterpillars to later eat; a wasp will paralyze a spider and lay her eggs inside of it, leaving her young to eat their way out; an octopus will leave her own body as food for her children. Is letting the children you will never meet feast on your corpse a kind of love? It is dedication, to be sure, but it is not love.
The ways in which one might care for one’s children takes myriad forms, but that parental care exists at all raises a question: why, when so many species produce children that they never even meet, and those species are doing just fine, does a parent ever stick around to take care of, perhaps even form a relationship with, his or her children? Doing so is an investment that increases the offspring’s chance of surviving, but comes at the cost of the parent’s ability to invest in other offspring. A parent sticking around may reduce the chance that her children get eaten, increase the chance that they are themselves sufficiently fed and housed, or, in the most elaborate cases, provide a long period of learning and experience during which the child can become his or her best self. In some places and times, for some species, this is the best route to leaving more of yourself in the next generation.
Parental care has evolved dozens of times in vertebrates alone, and many more times in other organisms. In some species, parents have so few children that they can offer their offspring fierce and devoted care—not just directly from themselves but from siblings and the parents’ extended family, from their friends and the wider community. The focused care bequeathed to children makes the death of any child a tragedy. This strategy builds a few strong, capable, and smart individuals, rather than many disposable ones. Dolphins and wolves, marmosets and elephants, all love and defend their children in these ways. But humans do so most of all.
Love, like sex, feels good because “feeling good” is how evolution encourages it. But the explanation from there gets a little more complex. The goal of evolution is banal and uninteresting: make more of yourself! But there are many routes to doing so, and the messy complexity of life on Earth reveals, in part, how much beauty can emerge from so lowly a goal.
First love is between mother and child. This is true for most people, but also true in the history of life on Earth. Go back nearly 200 million years, to the very earliest mammal, and you will find the rudiments of love in the offering up of milk. Without milk, a newborn mammal will die. And like sex in our lineage, once milk evolved in mammals, it never disappeared. Mother’s milk is such a universally valuable adaptation that it stuck. A mother could be just a milk-delivery service—but how much more valuable could she be if she cares deeply, is willing to lay down her life for her child? How much more capable and productive a life can she nurture if she truly loves her offspring?
At the base of the mammal tree, we find the Monotremes, which includes just three species of egg-laying mammals that are still alive today—two species of echidnas, and the duck-billed platypus. The Monotremes are substantially different from all the other egg-layers on Earth: as mammals, they also make milk. It’s a crude operation in Monotremes: modified sweat glands secrete a nutritious fluid that babies lap up off the mother’s skin. Later, a more elegant solution for delivery evolves—the nipple. But in all mammals, milk solves a problem, allowing the baby’s food to be chemically and nutritionally adjusted in various ways that facilitate development. That’s it, at first. Mother’s milk is just one of many elegant evolutionary solutions to problems of nutrition and immunity. But it is the gateway to much more.
Once milk glands become integral to offspring maturation, babies are guaranteed to meet and spend time with their mothers—this was the only way the transfer could take place until recently in human history. Love isn’t required for this. Mothers and babies could just be hardwired to do their parts without involving emotions. But emotions are adaptive, and evolve alongside complex sociality and long childhoods. Add to this the fact that any predator big enough to consume the babies will likely see them as a delicacy—defenseless, tender and probably free of pathogens. They are practically the perfect food. That means that a mammal mother will often be confronted with a question: how much risk should she take to protect her babies when they are threatened?
Every mother is different, as is every situation, and a mother’s answer to the question requires that she has information on a number of things. How much of her reproductive life remains ahead, and how much is behind her? How dangerous is the predator she is facing, and how well equipped is she for battle? If she dies saving one offspring, will she doom the rest to starvation? How, in the end, does Sophie make her choice?
Mammal mothers in such situations don’t calculate in any explicit sense, nor do they have access to data on reproductive lifespan, hazards or opportunities. But they have an internal architecture that selection has tuned to intuit these things and adjust behavior accordingly. The language in which these intuitive calculations manifest, and the way that they motivate behavior, is through emotion. Fear and worry, love and longing, grief and rage—all these may be felt by a mother about her child.
All true love is an elaboration on maternal love. Pair-bonding between adults borrows the evolutionary architecture of mother’s love. Monogamy, where pair-bonding shows up most frequently, is rare in mammals but common in humans. Most human cultures have been polygynous to some degree, meaning many women share a male mate, which leaves many males with no mates at all. But the most populous cultures have monogamy as a cultural norm, so the vast majority of humans expect to pair up. Love between bonded partners allows for trust and devotion, the development of more skills and insights than either might have alone, learning from the past together and planning for the future—precisely for the helpless babies that provide the first form of love. The emergent possibilities within a pair-bond mean that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.
Much human mythology is centered on inducing people to extend their concept of self. Two thousand years ago, Ovid wrote of the old married couple Baucis and Philemon. They had been poor all their lives, but generous with what little they had, and the gods recognized them for their righteousness. When asked what they would like most in the world, Baucis and Philemon requested that when death drew near, they might die together, so that neither should see the other die, nor be left behind. And the gods made it so. The old lovers became trees—an oak and a linden—which intertwined their branches with one another as they grew.
Once love has evolved, it begins to spread its wings, expand its scope. First a mother’s love for her child, then adults reliably experiencing love between partners, and then other forms of love begin to blossom—between fathers and children, grandparents and grandchildren, and among siblings. Love then finds a place between friends and between soldiers, between those who share intense experiences, good or bad. The story of the Good Samaritan reveals the capacity for love even between those who are supposed to be enemies. Ultimately, love evolves to include abstractions—love of country and love of god, love of honor and service, truth and justice. Love is the ultimate inclusion.
With the expansion of love, we see a concomitant expansion of the role of sex. For lizards, sex amounts to physical urges and actions driven by the simplest of evolutionary compulsions. But for humans, sex is about far more than reproduction. Like love, sex is an emergent phenomenon between individuals. Sex is a facilitator of connection, a glue between individuals, an assuager of hurt feelings, a celebration of good times, a revelation of emotional depth for which words are insufficient.
In a sense, then, for humans, “having sex” is not really a thing, since having sex with one person is not in any way the same as having sex with a different person. To imagine otherwise is to make a reductionist error. It’s not like having lunch, or watching a movie, or driving a car. While today’s salad is surely different from yesterday’s sandwich (or last month’s box office hit or last year’s model), we rarely grow and change as a result of consumption, and we certainly do not change the products that we consume. The interaction in sex is where the emergence lies—both partners giving and taking, capable of being surprised, both by our partners, and by ourselves.
When we generate a description of something, and a category for it, we too often imagine that the category itself can stand in for the larger, richer truth. Just because we can count and record something real—how much serotonin we produce, how many calories we ingest, or how many sexual partners we have had—does not mean that we have counted or recorded the vital heart of the thing. For a lizard, the simple quantification of serotonin, calories and sex partners will come closer to a complete accounting of health and fitness. For humans, though, for whom sociality is central, and for whom food and sex are about far more than metabolism and reproduction, we conflate the proxies for the larger truths at our peril. Breaking bread together has a social value that is more important than the calories consumed; similarly, loving sex has more social value than getting off and combining gametes. Chemical imbalance is not the same as mental illness, energy drinks are not food, and casual sex and porn are not deep sexuality. They all might do in a pinch—to address mental distress, hunger or desire—but at what cost?
Porn reduces human bodies to our constituent parts, and puts a premium on extreme sexual acts. Among the generation that has come of age on a steady diet of porn, women are far more likely to report being asked to engage in anal sex, strangling and other violent “games” that proliferate on screen, even though few real women want these things in our own lives. Porn, however titillating, creates the illusion that sex can be automated, bereft of communication or feedback, the options pulled from a narrow menu of repeated, stereotyped actions. By reducing sex and sexual pleasure to individual sexual acts, in which the person with whom you are engaging is an afterthought, irrelevant even, you make sex into a commodity. You reduce human sexuality to the sexuality of lizards.
Porn, I posit, produces a kind of sexual autism in its devotees.
When I say that porn produces sexual autism in its devotees, I am not arguing that actual autistic people are prone to such sexual autism, nor am I arguing that autistic people desire true connection, love and relationships any less than the rest of us. My argument is not about autistic people at all. If I had argued that porn was a cancer on society, mutating and metastasizing into realms in which it has no business, it would be understood that I was using “cancer” metaphorically, not slandering cancer patients.
Here, I take the diagnostic criteria for autism, and suggest that porn produces, in its adherents, something similar with regard to sexuality: incoming sensory data are of primary importance, and emotional and social communication is backgrounded, if considered at all.
People with autism display repetitive behavior, and atypical sensitivity to sensory inputs. Communication is difficult for them—probably because communication is a two-way street, and the other person cannot be fully predicted in advance, or controlled. People with autism often have difficulty developing, maintaining and understanding relationships; insist on inflexible adherence to routine; and show intense fixation on narrow interests. It is, in short, difficult for those with autism to contend with novelty and surprise, with discovery and with emergence.
What, then, do I mean when I say that porn produces sexual autism in its devotees? If the most complete human sexuality is, as I argue, an emergent property between whole individuals—bodies and brains, hearts and psyches—porn reduces sex to commodity, to acts, to mere bodies. Selecting from a narrow menu of options, sex learned from porn will be repetitive and inflexible, with a narrow focus on orgasm. Those who learn about sex from porn are likely to be insensitive to feedback from anything but their own body. Communication and feedback will not be priorities, nor perhaps understood as values at all. Relationships will be difficult to form, harder still to understand. Discovery and serendipity never happen when choosing from a menu. This is safer, in a way—while you risk not discovering the true highs of human relationship and connection, you are also protected from some of the true lows. Sex learned from porn can thus effectively flatten human sexuality. What of the world of emotional, deeply human discoveries that are possible with a richly connected sexuality? Without those, you might as well just be having lunch.
One can be positive about sex—embracingly positive—without accepting that cheapening sex, rendering it available on demand and without emotional content, is positive for either individuals or for society. While sex work is probably a permanent feature of human society, and sex workers deserve protection, minimizing the prevalence of porn and other forms of sex work would be a positive move for all.
Are we lizard, or are we human? We evolved from a superficially lizardy ancestor, one that had a lizard’s approach to sex: no affection between sexual partners, no lasting connection, no care for each other or for the young. Over hundreds of millions of years, we became capable of love, though, and it made everything in our lives richer. We can have sex lives that are anonymous and dehumanized, safe behind a screen, and wonder why it’s so hard to connect, why everyone in our lives seems like a stranger. Or we can look into one another’s eyes and come together.
Interesting. You may like my blog too
https://animalsinshape.home.blog/2020/09/19/the-astonishing-reproductive-life-of-the-animals/
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Decent article overall, but then the following assertion suddenly appears:
“minimizing the prevalence of porn and other forms of sex work would be a positive move for all”
What is your evidence or argument for this? It does not follow from anything in the rest of the article.
A very fine final line 😉
The analogy to autism is not apt because autistic people communicate well among themselves and generally only run into difficulties communicating with non-autistic people. Since communication is a two-way street this can be seen as a deficiency on either side and more like a language gap.
As an autistic person the best analogy I can give is that it feels like living in a foreign country as a non-native speaker, you’re bound to miss subtleties. However, when you encounter a fellow ex-pat or a person who can speak your native tongue you are thrilled and have long and intimate conversations.
Great article – but I would like to share a key disagreement. I think people can tell the difference between porn and real sex. It’s similar to an argument that video games or movies or rock n roll will make kids violent. I think most people don’t regard the content they see in porn as being reflective of how things are ‘supposed’ to work.
“Ultimately, love evolves to include abstractions”
Not to change the subject, but Dr. H. uses the parable of the Good Samaritan as an example of this. But did that parable evolve or was it intelligently designed by Jesus?
Me thinks that for starters everyone should become thoroughly familiar with the always marvelous writings of Susan Griffin beginning with: Her 1982 book Pornography and Silence Cultures Revenge Against Nature Forty years later the deeply psychotic situation described in this book has become extreme, especially as the White House is now occupied by a dark entity who effectively promotes and even glorifies both sexual pornography and the pornography of violence. The two phenomenon are of course deeply inter-related. Plus Woman and Nature The Roaring Inside Her I recently came across a 1996 book published by Spinifex Press. It is titled Radically Speaking Feminism Reclaimed. In one way or another all of the essays are about the pornification of culture. Several deal specifically with the topic of pornography with each of them being more of less heart-breaking especially an essay titled Femicide: A Framework for Understanding Genocide by Natalie Nenadic. In… Read more »
Ah, can I say — just now realising who you are and why you dub yourself ‘in exile’ — that you and your husband deserve full support for your principled stand against the insane political extremism in academia and the appalling treatment you received from your university.
«There are two kinds of us: male and female. These names that we have given to the sexes are human terms, but they describe a reality that is far older than any language» – Apparently this is the reason that the author is in exile 🙂
‘Porn’ [sic] is a pejorative term for erotica. Why use it when you refer to erotica males consume but not for that which females consume?
‘Fifty Shades’ is erotica women consume. How is this somehow not damaging yet male-consumed erotica is?
Isn’t your stance just usual boring misandry?
Men use porn because it ‘sublimates’ (if you excuse a Freudian term, but you get the gist) the universal male desire for sexual parers in numbers. This desire in no way precludes the desire and need for intimate full loving sexual relationship with a pair-bond partner. The two desires are independent, and being satiated re one does not do for both.
No harm is done to anyone by the great bulk of ‘male erotica’, which is actually a benefit, and societally as well as to individuals, as Nadine Stroessenr (if I recall her name accurately) argues at book length.