What if sexuality vanished?

[John_Doe]

where sex is disentangled from power

I think this is not possible at all.

Why do you think so? Just curious. Sex doesn't have to be about power at all; thinking in such a way is very narrow minded. Don't get me wrong, sex can be tied to power which is neither a good nor bad thing in of itself, but you could pretty much tie almost everything with power. What you said is very vague and came off has very narrow minded.

It's vague to me as well. I don't understand connecting sex with power (many people might have power fetishes but I don't think that's a necessary part of sexual interest). Power is just the ability to shape reality in ways that match our desires. I hope this isn't too off-topic/awkward but I think this is what makes magic so interesting (I've internally debated, even though I haven't been as interested in this lately, what 'the' appeal of the fantasy genre is and I don't think it has to be one thing, different people can like the same movie for different reasons, but when it comes to magic specifically I think it's about wish-fulfillment. Some people might feel that magic is corny or they can't get into it because it's too unrealistic and unrelatable but if magic were real everyone would naturally be interested in it because everyone has desires and magic wouldn't be constrained by the rules of physics, or potentially rules at all outside of what's logically incoherent, I could see some people having a philosophical or religious problem with it but there would probably still be some temptation there. I won't elaborate on this but magic would be power, it could satisfy our most unrealistic desires to a degree and with an ease and consistency that isn't possible within the rules of the natural world).

Personally, I have no desire to exert 'power' over a sexual partner and I'm not turned on by the idea of being with someone less powerful because they are less powerful. Why would I be? Attractiveness is power because it gives you access to desired partners, physical strength is power and so is being in a position of leadership but I don't really understand how that would impact my sexual relationship with Jane Doe. It seems to me that women are more likely to be intrigued by power, and I wonder if that's more about wanting a man who can 'dominate' them because that shows that he could be a good protector and provider or even because of the vicarious status that they can have through him and not because they want to be less powerful per se (on the contrary, having a powerful partner makes you more powerful).

zarkle,

Every culture has infidelity too although I guess that doesn't necessarily detract from your point. I'm not convinced that marriage is necessary for the social cohesion you have in mind without considering values people have that might have been favored by natural selection (like wanting to raise or invest in one's own biological offspring) but aren't required for some kind of stability. I didn't want to get into this or the power point though.

This is an interesting topic because I think it highlights the debate around happiness and distress being symmetrical in value. No sexuality means no possible sexual frustration which would be ideal from a negative hedonistic perspective (although even the memory of sexual pleasure and the concrete understanding of what one is missing out on can be a source of frustration for people with no libido) but it also means no possible sexual pleasure, which from a fundamental pro-happiness perspective would be valuable as an end and not just insofar as it helped to alleviate distress (if you introduce someone to a new source of pleasure it might alleviate some stress that they've been experiencing in their life but it also creates a new psychological addiction, something that they will miss if they lose. If you convince someone that x is bad you prime them to have a negative emotional response to it but what's also true is that if you convince someone that y is good you prime them to have a negative emotional response to its absence. I see minimizing suffering and promoting happiness as flip sides of the same one goal but if one is committed to the idea that only minimizing suffering has ultimate value then they should be as adamant about rejecting the idea that sexual pleasure qua happiness is inherently valuable as they should be about the idea that anything other than suffering, including certain sex acts or relationships on principle, is inherently bad). A world without sexuality would not be bad, if no one felt any frustration as a result of not experiencing sexual pleasure, but it wouldn't be ideal either. I think that a sexless society would fundamentally have the same value as a world without sentient life or death itself, not bad but not ideal.

Even though I tend to have a very low libido, so much of my fantasy life revolves around sex-related intimacy. I don't know what I would 'do' with myself without it. The anticipation or hope of it is a big part of what would make life worth living, for me. A big part of some of my most notable problems is ultimately rooted in sexual frustration (body dysphoria, mid-life crisis, erectile dysfunction but that's direct, I guess social anxiety and even the lack of privacy in this high-tech. society, ) and it doesn't matter if I don't want sex with real-life women (who might not be as sympathetic or caring as I'd like), the fantasy of it is always desirable. I don't know what exactly I wanted to say, this didn't really go as I thought it would but I'm not sure what else to add.

If I could choose a magical power, it would probably be something like-the ability to make myself/others young (largely so I could be more attractive to the people I'm attracted to and I'm sure that's at least partly why most other people would want me to make them young again as well), the ability to create some kind of virtual reality life/world (like a dream but with normal cognition so/and people experienced these lives or worlds in the exact same way that they experience the waking world. To avoid the existential crises that might come with waking up to find out that your entire life was an illusion, if people spend what seems to be years rather than just hours in these simulations or if in these simulations they have false memories, it might be better to just create the dreams that would make people happiest with normal dream cognition. Romance and sex would be a huge part of my perfect dreams), the ability to create actual new worlds or parallel universes and in these worlds I have god-like powers and can create perfect sex partners that I can breed entire new populations with, like a garden of eden (I'm sure that would earn me a 'narcissism' diagnosis but I would care for the people I created or brought into this world and because I'd have god-like powers I could guarantee that they would have a life worth living), etc. I can't see a really fulfilling life for me without the possibility of romance/sex even though I know that's practically too good to be true, it's so much a part of what it means to be an animal. Even if we can't draw perfectly clear lines between organic and inorganic matter, an inclination to reproduce is considered one of the defining characteristics of life itself and in animals that means an instinct to mate, it's up there with the need for warmth and food even if its absence doesn't kill us.

[Brain O'Conner]

What I’m saying is that every human relationship inherently involves a "power dynamic". It exists in social interactions, so it’s natural that it also manifests in the sexual sphere. And simply because we are social animals, this power dynamic inevitably finds its way into our relationships. It’s like talking about food or our need for sleep—it’s something so integral to our existence that it’s impossible to eliminate.

And since it’s something present everywhere, like everything that is ubiquitous, it becomes fetishized. Just as we fetishize food, work, or the moment of sleep, we fetishize what we engage with, the experiences we go through.

Regarding the origin of emotions… “fear has its survivalistic roots in escaping danger,” as I told someone else, I wouldn’t talk about origins or purposes when it comes to topics involving evolution, because there’s the whole concept of repurposing. Usually, people have a somewhat romanticized view, taking a context from somewhere in our evolutionary history and treating it as a "use case." But if we were living in that historical period today, we’d plant the same little flag even further back, perhaps using as a use case something more purely biological, like blood glucose. And 10,000 years from now, we might say that anger served to fight off anxiety triggered by an annoying Reddit post. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear.

You must have some poor reading comprehension because in my previous comments, I not only addressed your point that every relationship has a form of power dynamics, but I also said that there's a clear difference between a power dynamic and a fetish and not every relationship is about power fetishes or any fetish for that matter unless your definition of what a fetish is, is different. I not once said that no relationship has no degree of a power dynamic. Secondly, I wasn't defining emotions or their purposes to evolution, I simply just said that evolution was simply an expression of those emotions, a manifestation and how no emotion has no defined purpose. It's you like you didn't read my post in its entirety.

[Learning to undeny]

Peace, please.

Any opinions on the original topic? What would be lost if sexuality didn't exist? I know it's not possible or worth attempting, just wanted to know what people thought about that.