Seine Gedanken sind wie meine

Skipping tangentially from blog to blog I discovered this interesting little snippet. I post it here for feedback.

I was walking down the street this evening, the time encroaching on the wee hours of the morning, and I got to thinking about sex. How unusual, you’re thinking. Guy thinking about sex. And you’d be right to be cynical. Some studies have tagged the occurrence of sexual thoughts in a guy’s mind at something like once every 30 seconds, or even more often than that. Then I got thinking: What a phenomenon it is that there is really anything at all to think on the matter! If dogs could talk, and one were to ask such a dog what he liked about sex, his answer probably wouldn’t be particularly interesting. After all, there’s not a whole lot to the ritual of a dog’s getting it on. Female dog goes into heat, male dog responds and resolves the situation. Intercourse happens, and life continues as usual. Some might boil down the human experience similarly, but it’s the fact that it requires so much boiling down that is the point of interest. Sex, in its human form and all that surrounds it, has been fetishized to such a degree that all but the very basics of the act are unrecognizable from their original form. Merrian-Webster defines a fetish as “an object or bodily part whose real or fantasied presence is psychologically necessary for sexual gratification and that is an object of fixation to the extent that it may interfere with complete sexual expression”. Ignoring the more blatant associations of the term fetish (bondage, leather, feet, etc), things like clothing and music, or rituals and institutions like dating and marriage are all responsible for compartmentalizing the human experience of sex. In a way, all of these things serve to concentrate the basic act of sex, much the way the petals of certain flowers are concentrated to create a bottle of perfume, so that it can be delivered on command (relatively speaking) in a much more intense and sensual form than simple intercourse. Both men and women wear specific clothing to attract their mates, clothing that, in a purely utilitarian sense, is really a hindrance to the end result. As a culture, we date, listen to the right music, and partake in innumerable courting rituals, all of which ultimately delay the desired result. And yet, they all serve to enhance the experience. We increase our pleasure by making that pleasure more difficult to come by, by delaying the time it takes to arrive at it, and by introducing further complexity to the act itself. Fascinating that the human race could create such social tactics to modify a biological process. Is it to our benefit?

The darker side to this is that, since our social constructs tend to run towards monogamous sex, things like infidelity are also fetishized. There are, I'm sure, heaps of studies declaring that humans are hard-wired for multiple partners, and probably a fair number for the opposite point of view. Regardless, many people cheat, and since we are presented with an allegedly biological predilection for multiple partners, and a constructed social norm that prohibits this (inadvertently making a sort of fetish out of it as a result), the individual member of society is presented with an interesting challenge in this regard. To what degrees are we slaves to our impulses? To our conscience? Or are we slaves at all?

- By Seanny McShawn, from this post.