January 19, 2004
Health
But mastering even so basic an idea can be a slow process, often
too slow when survival is on the line. And so nature provides us
with a head start. Before we have a chance to practice our first
little Moro grab—before we leave the womb, in fact—our pleasure
engine is humming. "Little boys can have erections from the day
they're born, sometimes even in utero," says Marrow. "Both sexes
get pleasure from touching themselves without having to be
taught."
Once we're in the world, both nature and experience reinforce
that need for physical contact, turning us into full-blown
tactile bacchanalians. Nursing alone is a powerful reinforcer.
The mechanics of animal nursing can be a utilitarian business,
with wobbly-legged newborns standing up to drink from Mom as if
she were a spigot. Human nursing, by contrast, requires
flesh-on-flesh cuddling. What's more, a mother's metabolism
ensures that this contact occurs more or less all day long.
Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, professor emeritus at the
University of California at Davis, points out that human beings
produce very dilute breast milk, which necessitates frequent
nursing sessions and therefore provides loads of opportunities
for mother and child to touch.
The whole-body rapture found in Mom's arms lasts only through
infancy, but children become expert at seeking the same security
as they grow older, and good parents have a sixth sense about
what the priorities are. A wailing child with a cut knee gets a
long hug first, even though it's the bleeding wound that needs
attention. In uncounted thousands of such tactile transactions,
kids learn to use touch as a means of connection at least as
expressive as—and certainly more satisfying than—anything so
detached as speech. With the pump thus primed, they are ready for
the next, exponentially bigger step: the moment, at age 12 or so,
when the glands engage, the hormones flow and a childhood of
simple physicality becomes a lifetime of sexuality.
From the moment the bodies of boys and girls are able to
conceive, nature is very clear that it wants these mere babies to
go about making babies of their own, and so it makes the impulse
almost irresistible. There's a reason for the fabled sexual
stamina of teens: the more frequent the pairings, the more likely
the offspring. What's more, the pleasure of sex can often lead to
long-term bonding, something else nature wants if babies and
children—with their long years of dependency—are going to
survive into adulthood.
But even at this unsophisticated stage of sexual maturation,
there's more going on in kids than simply developing an exquisite
reproductive itch and learning the wonderful ways it can be
scratched. "More and more in our field, we don't even talk about
sex anymore," says anthropologist Gil Herdt, director of the
Program in Human Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State
University. "We talk about sexuality. It's something that
involves the entire person, the whole life course, not just the
sexual acts."
Marrow agrees and takes the notion even further with the belief
that human sexuality is a form of communication as much as it is
of procreation. Nearly all creative acts are at least in part
communicative. Songs are written to be sung to somebody else;
pictures are painted to be hung for somebody else. Is it any
surprise that sex—an act infinitely more intimate than any type
of art—is also a creative way of communicating complex ideas and
deep feelings? "The biologists think the biology comes first,"
Marrow says. "I think consciousness is the first part of sex, and
exploring that consciousness with another person is one of its
purposes." If Marrow is right, it's no wonder that poetry and
music are often included in the business of romance, if only to
make that message richer.
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