Until recently, the common fantasy of what sex would be like in the future borrowed from the spoof sci-fi movies of the 1960s. It would be solitary, robotic, it would probably involve a booth – Woody Allen’s orgasmatron springs to mind.
These days, now we are closer to the future, technology’s impact on sex conjures more threatening images, images of sperm for sale on the Internet; cyber sex, which will kill off relationships; genetically modified babies, which will render natural selection obsolete.
For at least one biologist, however, the future of sex looks bright. This month, Robin Baker, a reader in zoology in the School of Biological Sciences at Manchester University, United Kingdom, publishes his book Sex in the Future: Ancient Urges Meet Future Technology. In it, he anticipates a great leap forward in sex: there will be lots of it, and it will have no messy consequences.
“I envisage sexual behaviour in 20 or so years as being something like the 1960s again, but without the drawbacks,” Baker says. “Divorce sex from reproduction, as we are increasingly able to do, and there is no restraint on people showing the promiscuity that seems to be within.” The “promiscuity within” is given considerable space in Baker’s book and he intersperses the science bits with saucy vignettes, fictional scenes reminiscent of those science-for-schools programmes which saw Mr Jones slip on a banana skin to illustrate a point about gravity. Mr Jones is getting up to considerably more these days, although it is still in the name of learning.
Through these scenes, Baker explains how mankind’s “ancient urge” is to go at it like rabbits, a conclusion evinced from sources as diverse as the Ache forest-dwellers of Paraguay and the vole world. It is only the threat of disease, pregnancy and social disapproval which keeps us from pursuing our primal instincts. “There is evidence that in societies where there is no disease, there are high levels of promiscuity, bisexuality and liberal-mindedness towards sex.”
It is with some irony, then, that we read how the cold, hard and seemingly unnatural advance of technology promises to deliver man back to the realm of his ancient urges. By 2050, says Baker, in vitro fertilisation (IVF) technology will have become so accessible that babies will only ever need to be born in vitro. People will regularly freeze their eggs/sperm at a young age, get themselves sterilised and factor out all unplanned pregnancies from their future relationships.
“With routine IVF in the picture, the question then becomes, who shall I reproduce with? Somebody I know, or somebody I don’t know? Somebody famous? Somebody of the same sex?” The impact of removing reproduction from the sexual equation will shake up the whole structure of society and the relationships within it.
“It will be a society of lone parents. The idea of the family will gradually change so that people will expect to have children with lots of people rather than just one. Families will focus on the individual, rather than the unit, and people will end up with a lot of different partners: a live-in partner, a gamete partner and a hands-on partner. They may not necessarily be of the opposite sex. Men and women will start to think of their families as being dotted around.”
Won’t this unleash surges of ancient jealousy? “It depends on whether you are looking at it from the man’s or woman’s point of view. Possessiveness is more of a male characteristic.”
To Baker, jealousy can be largely explained as a man’s biological reaction to losing the paternity of his partner’s child – and his powerlessness in ever knowing whether it is his. With the introduction of routine paternity tests, Baker anticipates that future relationships will lose this layer of mistrust, permitting couples to give each other more space. “Look at past societies: people were monogamous for five, six, seven years – and then they moved on to another partner: they were, and are, sequentially monogamous.”
Does he envisage a day when scientists will be able to isolate a love gene or a monogamy gene? “Yes, I’m sure they will. There is a lot of work being done on voles at the moment. Some voles are monogamous and live in nuclear families; some wander around just having sex. There has been research done into the hormonal basis of this and by changing the hormones you can make the less monogamous more so and vice versa.”
The application of such hard-boiled logic to human emotions can be pretty unpalatable, and Baker is sensitive to accusations of heartlessness. Abstract emotions are not the biologists’ mandate, he says, but he takes it for granted that love is immutable; it’s how society expresses it that changes.
So is it the right of governments to limit genetic experiments which might, if they are right, speed the realisation of these predictions up? “They are pointless. The same reservations were raised when artificial insemination was first developed. If the market force is in its favour, it will happen, and as long as the technology doesn’t fall into the hands of pressure groups, I think we’re quite safe. Let people make up their own minds. I think a level of anarchy here is the best possible thing.”
But if sex and reproduction grow totally alien to one another, won’t ancient urges fall away into meaninglessness? “I don’t think they will die out – just look at the similarity between the way we and other primates behave. It is so strong.”
Worrying thought: doesn’t natural selection have a habit of letting body parts which don’t serve a useful purpose drop off? “An evolutionary biologist would predict that at some stage, if sex no longer has any biological benefit but is only acting out ancient scenarios, that it would slowly wane,” says Baker. “It would take more than 1 000 years before genitalia started shrinking, but I can see how it could happen. After all, some species are asexual.”
Whatever the future of sex in our lifetime, we should think ourselves lucky. If Baker is right, scientific advances made now will give our descendants the libido of greenfly.