Frankly, I suspect that if there had never been sex, life would have been stuck at the single-cell level. So I am assuming that for some reason sex has been abolished. The conscious mind boggles at the possibilities and ramifications. Therefore, I am reporting on what my unconscious had to say about this a few years ago.
I had a dream once when I was writing about orangutans. It was set in the future (somehow I knew that), and I was all keyed up in a fantastic state of expectation. It was that time of month, and I was about to have a week’s leave from work to go to the hotel. This was the time everyone lived for, the frosting on a very workaday cake. The world had achieved peace, at a price, and the price had been so apparently cheap. The solution to the problem of human aggression had been to alter the genetic development of people so that females, like our ape cousins, spent a week a month in estrus. Males likewise had a week of sexual excitation. When the time arrived, women, like me, simply checked into the hotel of our choice and entertained. We could choose to be monogamous and have our cycle coincide with our mate’s, or we could just take the luck of the draw. Reproduction, which was kept low, was apparently in vitro. This seemed to solve everything. For three-quarters of the time, women and men worked side by side without any sexual tension, between the sexes or among themselves. Sex simply didn’t exist, and without sexual tension and overtones, a lot more work got done. On the other hand, the weeks at the hotel were splendid--honeymoon or orgy or whatever seemed fun at the time. So this was not a world without sex exactly, but one where sex was certainly pushed to the margin, where it was pleasant and helped perpetuate the species, but where it no longer played an integral part in the texture of daily life.
Before I woke up, the dream me went to comb her hair. Looking in the mirror, I saw that I had fur on my face. I woke up laughing. The genes that controlled estrus were evidently linked to the genes for a furry pelt, and there I was, not very unlike the orangutans I was writing about.
-Bettyann Kevles
Author of Females of the Species
