Sex Is A Fantasy

2011.01.07   prev     next

Suppose some space aliens or gods gave every human alive a special ability: You would be able to see any facts you might be interested to know about the person you are about to have sex with. You wouldn’t remember any of it twenty seconds later, and you’d immediately forget it if you tried to write any of it down or otherwise record or transmit it from your own head. But for that brief twenty seconds, you would know anything there was to know about that person — their past, their plans, their preferences, their opinions. In perfect detail.

You could use this temporary knowledge for one purpose only: to decide if you really want to have sex with this person. If you chose not to, then you would remember only that there was some good reason you didn’t want to have a relationship with this person, you just wouldn’t remember what that reason was.

What would this do to humanity? I submit that it would destroy humanity. Most singles would stay single, most couples would break up, and the reproductive rate would drop below the threshold required to keep humanity from shrinking from one generation to the next, eventually disappearing.

So humanity is kept alive by the lack of knowledge people have about each other. When a woman and a man get together for a long-term relationship that is likely to produce children, they don’t know everything there is to know about each other. They each like (on the whole) the things they can see of their partner, and they mentally fill in what they can’t see with the rosiest, most optimistic assumptions, according to what they would like in a sexual partner.

This is also why the majority of sexual relationships don’t last: The longer you’re with your partner, the more likely you are to find out something about him that you really don’t like, something that’s a big turn-off.

Some fringe extremists like to say that sex is never really consensual, because how often would person A have sex with person B if person A had better choices than B? Almost everyone has to choose from their available options, and if they don’t want to be celibate, they have to choose the most desirable of those options, even if they’d prefer much better.

What these extremists are really observing is that sex is a fantasy. To have any sex at all in your life, you have to fantasize that the person you’re having sex with is something they almost certainly really aren’t.