RAW SEX: An Essay on the Evolution of Sexual Pleasure.

By Alicia: The Sexual Intellectual

Raw Sex
Session #9

Before the holiday, my biology professor announced that we needed to write an essay on some topic pertaining to evolution. Since I spend most of my time being late, texting my boyfriend and "reviewing" my sex toys...I thought I was in pretty deep shit. After class, I went to my teachers desk and asked "what kind of topics in evolution?" My professor began to ramble off a bunch of random things like "clown fish hermaphrodites" and "desert plants" all of a sudden my ears perked when he said "SEXUAL EVOLUTION" it was like music to my ears, an angel sent down from heaven. I submitted my short essay this morning and I decided to share it with my WBOB fans before I even know my grade...Here's to being hopeful! Hope you enjoy the read.

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The Evolution of Sexual Pleasure

    Sex, in today’s modern society with shrinking wallets, apartment living space and homosexual liberation, I think most would agree that sex has become more for pleasure than procreation when it comes to humans. On a larger scale, animals, plants and even bacteria are still “doing it” for its original purpose. Scientists say that “The first eukaryotes to engage in sex were single-celled protists that appeared approximately 2 billion years ago, over 1.3 billion years before development of the first animals with neurons capable of assessing pleasure. These bacteria (as well as their modern counterparts) engaged in genetic exchange via processes such as conjugation, transformation, and transduction, all of which fall under the umbrella of parasexuality. Surely, pleasure was not in a bacterium's realm of experience.”

OK, so maybe bacteria didn’t need to orgasm 2 billion years ago, but I’d like to think that most humans today, do. The orgasm gives a sense of satisfaction, pleasure and with the release of endorphins, a euphoric high to mimic “happiness.” In today’s modern world pleasure is the essence of life for humans, if we don’t enjoy our jobs, we leave…our houses, we sell them…our bodies we get plastic surgery…our mates, we dump them! So keeping someone happy is very important if we don’t want to lose them. Part of keeping them happy is through sexual pleasure. The rush of endorphins and other chemicals that stimulate our body and mind keep us “sexually satisfied” and helps a relationship last longer.

     Bacteria also didn’t need a mate to help raise and maintain its offspring and neither do many animals, which usually live in packs…where women stick together to help raise one another’s young or after a short time the young are able to sustain themselves. Humans on the other hand, raise their young for a good portion of its life, and it isn’t easy for a human to accomplish this alone. Humans have also evolved to need more variety, therefor the way we look to receive pleasure in many a ways. We have also evolved as social beings so “we use it to enhance love, to make peace after fights, to relieve tension, for social advantage, for recreation and for income.” 
     
     I think we are all quite aware that when we enjoy something in our lives, we chose to do it more often. Maybe, “Natural selection may have favored ancestors who developed pleasure centers - such as the female clitoris - because they might have mated more or been more desirable, and thus left more offspring.” But then again, we also have more animals and humans engaging in homosexuality, masturbation, anal sex, oral sex and using birth control, which clearly are solely for the purpose of pleasure and not procreation. So in conclusion, I’d say…it’s a tough call to determine whether or not pleasure evolved from our selfish needs or for our ever changing mission to spread our seed but I’m very thankful for it either way!

http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/sexual-reproduction-and-the-evolution-of-sex-824

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19960109&slug=2308111