It's a damn shame we pound sex into everyone's brain through media and whatnot, just reinforcing it's iron grip. It can really hinder your personal freedom and quality of life if you let it.
Are you really pulling for the "social construction" theory here? But you're right on the big point which is that as people we have the freedom (or at least the appearance of it) to escape some of the "programming."
I've long felt that sex (and biological systems in general, all adapted via evolutionary selection) is pretty much a jury-rigged contraption that requires an astonishing number of things to work "correctly." (I'm not going to get into it too much, but this is the hole in the teleological argument that "there is a reason for sex and you are bad if you do not adhere to our definition of that reason").
That sort of thinking would, if taken to its extreme, take us to some uncomfortable conclusions though. For example, it appears that over time humans have been selected for smaller testicles than chimpanzees (who have outrageous sex lives) but larger ones than gorillas (who can physically beat down competition for mates). In one sense, it's maybe a better use of resources to spend less of it spraying semen all over the place. On the other hand, raise your hand if you want smaller balls. Not many of us, I bet. There are times when it would be nice not to have balls in the way, but generally we still respect them and find them useful.
Society and laws certainly look to be accelerating the process of selecting for smaller balls (less energy spent on balls = more energy for other things, or less energy needed), and so you have to wonder if social laws are actually more durable than what's been around for millions of years. However, the bigger good is that in using your brain you can try to look beyond simple species or individual trait survival and hopefully find a greater good to go after, something sex has been pretty poor at doing. Of course, people are at an interesting crossroads since WHAT HAS SCIENCE DONE!? allows us to arbitrarily engineer (to at least a small degree) for what we want, regardless of whether it would survive in any context outside a highly supportive, resource-heavy society (like having assistants to carry around your super balls). The idea of carrying capacity of an ecosystem is an argument against the idea that just because something evolved in nature that it is good in the senses of species and environmental survival, too.
circuitface wrote:Aliquantic wrote:Circuitface, what then is the difference between sex and "regular" thrill seeking? Because I'm not really seeing how your example of hook suspension is sexual in nature, as opposed to some sort of adrenaline reaction.
I don't know what to tell you. Hook suspension is commonly associated with giving people a sexual high, which is why it's become a staple in the whole S&M scene. That's right alongside auto-erotic asphyxiation and genital torture. There are also people who like feces in their mouths.
Thrill seeking is luge or jumping out of airplanes. You can see the difference?
Just to make it simple, I see three levels distinct enough for me:
- Evolution (cross-over between sex and violence is surprisingly common in species, and fetishization or attraction is most likely a related phenomenon, instead of a small subset - but sex and violence historically have had a "purpose")
- Ethics
- Prudence (common sense)
In this case, circuitface is arguing from ethics and at least partly from prudence - if you have to get a thrill in a risky way, you're probably not the person to ask about prudence, but people don't get deadly sick or lose limbs as a regular and foreseeable consequence of jumping out of airplanes. We could try asking David Carradine about these things, in other words, but he's dead because he was blinded by the high. On the other hand, I was at an airshow as an infant (or nearly so, so I don't remember it) when a parachutist's canopy didn't open. I'm told he didn't scream at all on the way down.
We could try some amusingly convoluted arguments from the case of evolution, and it's tough to unravel because social things (hanging hooks off your body to prove you're pretty tough, though that's different from what's being mentioned here) are also evolutionary adaptations. So far the hook-hangers and poop eaters aren't winning the influence war, and contrary to reports poop is not a very effective weapon, even when aimed at the eyes.
