Lousy Sex by Gerald N. Callahan

Author:Gerald N. Callahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE PROBLEM WITH THE PAST

In the classroom, most of us learned three things about sex as we made our way through our science courses. First, since everybody—or at least everybody who is anybody to us humans—uses sex to reproduce—there must be some enormous evolutionary advantage to this sexual reproduction thing. Second, males and females always arise in about equal numbers so everybody gets an equal shot at reproducing. The same must be true for everyone else. And last, the thing with its hand most firmly on the throttle of gender control is a chromosome.

The textbooks and the teachers we learned from, though they meant well, were wrong.

The vast majority of animals in this world have dramatically skewed sex ratios, numbers nowhere near the supposed ideal of 1:1. The majority of the animals in this world are females—females who have given up on sex, but whose species still flourish. For most of us, chromosomes have nothing to do with sex. Instead, it’s all about bacteria, mindless bacteria bent on their own success.

Sex for most of us is, in fact, an emerging infectious disease. Eggs full of bacteria, bacteria whose sole interest is making more bacteria. To them we are nothing more than a vehicle, a vehicle designed to carry them from place to place and to move them from egg to egg. We persist only because we can deliver these bacteria into our children and the world beyond. Our past may have been filled with sterile misunderstandings about sex, but our future is septic.

___________________

In nearly slow motion, the wood louse rolls through the air toward the newly green lawn. Now, I am reminded of Strauss’s Blue Danube and Stanley Kubrick’s epic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The scene where the shuttle from Earth and the space station lock into in a slow minuet.

The wood louse hits the lawn, bounces upward once, and falls back. For a few seconds, it just lies there—feigning death. Then slowly, the isopod uncurls it chitinous body and rights itself.

Something like David Bowman’s last words rolls through my brain. In Arthur C. Clark’s book version of 2001, Bowman—the sole surviving crew member on the deep-space probe Discovery One—at last arrives near Saturn and finds a monolithic stone left in orbit there by some other intelligence. David dons his space suit and, inside one of the extravehicular activity pods, jettisons himself from the giant ship Discovery.

The music inside my head switches to that of another Strauss—Richard—and Also Sprach Zarathustra.

As he nears the monolith, David’s ragged breaths rasp like bellows through the telecommunications device inside his space suit. Finally, directly above the anomaly near Saturn, from the oval window of his EVA pod, he stares into the monolith.

“The thing’s hollow,” David says. “It goes on forever—and—oh my God! It’s full of bacteria!”

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