Discuss the dynamics of human sexual behavior
Answers
Human sexual activity has sociological, cognitive, emotional, behavioural and biological aspects; these include personal bonding, sharing emotions and the physiology of the reproductive system, sex drive, sexual intercourse and sexual behaviour in all its forms.
Unless you are raised by wolves or in a closet or basement, and even then, to the extent that genes are influenced by social evolution, everything that influences and shapes individuals comes from society. Humans seem to do better in groups (societies) than as isolated individuals. We are pretty good at cooperation, and the better we cooperate, the more powerful and successful we become as a species, and the more our genetic heritage reinforces the strength of the relationship between society and the individual.
Without a society of humans, there couldn’t be individual humans. We wouldn’t be alive. At the very least, at least until human cloning is standard, we all need the genetic material from a man and a woman in order to come into existence. The minimum number of people to form a society seems to be two — a parent and a child (unless the wolves really can raise children, but then, that’s a society, too).
Most of us are born into societies made of far more than two people. So our behavior is noticed by thousands of people, directly. We get feedback from those people in many ways. Some of the feedback is directly related to us, and is provided specifically with the intention to tell us how to be human. Most other feedback we get is from the body language of strangers or people less well known to us or from their words and other reactions, and this all helps us figure out what to do in order to survive.
I think it safe to say that without society, the vast majority of human beings could not survive. There might be a few “My Side of the Mountain” loners who can live off the land and need no contact with other humans, but I bet they still need some kind of contact with living beings. For most of us, though, society is the life force. Being able to fit in well enough to survive is essential, and so most people learn to do that to some degree or another. And, like other animals, our ability to pass our genes on to succeeding generations depends, in part, on our status within society. The more status we have, the better we can prepare our children to survive or the more access we have to what is necessary to reproduce.
I’d say that we aren’t human without human society. We don’t make sense as isolated individuals and we can’t survive as isolated individuals. In that sense, it makes sense to see humankind as an organism made up of cooperating individual humans, the same way as individual humans are made up of cooperating cells. The cells can’t exist without the other cells they cooperate with. Humans can’t exist without the other humans we cooperate with. If we can’t cooperate with others, it’s much more likely we will be excluded from society, which is a sentence to death without reproduction. So most people are completely influenced and shaped by society. There is no way to overstate the influence that society has on individuals.