Freedom of Sex

In the past few weeks, topics of relationships, adultery, marital fidelity and such have raised themselves in surprising ways. There were a number of movies I saw that dealt with these issues, and it came up in three unrelated discussions at work. In trying to order my thoughts about these subjects, I’m starting a series of posts about related freedoms. This first post delves right in by talking about the taboo subject of sex.

At its core, sex is there for procreation, to continue the existence of the species. I once read that we, humans, are really there as a mechanism for our DNA to reproduce itself. Of course, this is taking the evolutionary viewpoint to its extreme, but I felt it a sobering thought to realize that all our achievements, our history, are just ways for a couple of strands of DNA to reproduce themselves.

In animals, sex is almost entirely linked with reproduction. Studying animals, in particular mammals, makes it clear that copulating is usually a pleasurable experience for them, however that does not make them seek it outside of the reproductive experience.

Humans are fairly unique in that they have expanded their sexual behavior beyond the reproductive purpose. Performing sexual acts purely for the pleasure, without a desire or attempt to reproduce, has been part of human history since its oldest recordings. It can probably be argued that enjoying sex for itself is one of the things that make us different from animals.

It is not until fairly recently, though, that the connection between sex and procreation got entirely severed. The development of various reliable birth control tools in the latter half of the twentieth century, combined with medical advances in fertility treatment, has resulted in a situation where you can have sex without reproduction, and reproduction without sex.

Society has not kept up with these developments, however. Much of the mores of society are based on traditions that are thousands of years old. In order to understand society’s attitude towards sex, we need to take a look at the origins of these traditions.

One of the other ways in which humans are different from other animals is in the time it takes them to rear their young to adulthood. Human babies are born as entirely helpless creatures. Where other animals can walk or fly within days or weeks after birth, it takes humans more than a year before they even have independent locomotion. Where other animals can often take care of themselves within a year, human children remain dependent on their parents for fifteen years; in fact, in modern society when they attend institutes of higher education, the children may be economically dependent on their parents for the first twenty-five years of their life.

An investment into the raising of offspring of fifteen years or more cannot easily be supported by a single parent. Children supported by both of their parents would, on average, have a better chance to succeed in life; hence there would be an evolutionary force that would favor societies that encourage long-term bonding.

This puts in particular the male (but to a lesser extend also the female) of the species in a tug-of-war between conflicting goals. On the one hand, his DNA is trying to spread itself as far as it can, and encouraging the man to impregnate as many women as possible. On the other hand, society is pressuring him to provide his share towards the raising of his children. Perhaps it is not surprising that the 1950-era Kinsey Report found that half the American men and a quarter of the women had engaged in extramarital sex: over the thousands of years, society has evolved a don’t ask, don’t tell attitude to deal with its fundamental contradictions.

The introduction of reliable birth control, and thereby the severing of the connection between sex and reproduction, through a monkey wrench into this balance. For a while, the hippie culture tried to find a new balance in dealing with sexuality, but it was too different from mainstream society to become generally accepted. In fact, the backlash against the hippie culture of the 1960s seems to have driven American society backwards...

Conclusion: society’s attitudes towards sex are hopelessly outdated and can safely be ignored. The only value left in these attitudes is a an unspoken default, a baseline for expectations and interactions.

Valuable Freedom (cont.)

Yesterday, I wrote about the typical preparations for a trip to communist East Germany in the late 1980s. After all the preparations, the actual day of travel would arrive. Since the distance from Delft, where I lived, to Dresden, where my pen friend lived, was “only” about 550 miles (880 km), I would leave really early and do the trip in one day. Crossing the border into the East Block country at Helmstedt was a bit of a scary experience. Although I never had any real trouble (apart from it taking two hours or so), there was always the possibility they would find something wrong with the paperwork, or have questions about the things I was bringing into the country. (I would always have a box with me with all kinds of stuff that was hard to get in East Germany, like various shampoos, candy, etc.) Crossing the border felt like entering a maximum security prison. I had repeatedly been warned not to stray from the direct route to my destination, as my entry permit was only valid from the border crossing to the place I was staying. The day after arriving, I would report to the police station, my passport would be stamped with a permit to stay for a specific number of days, and I would get a separate exit permit. At the end of the visit, I would usually take two days to drive back, because crossing the border back into the free world would take even longer than entering the communist country. They would inspect the car much more careful, making sure I wasn’t smuggling any people out.

Brandenburger Tor, Berlin, 1988

One of the most impressive moments came in 1988, when my pen friend and I visited Berlin for a few days. In those days, Berlin was a divided city: East Berlin was the capital of East Germany, while West Berlin was effectively a part of West Germany. West Berlin was of course surrounded by East Germany, and had, since 1961, been separated from it by the famous Berlin Wall. Standing at the Brandenburger Tor, we could not only see the Wall, but also West Berlin behind it. There it hit me, stronger than ever before, the difference between my friend’s world and mine. A few years earlier I had stood at almost the same spot, in West Berlin, looking at the East. I could go back to West Berlin whenever I wanted, but she would (we thought back then) never be able to do that. Look at the police man in the photo above. For a moment, I thought of him as a kind of park ranger, there to help tourists and protect the monument from vandalism. In reality, he was a border guard—not to protect the country from outside attacks, but to make sure the East German people stayed inside. Earlier, I compared crossing the border from West to East Germany to entering a maximum security prison. That analogy was no accident: East Germany was, for all practical purposes, one giant prison for its population. The prison warden, Erich Honecker, determined what was shown on TV, what was printed in the newspapers and magazines, who could do what, where and when. The sixteen million or so East Germans had to obey him. Standing there in front of the Brandenburger Tor, looking at the West, knowing that I was free and my friend, because she happened to be born in this country, was not, really brought home to me that Freedom isn’t a given, isn’t free. Freedom is something we inherited from our parents and grandparents, some of whom may have paid dearly for it. I feel that we, all of us in the “free world,” have a responsibility to cherish and defend this precious gift.

Valuable Freedom

I have been thinking about starting a Blog, and finally decided to take the plunge. There are things I want to say, and here people may be hearing them. “Freedom” is something that is very dear to me, to a level that sometimes even surprises me. Looking back at my life, I have realized that some of the formative events in that respect were a series of visits I made to the then-communist East-Germany.

Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, 1985

Back in the late 1980s, visiting East Germany was not something one would do on the spur of the moment. It started off with the visa application. This application process would take six weeks—if you were lucky. To be safe, better plan two months of more ahead. As part of your visa application, you would have to specify where you would expect to be staying. In my case, I would be visiting a pen friend who lived in a small village not far from Dresden, and would be staying with her. She had told me that this information would go into her “file.” Nobody know exactly what information the Stasi (the East-German secret police) was collecting about the country’s citizens, but it was fully expected that contact with foreigners would be noted. Of course, the fact that she was regularly receiving letters from people in a capitalist country would already have been noted. Being a kindergarten teacher, which would have been considered a kind of public trust position, she would not have undertaken a regular correspondence with foreigners lightly. Choices like these could impact her career opportunities, could cause her to loose her job even. As someone born and raised in the West, I had always taken our basic freedoms for granted. Sure, western countries have their own “secret service” agencies, and we expect them to protect us against potential evil people. But I never expected that my government would want to know or care who I would exchange letters with, who would be visiting me, where I would travel. The East German government was known to keep that kind of information about its own citizens. In fact, with my visa application, they were bound to have opened a file on me. Sure, I could understand that there would be some kind of a background check if I would apply for a position that involves dealing with state secrets, and at such a point there might be questions about what I had done and who I would have known as a student. But for my East German friend, this was expected as part of every government job—and in a communist country, just about every job is directly or indirectly a government job. ... to be continued