Psychology Today: What Rick Santorum Doesn’t Know About Sex
Rick Santorum doesnt know what sex is for.
In a recent appearance in New Hampshire, he summarized his thoughts on the subject, saying, God made man and woman, and men and women come together to have a union to produce children, which keeps civilization going and provides the best environment for children to be raised. While this may seem a common-sense understanding of the function and purpose of sexuality, it doesnt apply to human beings.
What Santorum is missing can be expressed in simple math. The vast majority of species have sex only to reproducea function reflected in a very low ratio of sex-acts-to-births. Gorillas, for example, have intercourse at most about a dozen times per birth. And as with good Catholics, gorilla sex is all business: no oral, anal, manual, or any other kind of non-reproductive dilly-dallying. The female of most mammals only has sex when she is ovulating. Otherwise, no go. But the sexuality of human beingsand our closest primate relations, bonobos and chimpsis utterly different. We and our chimp and bonobo cousins typically have sex hundredsif not thousandsof times per birth, with or without contraception.
Santorum has argued that contraception is morally wrong because, Its a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. But human beings happily experience, witness, imagine, and lament a cornicopia of erotic encounters that couldnt possibly result in conception. Leaving aside the many perversions happily practiced by humans the world over, the human female is available even for Vatican-approved missionary position intercourseat least theoreticallywhen shes menstruating, already pregnant, post-menopausal, or otherwise precluded from conceiving. Is this, too, an abomination? Even Santorum and his wife, who have had more children than most couples, have certainly had a lot more non-reproductive than reproductive sex over the years.
by Christopher Ryan
Aristus
(66,316 posts)izquierdista
(11,689 posts)JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)yardwork
(61,588 posts)FSogol
(45,473 posts)Good article. "Sex and love hold communitiesnot just familiestogether."
HopeHoops
(47,675 posts)If YOU were married to Mr. Frothy, would YOU have sex with him? Seriously. That's just "icky". Hmm. "Icky Ricky"? Nah, I still like Mr. Frothy better - remember to hit the Google link!
htuttle
(23,738 posts)no_hypocrisy
(46,080 posts)It trumps religion every time.
kenny blankenship
(15,689 posts)Please don't make me imagine Rick Santorum having sex. Invisibul unrec!
Orangepeel
(13,933 posts)I wouldn't bet on it
HockeyMom
(14,337 posts)either will have to twiddle their tumbs, or find some young chickie who CAN conceive since procreation is the ONLY reason for intercourse.
Better prevent all the old widows from remarrying since they won't be making any babies. You know, when these religious kooks talk about gays should not be able to marry because they can't procreate, ask them if they want to require fertility tests of straight couples, and outraight ban post menopausal women from marrying. One moron said, "Well, they might be SURPRISED to find they are pregnant". A 65 year old woman??????? ROFL
treestar
(82,383 posts)And made Elizabeth pregnant when she was old.
So with God all things are possible, even a gay couple might conceive!
Ricky is just not religious enough.
jillan
(39,451 posts)It's no wonder why he talks about it so much. barf....
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)We try to be monogamous. But many of us do not always succeed. Those of us who do succeed are lucky and should not bear too much ill will toward those who fail.
knocklindquist
(5 posts)The author fails to address the professed topic of Psychology Today - namely, psychology. The mental, moral, and social effects of sexual activity on the person are utterly ignored in exchange for a novice appeal to biology. Also, this is an opinion piece only, with more than a little sarcasm.
usrname
(398 posts)There's no way that an animal, especially "lower" order animals can conceptualize, "hey, I want babies, so I will have sex." And that's even especially true for the male part of the species when in many cases, they have sex and never ever see the results as they move on to greener pastures.
It's just that the hormones activate at certain times of the year or month or day that gets them interested in getting off. They find what it takes to get them off and off they go. It's not as though a bat understands the consequences of having sex, or that after some relatively long period of gestation, a baby bat is produced. They just get the urge, get it on and done. Not much different from humans.
mistertrickster
(7,062 posts)That ignores the way sex is used to objectivize women (or objectivize women for sex, whichever is most convenient for the argument at hand) and make them bad at math?
Or something?
On edit--good article, k'd and r'd.
eallen
(2,953 posts)There are many animals that have sex far more often than necessary for reproduction, from ducks and dolphins to giant squid.
More, none of them are doing it for the purpose of reproduction. Any notion of a duck's sexual thoughts (nice tail?) is quite speculative. But it sure isn't "well, we better to do it one more time because it's that time of the year and we want a good batch of chicks."
I suspect humans may be the only animals capable of having sex for the purpose of reproducing, because likely we're the only animals with the cognitive capacity to connect sex and reproduction. Which isn't usually why we do it. But it's never why any other animal does it.
saras
(6,670 posts)You just KNOW they're going to LOVE the idea of gay-bashing male deer in Texas (yes, they exist), but you can't make sense of them without coming to terms with the concept "gay" in a whole new way. Exploding heads left and right.
Angry Dragon
(36,693 posts)Dont call me Shirley
(10,998 posts)alarimer
(16,245 posts)How boring they would be. I feel sorry for his wife. Does she just lie there and hope it's over quickly so she can get back to her book?
I would rather be dead that have to have sex with someone like that. Though I do wonder if Santorum is a closet case.