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Sex is fun. Sex is pleasurable. This is obvious, right? These sorts of things don?t need to be said, right? Well, perhaps they do. Everyone realizes that sex is fun and pleasurable (though some seem to wish that it weren?t), but the prevailing belief is that sex really only exists for procreation and that pleasure is merely a byproduct. This belief is shared by religious activists as well as some scientists.

What if the belief is wrong?

Summary

Title: With Pleasure: Thoughts on the Nature of Human Sexuality
Author: Paul R. Abramson, Steven D. Pinkerton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195146093

Pro:
? Interesting and thought-provoking subject
? Marshals impressive evidence from biology, anthropology, psychology, and more

Con:
? None

Description:
? Addresses a variety of issues on sexuality ? religion, pornography, politics, and evolution
? Argues that sexuality is as much if not more about pleasure than about procreation
? Explains how we should rethink the role and place of sexuality in our culture

Book Review

There is no question but that sex exists for the purpose of procreation. At the same time, though, there are a multitude of sexual acts which people engage in that have absolutely nothing to do with procreation. Are such acts just byproducts of the evolutionary drive toward procreation, or are they instead part of the point of sexuality in the first place?

The standard response tends to be that sexual pleasure and non-procreative activity are byproducts of the ?real? purpose of sexuality, but in their book With Pleasure: Thoughts on the Nature of Human Sexuality, Paul R.

Abramson and Steven D. Pinkerton argue that this standard response is mistaken. According to Abramson and Pinkerton, the point of sex isn?t just procreation, but pleasure itself.

• ?From the pristine vantage point of religious, political, and evolutionary doctrine, it is sometimes argued that the sole function of human sexuality is reproduction. As a consequence, noreproductive expressions of sexuality are deemed illicit, immoral, or illogical. However, we believe the primacy of reproduction to be vastly overemphasized, and the insistence on procreation as the end-all of human sexuality to be inherently misguided.?

Abramson and Pinkerton discuss evidence from physiology, psychology, and culture in order to demonstrate that pleasure is not an irrelevant byproduct of the drive to procreate.

It is probably undeniable that pleasure originally developed in order to promote procreation ? the more pleasurable an activity is, the more likely individuals are to engage in it. Those who have sex more will produce more offspring, and so the genes that make sex pleasurable get passed on.

That, however, is not the final word on how evolution operates. Traits that develop in order to meet one need can be co-opted to fulfill entirely different purposes. In the case of sexual pleasure, it turns out that this pleasure facilitates things such as interpersonal bonding, promoting interpersonal relationships, and reducing social tensions. These may not have been reasons why sexual pleasure developed, but they certainly helped ensure that it stayed with us and spread through the population. Today, perhaps, reproduction is simply a byproduct of sexual pleasure.

Religious conservatives have tried hard to repress sexuality and focus it exclusively on reproduction, but have they been successful? No. Sexuality is expressed in a multitude of ways, and for the most part, reproduction is a minor factor in all this.

There is far more sex-for-pleasure than there is sex-for-reproduction, that is indisputable. It is because of this that one can conclude that, for homo sapiens at least, sex exists primarily for the sake of the pleasure it creates rather than the children which are only sometimes created.

This is actually a very positive development because if something that is so much fun were also always about reproduction, the population problems on the planet would be far worse than they currently are. It is arguable that our ability to have fun with sex helps save us from deadly population pressures ? though many religious believers argue that our ability to have fun with sex puts us at risk for hell.

It is because of this that Abramson and Pinkerton don?t merely present their observations about human sexuality; instead, they also advocate that we all develop a more realistic perspective on sexuality. We have been misled into thinking that sex is just about procreation, but once we recognize it for being about pleasure, we?ll be able to handle it better and live our lives a bit better.