Emily Nagoski of sex nerd, celebrating her 100th post, says

So here we are. Almost none of the sex we have is reproductive, yet we’ve managed to populate the planet beyond its capacity to sustain us. We use sex to every end – as a commodity, as a weapon, as a status marker, as plain old recreation. In everything that makes us most human – our economy, our wars, our art, our language, our complex relationships and social systems – sex plays a role.

Read the quote in context here.

And then adds

“Emily, if you could be any animal, what animal would you be?” I’d be a human, any day of the week.

Why, then, with all this genius, all this creativity and innovation, can we not stop using sex as a weapon of war, when we have so many other weapons? Why can’t we let women’s sexuality belong to the women in whose bodies it resides, rather than treating it as a commodity in the public domain? Why can’t we even just let two people who love each other get fucking married, without worrying about how their genitals might fit together?

What, in short, the fuck is wrong with us?

I still think she’s over-reliant on the whole evolution-as-destiny thing — after nearly all the sex we have really isn’t reproductive. Nor, for that matter, is most of the sex we have political or weaponized. But it is heavily socialized, and (mainly in our culture but not all) heavily overloaded with status and self-esteem. And, again more in our culture than many others, we have a tendency to make it highly transactional.

I’d just add, too, that what humans really seem to be evolved for (in the sense that you see us doing it in all manner of circumstances by all manner of methods among all manners of age, gender, class, orientation, etc.) is competing for status. And among humans status really does seem to confer reproductive benefit in the sense that more of one’s offspring are more likely to survive to reproduce in turn. You’ll also see there are plenty of instances where we compete for status even when, whether by disinterest or glut, sex isn’t significant to status.

I think there’s a tendency (particularly strong among, say, those inclined to speak English as a first language) to see sexual conflict as its own thing instead of a single, particularly pervasive instance of conflict for status. And sex in this instance, going back to Nagoski’s first sentence, being almost completely separate from sexual reproduction in the directly evolutionary sense.

That’s actually a good thing, though. Because one consequence of feminism is that women are resisting the layers and layers and layers of social and status significance that’s been put on, almost literally, their asses independent of their own autonomy or desire. The end result will never be the “free love” free for all imagined in, say, the 1960s Playboy mansion — which was itself a vision of bypassing rather than eliminating use of women’s sexuality to measure one’s own status. Instead it would more likely offload much of the social overloading we currently put on sex in favor of… well… almost any other form of interchange or competition between adults.

Just to be clear what I mean when I say that getting over Nagoski’s question “what the fuck is wrong with us” isn’t that we’d, well, fuck less. It’s that we’d de-galvanize sex to the point where we might instead ask ourselves “what the food-consumption is wrong with us” or “what the stamp-collecting is wrong with us” or “what the fashion-sense is wrong with us” or, getting closer to the bottom line, “what the pecking order is wrong with us?”

Note: I also agree completely that if I could be any animal I’d pick human every time.