I have never actually heard anyone say “sex is what makes us human,” which I’m grateful for because it is one of the most ridiculously obviously wrong statements you can say (sexual reproduction is so widespread throughout life on earth that it’s not even confined to the friggin animal kingdom).

BUT I have heard people say that “having sex for pleasure” is uniquely human. Or that there’s some vanishingly small number of other species that share this behavior with us.

Which is… very nearly as obviously wrong.

Because even if you disregard the animals that have clearly non-procreative sexual acts (with the same sex, with different species, with things that aren’t even alive)… Even if you claim that all those animals were trying to reproduce and just “got confused” or something…

…that implies that they were trying? That they had intentions? That they consciously planned ahead to have sex with the goal of making babies??

really? You think squirrels are tracking their ovulation cycles trying for pregnancy? You think a friggin bedbug approaches his mate and stabs her to inject sperm into her abdominal cavity and his whole motivation is “this is gonna generate so many bedbug eggs, this bed’s gonna be crawling with my dang progeny”

I do not think so.

I think they have sex to satisfy an urge.

For pleasure. Just like many humans.

Except in the animals’ case, they don’t even know the urge exists for reproductive reasons.

If they knew they probably would not even care.

Can you imagine them actually having opinions about the distant future of their own species’ population? No. I can’t. Their motives are based entirely around the most immediate desires of their own lives. In other words, they do everything for freaking pleasure.

Bitch, humans might be the only animals that ever DO have sex for reproduction.

But that’s still not what makes us human.