Fertility

Sex is our reproductive biology: it evolved as a way for us to reproduce effectively.  No matter what your feelings about having children, no matter whether you can or can't, no matter what your sexual orientation, it's worth keeping in mind that reproduction is the logic, the heart and central purpose of our sexual natures. 

At the same time, people who fear the beauty and power of sex often try to reduce it to some kind of simple mechanistic transaction where sperm and egg are joined, ignoring all the passion, anguish, ecstasy, deep devotion and complexity of our sexual lives.  They try to ignore how subtle, messy and profound our biology really is. 

Some people, for example, smugly avoid confronting their own homophobia by concluding that gay relationships must be unnatural because no reproduction results directly from them.  However, as we discuss on our homosexuality page, childless gay relationships are common in other species who form pair bonds, as are significant proportions of "celibate" adults. 

Also, people tend to think of reproduction as simple, sweet and innocent, all about little babies and tender feelings.  In fact, our reproductive instincts have evolved in one of the darkest sides of natural competition, one of those cruel areas where nature is relentlessly "red in tooth and claw."  Seen from a broader perspective, reproduction is one of our most savage, competitive acts, but of course as animals we're savage and competitive when we need to be (see babies mean war). 

None of this is to say that you should or shouldn't have children — what I'm getting at is that your fertility is really important.  It's worth being as conscious as possible of all its implications, and making your decisions with integrity and care.

Making a commitment to your own fertility

Fertility is not just about having children. 

The reason most parents don't mind devoting twenty years or more of their lives and a large portion of their incomes to bringing up children is that they're programmed for it.  One of the keys to satisfaction in life is recognizing and honoring that programming in ourselves. 

Almost certainly you have within you a strong desire to bring new beauty into the world, care for it, nurture it, and let it grow beyond you.  This is your fertility in the general sense, that is completely independent of any particular expression of the urge (such as literal children). 

Chances are, when you're lying on your deathbed looking back at your life, all the ways you've expressed fertility will seem far more important to you than any other measures of success. 

Recognizing your art

Art is a word humans often use to talk about our drive to be creative.  In my observation, just about everyone wants and needs an art as a means of expressing fertility, whether or not you have literal offspring as well. 

The creativity that goes into art is profoundly sexual.  Freud recognized this, and used the term "sublimation" to describe the displacement of repressed libido into activities that are not literally sexual, particularly into creative activities like the arts.  However, his implication that repression is needed to displace libido into these areas is in conflict with the reputation of artists, who are often openly libidinous.

Our libidos are not so limited that they only express themselves in literal sex.  My own experience is that when I'm most full of joyful horniness, the feeling just naturally spills over into my artistic activities and fills them with creative energy.  In other animals, most analogs to human art (and there are quite a few)  are also sexually motivated.  They're generally courtship displays, though, produced by males to demonstrate their prowess to discerning females, whereas among humans, women create just as much art as men do. 

Also, humans tend to devote a lot more of their lives to art than can be explained by its undeniable sexiness alone.  For us, art seems to tap into our need to be fertile, to create and nourish beauty over an extended period.  As Hippocrates observed, life is short and art is long — the particular art he was talking about was medicine, to which he devoted his life, but the same goes for all the human arts, and for literal parenthood as well. 

Just as the concept of fertility is not limited to literal children, the concept of art isn't limited to painting, poetry, music, sculpture, story-telling, drama, cooking and all the other activities principally judged by the aesthetic pleasure they give to an audience. 

Art is whatever an artist's creative fertility produces, the child of any person's love-affair with life.  It's what turns you on, what you want to expend effort doing, what you're willing to invest precious time practicing and perfecting.  It may be gardening, auto mechanics, physics, needlepoint, photography, singing, or any of the innumerable activities we casually call "hobbies," or perhaps something you do at work — but somewhere in your life there should be a place where you feel excitement in creating something lovely out of your inspiration and energy. 

In the same way that many of us take our sex lives for granted and fail to honor ourselves around our sexuality, so too many of us fail to recognize and honor our own creative efforts.  There may only be a few great artists in every generation, but every single one of us is an artist nonetheless, and it really doesn't have to be a competitive thing. 

Your art is a part of your spiritual practice

Whoever you are and whatever you do for a living, it's worth identifying the places in your life where you express your creativity.  In a very real way, those areas are a part of your spiritual practice — they're your sexual relationship with the universe, with the mundane divine.

And in the end, many people find that their life satisfaction depends much more on the fertility of that sexual relationship than they ever expected.

Aspects of fertility

Fertility, both biological and spiritual, has a number of aspects that deserve further discussion as topics to themselves:

• Babies mean war:  In a zero-sum game, every birth means that someone else must die.
• Conception:  The moment of inspiration.
• Pregnancy:  Carrying a child within you.
• Childbirth:  Rite of passage, moment of realization.
• Parenthood:  An investment in other people.