The Paradox Of Sexuality And Survival

An individual person can go a lifetime without sex and never suffer physically for it, and perhaps they are perfectly content to forgo having sex regardless of their relational/marital status.  Logically and scientifically, sex has nothing to do with personal survival.  No one at all needs to have sex in order to both live and take pleasure in their life.  At times, sex and the far more expansive components of sexuality beyond mere sexual intercourse can add layers of immense satisfaction and excitement to life, but they are not necessities for life in the way that food or water are.  This is not even to say that being nonessential for survival lessens the significance of something, as mere survival is philosophically meaningless on its own; the point at hand is that sexual expression is not vital to stay alive.

When it comes to the human species, sex is, as far as correlative empirical observation suggests (which could all be mere correlation instead of true causation like all other unprovable but seeming causal relationships), actually necessary to survival--never on an individual level for the aforementioned reasons, yet always on a species level.  The survival of humanity via successive generations and the survival of individuals are paradoxically distinct in full.  Thus, if someone believes sexual expression is necessary for survival, they are right only if they mean something very specific.  However, sexuality is far more prominent when it comes to rationalistic self-exploration than it ever is when it comes to survival on an individual level.

One ramification is that this is a way, just one of many, to logically prove that sexuality is not the most foundational or philosophically significant aspect of human existence.  Biologically, it might be imperative to continue the species, but even then, there are numerous aspects of sexuality that are deeper than sex between partners could ever be, like the analysis of logical truths about the nature of sexuality and the great potential for sexual introspection (which, of course, has nothing to do with sensory perceptions and other people on its own).  Sexual reductionism, like naturalistic reductionism, economic reductionism, emotionalistic reductionism, and any other idea that false reduces all or most of human life to something that is but a part of it, is untrue and devastating.

The paradox of sexuality and survival is just one reason why sexual reductionism is false.  Not only is sex and broader sexuality not necessary for individual survival, it is something that cannot change the inherently nonsexual nature of most kinds of relationships, interactions, desires, and thoughts.  Clothing, nudity, friendship, emotional intimacy, physical intimacy, physical beauty, and sensuality are not sexual.  Even survival itself is not a matter of sexuality except at the largest scale of continual human presence.  The paradoxical nature of how sexuality is observational connected with the continuation of humanity as a while even though it is not inherently tied to broad individual flourishing is worth contemplating on its own, yet it also dispels the errors of sexual reductionism.