From the Archives by Anthrofuentes: Why have humans taken mammalian sex to a whole new level?
Googling “sex” in 2016 yields approximately 3.34 billion results in 0.29 seconds. That’s nearly four times as many hits as one gets when Googling “religion,” three times as many as “politics,” and about 50 percent more than “death”—but slightly less than “food.” If representation on the internet tells us anything about what matters to humans, then sex and food are pretty darned important. But we don’t need Google to tell us that.
Sex is more than just an act, a goal, or a biological pattern; it’s a central part of our lives. We write about sex, we think about sex, we talk about sex, we have prohibitions about sex, and we have laws, ideologies, and assumptions about sex. We watch sex we are not participating in, we pay for sex, and we use sex as a tool, a weapon, and a healing practice. We are so creative with sex that we’ve even developed a distinctively human category to mess with the basic biology of sex: gender.
Sex is a biological way to generate more variation for organisms in order for them to have better chances at meeting the challenges the world throws at them. It is a risky venture. Given that, one would think that most organisms would be conservative about sex, thereby minimizing the chances for problems. For many insects, fish, and reptiles, sexual reproduction is reasonably straightforward.
In most macaque species, there are one or two peak times of the year for mating. At those times, most females go through a variety of physiological changes. The skin around the females’ vaginas and anuses can become slightly swollen such that any male can notice. These females also undergo behavioral shifts, causing them to spend more than the usual amount of time following males and presenting their rear ends to those males in an invitation to have sex.
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