Biology and Sexuality
I was having a discussion with some of my friends the other day, both guys and girls were present, and we got onto the subject of older women and older men. The guys were saying that it’s a lot easier for a younger woman to be attracted to an older guy becuase, biologically, the older man is still able to procreate. However, once women reach a certain age, they are unable to have children, and therefore younger men are not biologically programmed to be interested in older women. Honestly, I had never really considered the issue before, but the boys were making an intersting point. After a little more discussion they also described that they thought the entire reason that men are attracted to women with curvy figures and women are attracted to men who have large, masculine features is simply biological. Furthermore, they reduced sexual attraction, in general, to biology. While this is not a completely unheard of perspective, it seems hard to actually believe.
Why is it that there are so many people who are not attracted to sex with will lead to procreation. Why is it that there is such a thing as desire? It seems that desire and pleasure have been completely left out of this purely biological analysis of sex. Why is it that people think this type of thing? These are all questions I was left with after our discussion.
It seems that the amount of people who actually have sex, even if it is in the vanilla, monogamous, sort of “charmed circle” type of way, are not usually doing so to achieve procreation. They are doing so out of some type of desire for pleasure. Therefore, why is it that we still think of sex as a biological act? There are, in fact, plenty of younger men who desire older women, even those who are unable to give them children. Furthermore, there are plenty of older women who desire younger men ever after they find out they are no longer to have children. And this is not simply limited to an analysis of age. Why is it that some people have desires for people of the same gender? And why is it that the account my friends gave of certain body types for men being signifiers of virility and certain body types of women being signifiers of femininity seem to be untrue in several cases. In fact, I personally don’t even see the connection with any biological instinct being rooted in sex. However, I think an argument can be made as to why people continue to pawn these things off as arguments. The answer cna be found in the charmed circle. By deciding who can and cannot be accepted based on sexual practice, the charmed circle must find some way to argue, some discourse of power, to explain why they are able to call themselves superior to other sexualities. It seems that biology is the path that they have taken in order to fulfill this goal. By concstructing an argument through biology that there are reasons rooted in science for why certain people are attracted to other kinds of people, and that there is a scientific reason why people should not be attracted to other kinds of people, the charmed circle is again attempting to posit that they have the inside track on sexuality.
The interesting thing to me, especially after taking this class, is that… I don’t know why anyone would buy into that– it makes so little sense.
Tags: biology, charmed circle
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