For completeness sake, let me also add more general health hazards:
Getting rid of all of any one of these things will do more to improve the world than getting rid of sexual desire. I suspect that there’s another good 20 things you could still list above it.
Eliminating emotion (which can happen, due to brain damage) doesn’t make people less prone to crime; quite the opposite. Morality is based on emotion; on compassion, empathy, fear of consequences. Without emotion people become a danger to themselves and others.
I’ll grant that I was unclear there, I meant high emotions. Domestic abuse cases, rape, etc. are most often preceded by a period of stress, by an argument, etc. If you could make people unable to get into those states, that portion of ill human behavior would go away.
It would also mean that people inclined to cold-bloodedly assault, oppress and exploit people could do so with far less resistance or fear of consequences. No dictator would ever need to worry about outraged demonstrators taking to the street against him, much less taking up arms against him.
I can’t believe I get to type this to you, of all people :D, but I think you don’t go far enough:
In general, people don’t get along very well, especially when living together and regardless of gender. Sharing a major responsibility - the raising of a child - will exacerbate that issue. Sexual attraction is one of the lubricators that keeps people able to live together and not go insane over petty annoyances reiterated over years and years. Without it, the number of pairs of people (of any gender) willing to live together for the 18+ years necessary to co-parent a child would absolutely plummet. Arguments - especially arguments over parenting decisions - would be a hundred times more destructive to the relationship without sex as a mitigating/soothing factor.
More generally, I think you’d see very little art or literature, and the best of it would not exist.
There would be a few children created, but given that the solutions posed in this thread have mostly involved strangling men or sticking cattle prods into their rectums, I’m guessing most men would be less than interested in reproducing. Probably they could come up with a procedure to extract sperm, performed under general anaesthesia, but I doubt that’d be hugely popular.
Sex is a huge motivator for people right now; take it away, and other things will need to fill the gap, with various consequences, many of them negative. It’s generally better for people to have lots of motivators in their lives; it keeps them from getting dangerously focused on a single thing.
Crime wouldn’t decrease, and it might even increase. Removing one motivator will strengthen other motivators. The guy who wants money really, really badly and also wants to have sex with his wife will now want money really, really, really badly - since it’s all he has left to live for, his urgency to obtain it will increase, potentially to the point where he’s willing to break the law to get it.
People will eat more. Without the desire to find, attract, and keep a mate serving as a brake, they’ll indulge the desire to eat to even greater levels. Health-consciousness will still serve as a mitigating factor, but even so obesity and its various comorbidities will increase ever further.
Stress will become a bigger problem. Sex is, in my own personal experience, a great de-stresser; a very bad day day at work can turn into a very good night at home very quickly and with no expense, preparation, or planning required. Without periodic release, people will use more mind-altering drugs and will suffer from increased levels of anxiety and depression.
Doesn’t sound like a good plan to me.
I don’t think that the removal of sexual desire would negate the need for affection and the wish to bond. I think it’s interesting that we’re allt alking as if it would. I wonder whether the desire to develop affection and bonding with a specific gender would be gone? Might there still be such a thing as “Straight” and “Gay” if some people preferred the company of the opposite/same sex?
I think a lot of that stage is actually an attempt to overcompensate for increased interest in the other sex. “No, I don’t like Jenny! Girls are GROSS!”
They are in the “I’m starting to get interested in boys/girls” closet!
Good point. I think once the pressure is off, so to speak, then they get along quite well. Straight women are often comfortable with gay men and that’s a situation where there isn’t sexual tension (or where it would be only one sided). If there were no possibility of sexual tension then there wouldn’t really be any of these issues (boys/girls being “icky” or weird).