Sex and Students

Sex is a subject which touches all societies. Sex is one of the primeval urges upon which all lives ultimately depend. Originally, it was one of the methods Nature has found of procreating different species, both plants and animals. There are two types of reproduction, sexual and asexual. For some species, their sex will depend upon the ambient temperature upon the relevant eggs hatch, if I remember correctly, like the crocodiles. For others like certain species of fish, gender depends on the relative distribution of males and females in the population. And for still other species, they can choose to reproduce themselves either sexually or asexually. The benefit of sexual reproduction is that there can be a mixture of different genes: sexual reproduction is just a genes lottery game of Nature the purpose of which is the production of stronger members of the specific species. But human reproduction is now quite different. To a certain extent, we have moved ahead of our evolution because of the development of a specific organ: the human brain which makes us in many ways, the master of planet earth.

The development of our new brain, the frontal cortex has enabled us to explore and to have a very precise knowledge of how our brain and our body operate, in ways not possible to any other species. We have three brains: the most primitive, what is sometimes called the reptilian brain, is the oldest and consists of little more than some growths of nerves at the tip of our spinal cord and is concerned with most of our automatic bodily functions; the mid-brain, which serves to collate and to do a kind of primitive processing of information from the external world and then to trigger certain primitive emotions required for fighting our enemies or perceived enemies and to approach objects as food or friends or mates for procreation, the so-called firiend/foe/mate identification and if identified as foe, the fight or flight response and finally our cortex which is the latest evolutionary addition to our brain, the part of our brain which makes us specifically human and which enables us to do some really fine-grained analysis which then enables us to consider alternative modes of action. Perhaps as a result of the development of this part of our brain, we now know much more how our body works and how it may be tricked to give us a candy: the production of a hormone called dopamine, which evolution originally designed to encourage us to engage in sex for the purpose of reproduction and then for women, for caring for and raising them, which are processes which involve quite a heavy investment of our time, our energies and our other resources, both material and emotional, for prolonged periods of time. Dopamine is now known to be closely associated with all forms of addictive behavior: alcoholism, gambling and other forms of compulsive behavior including, addiction to the internet and also our obsession with non-reproduction related sex e.g our addiction to pornography ( in book, magazine, celluloid or digital formats) in covert or even overt forms eg. in the promotion and advertisement of all types of commercial products embodied in the catchy advertising lingo "sex sells" and of course in the oldest profession of the human race, prostitution and its contemporary euphemistic form of so-called "escort" service and/or under some other barely disguised forms eg. peep shows, striptease and pole dancing in nightclubs, "dance" halls, ladies hair salons, "female body message" parlours, porn magazines, posh or vulgar, with liberally advertised "guides" etc.

There is no doubt that sex is a basic biological need, no different from other normal biological functions like breathing, eating, drinking and excretion. We just need to do it to stay healthy. But because the need for reproduction is the most important biological function for the survival of the our race, evolution has endowed it with the strongest possible motivating agent and its most powerful evolutionary weapon to encourage it, hormones, which however act only for brief periods of time. But since reproduction has traditionally been associated with the human institution of family and with family propagation in agricultural societies, with properties needed to sustain such families ie. the inheritance and distribution of such properites, marriage, by which societies give a formal licence for its adult members to engage in sex, has always been  a matter of the gravest economic, social and hence religious importance. Hence sex has always been linked to property and the idea of the continuation of the family. This explains the various taboos against incest (but in Egypt incest within the royal families is the rule rather than the exception) and many forms of extra-marital sex, and with the rise of Christianity, with the one-man and woman monogamy system and the concept of "adultery" which is legally defined as sexual intercourse between a man and a woman at least one of whom is married but not to the other. Hence the official bad name which sex has acquired in modern "polite" societies. But in 18th century Europe, amongst the aristocrats at least, it is a "disgrace" for a man or a woman not to have a "lover" in adddition to having either a husband or a wife. All that was required was that they did not cause a public "scandal". Because of the risk which such a powerful biological drive may pose to the stability of the family and hence the havoc it may wreak upon the orderly distribution of family properties and also the heavy social responsibility of "raising the kids", all societies seek to discourage extra-marital sex, some stricter and more enthusiastic in enforcing their conventional social, moral, religious and legal rules than others. But our modern brain has now decided that we may get the candy without being fooled into serving its original object: procreation. We now just want our biological lollipop!

In a modern metropolis like Hong Kong, where merchants are kings and where consumerism is considered by our leaders as the life-blood of our economy, it is sheer madness to think that our young men and young girls shall somehow and magically remain completely immune to the temptation of wanting to possess all those posh and beautifully packaged "brand name" products. Our teenagers are human too. They are subject to the need for social recognition ( in the cut-throat teenage one up-man-ship amongst their peers) whilst hormones rage inside their young veins during the emotional roller-coaster period of their developing bodies when the secondary sexual characteristic daily remind them of the urgency of their biological needs. The combination of need for money to satisfy their need for social status amongst their peers, a little curiosity and plenty of opportunities afforded by the anonymity of the internet to sell their bodies for money thus leads to what our hypocritical society regard as "scandals". The media and the relevant film producers are the most hypocritcal of all. They merely exploit the conventional social hypocrisy to create a so-called "scandal" to boost their newspaper or magazine circulation and sales by having "hot" headlines or by putting out an artificially "controversial" film which may well be a perfectly good excuse to display a bit of beautiful flesh under the guise of "art". To me, what is surprising is not that such teenage "escort" service as depicted in the Japanese film or as described in the news in Hong Kong discussed in the blog of my fellow blogger (路人甲) may occur but that they do NOT!