Sexy Futures

Quoted via Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies

The human sex drive is complicated (duh). It is closely tied with mental processes, both biologically and by association within our culture, that we often forget how simple hormonal or physical “problems with the plumbing,” as it were, can mess things up.

There are hundreds of reasons that one person might be sexually attracted to another person but not physically and/or mentally aroused. One of the most infuriating is timing. Simply put, one person might be horny and the other might not be. Despite mutual attraction and no chronic problems, two people might just not sync up due to their schedules. It is a problem.

Of course, given our culture’s weird mystification of sexuality and romance, we then proceed to make an already frustrating situation far worse. We pretend that things have to be passionate, instant, and awesome every time, so we force the situation, with neither person really all that happy. Ok, most of us have come to the conclusion that they don’t need to be and are actually very practical about the whole situation. Sometimes it’s just meh but that’s alright because hey, nobody’s perfect. Yet the idea of taking sex enhancing drugs that alter our mental state of emotional arousal are far more controversial than mere physically arousing drugs, despite our reasonable knowledge of how day-to-day life can go and that mental states are more often the real problem.

The shocking, or at least confusing, part of this mental-physical split is that we generally accept physically altering drugs (e.g. Viagra). Viagra’s chemically active ingredients do not do much for one’s mental state. Actually, its ingredients have the somewhat humorous effect of working regardless of one’s mental state, resulting in the dreaded four-hour situation in which it is recommended that one go and see a doctor. more