Sex and Chance: Strange Bedfellows? :: Philosophy Essays

Sex and Chance: Strange Bedfellows? History was sex, French was sex, art was sex, the Bible... everything was sex except biology which was obviously sex but not really sex, not the one that was secret and ecstatic and wicked and a sacrament and all the things it was supposed to be but couldn't be at one and the same time-- I got that in the boiler room and it turned out to be biology after all. (Stoppard, 218) I'll admit it. I'm fascinated by sex. After all, it is the reason that we are all here, isn't it? And not just thanks to our parents: for years and years and years, sex has been the motor driving the evolutionary process. I don't think people give sex enough credit for its role in the evolutionary process. Call evolution "survival of the fittest", call it random chance, call it whatever you want-- in the end, whoever's left alive is just searching for another body in which to find comfort. I have not always been fascinated by sex. An infamous family story records my disgust when I first learned about "the birds and the bees". Apparently, I turned around in the car seat to look at my baby brother: "You mean you did it twice??" Part of my growing fascination has been a result of the evolving story I have been told/am telling myself about sex. In class, Professor Grobstein taught us about "lateral transfer", and Elizabeth dubbed sex "the transfer of genetic material". I don't like to think about sex in purely clinical terms, however. It's not just my status as a "hopeless romantic", it's also my belief that sex is bigger than the box of words it is often put into. Sex is a growing, changing thing that is going through its own evolution. Not that the process itself has changed much; it's human interpretation and response to sex that continues to evolve. Also , if sex is allowed leeway to expand beyond the clinical level, it gains greater implications (not that birth isn't a great implication by any means). As Stoppard puts it: "Einstein- relativity and sex. Chippendale- sex and furniture. Galileo- 'Did the earth move?'" (Stoppard, 90). In this sense, everything we do is linked inextricably to sex. (Upon writing this previous sentence, I realized that I have picked a topic which is quite beyond the scope of this paper, and would require many many years of research.