Member-only story
Yes, sex is actually fun
Second in a series on marriage
Most animals have seasons of rut to perpetuate their species, and when they are not in rut, they don’t have sex. Not us humans! Our mating behaviors are quite odd, compared to other animals. In his classic book, Why Is Sex Fun?, Jared Diamond rather dryly spells out what is peculiar to us naked apes: “long-term sexual partnerships, co-parenting, proximity to the sexual partnerships of others, private sex, concealed ovulation, extended female receptivity, sex for fun, and female menopause.”[1] And that’s not all, not by a long shot.
So much for zoology. What makes us human, different from the rest of the beasts, including previous human species,[2] is four things. First, we talk. A lot. In other words (!) we make and string together symbolic sounds with our bodies, mouths, larynxes, and diaphragms. We create meanings this way, and in the recent past, 5000 years or so, we have learned how to transcribe those ordered sounds into signs like the ones you are reading. Second, we create art — music, dance, paintings, sculptures, plays, and so on — to express all sorts of ideas, from the grindingly ordinary to the sublime. Third, we struggle with a “sense of the sacred,” which I would describe as feelings of Something greater beyond what we experience, even if we do not believe that the Something is real. And last, humans marry…
