Maybe We're Not Created for Procreation

I believe my political views on issues like birth control, abortion, and feminism are pretty clear. But at last, I think I'm getting some scientific back-up.

I am in the midst of reading Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee. Which is us, by the way. And he says that actually, the female reproductive cycle of humans gives every evidence that we are not built to use sex exclusivel as a procreative tool, because, unlike some other primates, we do not know when we are ovulating, and we can have and want sex even when we're not.

See, other species make it easy. Their butt turns bright red, or they go into heat, or something, and that's when they're fertile, and that's when they want sex, and that's when they're at their most attractive to members of the opposite sex. But we hide our ovulation well. Even with our current scientific knowledge about it, we're wrong a great deal of the time. That's why the rhythm method works so shoddily; we just can't predict when we're going to get pregnant. Furthermore, we're capable of wanting sex even when it won't produce children (since we have no idea when it will), and men are capable of wanting it from us. Plus, we have a clitoris, which not many species have. (I think it's just us and Bonobo chimps, but I could be wrong.) So clearly, we're supposed to be using sex for recreation and bonding, possibly even more than we're supposed to be using it for making the babies.

In a weird way, this also accounts evolutionarily for homosexuality, which is supposed to be "unnatural" because it's not procreative. Because if you're supposed to be having sex for fun and bonding, why shouldn't you have it with members of the same sex?

And I can hear the objections already. Aren't we supposed to have kids? Isn't passing on genetic material the most important thing, evolutionarily? Well, yes. But we're humans, not fruit flies. It's not a numbers game. It's getting the kids you have to reproductive adulthood, which takes at least twelve years. So you're really better off having a few to whom you can devote your resources. So it'd be good if you didn't get pregnant every time you had sex. And it would be good to form a bond with the person you had sex with, so that they devote their resources to your kid, too.

See, it all works!