What Matters

Sex is the breeding algorithm nature designed—mechanical, optimized to produce healthy offspring through appearance and scent and social position. Nothing outside of food and sleep should theoretically matter more. But humans have never been content with what nature gives us, and we’ve taken this straightforward biological imperative and buried it under layers of fantasy and complication.

Schoolgirlcostumes on kitchen tables. World records in fellatio marathons at erotic conventions. The annual GDP of small nations spent on prostitutes. The Christian church has fundamentally different opinions on all of this.

What’s most interesting is how thoroughly we’ve managed to complicate something genuinely simple. The real gap lies between what sex is supposed to accomplish—reproduction—and what we’ve actually made it accomplish. Some people want candlelit romance. Others want to get destroyed in a parking lot with a stranger. Most of us want something we can’t articulate, something that feels like both intimacy and consumption, surrender and control, vulnerability and power all at once.

The weird part is how it’s become industrialized while still being taboo. We’ve built an entire economy around human sexuality—dating apps, OnlyFans, sex work, pornography, toys, surgery—all while pretending to be scandalized by it. We sell desire and then sell shame about that desire. We package intimacy and sell it back to lonely people as a product.

I don’t think sex is less important than food or sleep. But its importance has nothing to do with reproduction anymore. It’s about ego, power, pleasure, the strange vulnerability of being wanted, the equally strange privacy of wanting someone. What actually matters isn’t frequency or configuration or how many or how often—it’s knowing what you actually want versus what you’ve been sold as wanting. Most people spend their whole lives on the wrong side of that distinction.