[GloomyBoots]

> Sex doesn't have a goal, neither does biology more generally.

I’m trying to take this in good faith, but I’m struggling, and it feels like a convenient way to divert this conversation into meaningless hair-splitting about whether by biology you mean the science itself or the processes biologists study, and whether by goal you mean an consciously intended outcome or a mechanistic one. Neither of which topics has any real bearing on what I said.

> Reproduction as distinct from sex might be a safer argument, but reducing sex to reproduction is inapt, particularly in a discussion of human social behavior.

It’s impossible to disentangle reproduction from sexual behavior, and, again, I’m having trouble taking this in good faith.

It’s more troubling since I specifically voiced my distaste for the reduction of sexuality to mere biological processes. I’m in the middle ground between the extremes of biological essentialism and positions like your own that biology has no meaningful relation to human sexuality.

> The active vs passive voice is depicting the angst as a choice, a reaction which is under voluntary control. No one is required or forced to feel social distress, certainly not by advertising or philosophy.

This, again, seems to be a very extreme and basically religious position to take. People are affected, whether they intend to be or not, by those around them. None of us is a being of pure reason divorced from the world around us, or anything even close to it. We can’t choose to be unaffected by our social environment any more than we can choose to be unaffected by our physical one.

[sethrin]

Instead of "I'm struggling to take this in good faith" you might try asking clarifying questions; it's less rude that way.

Talking about goals is a way of suggesting that sex isn't competitive. It is simply an act, with what meaning humans impart.

> It’s impossible to disentangle reproduction from sexual behavior

Gay people beg to differ.

I'm not going to engage in generalities about how people affect each other; the subject at hand was a philosophy that encourages people to feel badly about themselves if they're not having sex with a "10", with an analogy to beauty product advertising. The claim was that subscribing to that philosophy was a choice. Happy to hear your thoughts regarding that.

[jfengel]

Gay people beg to differ.

As do straight people. Most straight people, most of the time, take considerable pains to avoid reproduction.

Evolutionary psychology often proposes badly oversimplified models, and people draw invalid conclusions, even in non-human animals. But even more importantly, human conscious goals are categorically different from "every action is a selfish gene making a choice".