[Fis] Emergence of Human Sexual Behaviour. Anxiety management

[Christophe Menant]

Dear Rainer,
Your focus on the transition to bipedal gait as supporting pre-human sexual evolution is original and interesting. It highlights a complex subject that may be influencing our human behavior much more than assumed. Regarding this last perspective, let me propose a possible development of human sexuality based on sexual related pleasures that our pre-human ancestors may have been looking for in order to limit a specific pre-human anxiety.
You may know the hypothesis about evolution of our ancestors toward self-consciousness bringing them to face new anxieties coming from identifications with suffering conspecifics (https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://philpapers.org/archive/MENEOS-5.pdf__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!TlZuTh90Sdeug5sWxjjcSH2MceRaZCtf3fXO6OnAoOcqzfGApSpGzxrSqWs6wZKBMH48hcBIrn3piStx0JIHTDuRsMM3H0UY$ ). To limit that mental suffering our ancestors may have been obliged to look for new anxiety limitation processes. Pleasure, as naturally limiting anxiety, could have been a candidate for various developments in that perspective. More precisely, it was possible for our ancestors to extend sexual pleasure by developing its occurrence independently of reproduction concerns. Developing and amplifying sexual relations could have been an easy, and quite natural,  way for our ancestors to limit the anxiety increase they were facing.
What is proposed here is that our ancestors have capitalized on sexual pleasures to develop sources of anxiety limitation. This could have led pre-human sexuality to become highly ritualized and very different from chimpanzee’s sexual behaviours.
For instance, here are some human sexual specificities the implementation of which could illustrate the search for more pleasure by our pre-human ancestors:
- No mating season, sexual pleasure possible at any time. Permanent breast as signal.
- Sexual behaviors embedded in symbolic, emotional, and cultural systems. More emotional sharing by face mating.
- Sexual pleasure layered with self-consciousness, fantasy, attachment, anxiety, and meaning.
- Sexual pleasure more intense as psychologically deeper, more elaborated and more cognitively amplified.
The above hypothesis brings sexuality and anxiety limitation to be at the forefront of human motivations. This subject is not new but deserves being developed a bit more, I feel.
Thanks again Rainer for having introduced it.



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