For pleasure or procreation

There comes a time in every woman’s life when she must confess to the offspring that he or she was not the result of immaculate conception. In my case the reverse is true. The bubble burst for the spawn a couple of years ago. I spotted an article on the good doctor who had helped me conceive. (The brat came along a good eight years after we were married, thanks to my ovaries being awash with PCOD, and I still maintain that he is the best anti-ageing treatment ever.)

“Look, here’s the doctor who helped us to make you!” He morphed instantly into a porcupine with quills upright. “Mamma,” he stated, his voice all indignant quiver. “I am not natural reproduction?”

I spent the next hour explaining mamma egg and pappa sperm being introduced to each other outside the body and then being reintroduced into the womb and how he grew inside my body from two fused cells into a strong gurgling baby. He furrowed his brow. “Don’t people do sex to have babies? Or you can do sex even if you don’t make babies?”

It was an important question – The differentiation between sex for pleasure and sex for procreation.

For most of us, the reason to have sex hasn’t been procreation. Yes of course, we want to keep our little chit of genetic combination on this earth, but technology has come far enough to eradicate the need for sex completely and even just clone us if international laws permit.

The stork doesn’t bring us our kids anymore -- an army of gynaecologists, prenatal consultants, infertility experts, doulas, and post-natal experts do. In fact, we can actually decide whether or not and when we would like to reproduce. And the pill in the 1960s did more for the female libido in a single decade than all the erotica of the previous centuries ever could. Contraception definitely improves sex lives unless you are an adrenaline junkie living for the rush of toasting a no baby month every month.

Sex for pleasure seems to be something that is distinctly human, given most animals seem to get it on only during ovulation or heat, except of course for dolphins and bonobos. The fact is that most, sex doesn’t happen for procreational purposes. Nor, interestingly, is it for pleasure. In fact, according to some research, the desire for physical pleasure is not the most important reason for us to have sex.

According to sociologist Randall Collins, we have sex to bond. And never mind the impersonality of some sexual encounters, paid and unpaid, human bonding and a sense of connection seems to be what we seek through sex.

Eventually, in the dystopian future we might just stop putting our bodies through the stretch of pregnancy, heartburn, stretch marks around our knees and the agony of teething and cracked nipples feeding and clone ourselves. Will we have sex then? I think we will. Not for pleasure, nor for procreation, but just to stay connected.

Kiran Manral is the author of six published books across genres. She is also a recovering Nutella addict

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