I heard only 10 minutes of October General Conference and it led me to a revelation. I turned on the radio while driving home on a Saturday afternoon in time to hear Elder Alan T. Phillips of the Seventy say, “You are not an accidental by-product of nature, a cosmic orphan, or the result of matter plus time plus chance. Where there is design, there is a designer.” [source]
I spent the rest of the afternoon fuming, composing feedback for the Designer on how badly he designed the female reproductive system and procreation in general (menopause is not fun). The Sacred Procreative Process (SPP) means a man has an orgasm, and a woman does all the hard work. Good fathers are vitally important for raising children, but the conception, gestation, delivery and lactation is the mother’s responsibility.
Bad design.
Plus, sexual pleasure isn’t evenly shared. A woman can get pregnant during the worst experience of her life (rape), or when she’s bored and wishing he’d hurry up and finish, or when she’s loving every second. And honestly, most people don’t want to make a baby every time they have sex. Here – I made a Venn diagram.
This is what your sex drive and procreative drive usually look like. Single horny teenagers, married couples using birth control, post-menopause sex, gay lovers, one-night stands, a summer fling, whatever. I’m going to say that no one wants to make a baby every time they experience sexual pleasure (tell me if you do in the comments). The majority of sex happens without any hope to conceive. In fact, the time when sexual pleasure and procreation overlap is probably just a few years early in a marriage.
This stage isn’t the majority of anyone’s life. And yet Church leaders name sex the Sacred Procreative Process as if procreative sex is most of what people do.
I was grousing and grumbling about that Designer, and then I had my revelation.
Church leaders are expecting humans to act like dogs in heat. The SPP and the law of chastity work great for dogs in heat. No wait! Hear me out!
Female dogs go into heat when they’re fertile. This is the only time a female dog is receptive to having sex with a male dog. This is fine with the male dog. Dogs don’t have a sex drive. The male dog gets interested in sex only when a female in heat gives off pheromones that signal fertility. The only time dogs do the sacred procreative process is when they are making puppies.
The dog’s Venn diagram looks like this:
Dogs are a good example for humans in following the law of chastity.
The Designer should make a couple other changes to the SPP. One is that a woman will not go into heat until she’s in her twenties. Did you know puppies can go into heat as young as six months old? (I googled it.) Don’t let a puppy get pregnant because that’s bad for puppy-mom and the new puppies too. Human females can get pregnant as young as 10 years old. I was 12 when I started menstruating. That’s incredibly bad design. The Designer really screwed up by making females fertile before their bodies and brains have developed enough to carry a healthy pregnancy and be a good mom.
Instead of monthly cycles, the Designer should arrange so that a woman [fn 1] will have a heat cycle once a year. She’s fertile for three days. She knows when this is happening, and culture accommodates this (paid vacation days) (societal norms respect this process). If she doesn’t want to conceive she goes to a “heat resort” where no males are allowed and she spends three days getting facials and eating chocolate. If she does want to conceive, she makes arrangements so that the only man around when she starts emitting pheromones is her husband. They both want to have hot and steamy sex; they conceive. Yay! The SPP worked!
Heat cycles produce other bonuses too. Imagine a world in which no one has a sex drive other than a response to pheromones when an adult woman is fertile. Child sex abuse doesn’t exist because no child gives off pheromones (I’ve decreed heat starts in your twenties). Rape doesn’t exist because if there aren’t pheromones, the man doesn’t want sex. The beauty industry evaporates because attraction has nothing to do with physical appearance. Marriages are based on friendship and compatibility rather than sexual attraction. No one commits adultery because you’re just not around anyone’s heat cycle besides your spouse’s. Prostitution is gone. There’s no such thing as homosexual attraction because there isn’t heterosexual attraction either. Also, no one feels sexually deprived because not having sex when you don’t want sex is just fine.
The law of chastity works great for creatures who have heat cycles rather than what humans really deal with – largely unpredictable fertility and a continuous sex drive.
In All Seriousness Though
Church leaders are out of touch with their teachings about sex. If they want to insist that the Gospel is universal and that its teachings apply to everyone, then the leaders need to come up with a doctrine about sex and procreation that applies to everyone, rather than pretending that human sexuality should be like dogs in heat. The Designer did not design a law of chastity that works with human design.
The law of chastity presupposes that everyone enjoys procreative sex, everyone gets married and stays married and everyone wants children and can have them. There are many people who meet all these conditions precedent, but also many who don’t. The law of chastity overlooks and ignores some common and painful things.
The law of chastity does not mention rape, incest or sexual assault. Sexual violence just isn’t supposed to happen. Church leaders have had to learn the hard way that they can’t assume that women deserve to be assaulted and that victims can’t just forgive and get over it. Any and all progress that Church leaders have made in counseling rape and assault victims has been made because women have taught the men that the Church’s blame-the-victim approach was wrong.
The law of chastity and the SPP do not deal with infertility. You just get a pat on the head and some encouragement. But the doctrine itself does not explain why some people struggle to conceive while others don’t. Parenthood is a product of biology and not a comment on your worthiness and spirituality. People struggling with infertility have had to educate Church leaders that great faith doesn’t bring a miracle pregnancy.
The law of chastity is silent about same-sex attraction. Queer people can probably procreate just fine – they just don’t enjoy it. Telling someone to have sex they don’t like for their entire lives has been a really bad idea. The Church has quit encouraging gay people to get into heterosexual marriages because of the overwhelming number of people insisting those teachings were wrong.
The Church’s insistence that being gay is a lifestyle choice has softened only after untold amounts of misery, and a high suicide rate, among the gay Church members.
Church leaders have gradually given up on policing non-procreative sex between married couples. Birth control, which used to be strongly discouraged, is now up to the couple themselves. Attempts to tell married couples to stop having sex once they were done having children were quickly discarded. Whatever efforts Church leaders made to discourage oral sex have been abandoned. The Designer designed humans to enjoy sex, even when they don’t want to procreate. The Church (and Christianity) keeps trying to label that a temptation we must resist.
The temptation/sin/repentance/obedience dialogue around sex has many negative results. Assault victims were/are stigmatized. Perpetrators are rarely held accountable. Out of wedlock pregnancies burden an unmarried woman much more than they burden the man who impregnated her. Indeed, the historical treatment of unwed mothers is horrific. Children born out of wedlock were outcasts. People raised in purity culture struggle with their sex lives after marriage. Women are made responsible for men’s actions.
The law of chastity does not talk about consent or respect, though it should. Those principles have soaked into the Church from secular sources. And before you comment with, “of course chastity includes respect and consent!” tell me when you’ve last heard/taught a chastity lesson and whether it mentioned consent at all. Even once. Or hinted at it. Anything? No, there isn’t. The law of chastity is based on purity and procreation, and if a person doesn’t already believe their consent matters, they aren’t going to learn that at Church.
A Personal Note
I’m one of the many people raised in the LDS Church who does not fit neatly into the law of chastity. It caused me a lot of confusion and pain, and was one of the reasons I concluded that Church leaders really don’t know what God wants for everyone. The social sciences, psychology, and secular studies about human sexuality saved me from Christian teachings about sex, and LDS teachings in particular.
The law of chastity is designed for only a minority of human beings. The rest of us are better off relying on social science and secular teachings about human sexuality.
[fn 1] I thought about what if the heat cycle happened to the men instead of the women, but I can’t find a species on earth in which that happens. Vulcans and pon farr were created by Gene Rodenberry, not God. Though I believe Spock would agree with me that heat cycles are more logical than what humanity has going on, if the goal is procreation.
Questions:
- Would you be willing to switch from a sex drive to a heat cycle (along with every other human) if it would eliminate all sexual violence and exploitation?
- If you were the Designer, how would you design sex and reproduction?
- Do you have any other feedback for the Designer?
Wheat & Tares 
Okay, so, when women start saying that they don’t want to spend eternity pregnant and going through childbirth, I’ve heard a few people insist that the process is much easier in the eternities. It won’t be like mortal gestation and delivery.
Which leads to a hilarious result. Both the man and woman are lying in bed in the afterglow, when a stork flies through the window and leaves a newborn. They spend the rest of the night dealing with a brand new baby.
Even if gestation and delivery are simplified, would you really want a newborn baby to appear every time you have an orgasm? Even in the eternities?
So, perhaps this is too much of a side note, but “dogs don’t have a sex drive” sure seems like an overstatement when I see one of my dogs trying to hump another dog (who is definitely not in heat, as it is another male and litter mate!). Though I acknowledge that the example was to set up the real premise of your post.
THEY spend the rest of the night dealing with a newborn baby? I’m pretty sure in Mormon heaven the man just heads over to his next wife’s place and spends the rest of the night sleeping there (repeat as desired). He’s got a busy day ahead of him, what with creating worlds, answering prayers (or not), and presiding—can’t be bothered with all that baby stuff.
I like the heat cycle plan.
One note: the SPP as defined by LDS leaders since 1830 conveniently condones straight powerful men sexually using women. Not that this is a polygamy post but it’s a pretty big issue with the law of chastity – or feature – depending on your point of view. I’m not sure how that fits into the dog model, maybe it fits fine since male dogs don’t seem to get jealous of other male dogs.
Adam, don’t dogs and many animals use humping other males as an act of dominance? That might be an improvement in humans too. Say, rather than war, if the men just had some sex with each other.
Anyway.
Back to how God designed humans.
I read recently a theory that humans needed to have sex frequently so that the females’s body gets used to her partner’s sperm/DNA being in her body. Humans have a more invasive placenta because human babies have to develop big brains very fast. Part of the design. Big brain. Big brain needs a much more effective placenta. So, the placenta digs deep into the mother’s body. This very very invasive placenta humans have with mixing of the mother’s blood with her infant’s, can cause the mother’s body to try to kill off the baby’s invasive cells. The most deadly form of this is when the Rh factor is mismatched, but happens to some extent just because the baby has a different blood type or different foreign DNA. The theory is that this bodily rejection of the baby causes pre-eclampsia which can be fatal to baby and mother, as in leading cause of maternal death. So, in the same way doctors introduce small amounts of a substance to cure allergic reactions to that substance, the father introducing his sperm frequently before the mother gets pregnant can prevent pre-eclampsia.
And Janey, if you think menopause is no fun, you should try pre-eclampsia. God really messed up with that flaw in the design. But, those big brains have a big cost.
So, maybe not going into heat is part of that big brain thingy that God thought was so all fired important that humans have a higher maternal death rate because that big head is hard to push through a small hole. We should be able to birth through a bigger opening than the inside of the hip bones. Bad design.
But it would have been SO nice to nay have one period a year.
And several new studies show that some animals have menopause as well as humans. Chimps apparently do.
You missed, literally, the biggest demographic in the Church, single, straight women. And they are to. . . ?
I have an honest question for TBMs (or even semi-active) LDS: do you believe that any members of the Q15 have ever received an actual revelation from God / the Lord related to sex? For example, do you believe that the Church’s Law of Chastity or Family Proclamation is actual product from revelation?
Let me present an alternative possibility: Church leaders (Prophets / Q15) have often spoken or written about sex and sexuality (and even gender) and their words reflect their own personal opinions based on the world they live in. These words are usually a reflection of the most conservative Christian thought of the day.
If I am being generous I’ll say that their words are “inspired”. But I see no evidence that their thoughts on sex are based on any revelation. I’m not sure they even claim that. And if they aren’t based on revelation why should we listen to them?
“Marriages are based on friendship and compatibility rather than sexual attraction.”. Call me cynical, but if that change happens overnight (assuming no other changes to the various cultures i which we live), I think that leads to a plummet in marriage rates and a concomitant cratering of birth rates. We (as in much of the first world) already have a couple generations of men who have a demonstrated a huge struggle to date, marry, and procreate. Remove the sexual desire and you remove the single strongest reason these men have to put down the game controller, log off Reddit, and do the scariest thing imaginable, talk to a girl.
A topic I have thought about in similar ways for many years.
One of the more poignant moments was that time years ago watching a natural history documentary on an African warthog species. At the point in the documentary where they talked about the mating/rutting season/practices of this species, I thought (as a man in a sexless marriage), “How nice would it be to not have any sexual interest or desire for 10 or 11 months out of the year?!” Or even to be free of sexual interest/desire until my wife gave an obvious sign of her readiness and willingness.
The main point I agree with is this idea that maybe we don’t know as much as we like to think we know about God’s purposes and designs behind human sexuality. If we believe (and I think most orthodox LDS will agree) that God designed our bodies and sexuality, then I think there are some gaps in our understanding about chastity and sexuality based on the kinds of observations you make.
We, and by we, I mean the LDS Church could begin by not teaching that Sexuality and Spirituality are antithetical to each other. Why is sexuality any more the devils workshop than God’s?
And using abject fear as the motivating force to abstain from normative human development has much more to say about the teachers than the students. Fear is the technique used to manage the supposed Adults own anxiety about sexuality in general. Telling a 12-year-old boy not to masturbate is like telling a toddler in a candy store not to eat any of it. And then developing superstitious “hair on hands” or God will abandon you (withdraw his spirit) because you are not perfectly controlling this brand new, very powerful urge, that you didn’t ask for, that he supposedly installed in you. How about having an honest conversation about biology and human development. I think kids and Adults, if taught honestly and openly, develop the ability to make healthy choices around sexuality or any other desires and hungers that come factory installed.
I would take the title a step further and posit that the entire Plan of Salvation (as presently taught by the COJCOLDS) works great for dogs. The emphasis on obedience, the transactional relationship with one’s Master (obedience in, blessings out; failure to obey results in a rolled-up newspaper to the head), the lack of trust in individuals, the mandate to constantly praise our Master despite his apparent ambivalence or cruelty, and the possibility of progressing to a more advanced species after death (though failure to progress may result in being eternally spayed/neutered)…it’s all aimed at making us eternal pets, not independent people.
Re: Bad Design
Not quite on topic except that the treatment does usually affect sexual performance.
After researching with my husband options for treating prostate cancer and the side effects of all of them, i decided that God had goofed up on designing the male anatomy. There are just too many functions too close together. Which always reminds me of an old bad joke:
Three engineers were arguing about what kind of engineer God is.
Electrical engineer: “surely God is an electrical engineer, the brain and nerves are a symphony of exquisite circuitry.”
Mechanical engineer: “no, look at the ballet between bone, muscle and sinew. God must be a mechanical engineer.”
Civil engineer: “God is a civil engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipe right through a recreational area.”
I agree the church doesn’t teach consent, but I’m aware of one small exception. It’s not “the church” per se, just one guy. In January 2018, there was a BYU devotional talk by a professor about agency and sexuality, and he addressed consent. It was the best thing I’ve ever heard from an LDS pulpit on the topic and instantly put him on my wish list for people I want to become GAs so they can repeat the good things they’ve said over a more important pulpit. Alas, I’m still waiting. It was really important to me at the time because I was teaching the Book of Mormon as a seminary teacher, and wracking my brain with how to teach the upcoming Alma chapter 39. I ended up playing a video of part of the talk to my students and spun the “sin next to murder” as sexual abuse. It’s a little bit of a stretch to get that from the Book of Mormon text, but I stand by how I taught that lesson.
Love the comments, all. It was rather a tongue-in-cheek post, and yet the comments are thought-provoking.
Adam F. – Yeah, but see, your dog isn’t actually having dog sex, right? It’s just, um, friction masturbating. idk. I can’t believe I just wrote that. lol.
Dot – as the Designer, I would shift lactation to the men. That would be awesome. Then they can’t dodge newborn care.
Anna – I have no clue about placenta and baby heads. You know what? If human heads need to be that big, we should be pouch mammals. Like kangaroos. Baby is born super tiny, then crawls into a pouch (nice big exit) for the next several months. Dad can have the pouch; mom does the initial incubating. That would split things up nicely!
Toad – you’re right. The fact that one man can get several women pregnant is the entire goal of polygamy. Ick.
Lily – single straight women get to go to the three-day spa. Or they can find a male friend who wants to co-parent. Church leaders wouldn’t like that, but dogs are more chill about parenting anyway. We could adopt some of those traits too.
josh h – same.
Not a Cougar – Would it be such a bad thing if marriage rates and birth rates plummeted? Not getting married because you’d rather play video games, and not making babies because you’d rather play video games, actually seems like a painless way to decrease the world’s population a bit. Ease the housing crisis. Leave more land for animals and plants. Roll back productivity so billionaires drop back to being millionaires.
MrShorty – that’s a difficult dynamic in a marriage. My XH and I were badly mismatched as well.
toddsmithson – agreed. sexuality should be taught as a natural part of having a body, not pathologized or made into sin.
Jack Hughes – that was insightful.
Quentin – I wish that professor could give that talk in Gen Conf too. Wow, I’m glad he said that and I’m glad a roomful of people got to hear it.
Every time some GA suggests over the pulpit that the Family Proclamation is inspired (DHO), I am reminded that there is circumstantial evidence to the rumor that it was drafted by Kirton & McConkie to give the church standing in the Hawaii same sex marriage legal action.
Janey, I lovvvvvvvved the tongue in cheek post, because there is just so much truth to this whole situation of the whole church would work better for dogs, and I need to laugh about some of it all because I am sick of crying.
My post above really was because I had just read an article about this theory on something that came within an inch of killing me. So, I was in a serious kind of mood. But really, does God hate women that he designed everything about pregnancy and childbirth so badly?
And really, whether God designed it or evolution caused it because of human intelligence, the cost of pregnancy and childbirth is humongous for women. So, why does the church make being a woman even harder? Isn’t it hard enough the way God designed our bodies? If there is a God, he hates women or he would have figured something else out. Like you said, maybe not be placental animals. Maybe we could lay eggs and brain development happens long after hatching. If there is a God he loves dogs more than human women. So, of course the church is set up better for dogs than humans, Mormon God loves them.
No wonder I have so much trouble understanding Mormon God. He’s a dog person and I’m a cat person.
When I’m a god designing a world, my humans will lay eggs and after hatching the fathers will take care of them, like sea horses. And my worshippers will sit in boxes at church instead of pews and my church will be set up for the independent thinking of cats.
Janey, given the deep joy I have discovered in marriage and raising children and that were brought about in no small part by sex drive (and I’m confident I’m not alone in that regard), yes I think it would be a disastrous thing and I’d also point to Japan’s demographic crisis playing out in real time as support. Maybe I underestimate the likelihood of an environmental utopia springing up from your plan, but likewise I think you seriously underestimate what would happen when the stakes people have in the future are that much more tenuous, remote and, hypothetical. Regardless, it’s a fascinating thought experiment.
Linda,
On bad design: My son’s pulmonologist complained about how often she had to work with the gastroenterologist because the trachea and esophagus form too close together in her opinion.
My son was born with both esophageal atresia (esophagus ended but was attached to the stomach 1 day after birth)and tracheal malacia (soft trachea that closed down when he coughed). He was having repeated hospital admissions with pneumonia. Eventually the pulmonologist found formula in his lungs (he was aspirating formula that would reflux up from his stomach).
Our anatomy is very carefully balanced in good health. It doesn’t take much to throw that balance off.
No Temple Recommend for Adam F.’s dog!
There are some cool video’s of seahorses giving birth. 2000 little seahorses popping out of Dad’s pouch. What a sight.
As for bad design. The poster child is the Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve. Pity the giraffe. And Sauropod Dinosaurs with over 90 feet of why.
I’ve heard that when it comes to back muscles, humans should walk on all fours. No idea how this affects human sexuality. But my sweet very submissive fixed girl dog had to mount the boy dogs. It made visits to the dog park comical.
Now humans sexually seem to be all over the place. And it’s no wonder looking into the ancestral genome. There’s neanderthals, denisovans and some unknowns.
And when we look at our cousins, chimps and bonobos– so genetically close to each other, and yet behaviorally different.
With over 8 billion people on this over populated planet, variety does not surprise me. What surprises me is that some people think 1950’s middle class behavior is the one true model for eternity. I’d rather be a dog.
Not a Cougar – yeah, this is all just a thought experiment. So now I have a question. Can you separate your sex drive from your desire to have children? I can and I did. I’ve always wanted to be a mother, and I was willing to have sex to make a baby, but I have little/no sex drive. Part of what my post is about is that most people also separate that out. People have a few babies, and much more sex. If you had no sex drive, do you really think that you wouldn’t have wanted children? Maybe you can’t separate that out, and that’s valid. For me, it’s separate.
Part of my thought experiment is to wonder about the impact on the population. What if no one had a baby unless they really really wanted a baby. I have an asexual friend who spent two years and lots of money on getting pregnant. Shots of hormones, icky tests, IVF, embryo implantation, lots of side effects and pain. That baby is *wanted* so much! What if there were no accidental pregnancies? What if everyone had to want the baby more than they wanted sexual pleasure?
The population would be much lower, and children would be treated so much better (I like to think). Whether this is easier on the environment is a side concern. I like to think that the children would benefit if conception was harder. Every baby should be wanted.
Japan’s demographics, in my opinion, don’t have much to do with sex drive. (All I know about it is from reading every news article – I am really interested in population demographics.) When reporters interview/survey people between ages 20 to 40, the reason they aren’t marrying and having children is not a lack of a sex drive. I’ve read that the corporate culture is to work long weeks and be more loyal to the employer than to family obligations at home. The society is sexist – mothers are discriminated against at work, meaning women feel like they have to choose between either a child or a career, and a career is better. The economics of Japanese society don’t allow for strong families and good parenting (in general) because of the culture of work. Exhaustion is a real moodkiller. If Japan wanted people to have more sex and make more babies, they should limit the workweek to 30 hours and still pay a living wage. Relaxed people have more sex.
“Church leaders have gradually given up on policing non-procreative sex between married couples.”
While I do agree that the church has backed off quite a bit on inserting itself (ahem) into the sex lives of heterosexual married couples, I feel they are still doing a lot of damage in setting up unrealistic expectations for sex, especially for younger people. The message seems to be that if you don’t enjoy it or you’re not good at it, you’re doing something wrong because intimacy within marriage is the ultimate expression of unity between the couple yada yada, with God as the holy third wheel in a way because of the sacred procreactive power so on and so forth.
If I recall, Wendy Nelson gave a CES devotional a few years ago that seemed to suggest that if your sex life isn’t satisfying, you aren’t keeping your covenants. I would try to dig the talk up, but ya… no thanks. So the church teaches young people that sex is evil, until you get (heterosexually) married, and boom! – damn it, if you don’t snap right in to holy, covenant path porn stars, you’re doing something wrong. Outside of consent, sex crime etc, I wish religious institutions would stay out of the bedroom altogether. How about focusing instead on making sure everyone has a bedroom to sleep in.
One of the comments, unintentional of course I assume, contained the words masturbate and factory in close proximity which is rather unfortunate.
Sister Nelson II may be sending mixed messages. In one of her talks it sounded like god only approves of missionary position-anything else is not celestial sex.
FYI, there’s an entire erotic subgenre called the Omegaverse where humans have dog-like reproductive systems. If you’re interested in seeing how authors have imagined such a world (and don’t mind the pornographic aspect of it) check it out. They explore a lot of questions around consent, biology, social gender hierarchies, etc.
Janey, to the question of “Can you separate your sex drive from your desire to have children?” I would respond by quoting you, “The Sacred Procreative Process (SPP) means a man has an orgasm, and a woman does all the hard work.” I’m sure there are men out there for whom an orgasm is nothing but unpleasant, but I’m also pretty confident that those men are a very small minority of men. If I had no sex drive, would I still want children? I suppose the answer might be yes, but then again maybe not, and I struggle to imagine with any sense of confidence the kind of person I would be in that scenario.
As to whether children would be treated better if there were far fewer of them, I’m far from certain that being wanted correlates nearly as closely with better outcomes for those children. There are lots of countries where children are “wanted” but who nonetheless suffer from the effects of poverty. Likewise, I’m sure you’ve met people who had “surprises” but nonetheless loved that unexcepted child no less for not being planned. And as to the effects on the environment, China has had artificially low birth rates for generations and has wrought havoc on the environment. If replacements rates in poor countries with historically high birth rates magically plummet to 1.5 or less (for argument’s sake), do those countries immediately or even eventually become less poor? Do low birth rates fix corruption or crime? Russia for example suggests that the answer isn’t automatically, “Yes.” Nonetheless, if the answer is yes, then how long does all that take and what are the tradeoffs? Perhaps even more interesting to contemplate, what do cultures look like where children are a tiny percentage of the population? Is it closer to The Sound of Music (or some other beloved celebration of childhood) or to P.D. James’ novel (and movie) The Children of Men?
Not a Cougar: If I’m understanding you correctly–and you’ve restated this several times, so I think I get it–without your sex drive, you’re not sure there would be much reason, if any, to interact with women or to have children at all. In fact, you’re not even sure what kind of a person you would be. That is really, really sad.
I don’t think Not a Cougar is alone in having this point of view. I
Dot, I’m sorry, but I respectfully disagree with your sentiment. I was merely trying to be honest with the counterfactual. Would my interactions with women and desire to have children be different under the hypothetical? I’m not so proud as to suggest I have a crystal ball as to that answer, but I struggle to point out settled human societies in the past where women in general had it better simply because they weren’t always the constant focus of male sexual attention.
I would add that more than a dash of humility is needed when trying to puzzle out the ramifications of any significant change to one’s identity. Change the century and continent of your birth. Change sex, skin color, religion, or a host of other indelible characteristics, experiences, and choices that make each of us “us,” and the hypothetical us may be very, very different than the people we are. It’s shades of “Well, if I lived back then, I would have been one of the ones who resisted [insert evil historical event here] even though everyone else back then participated and actually thought it was a good thing.”
Men have proven themselves very adept at excluding women from most avenues of public life and power throughout the history of settled societies. Maybe I’m wrong, and we’ve come far enough in human development (in select countries at least) where the chains of the past would stay in the past such that Janey’s counterfactual would indeed work wonders. But maybe not.
A slight edit to me comment:
To say otherwise is shades of “Well, if I lived back then, I would have been one of the ones who resisted [insert evil historical event here] even though everyone else back then participated and actually thought it was a good thing.”
Not a Cougar
“China has had artificially low birth rates for generations and has wrought havoc on the environment”. China currently has a population of over 1.4 billion despite the great famine around the year 1960 that killed between 15-55 million. In one person lifetime, the majority of the population went from preindustrial into the technological age which takes a tremendous amount of resources. Environmental havoc indeed.
There are geographic games people play. One is what is the smallest circle one can make on our globe and still contain the majority of people. Otherwise known as the Valeriepieris circle. So take this spot in Myanmar and have just over a 2000 miles radius, and voila, one small circle of concentrated humans. So take India, China, a good deal of Indonesia and add rising sea levels. May need to redraw that circle.
Having a continuous growing year and plenty of fresh water means you can pack in people. And what is remarkable to me, is that circle is over one third empty ocean.
Another game is line drawing in the US. The geographical center of the Contiguous United States is Kansas. But draw a line where 80% lives east of it. Oh, we’re still in Kansas very more. Ok take California and it’s mediterranean climate out.
The thing is technology has artificially raised the carrying capacity. A population crash is coming. Past famines are small potatoes. “Children of Men” may be optimistic. Doom, Gloom etc etc. But perhaps there is hope in taking procreation out of sex.
Not a Cougar – I appreciate your perspective. I don’t know how the world would change if this post were real and I like reading your thoughts. There would be other ways to cause problems and other things that would bring joy if the human sex drive turned into a heat cycle. Like, any nearly universal situation is good for some and bad for others, and vice versa. If humans actually did have heat cycles, there would still be difficulties to deal with.
Besides the thought experiment of this “what if”, I think it is important to talk about the fact that the law of chastity really doesn’t take into account a lot of human experience. The law of chastity isn’t some profound and universal doctrine that everyone can obey. Church leaders do fine with it; people like me find it lacking.
I really like this post, Janey. The title is hilariously perfect, and I love all the points you make about how the law of chastity doesn’t account for so many things. This is probably just restating what you’ve already said so well, but it just seems to me like GAs came up with it by what felt right to them, and for them, straight marriage and having lots of kids and ignoring women’s rights or concerns worked well, so that’s what they decided God must want. It’s just them looking at what is and deciding that it’s what should be.
I love this article, and I appreciate the dog comparison to illustrate the point, but my parents’ female dog and her teddy bear have a crazy around-the-clock sex life for years that has nothing to do with heat, haha. The scandalized averted gazes my dog continually causes with family never get old! Anyway, it would be nice to also put some focus on the challenges of older single adults (by choice or otherwise) being expected to completely deny themselves any sort of sexual life (real or even imagined-no impure thoughts allowed, right?) when that is a basic human need for many of us. Great concepts though! Thanks for the article.