- jonsknowles
- Jun 19
- 13 min read
The process of reproduction and the urge for sexual connection were venerated as two separate forces in the ancient religions of the west. Sex and fertility were rarely confused with one another. Crossover cults might muddle them together—but not usually. If you couldn’t have babies or your cows refused to calf, you prayed at the shrine of a certain god, or a specific aspect of that god. If you had a sexual concern or you were lovesick, you prayed at another.
Pleas for fertility were offered at the temples of Attis, Cybele, Demeter, and Isis. Prayers for success in love were offered to the lustful aspects of Adonis, Aphrodite, Dionysius, Eros, and Ishtar.
The devout paid their homage in different ways. They made prayers or gave gifts. Or they had sex with each another or with the deity’s sacred harlots — girls or boys.
Before the common, or Christian era, sexual longing, for the same or opposite sex, was seen as a primordial urge apart from pro-creation. This belief is captured in a famous passage of Plato’s Symposium: The gods created three kinds of humans—female, male, and intersex—the third kind of human had both genders. These proto-humans were sphere-shaped. They had had two heads, two sets of sex organs, four arms, and four legs. When they wanted to get somewhere fast, they rolled on all their limbs like cartwheels. They were very powerful. They even challenged the gods, who took their vengeance by cutting every single human sphere in half. And so were created the two-legged, two-armed, one-headed humans we know today.
According to Plato, each half of a female sphere longs for the other. So too with the male halves of male spheres. The halves of the intersex spheres long for their opposite sex—these are the straight couples. Plato put it more eloquently:
... when a person meets the half that is his very own, whatever his orientation, whether it’s to young men, or not, then something wonderful happens: The two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment ...
Plato goes on:
... we used to be complete wholes in our original nature, and now “Love” is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.
Plato did not see the desire to belong, to pursue wholeness, to love, to connect with another, as an essentially procreative activity.
Non-procreative sex played a dominate role in the social and domestic lives of the ancient world as well as in its philosophy and mythology. All kinds of non-procreative sex acts were pictured all over household pottery in ancient Greece. How people had sex—with boys, with toys, with sex workers, with slaves—was a favorite household decoration. No one seems to have been shy about it. Thousands of these vases and dishes can still be seen in museums around the world. There were so many pots illustrated with pictures of men having sex with prostitutes—pornê—that it inspired our word pornography, a composite of pornê and graphê, Greek for illustration. Women could purchase dildos¾olisbos¾without breaking the law. These fake penises were made of padded leather or wood. They were one of the major exports of a Greek city in Asia Minor. Lubricated with olive oil, these sex toys were used for masturbation. They were also used by women who had sex with other women.
The Romans decorated their homes with murals and mosaics of women and men having sex.
Procreation does not seem to be the goal in these works of art. There were drinking goblets decorated with men fucking other men and boys. Of women having oral sex with each other. Of men going down on women. Even the chits the Romans used for playing board and gambling games—spinitriae—were decorated with images of people having sex. The women in most of these images are taking an active role in giving themselves, and their partners, pleasure. The Romans were very easy with these images, which were everywhere. They were in places where the kids could look at them. Where women could look at them. Having pictures in the dining room of people having sex was common, not exceptional.
Non-procreative sex was so de rigeur in the ancient west that an herb—silphium—popularly used for contraception became extinct and states had to pass laws to force men to marry and become parents.
Athenian youth of 594 BCE, for example, didn’t want to get married—ever. Why should they? They didn’t expect to find love in marriage, which was nearly always arranged for money and property. They could enjoy sex on most any occasion they liked with boys, slaves, or sex workers. Who needed a loveless civic obligation like marriage or children? In his election bid to be tyrant, the Iron-age philosopher Solon promised a return to the Bronze-Age family values of Homer. His solutions were very simple: Force men to marry. When elected, Solon obligated men to marry. They had to have children. They also had to have vaginal intercourse with their wives at least three times a month. They could still go to their boyfriends or sex workers whenever they liked. (But men had to keep their hands off citizen women who were not their wives, and they had to marry.
It seems men continued to avoid marriage, anyway. More than a hundred years later, in 451 BCE, there were still not enough aristocrat babies being born. Pericles was the new ruler of Athens. He gave the old laws new teeth—men had to get married, or else! The laws of Pericles were known as the Citizenship Laws. Men who didn’t obey them would lose their citizenship and property. They had to serve in the military until they were 30. During that time they were encouraged to have other men for lovers. That was good for army morale. After that, they had to get married and have children. They could still have boy friends if they wanted to, but they had to have legitimate sons who would grow up to be warrior citizens.
To make respectable women more sexually appealing to the guys, artists were, for the first time, encouraged to depict women nude in vase painting. And even the images on household pottery shifted from the “revelry” themes of homoerotic seductions and heterosexual rape to pictures of domestic warmth and tranquility between women and men. Marriage became romanticized on dinnerware. These pictures of affectionate married couples were very likely designed to persuade women and men to accept the sexual and social roles expected of them. The love of paides and erastes was not yet outlawed. But it was increasingly regarded as old-fashioned.
In the first century BCE in Rome, stringent laws were also needed to force men into marriage. Like Solon and Pericles, the first Roman Emperor, Octavius Augustus, passed a slew of laws—jus trium liberorum—to declare that all citizens had to marry and have children. Just as many men wanted to avoid marriage and many women were repelled by the idea of having babies, there were penalties for not doing so. There were also penalties for not remarrying if a spouse died or a marriage failed during one’s reproductive years. Men between 20 and 50 who had no wife, and women and men over 25 who had no children, couldn’t own property. On the other hand, couples who had three or more children got rewards in property and in cash. Senators were required to take wives from their own class or forfeit their senatorial rights.
Emperor Augustus made fornication with free women and men—stuprum—illegal outside of marriage. Upper-class men were expected to have sex with sex workers and slaves—female or male, but they were prohibited from having sex with unmarried citizen women or widows. Upper-class women were forbidden any kind of sex outside of marriage.
But even as Plato composed his charming myth in the late 4th century BCE, there was always plenty of moralizing and suspicion about sexual desire. The Stoic school, for example, taught that sex itself was bad. The founder of the Stoic school in Athens was Zeno. He was about 25 at the time. He got himself all excited about two ancient Persian ideas that were the brainchildren of the prophet Zoroaster. One was that the world is divided into two parts—good and evil. The world of the spirit is good. The physical world is evil. The other idea was that the soul is rewarded or punished for eternity.
Like the Buddha, Zeno said that the material world was bad. Indifference to suffering was good. Self satisfaction was bad. Accepting one’s fate was good. The sex drive was bad. Sex was responsible for destroying old-fashioned family values. It distracted men from marriage. It was destructive for the family. Not only was sex bad, the body itself was bad. The body and its sexual needs had to be strictly contained and controlled. And so the scene was set for the Christian era and the abstinence-until-marriage movement of our own time.
When it came to sex and the desire to connect, Plato’s most famous student, spoke less of love than he did of biology and reproduction. In his Generation of Animals, Aristotle cataloged the many ways in which animals reproduce. Copulation was a reproductive tool. Although Aristotle permitted sexual pleasure outside of procreative efforts when it served the health and well-being of the mind and soul, he believed that humans should follow the example of animals and be “continent” about their sexual pleasures. He held that sexual expression was “dangerous, hard to control, harmful to health, and draining.” Aristotle’s views were to dominate zoological and moral teaching in the Judeo-Christian west for nearly 2,500 years.
Six hundred years after Aristotle, Christian Bishop, Augustine of Hippo, taught that sexual intercourse even in marriage, even for the begetting of children was a sin — a “venal” sin, but a sin nevertheless Fornication, rape, incest, and adultery were also “venal.” Augustine considered them “natural sins” because they could lead to procreation. Rape, incest, and adultery were less serious violations of the natural order and therefore less sinful than masturbation and oral and anal sex, which were contraceptive, “unnatural,” and very serious sins and crimes.
In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas married his readings and misreadings of Aristotelian “science” and philosophy to Augustine’s violent Zoroastrian hatred of the physical world. To Augustine’s list of serious sins of the flesh, he added deviation from the missionary position. He did so because he believed that it was more difficult to conceive a pregnancy in any other position.” Misinterpreting Aristotle, Acquinas claimed that “In sexual intercourse the human being becomes similar to the beast” Unlike Aristotle’s, Acquinas’s analogy was not a positive one.
In Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, Catholic theologian Uta Ranke Heineman traces the Western church’s thinking and beliefs about non-procreative sexual expression from Aristotle and the Stoics through Augustine and Aquinas to today’s Christian church. She demonstrates that the Medieval, Roman Catholic views of Thomas Aquinas dominated Judeo-Christian theology and secular Western thinking about human sexuality well into the 20th century, i.e., that sexual intercourse was morally permissive only in committed heterosexual relationships when procreation was a possible, if not always a desired, outcome. For papal motivation behind church attitudes about sexuality in the last two centuries, there is no better general source than Garry Wills’ Papal Sins, published in 2000.
During the middle of the 19th century, science colluded with Judeo-Christian theology and social and economic politics to reinforce the doctrine that procreation was the sine qua non of sexual desire. The Industrial Revolution had spread worldwide. Nations of the west saw their world through a filter colored by a global excitement with mass production and economic competition. Victoria, and all she stood for, was Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and Empress of India.
In this milieu Charles Darwin published Origin of the Species. He suggested that all sexual behavior was tied to reproductive effort. Darwin’s concept of “sexual selection” paralleled his theory of “natural selection.” He saw sexual selection as a “battle,” usually by the males, for access to reproductive females. Only the most fit would get to reproduce and all sexual selection was about reproductive success.
Darwin expanded his thinking about sex selection in The Descent of Man, which he published in 1874. His theories of sexual selection were not only in perfect harmony with the Industrial Revolution’s sense of competition; they were in perfect sync with his Queen’s strong beliefs that sex belonged in the domain of domesticity and reproduction.
Darwin’s theories concurred with Victorian stereotypes and biases about human sexuality:
Males are stronger, more passionate, and more dominant than females.
The most fit males fight for and win the right to breed with the most fit females.
The female of the species is always “less eager” than the male and has no need to compete sexually.
Sexual selection never happens before or after reproductive age.
Animal pairing are “mostly” monogamous.
Sexual selection in all animals includes the most important elements of “love” and “sympathy.”
Sex nearly always occurs in a “breeding” season—which Darwin calls “the season of love.”
Sex exists to serve “propagation.”
Animals “know what they’re about” when they select each other for procreation or making “marriage arrangements,” a term he uses to describe the relationships of reptiles.
With the religious and social prejudices of his Queen, Darwin does not entertain the possibility of non-procreative sexual “selection”.
Very few seem to have argued with Darwin’s theory of sex selection. The general assumption that animals have sex only in order to reproduce was unquestioned and reinforced throughout most of the 20th century. Sexual expression that had no direct procreative potential—masturbation and same-sex partnering for example—has been largely held suspect and considered deviant. Heads of biology departments, like the one who lectured at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1962, taught that animals only had sex for reproduction, usually during some delineated “breeding” season. We were taught that, with very rare exceptions—homo sapiens being a nearly unique example—even warm-blooded vertebrates were uniformly monogamous.
Although Darwin did not use the term “reproductive instinct” in his theory of sex selection, his concept that animals “know what they’re about” when they select one another for sex, i.e., reproduction, became amplified in the concept that “reproductive instinct” was the driving, and even conscious, force behind all sexual expression, whether in, to use John Money’s terms, “robotic” or in “non-robotic” animals.
In their well-intentioned and humane efforts to destigmatize non-procreative behaviors and make them seem less deviant, especially among adult humans in the western world, many sexologists forcibly wedged all non-procreative sexual behaviors—such as masturbation, same-sex mounting, and intercourse outside of estrus—into this procreative paradigm. According to these apologists, there is no such thing as an essentially non-procreative sexual activity. All sexual activity, even if seemingly non-procreative, can only be legitimized in terms of reproductive value. It is argued that non-procreative sexual expression rehearses and improves reproductive prowess. Or it fulfills a “helper” role that ensures species survival. Or it regulates population growth, etc., etc.
Even as homosexuality, for example, is increasingly seen as an anatomical if not genetic predisposition throughout the animal, it continues to be theorized as a behavior that is beneficial to the reproductive and survival strategies of the species—that it conforms to the rules of Darwin’s theories about natural and sexual selection. Countless papers in the fields of queer theory and evolutionary psychology have been published to support the theory that any and all non-procreative behaviors in all species are “successful” and will only recur when they support the reproductive success of the species.
In 1999, Bruce Bagemihl’s landmark meta-analysis, Biological Exuberance, invited us all to take a look at the man behind the curtain of this procreationist view of our biological world. Bagemihl points to the increasing scientific evidence that so-called “lower,” non-human animals frequently engage in sexual behavior, including same-sex behavior, that cannot result in reproduction. Like other scientists at the end of the 20th century, Bagemihl demonstrates that humans aren’t the only animals who have non-reproductive sex. Animals have sex for the sake of having sex. They do it in thousands of inventive ways.
Dogs lick themselves into ecstasy or hump themselves wildly against your leg. Red stags get erect by rubbing their antlers on tree trunks. Lady porcupines straddle sticks and drag them against the ground, getting a kick out of the vibrations that doing so makes against their sex organs. A lady gibbon is likely to make a dildo out of any object that will fit into her vagina. (Strong & DeVault, 1997, 304).
So far, we know that more than 450 species of animals enjoy same-sex pleasure. Many enjoy same-sex pairbonds. The number of animals that we learn have same-sex activities keeps increasing. Same-sex activity is common among females and males and among all kinds of animals—mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and insects. The octopus does it deep in the ocean. He slips his sex tentacle inside his boyfriend—of a different species!—to stroke his pleasure spot. Mallard drakes and buck giraffes mount each other to rub sex organs. Dolphins enjoy penis-to-penis frottage. Sometimes they even fuck one another’s blow holes. Female western gulls nest and raise broods together. Female gorillas and chimpanzees have a good time brushing their clitorises together. So do cattle, pigs, and rabbits. Male chimps mount one another. Bonobo apes enjoy celebrating the prospect of a good meal with an orgy. Age, social position, and gender don’t matter to them. The whole clan eagerly swaps partners. Everyone has a few good orgasms. Then they eat.
In his view of non-procreative sexual activity, Bagemihl goes further than many of his colleagues. He demonstrates that all animals have sex that has absolutely no reproductive potential—they do it with partners, or at times, or in ways that obviate the reproductive possibility. Bagemihl suggests that the sex drive, the impulse to connect, can be an end in itself in the animal kingdom. He is not alone. In his 2002 study of homosexuality among domestic cattle, domestic sheep, Uganda kobs, and Japanese macaques, Paul L. Vasey found that “Qualitative research on three of the species identified in this review fails to provide support the conclusion that the same-sex sexual behavior and by extension, same-sex partner preference, they exhibit have any sociosexual function.
Bagemihl goes further than most and suggests that sexual reproduction is an incidental by-product of an essential exuberant desire of organisms to connect—a “biological exuberance”—one that is reminiscent of ancient, pre-Christian religion and mythology. Could Bagemihl be onto something? To hint at a possible answer to that question, I ask you to travel back in time with me, maybe 3.5 billion years. It is the moment when sexual reproduction first took place. We see two one-celled lifeforms encountering one another in the briny deep. Instead of avoiding each other in fear of being eaten, they rub up against each other. They connect. They actually merge. In their connection, they allow their DNA to fuse and split away from them. A new life form emerges from their connection. It is very like, but not exactly like, its parents, who have separated from one another and have drifted far away from each other into the deep.
What caused this very first instance of sexual reproduction? What brought these early life forms into contact with one another? Was it reproductive instinct? How could an organism have an instinct for something that has never happened before? What else could have brought these two life forms together? Was it just an accident? Could an accident lead to reproduction? What caused the accident? Could it be that life forms like to connect? Could it be that connection sometimes leads to reproduction? Could it be that reproduction among animals is a side effect, not the cause, of the urge to connect? Is this as useful an explanation for sexual behavior as reproductive instinct? Is it more useful? Is it possible that sexual selection is more about sex than it is about reproduction?
We know that for most people, procreation is at the bottom of the list of reasons to have sex. Most times, we have other reasons: We have sex because we like feeling attracted and attractive. We want to relieve stress, we want to feel pleasure, or we want to feel nurtured. We want to feel power, or we want to let our partners feel power. All of these reasons for having sex are much more frequent than our desire to have a kid. Can this be true for other animals? We want to connect. Why do we not see, as Plato and others of the ancient world have seen, that the impulse to connect is a universal and essential impulse regardless of reproductive potential? The answer to this question is important. It shapes the lens through which we observe our sexual world—as individuals, as sexologists, and as a society.
Presented at a conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, November 14, 2004, Madison, Wisconsin.
