When a person consults about sexuality, or when they are asked for their opinion about their own, it is easier for people to talk about why they are embarrassed to talk about it and with others, with their partner, than to speak truthfully about what they think and happens to him about it. If you look at the reason for that, the reason is always the same: each one of us hopes to acquire, through the sufficient pleasure and well-being that we obtain from what we do, a reciprocal response from our partner or from the one who listens to us; but we cannot be sure of this, for, in the course of any clarification, it may turn out that this is not the case. As a result, we don’t want to talk about it, for fear of destroying our own status. Similarly, if sex starts to bring less pleasure, talking about it becomes even less desirable: you have the idea that you are failing.
It is always easier for the doctor, the biologist, to talk about the general principles of sexual life. For example, the doctor can talk about sex and sexuality with people and not experience negative feelings: he is in the safe territory of his own professional competences and sex is going to be related to disease. But if someone like the psychologist is asked to talk about personal relationships and sexuality and how to live it, someone’s entry into this space may be prohibited by principles and values; anxieties and fears and also full of ignorance on the part of those who consult him.
In many cases, the psychologist, rather than expressing his own opinions, deals with the subject of sexuality with his patients, properly teaching what biological and social evolution teaches about sexual behaviors and behaviors, relating them to other abnormal behaviors and discomforts of his patient.
For animals, for example, it is important to occupy and maintain the territory, protect and mark its limits, because this means taking care of the resources to obtain food, attract sexual partners and raise offspring. This biological component of sex and animal sexuality, in the human species, tends and is evolutionary and more complex. Probably in very remote times, when agriculture did not exist, society was sufficiently desexualized. It was when the great human conglomerates were formed, demanding an evolution of socialization, that it was considered possible to interfere in the intimate affairs of individuals, and sexual and love affairs, ended in a strict analysis that, finally, was even a reason for State and a lot of religious normalization. From then on, the biological nature of sex was enclosed in behaviors and behaviors on how to conduct and manage sexuality and that great division of male and female roles was created in it, with high privilege towards one of them. Old attitude that is still relevant today: «A correct and respectable citizen should not think of sex in a perverted way«. But the old instincts and thoughts inevitably come to the current male and female and we begin to hide them many times badly, from what society and homes have regulated us, affecting our mental health.
The deviations from the social norm of sex are multiple and in some they even create difficulty. One difficulty lies in the fact that by having sex we seem to lose something human: we surrender to passion. Therefore, shame also appears, due to the fact that we do not control sexual desires and they control us. In short, social norms about sexual behavior have not always been correct or fair and have led to behavioral imbalances in both sexes.
In such a way that, throughout our history, the subject of sexual relations has been severely regulated with the help of religious prohibitions, policies, educational prescriptions, many of them very unfair. For example, in the case of girls, education until very recently, but even in our culture, considered the pleasurable aspect of sexual relations to be dangerous. Then it was said that the consequences of the desire for pleasure in a young woman could be very serious: it was argued that it was a “loss of honor”; therefore, it is often difficult for women to talk about their desires and behaviors. Many of those women with that type of education have a complex connection between sex, enjoyment and self-esteem, which leads them to lose their mental health.
A lot of men don’t fare so well either. In practice, in certain groups, the psychologist often comes across the fact that the boys were also inspired with the idea that even the very sexual desire of a man is a sign of manliness, even if the sexual act offends the other. a woman. Therefore, some young people live enough tension between good and bad. Difficulties are also experienced by young people whose sexual appetites are not as strong as “expected.” They are embarrassed to say that they are not actually that interested in sex, because this means that they do not meet some kind of standard.
Although in practice, there should be no standard for men or women, as this is a purely individual, personal matter and depends on many factors: genetic, social, etc., in reality this is difficult to enforce and respect and This leads to abnormal behaviors, which are not only related to sexuality, but also to socialization. For many psychologists, people should have the correct idea that there is really nothing good or bad in sex, if both agree. Any desire is natural and decent, if it does not violate anyone’s limits.
We cannot ignore that we observe in germ, in other animal species very close to us, everything that defines us (particularly language, morality and even conscience) but that biological continuity, even social, is broken by human culture, given and given the diversity in which these biological particularities such as sex and preproduction, develop and grow, sometimes moving away from those primitive ways of manifesting and for a human brain that has three qualities that allow us to select what we are and do: ( i) the ability to anticipate the consequences of one’s own actions; (ii) the ability to make value judgments; and (iii) the ability to choose between alternative courses of action.
In other words, unlike animal behaviors, we are able to partially manipulate our animal nature, our physiology, our anatomy, our instincts (genetic programs), selfishness, living in the present moment, and cost-benefit evaluation. In other words, we are manipulators of all the mechanisms that help ensure survival, but also increase success, for better personal well-being.
Someone said, regarding sexuality and sex, that in human nature these touch “the life of the mind in all its dimensions”. You can even leave behind the biological, everything that is automatic, programmed or instinctive; that is, things that do not contribute to survival or reproductive success as a function. From that account (music, poetry, fiction, literature, cinema, art and architecture; shows such as theater, opera and dance; professional sports, gambling in general, travel, gastronomy, spirituality, luxury, fashion), are actions that can be the center of sex and sexuality and can even lead to behaviors, attitudes and decisions that are harmful to health, survival and sexual behavior (contraception, celibacy and voluntary chastity, exclusive homosexuality, adoption, extreme sports, suicide and drug use). voluntary excessive). That is to say: sexuality has greater freedom in human nature. Freedom that we have, to make decisions that can go against our instincts, as well as our ability to anticipate, which allows us to act proactively, based on possible future events, involving other behaviors and other satisfiers.
At present -argue some neuroscientists- decisions and situations, product of a society and culture with certain characteristics (their sexuality for example), may be exacerbating the intelligence of the genes (animal nature) rather than opposing it, hence the dangerous situation in which humanity finds itself today.
The current final idea is that a vision of individual and social sexuality should be built, in values of equality and solidarity; attitudes that clearly have nothing natural since they are “creations of the individual and collective spirit of our species”, but that must be based not on reactivity but on proactivity. This idea is still worrying, since it is sometimes distorted amid the belief that humans have control over nature, at a time when, precisely, nature (pandemic, climatic disorders) reminds us that we are part of it.
When considering the evolution of sexuality, we cannot forget that it is very possible that humans are still under the effect of natural selection. Research in molecular genetics over the last decade has begun to show that genotypic variation, along with phenotypic variation in certain traits, is driven by natural selection. But that can happen in social media that have different standards. Thus, it is not uncommon to see that in poor and extremely poor social groups, life history traits, which configure a dangerous or unpredictable environment in terms of resource availability, foster a sexual history and behavior strategy that tends to favor the transmission of the genetic patrimony, in the short term and with very different behavior problems than a safe and stable environment (in terms of availability of resources) with a strategy of later initiation of sentimental and sexual relations, for example, that maximizes the transmission of the genes of the individual in the long term.
In other words: the environment created by human beings in modern societies (big cities, chronic stress, loneliness, widening gap between rich and poor, pollution, etc.) is now a new natural environment and constitutes a set of pressures, which theoretically they can affect the sexual and sexuality. In short, the human nature of response to its interior and exterior, includes everything that results from biological evolution: emotions, basic needs, cognitions (intelligence, learning, memory, etc.), temperaments and physical characteristics, in addition to everything that that our brain created to survive and reproduce, and even much more from the biological to the passionate and pleasurable. Sex does not escape it, moving like a river in the middle of the valleys of our motivations, passions, pleasures and emotions; propitiating joys, sorrows and sufferings, which the psychologist sees and attends to in individuals and societies.