Eliminate Sex? SCREW YOU!

One thing transhumanists argue about is sex. As a Satanist and a sex-positive Feminist, you can count me firmly in on the pro-sex side. Of course, I agree that a lot of the effort we put into sexual signalling could better be used for other pursuits; that is in fact a large part of the Feminist agenda, as sexual signalling is strongly tied up with gender policing and objectification. But a lot of the progress of the last several decades, and indeed of much of human history, has involved divorcing sex from reproduction, and thus divorcing social roles from biological templates, in ways that very much form some of the first steps in the transhumanist project. Being able to enjoy sex as a pleasure in itself, and to express the full range of healthy human sexuality from straight-vanilla to homosexuality, polyamory and BDSM, is one of the most significant of the real transhumanist advances accomplished to date. It's a bit disrespectful to spit on that real progress for the sake of some imagined future 'ultimate pleasure'.

It's also a bit intrinsically sinister to be told we will need to 'give up' our sweaty biological indulgences in order to reach the sanctified, purified state of transhuman grace. Historically, every attempt to repress sexuality has been an attempt to control the population through fear and shame tactics, and I have trouble seeing how anti-sex transhumanism of the Ben Goertzel variety is so very different. It may very well be that in the posthuman future we evolve beyond sex, but that will be a long time coming. As long as we retain physical bodies we will retain physical pleasures. If anything, I see transhumanism as an opportunity for sexual experimentation on a grand scale, an explosion of gender-bending and a rarefaction of pure carnal hedonia. A deliberate attempt to eliminate sex from the transhuman equation is in a way as bio-fundementalist as the demand that all sex be tied to reproduction; all or nothing! I really would prefer to have my cake and eat it too.