The Story Of Our Sexuality
Mind-blowing origin stories of our sexual features
Hello there,
A lot of you enjoyed the recent piece on the future of sex (who wouldn’t?). It was quite juicy and got the crowd going.
Since everybody likes reading about this topic while carefully ensuring that no one’s watching, I thought of writing a lot more about this.
I mean about the science and origins behind some of our sexual features- not some lame & lewd stuff to bait an intelligent bro.
Today we’re going back millions of years and exploring 8 fascinating insights on how some of our sexual organs, desires, and features have evolved.
So shut out all the lustful thoughts and start paying attention, because we have some ideas that’ll make you go “Damn, that explains it!”:
Sex: Before we get into the steamy stuff, we must ask ourselves the golden question: why did sex evolve in the first place? After all, asexual reproduction also did the job of DNA replication pretty well. The reason is that using sex to combine DNA leads to greater chances of combining good genes, eliminating unwanted/unhealthy traits from the gene pool (like genes that make you prefer pineapple on your pizza), and most importantly, helping our offspring constantly change their genetic makeup and stay one step ahead in the forever war between animals and parasites. This is called the Red Queen effect.
Calm before the storm Male orgasm: So the KRA for sex was passing one’s genes, not pleasure, even though that’s all you must be thinking about right now. So how did pleasure enter the mix, and how did the male orgasm come up? Think of it as an incentive scheme devised by Mother Nature. If you know there’s a reward at the end, you’ll work harder to get it- and what a brilliant tactic this is to push males to achieve the main goal of their life (i.e. reproduction) instead of just lying around dejected every time they heard a female make sounds that were translations of “I have a boyfriend”.
Penises: Billions of years ago, sex in the ocean (because we’ve all evolved from fish) was as boring as reading an email from HR. Females would throw out their eggs, males would squirt all over them, and if all went well and nobody came and destroyed the eggs out of jealousy (this isn’t a joke, it actually was a legit way to kill competition), lo and behold- there’d be a cute, microscopic offspring soon. But this spray-and-pray approach was as insufficient as VC investing during a tech mania, and thus penises evolved as they raised the chances of successful insemination. Plus females could examine them to see if they weren’t damaged, and could get erect (ouch!) before deciding to mate. Sexual selection, therefore, drove the evolution of the male weapon of mass construction.
Female Orgasm: The male orgasm was sufficient to incentivize males to find mates and reproduce- so how is it that female orgasms evolve? One, they had no evolutionary drawback. Two, the female orgasm squeezes the penis and raises the chances of successfully absorbing the sperm and fertilizing the egg (observe it next time- it’s still true). As you can see, nature loves any sex-tech update that raises the chances of producing more and more babies, and this single fact has driven the evolution of all our sexual organs and behaviors.
Erogenous zones: The neck, ears, thighs, and lower belly are all spots that produce high levels of stimulation when touched. Why? The neck and ears were places that got touched when a male mounted a female for sex (and hence a touch on those parts produces arousal), and the latter two are closer to the sex organs and naturally produce higher stimulation.
Bendy penises: Initially penises had a bone but eventually that feature achieved the same fate as floppy disks- nobody wanted them and they went extinct. Why? Because, thanks to the evolution of the female orgasm, they demanded greater sexual pleasure i.e. newer positions instead of the same, old missionary 4 times a day. Penises without bones were way more flexible and could explore a ton of different positions, thus getting selected. Another reason is that it was easy for a male competitor to just break that bone in a fight to eliminate a rival from the gene pool- a big vulnerability. Evolution hates features that prevent one from replicating, and hence we have tools sans bones.
Breasts: Coming to perhaps the most important question of our lives- why have we evolved to be obsessed with big breasts? It’s because when we were bipedal apes (meaning we stood on 2 limbs instead of 4) in Africa millions of years ago, we followed a foraging lifestyle which meant traveling long distances in search of food. Not finding enough to eat at that time was a common thing, so having a bit of extra fat to survive and feed offspring was a major plus point. Big breasts were a sure-shot indication of this surplus reserve, and hence the male obsession with 38Ds. For the same reason, large hips and buttocks were deemed attractive, but having fat throughout the body wasn’t. That’s because it’d hinder the woman’s ability to travel long distances. Essentially, our sexual preferences are based on survival instincts that developed 100M years ago.
Testicles: Balls evolved to provide sperm, but what dictates their size relative to body size? This is where things get very interesting. Gorillas have super tiny ones because they follow a system of polygyny, where an alpha male takes a group of females (and the beta males live a left-swiped life). Since there’s no male competition for the big boss, he doesn’t need to have quick sex and impregnate females- and consequently, gorillas have tiny penises and testicles. Contrast that to chimpanzees who have higher male competition: it’s so intense their average sex duration is 7 seconds! (That should make you feel better). It’s all about making sure the DNA transfer happens before some other male comes and whoops your ass, ending the show before you could inseminate. This sperm competition has led to chimpanzees evolving penises & testicles bigger than the average human penis even though they’re much shorter on average! So testicle size is a reflection of the male competition in any species.
That’s it for today, friends. I hope you managed to reach so far without any major distractions.
If you enjoyed this, you may also like:
The Magic Of Placebo [Thought provoking]
Why Your Laziness Is Justified! [Another mind-bender]