What if Making Babies -- Extending the Species -- Isn't the Real Reason for Having Sex?

What if everything we’ve ever learned about our basic motivation to have sex — the procreation of the species — is unequivocally wrong? What if making babies is a byproduct of the real purpose of our couplings?

What if the reason humans as a species spend more time having sex than any other creature on the planet — including our randy bonobo cousins who don’t seem to have any hang-ups about enjoying a good knoodling — is driven by something entirely different from what we’ve thus far been taught?

For this jaunt down sexual lane, we’re wrapping our scientific hands around controversial notions of female sexuality. An illuminating place to start is the recently published best-selling memoir by Pamela Madsen: Shameless: How I Ditched the Diet, Got Naked, Found True Pleasure...and Somehow Got Home in Time to Cook Dinner (Rodale, 2011).

Madsen’s narrative is a bold revelation of the pursuit of sexual gratification within the confines of marriage. Her courtship story reflects the social norms of her time: monogamy and matrimony, not necessarily in that order, but certainly till death do us part. When that construct no longer worked, Madsen found herself needing to scratch that immeasurable sexualove itch, the one begging for satisfaction and novelty, without violating her vows.

Based on her uber-popular blog by the same name, Shameless describes her sexual metamorphosis through oily encounters with sex surrogates in New York, to BDSM parties in San Francisco. Madsen did what few women in her demographics would dare do: gets her rocks off, and write a best-selling sexual tell-all that has some wagging their tongues, and others simply drooling. Her story is audacious, but really, is it that far off base from all our primal urges?

Primal Nature

The standard explanation for our sexual choices for the past twenty years has been Sexual Strategies Theory: women are choosy about their partners because they need someone strong and resourceful to take care of their offspring, a guy likely to stick around during those tumultuous child-rearing years. Men, on the other hand, have an evolutionary drive to propagate their seedlings far and wide, preferably in young, fertile wombs belonging to faithful partners. This pits the genders (I use that word in the traditional sense, no insult intended to queers) against one another, creating dysfunctional mating and marriage patterns.

But Madsen’s journey is confirmation that something besides procreation drives our dalliances. A happily married mother of teenage boys enjoying weekly visits with her Therapist-cum-Adonis Sacred Intimate is looking for something, but it ain’t a papa for her brood.

And if baby making was the reason for our factories in the first place, how do we explain all our non-productive humping? Humans have very “unproductive” sex by evolutionary standards, on the odds of hundreds of couplings per successful insemination.

Forget the phrase, screwing like bunnies: if people were truly like the majority of animals, we’d hook up during estrus only. Instead, we are a decidedly horny species capable of extreme sexual acts. And the female orgasm is bar none an experience to behold with many paths — clitoral, vaginal, g-spot, etc. — shaking our booties and bedrooms. There’s more than genetic strategizing going on behind closed doors.

Picky Lovers

That women are “choosier” than men is scientifically verified. A commonly referenced 1989 study, by psychologists Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield, asked female college students to introduce themselves to a male colleague and offer sex. In those trials, up to 75 percent of the guys said yes. When the roles were reversed, not a single woman was interested in casual sex with the guys.

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