Sex: It's Just Another Body Function. So What's the Big Deal?

Great Debates
1

Sneezing. When you’re little, your mother tells you never to do it in public. Then when you turn 13, you’re told you can do it in private, but some families that are more conservative still frown on that too. All your life, you’re told that in order to sneeze with another person, you have to wait until you get married. But your mother confides in you when you turn 18, that she once sneezed with a man when she was still unmarried and in high school. You eventually learn that most people sneeze with other people outside of marriage anyways, but for some reason most people still say it is immoral, when given a survey. And sneezing with someone of the same sex–how confusing. Paradoxically, some people who have no problem with sneezing outside of marriage for couples of the opposite sex, are against it for people of the same sex. Although sneezing for, say, a couple composed of two women, seems to gain more acceptance than two men.

Sounds pretty ridiculous, doesn’t it? And yet like sneezing, sex is just a normal bodily function. At some point in the development of members of the homo genus, year round mating gained some advantage. But I guess it also became clear man would have to restrain himself a little more or else world might become over-populated–which it has. So sex clearly has some drawbacks too.

So let me make it clear what kind of sex I am talking about in my premise. I am talking about sex between consenting adults that harms no one in the process. Of course there can always be unforseen consequences. But for the sake of my premise, just forget about that part of the equation.

:smiley:

2

(1) A cavalier attitude about sex that could lead one to have lots of sex with promiscous strangers. What’s so bad about that?

Well, there are venereal diseases out there. So being a little selective about partners may be a good idea. It may or may not be a big deal to get an STD, it just depends on what risks one is willing to take.

(2) It can cause babies. New human beings could be created, intentionally or unintentionally, as a result of sex.

Big deal? Yep. It’s an 18 year (at the very least) obligation!

(3) Somewhere along the line, the lofty notion of “love” comes into play. Which makes it a big deal. Many associate sex with love.

3

This is Peter Singer’s case about sex. That the moral considerations involved with sex are not substantively different than those of any other activity, which involves both costs and benefits, and various risks that people are willing to undertake or not. He thinks that the very idea of morality has become corrupted by how it has become to be almost obsessively associated with sex, to the real neglect of moral action

Now, I think Singer is a little off on this. While I agree with his case on the substance, I do think it’s worth noting that certain sexual acts can potentially lead to, well, babies, which are potentially very much affected by being brought into the world without a thoughtful plan on how to raise and care for them. That doesn’t change the basic idea of sex being no different from any activity which poses risks to others (like driving, for instance), but it does in some cases expand the relevant considerations beyond just consenting adults.

However, none of those concerns justify those who feel that oral, anal, homosexual sex, or other non-reproductive sex acts are wrong.

But then, I’m one of those people that doesn’t think that “overpopulation” is necessarily a bad thing.

4

Ah choo!

Actually, unlike farting, belching or sneezing, I think sex has more cognitive aspects to it.

5

—A cavalier attitude about sex that could lead one to have lots of sex with promiscous strangers. What’s so bad about that? Hell, there are venereal diseases out there.—

Actually, it’s been suggested (most famously by Michael Kremer at MIT and Stephen Landsberg of the University of Rochester) that if people who are relatively conservative with their number of sexual partners were more promiscuous, it would very likely cut DOWN on the rates of veneral disease.

That sounds counter-intuitive, I know. But here’s the basic case, for which I credit Landsberg for bringing to my attention: Let’s say that you have four potential sex partners to choose from one night: unknown to you, two (who sleep around a lot) might have a high chance of having AIDS and the other two not (they only sleep with someone once a year). Let’s say that your chances of sleeping with an likely infected person could be put at 50%.

But if those two relatively conservative people increased their partners per year, that means that on any given night, more of them would be around to choose from (say, four of them instead of just two, making six overall). They might well have a slightly higher chance of being infected: but still not anywhere near as high as the truly promiscuous ones. And that means that your chances of choosing a likely infected person have roughly dropped from one half to one third.

Consider how this might play out with abstinence programs: if these programs convince more uninfected people to stay at home and masturbate, that leaves a much higher percentage of infected people out there for any given uninfected person looking for a partner to hook up with. This means that, in this particuar case, more monogamy or abstinence among the uninfected actually helps SPREAD the disease faster, instead or curtailing it.

Another example is a world where almost all women are monogamous (say, sex only during marriage), but men seek extra partners. This means that the few promiscuous women (say, prostitutes) will very quickly all become infected with a particular disease, and most of the men will then carry the disease back to their wives, infecting most of the population. But, if the women in this story slept around more often (even one or two extra partners), then this effect would be wiped largely out (along with the bulk of prostitution). And given the much lower rate of infection, the disease might not even be able to spread fast enough to survive.

A whole article considering this apparent paradox here:
http://www.netacc.net/~fairplay/moresex.htm

6

A sneeze is a body function. A belch is a body function. An erection is a body function.

Sex is a social act.

The comparison between sneezing and sex doesn’t hold unless you restrict the “sex” to masturbation. Anything else becomes a social act, which is a completely different breed of cat from a body function.

7

Could you explain the function of the word “just” in the thread title?

Seems to me like a very high percentage of our moral customs, strong attitudes, rules, laws, conventions, social structures, literature, music, and spending habits revolve around a few body functions.

8

I think there’s a fallacy here. Specifically, it’s not the monogamy or abstinence that is helping to spread the disease faster. Rather, the spread occurs when a person violates that monogamy or abstinence.

Your idea is that a large group of potential partners will curtail the disease, but that seems based on a presumption that people will stray outside their group, and so safety is insured by having a large group of potential partners, in order to lessen the chances of straying outside the group.

The flip side, though, is that if just one person in the group strays outside, then the whole group now has a potential to get infected. And the larger the group is, the greater the chance that someone will stray.

Bottom line: I think that if I would have to set aside my personal beliefs in favor of monogamy and abstinence, and judge your idea purely on its health merits, I’d have to say that even if large groups are a factor to help contain the spread of such diseases, it is a far smaller factor than fidelity to the group, whatever size it is. In which case, if one (and one’s partner) can be faithful without straying - or with minimal straying - that is a far safer setup than a big crowd of people, whose actions you’ll have a much tougher time monitoring.

9

[Comic Book Guy]
Inspired by the most logical race in the galaxy, the Vulcans, breeding will be permitted once every seven years. For many of you this will mean much less breeding, for me, much much more.
[/Comic Book Guy]

There is the problem, you can’t forget about that part of the equation. The physical, emotional and social “unfoseen consequences” is what makes sex and sneezing uncomparable.

Well, except both can result in one being left with moist and sticky parts and feeling slightly light headed.

10

—I think there’s a fallacy here. Specifically, it’s not the monogamy or abstinence that is helping to spread the disease faster. Rather, the spread occurs when a person violates that monogamy or abstinence.—

No. Should I go through the math again?

When a person ALL BY THEMSELVES stops being monogamous, they slightly increase their own risk of contracting the disease, true. But when previously monogamous people in general start sleeping around, everyone’s chance of infection goes down. As I said, I know it’s counter-intuitive: that’s why you need math to see how it works.

If we can’t outlaw sex entirely, then the next best thing is this: that people with conservative sexual pasts sleep around much more often. If abstinence programs encourage sexual conservatives to sleep around less (that is, if they achieve part of what they are intended to achieve) but have little effect on promiscuous people, then they actually help spread disease, not curb it. Perfect monogamy isn’t possible (and wouldn’t be much fun anyway): but imperfect monogamy, as a social policy, can be far more deadly than promiscuity. As the article notes, the best solution would be some way to encourage people with tame pasts to sleep around more without doing the same for those with sketchy and dangerous pasts. One possible solution is to subsidize condoms: the things that more risk averse people will be much more likely to care about (and in addition to being really good anyway from a public health perspective, are ALSO positive externalities and hence underinvested in).

Now, one possible reason conservative people don’t sleep around more than they do is because they don’t reap all the benefits of their promiscuity. It’s pretty much the same thing with pollution: factory owners don’t bear all the costs of their pollution, so they tend to overproduce. Conservatives don’t reap all the benefits of their promiscuity, so they tend to underfuck.

Now, it’s not true in every situation one could imagine that increased promiscuity from conservatives could reduce transmission rates. The basic case only shows that it is possible in various situations, not that it’s actual. But there has been plenty of work done on whether it is actual, and I encourage you to check out that work. Kremer’s study was on Britian, and using data and the best models he could develop to caputre how people generally sleep around, he figured out that if previously conservative people would sleep around just a little more often, the rate of AIDS infection would be slowed, not sped up. Similar work has been done in Africa, where the situation I described (promiscuous men, but only a few promiscuous women) is fairly similar, and a very real and huge problem.

—I think that if I would have to set aside my personal beliefs in favor of monogamy and abstinence,—

Well, that’s all well and good for you. But what we’re talking about here isn’t just about your tastes, but rather about what would be altruistic of you. It might be possible that you hate having sex so much that it outweighs all the good you’d do to others, but I don’t think that’s very likely.

—and judge your idea purely on its health merits, I’d have to say that even if large groups are a factor to help contain the spread of such diseases, it is a far smaller factor than fidelity to the group, whatever size it is. In which case, if one (and one’s partner) can be faithful without straying - or with minimal straying - that is a far safer setup than a big crowd of people, whose actions you’ll have a much tougher time monitoring.—

You didn’t read the article, did you? Yes, if we were perfect social planners, and wanted to stop the stop the spread of AIDS, we could outlaw sex (perhaps including marital sex: because who knows where your partner had REALLY been before being with you?). But that, in addition to being wrong, would probably be far more costly (in terms of lost enjoyment) than it was beneficial (in terms of the unwillingly bourne costs of disease).

Yes, if you want to reduce your rate of infection, you could try to find a monogamous partner, and hope they were doing the same.

But so what? We’re not perfect authoritarian social planners, and few people are perfectly monogamous (even if they say they are). This arguement takes it as a given that some people are going to be promiscuous, even “minimally,” and other people are going to have SOME sexual history beyond a single partner (who still could be infected themselves!). Insular groups with “minimal” (but not zero) promiscuity are actually a GREAT way to spread disease (did you forget the promiscuous men, conservative women story?), because all it takes is one cheater per group, and “monitoring” isn’t really a realistic goal no matter how small your group is.

Even regardless of that problem, however, what you are neglecting here is the good you could do to OTHERS outside your group by sleeping around more. You are thinking only of yourself! Typical. :slight_smile:

11

**

That’s for one single night. Now how about if I engage in promiscious behavior every weekend with the same 50% odds?

**

This just creates a greater potential pool for the virus or bacteria. You infect person A. Person A infects person B and C. Persons B and C infect persons D, E, F, and G and it keeps on going from there.

I must say that it is a novel approach. To bad they didn’t think of it in regards to hepatitis, whooping cough, or smallpox.

**

That really all depends on how likely you were to get infected in the first place. As a straight male in Arkansas who doesn’t shoot up I doubt my odds of being infected are as great as a gay male in San Francisco who frequents bath houses or a junkie who uses dirty needles.

**

I don’t have any cites but didn’t the rates of VD go up during the free love of the 60’s and 70’s?

Marc

12

BlackKnight, you said it very well.

Another way I would put it is that all other biological urges – hunger, thirst, the need to urinate, the need to sleep, etc. – can be satisfied by yourself alone. You don’t need anyone else’s permission. But sex requires a willing partner. So it is, fundamentally, a different kind of body function.

Ed

13

—That’s for one single night. Now how about if I engage in promiscious behavior every weekend with the same 50% odds?—

You odds go up. But we already covered this. At question is not whether YOU alone would or wouldn’t increase your rate of infection by sleeping around (duh, of course it would), but rather whether conservative people in general having more sex can reduce the rate of infection.

—As a straight male in Arkansas who doesn’t shoot up I doubt my odds of being infected are as great as a gay male in San Francisco who frequents bath houses or a junkie who uses dirty needles.—

Okay…(apparently the stereotypes are slow moving in Arkansas) but so? That’s an arguement for all people like you to join in, not for you all to continue to restrain yourself. Your low odds of being infected are a boon to other potential partners out there.

—I don’t have any cites but didn’t the rates of VD go up during the free love of the 60’s and 70’s?—

Indeed. But that still was a fairly small group of people with already promiscuous pasts, and such people alone are always going to spread disease if left to their own devices. One could just as easily say that the real problem was that not enough OTHER people joined in on things.

This isn’t actually a counter-intuitive arguement from a biological standpoint. General promiscuity in the animal kingdom is one of the things that makes life hard for potential epidemics.

14

Apos, I linked to the paper but it didn’t work for me. All I got was the fisrt two hunderd words and a footnote. No mention of an author or source. Could you post this info please?

I was however able to get this quote:

I don’t buy it. How does increasing one’s number of sexual partners lead to an increase of available mates? Just because more people are poking doesn’t mean more people are going out. Additionally, the number of people having sex has no bearing on the number of people I meet. As far as I know there’s no correlation between having sex and maximum bar capacity

God I wish sex was like sneezing. It would make allergy season a helluva lot more fun.

15

Apos:

I think I noticed a few flaws in that article. (I admit that I only read about the first half, due to time constraints, so this may have been addressed later on.) The article specifically mentions that this “more promiscuity = less STDs” approach is only valid for moderate increases in sexual activity among sexual conservatives (SCs). If the SCs become wild free-love party animals, then, as would be expected, STDs become more common, not less (this would seem to address the rate of VDs increasing during the 60’s and 70’s, as MGibson suggests).

So the implication there is that there would exist, in a graph of promiscuity among SCs vs STD rate, a local minimum somewhere, where if the SCs change their sexual habits in either way, STD rates will actually climb. If we’re to the left of that point on the curve, then yes, having Mr. Stodgy get jiggy widdit a little more often will help us all in the long run (except, of course, for us monogamous folks, who you seem to doubt the existence of). If we’re to the right of the minimum, though, then an increase in sexual activity will lead to an increase in STDs. Without any evidence to indicate where we lie on that graph, the case that we should all go sow our oats more often is pretty weak. There is brief reference to some british economist stating that those with fewer than 2.25 partners per year should increase, and others shouldn’t, but I’d have to see this economist’s research to see how he came across that number.

Also, it would seem the author makes the assumption that there’s a linear relationship between sexual frequency and STD risk. If I have sex twice as often, I’m twice as likely to have an STD. It’s certainly not safe to assume this is accurate on an absolute scale - if I’m currently 65% likely to have an STD, and I double my activity rate, am I now 130% likely to have an STD?

Another thing it seems to assume is that people with differing promiscuity levels are all going to be in the same pool. The casual dater who only goes out twice a year is just as likely to sleep with the slutty chick with her boobs hanging out who boffs everything in a five mile radius as he is to sleep with the other conservative-looking girl in the corner, quietly nursing her martini. I would make a WAG that people who are promiscuous are more likely to sleep with other people who are promiscuous, while SCs are more likely to sleep with other SCs. I could be wrong, but it would be nice to see this addressed.

Further, just because I can walk into a bar and have a smaller chance of picking a partner with the clap, that doesn’t mean that fewer people overall have it. It just means that a smaller percentage of people IN MY POOL OF ELIGIBILITY have it. If 200 out of 700 people in my pool have it, my odds are better than if 100 out of 300 have it. That doesn’t mean the disease is less prevalent.

Lastly, and this kind of goes back to my second point about the linear relationship between risk level and activity level, no mention is given to whether this lessening of risk is a short-term or long-term effect. It seems possible that there could be some sort of large scale stabilization effect, where the disease spreads itself out more, such that even with a larger pool, my odds of getting the disease are the same as before, or worse.
Overall, this approach seems like something that would, at best, benefit those inclined to screw half of central LA, by giving them a larger, more diverse selection of fuckable targets. There seem to be too many holes in this idea to be of any use to SCs, other than maybe some people need to get laid more often. :slight_smile:

Jeff

16

—Apos, I linked to the paper but it didn’t work for me. All I got was the fisrt two hunderd words and a footnote. No mention of an author or source.—

It’s Stephen Landsberg’s article, as I noted before. I’m not sure if Kremer’s research is out there: the only source I knew of was a link from one of Landsberg’s slate articles. Nevertheless, you don’t need a source to do check his math.

—I don’t buy it. How does increasing one’s number of sexual partners lead to an increase of available mates?—

Increasing YOUR sexual partners doesn’t increase the number of mates available to YOU silly. But it does increase the number of partners available to other people.

—Additionally, the number of people having sex has no bearing on the number of people I meet.—

It isn’t the number of people in the world that changes, but rather the number of them who would potentially have sex with you.

—As far as I know there’s no correlation between having sex and maximum bar capacity—

Two obvious objections here. First of all, if more people are going out to bars looking for sex, there are likely to be more and biggers bars to serve them. But second of all, you’re trying to correlate the wrong things. It isn’t bar capacity that’s important: it’s the number of people per bar that you might encounter that would be willing to go home with you.

17

Apos, when you have sex with more people, there is more a likelihood that you will have sex with more irresponsible people. The correlation assumes that you will do it with those as responsible as you. If it is not the case, then that’s where the correlation collapses.

18

—except, of course, for us monogamous folks, who you seem to doubt the existence of—

I don’t necessarily want to doubt the monogamy of a single specific person… but how sure can anyone ever be of their partner? (remember also: when you have sex with them, it’s their past sexual history that’s relevant, not their future)

—If I have sex twice as often, I’m twice as likely to have an STD. It’s certainly not safe to assume this is accurate on an absolute scale - if I’m currently 65% likely to have an STD, and I double my activity rate, am I now 130% likely to have an STD?—

That’s not how probability works. When you increase cases, you don’t add probability, you multiply.

Let’s say that you have a 50% chance of getting AIDS per encounter. If you have two encounters, how much more likely are you to have AIDS than you were with one encounter? By your math, 100%, right? No. Via the multiplication rule .5 times .5 is .25 But that’s for only one outcome: both partners being infected (or both being uninfected, depending on what you originally had .5 be the probability OF). There are four possible (safe,safe / infected,safe / safe,infected / infected,infected), each of them with a probability of .25 Three of those cases result in you being infected: so your increase in activity bumps you up to 75%, not 100%. Think about it: if there’s a 50% of rain two days in a row, that doesn’t guarantee rain!

Whatever you call this sort of relationship, Landsberg is not making the faulty assumption you’re insinuating: he’s using a method of calculating probability, not simply adding up chances.

Now, your story about the possible group insularity of dating habits IS relevant, but then no one ever said that the story wasn’t relevant to whether or not a similarly restricted and selective en masse sexfest would lower disease rates (perhaps that’s part of what you missed in the rest of the article). That’s why we need work like Kramer’s to try and figure out what’s actually reasonably going on with sex these days, or the studies done on Africa.

However, there is a basic point that make sense with even a few people, which is also in the article.

I’ll restate it in my own words: Jill is potentially considering starting a relationship with one of two people in her office: Tim and Lance. She’s leaning towards Tim, so the ball is mostly in his court. Tim has a very timid sexual past: he’s pretty risk averse. Lance isn’t so risk averse, and he sleeps around quite a lot (and is likely to have herpes). Jill doesn’t (and can’t) know much about their sexual histories though.

On the way to the office, on the day they were both thinking of making more serious bids for Jill’s affections, they happen to see a particularly effective pro-abstinence ad. This ad affects Tim heavily: bids up the risks. It doesn’t affect Lance much: not only is it probably too late for him anyway, he just doesn’t care as much, and never has. As a result, Tim avoids Jill, and she ends up with Lance… and infected. In this story, it would have been better if the men had seen a particularly effective ad for sex. It wouldn’t make Lance much more likely to pursue Jill: he’s already a sleaze. But it would make Tim think more about the benefits of sex. And the result of Tim’s increased sexual prolicivity is that Jill doesn’t get herpes.

Now, from Tim’s perspective, having sex with Jill is a little more dangerous for him in terms of risk (she might be infected), and a little more beneficial in that he’d really like to have sex with Jill. Whether the benefits outweigh the risk is part of what will determine his decision about whether or not to sleep with her. But the key here is that Tim is missing something about his decision: the benefits to Jill! We can provisionally ignore Jill’s enjoyment of sex with Tim because she could be just as happy in bed with Lance. But what we can’t cancel out is the benefit to Jill of having a clean partner. By taking himself out of the game, Tim is denying her that chance, leaving her more likely to end up with someone like Lance.

That’s the connection that’s being missed: “safe” partners (who know that they are unlikely to be infected, but can’t prove it to anyone else) are underproviding their partnership because they only calculate the benefits and costs that THEY bear. If they would only consider the good they could potentially do for others, they might reconsider. Alternatively, if they COULD prove that they were safe partners, they’d be in much much higher demand. That’s why condom usage is one rough indicator of someone’s attitude towards risky behavior (so too, interestingly enough, is smoking), and subsidizing condoms actually seems like a pretty fantastic public health idea. Unless, of course, one happens to be the sort of people who thinks more sex and sexual enjoyment is a BAD thing, all by itself.

I guess the point is not that in every story, the moral is going to be that sexual conservatives should loosen up if they want to see less disease overall. This ISN’T about any sort of curve with a minimum, because every story about how partnering generally works is a little different.

The real point is that the claim that more sex leads to more disease is NOT at all the sort of truism it portrayed as being. It depends on who changed their behavior, and in what partnering context.

Now, there are arguments we can make that support the idea that this would be realistic (for instance, that most sexual conservatives aren’t going to increase their partnering more than moderately if they decide to increase at all, because chaning to be really really promiscuous, given how much sex you’d get normally, takes tons more effort, with diminishing returns: likewise, many really sexually promiscuous people probably CAN’T increase much more, because they’re probably already booked solid), but that’s where the fun lies, and where its important to have people like Kramer around.

19

Granted, given any individual person, there is a non-zero chance that they are lying about being faithful. However, you seemed to imply that the vast majority of people are lying philanderers, of which I’m skeptical. However, this isn’t really relevant to the topic at hand. I will, however, mention that someone’s past sexual history is only relevant to the extent that it determines whether or not someone has a disease, which is a binary state. Either I have a disease, or I don’t. If I have sex with 1000 people, and I somehow manage to not contract a disease, then I’m indistinghuishable from someone who’s never had sex at all, in this respect.

Yes, I know how probability works. I was referring to the single example the author made that happened to use real numbers. It was talking about once-a-year “revelers” doubling their frequency. It then suggested that, in a given bar, two 5% chance people will be replaced by four 10% chance people. The implication, to me at least, is that by doubling their sexual frequency, they have doubled their risk. If this isn’t that case, then it appears the author is just plucking numbers from his bum, in which case his single numerical example is useless.

Bottom line, you can debate using qualitative arguments all you want, but that won’t get you anywhere. In order to make any sort of good recommendations, you need real-live numbers. That article only presents one strong instance of real-live numbers, and it’s a lousy one, at that.

In that respect, I would argue that this is exactly about a curve with a minimum. We’re trying to minimize the number of people who have a disease (not, as I said before, and as the author seems to believe, my odds of contracting a disease when I choose a sex partner). Since we know the curve is not either purely increasing or purely decreasing, it’s important to know where on the curve we lie before we start recommending an increase or decrease of the independent variable. The author recommends an increase, but fails to establish that we’re at a point on the curve where that would make sense.

Jeff

20

Actually, I should mention that we don’t know the graph is not purely increasing, though we can be pretty sure it’s not purely decreasing. “Purely increasing” would be the intuitive assumption, though not necessarily the correct one.

Jeff