Wednesday’s History of Sex and the Human Race

Get the Kids Out of the Room—We’re Going To Talk About Sex

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Sex is everywhere, and despite what you may think, it’s mostly a good thing. My authority on this is that eminent Victorian, Charles Darwin, who taught us that sex is one of the two great drivers of natural selection, along with our environment. We evolve to adapt but also to seduce. Everyone alive today—all the accumulated art and wisdom of the human race, even unto Facebook and streaming—got here because of sex. (I did say it was mostly a good thing.)

Behold the peacock in all its glory: As an evolved organism, it doesn’t make sense. The peacock can barely fly, and its extravagant tail feathers signal “Hey, here’s lunch!” to predators for miles around. So why the fancy look? Simple: The girls love it. Peacocks with the biggest and most dazzling tail feathers mated with lots of adoring peahens and begat lots of offspring, a process that resulted in the utterly useless but amazing-looking birds that we decorate our parks with today.

The “peacock principle” provides the answer to one of the abiding mysteries of nature: Males will evolve into any sort of weirdness to attract females. Since psychology recapitulates phylogeny, I have personally experienced the peacock principle. In my callow youth, I grew my hair to enormous length and strutted around in ridiculously colored garments. My bewildered parents thought I had become gay, but the explanation was the exact opposite of that. Long hair and gaudy clothes were my peacock feathers.

Cool hair, big muscles, slick dance moves, fancy cars and swagger has always attracted females in the modern world.

And, hey, in the past it was horses, chariots and always great hair…if you think I’m kidding…

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The next day Delilah asked Samson continually about his strength and bugged him so much that he finally told her the secret to his strength – that he was given his strength at birth by God and that if his hair was cut he would lose his strength. That evening as Samson slept, Delilah cut his hair and called in the Philistines. The Philistine men were able to capture Samson. They barged in, gouged his eyes out, and took him to prison in Gaza.

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History warns us that whole societies have disintegrated over pronouns. Once you’re worried about the splendor of your titles, liberty, equality and fraternity get chucked out the window. I freely confess that I have always nursed the secret wish to be addressed as “El Supremo,” particularly by my children. That never happened, but others made of coarser grain may well succumb to the peril of our way of life. Here’s a radical proposal: Let others bestow names on us—so long as we can do the same to them.

As well as the terrifying parts of it…

Look, I have no wish to glamorize nature. Human mating is mainly a miserable mess. Those biological impulses collide with subjective feelings—our organic selves against our symbolic selves—in what is literally a silent but endless struggle of all against all. Nobody wants to be lonely. Nobody wants to be humiliated. It’s the most intimate and self-revealing act human beings will engage in, yet the rules of the game are written by culture-geezers too old to give a hoot. Plus, on the internet, you can’t tell that the lovely girl of your dreams is actually a bearded, 250-pound truck driver.

Yikes, Heaven Forbid !!!

*All emboldened highlights are mine.

RTWDT.