Natural behavior

This section contains a fair amount of scientific information that you may find interesting and useful when thinking about your sex life, along with some speculation based on it. How much of it is true?  Well, I've tried to keep it consistent with current thinking in the scientific community at the moment, but as for being true...

Scientific truths

The best thing about scientific Truths is: there aren't any.  Scientific information is meant to be questioned — that's part of the scientific process. You're not supposed to accept it as certain, you're supposed to wonder about it and test it against your own experience and think about all the ways it might be wrong. For that reason, the process of learning scientific information can be valuable even when the information you're learning turns out to be faulty (which it often is).

In fact, the whole idea of "truth" may not be very applicable in the spiritual area either (for more about this, see the article about truth).

The bottom line is, find out as much as you can, and keep thinking about the information you discover. You are the judge of whether it's useful to you.

Our evolutionary heritage

It's amazing how well bred you are!  You come from a line with a perfect record — not one of your ancestors, not a single one, ever failed to survive and breed.  This suggests that you too are excellently positioned to survive and have sex. 

We really are all animals, that's the beauty of it.  As a result, to understand and accept our sexuality we have to understand and accept our animal natures. 

Some people may not like that idea, but the more you find out about your animal nature, the more you realize it doesn't diminish you — in fact, your animal nature is the source of much you cherish in yourself. And it isn't simple!  If the natural world were simple then understanding it might "take away its mystery," but in real life that problem shouldn't arise.  John von Neumann, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, is supposed to have observed, "We never really understand anything, we just get used to things."  No matter how much you learn, there's always so vastly much more you still don't know. 

Nor does your long and complex evolutionary heritage trap you in a biological destiny of some kind.  Nothing requires you to follow an ancestral breeding regimen.  Children are indeed infinitely precious and wonderful, but that doesn't mean you're somehow obligated to produce them! 

In fact, part of the endlessly complex equation of life is that overpopulation regularly leads to catastrophe.  As far as we can tell, overpopulation is what led to the downfall of virtually all early civilizations, including those of the Indus valley, the Minoans, and countless others.  It now threatens to destroy our civilization as well.  Traditional human antidotes to overpopulation have been war, famine and plague, but maybe this time we can discover a better solution — if we try. 

For ways evolution guides your sexual behavior, see the evolution page.

Against nature?

How about being gay — that clearly goes against the natural order, doesn't it?  NO!  Not only is all of nature rife with gay sex, there's reason to believe that during lean times throughout prehistory, having gay people in a family and tribe gave the children a better shot at survival.  In fact, chances are, without help from gay relatives and friends, many of your ancestors over hundreds of thousands of years would not have survived as children, and you wouldn't be here now! 

For information about same-sex relationships in nature, see the gay sex page.

Body chemistry

It's something of a scandal that we know as little as we do about the biochemistry of desire. Even these days, it can ruin your career as a research scientist to be considered too interested in sex (the scientific community can be so selective about its objectivity). Work on the pathways of pleasure is being funded largely because people have belatedly realized that those pathways are hijacked by drug addiction.

Still, it's interesting to be aware of what we have found out about the hormones and brain chemistry that affect lust and pleasure, and to realize how much more there is yet to be discovered.

For information about the biochemistry of sex, see the hormones page.

So, read on...

The more you learn, the more you'll probably find that understanding your biology and chemistry doesn't limit your choices, it actually broadens them.  The more you understand about why you feel the way you do, the better chance you have of evaluating, mediating and honoring those feelings to get what you really want in the long run.