Sex Brain
Feature #6: Your sex brain knows people are weird.
Some of you
who watch those nature channels on TV (and let's face it who among
us doesn't stare with slack-jawed fascination at the occasional
lengthy nature documentary now and again) have become aware that
many animals have mating seasons. 4 wild and crazy weeks in May
and some fairly disturbing shots of moose in heat. 6 scary weeks
once every two years for the blue-tipped rhinocerous in the wild.
Or simply those animals who don't do much until they spot a female
in heat at which point they completely lose their fucking minds
and engage in a frenzy of brutal competition and desperate pregnancy
attempts.
So why don't
people have mating seasons? Wouldn't it be simpler all around
if the human mating season occurred reliably during Mardi Gras so
that we could all indulge guilt-free in a riotous festival of pregnancy-causing
activities, massive alcohol intake and fatty foods - and then
not have to worry about it at all for the rest of the year?
No dating angst, no fears of sexual inadequacy, no relentless competition
and worry, no long drawn-out discussions, no unfulfilled horniness,
nothing but a hell of a good time and an 11 month recovery period.
Why exactly does our sex brain force us to worry about
sex 24/7 for decades and decades on end? The answer is - you
guessed it, because your sex brain knows people are weird.
Your sex brain
doesn't know a lot about people, really, only what it needs to get
by, but what it does know is that as a human being you are going
to born into a culture and society jam-packed and stuffed to the
gills with Other People. These Other People are bound, in the evolutionary
nature of things, to come up with all sorts of arcane and absurd
rules for How Things Ought to Be Done.
They'll have
rules about eating utensils and wearing apparel and polite forms
of speech, and status and hierarchy and daily activities and division
of labor and religion and money and god knows what else, but stuck
in that morass of rules somewhere is bound to be a whole list of
rules about sex. About who and when and where and why. There'll
be some crazy-ass rules and prohibitions and taboos and superstitions
about menstruation and sex, or marriage and sex, or relatives and
sex, or age and sex, or death and sex, or times of day and sex,
or full moons and sex, or pregnancy and sex, or money and sex, or
pineapples and sex, and god knows what else and sex.
Your poor sex
brain has no way of knowing before you're born what kind of crazy-ass
social rules you're going to encounter. All it knows is that you're
going to encounter some. And the only way it can prepare for this
reality is to have the default setting switched to 'Mate Whenever
You Fucking Can!' Or 'If they'll let you mate, mate for Chrissakes,
mate now! God knows you may never get another fucking opportunity'.
This underlying anxiety your Sex Brain has that Other People are
going to quixotically and suddenly decide that you're never allowed
to have sex again accounts for a lot of its attitudes towards things.
Humans can't have mating seasons because they have cultures. And
cultures have 2 qualities relevant in this context - a) they vary
and b) they fuck things up. Add these 2 together and you have a
basically worried Human Sex Brain.
This is half
the explanation for the year-round, year-in, year-out nature of
human sexuality. The other half of the explanation has to do with
the Love Brain. Which as we said before, is a different entity entirely
although people have a natural and misleading tendency to get the
Love Brain and the Sex Brain mixed up with each other or to accidentally
think they're the same thing. They're not. The Love Brain is a whole
different animal and we'll get to it later. When we feel like it.
Suffice it to
say that as far as your Sex Brain goes, from the time you are physically
able to get pregnant, your Sex Brain has the responsibility of scanning
for Pregnancy Opportunties and attempting to capitalize on them.
Since it doesn't know from birth what form pregnancy opportunities
are going to take in your culture, it has to learn on the fly. And
following the better safe than sorry rule of evolution, it is pre-set
to be pretty hyper-vigilant about this and to investigate all leads
in its search for pregnancy opportunities.
For example,
let's say you were accidentally watching Baywatch and a woman with
a bikini appeared on the screen. Your sex brain would be duty-bound
to perk up its ears intelligently like a dog, put itself on alert
and observe the woman in the bikini closely to determine whether
or not she represented a pregnancy opportunity. Because she might.
And remember your sex brain is old, so it can't tell the difference
between television and reality. So it stops everything for a second
to check out the situation. Upon a moment or two of close observation,
it will determine, on the basis of experience, that the woman in
the bikini does not in fact represent a pregnancy opportunity. She
is not in close physical proximity to you and if she was, she woudn't
like you. From your Sex Brain's point of view this is regrettable
perhaps due to the presence of some rather enticing fertility indicators
above the waist, but hardly surprising. Your Sex Brain does not
actually expect to encounter a lot of worthwhile pregnancy opportunities
- that's exactly why it reliably and conscientiously checks out
all possible opportunities, promising or not. 99% of the time your
Sex Brain quickly discards momentary possible pregnancy opportunities
without a second thought.
The fact that
your sex brain might check out 145 possible pregnancy opportunities
during a day does not mean that your sex brain wants you to have
sex 145 times a day. What it actually means is that its doing its
job and has efficiently discarded 145 possible pregnancy leads as
really not worth following up on. It's fast this way, your sex brain
is, and it can discard a worthless potential pregnancy opportunity
without coming close to the breaking a sweat. It usually distinguishes
between the wheat and the chaff with ease. It's when it comes across
something that looks suspiciously like wheat that it really kicks
into gear.
Procedural
note: Your Sex Brain will discard some possible pregnancy opportunities
as impractical but make a mental note of them to consider further
at a later time when it has a moment to mull things over. These
will frequently show up later as sexual fantasies as your Sex Brain
launches a thorough imaginary investigation of the implications
of the impractical pregnancy opportunity. Suppose Heather Locklear
was in close physical proximity? It may want to engage in a thorough
interrogation of itself on this very subject. Could be important
to know at a later date if she ever shows up at your house asking
for directions. There could many possible features of engaging in
a pregnancy opportunity with Heather Locklear and perhaps it would
be wise to consider them all in careful detail. Just in case. A
conscientious sex brain may want to rehearse the best ways to get
pregnant with Heather Locklear a number of times just to be certain
it is thoroughly prepared and doing the best job it can for your
reproductive future.
This rehearsal
quality of your Sex Brain can make for some fairly interesting daydreams.
You can enjoy this quality or you can get weirded out about it,
but either way your Sex Brain doesn't really give a damn. It's got
a job to do, and it's going to do it damn it! And if this requires
Extensive Fantasy Rehearsal, Extensive Fantasy Rehearsal
is going to be implemented. Nothing is too good for You and your
potential offspring.
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