The Naked Ape

That's the title of a book. I have never read it, but I suppose it has something to do with our current subject.

I don't know why apes and humans are the only animals that don't go into heat. Maybe it's just an evolutionary experiment. Come to think of it, maybe we are just an evolutionary experiment. So far we appear to be the smartest animals that evolution has come up with, but evolution is still going on, and we can only speculate about what it might lead to in the future. Be that as it may, I don't think that animals enjoy sex, or anything else for that matter, the way we do.

As far as I know, that saltpeter in the food thing is just a myth. Saltpeter is sometimes used in agriculture to suppress breeding in livestock, but it's primary use is as a food preservative. Lots of food probably has saltpeter in it, but not in sufficient amounts to suppress sexual behavior in humans. My father used to put it into his sausage, but only in very small amounts. He said that you had to be careful about that because too much of it will make people sick. The chemical name for saltpeter is either sodium nitrate or sodium nitrite, I forget which. You have to be careful about that too because one of them is quite toxic. If you put the wrong one into food, you can kill people with it. I seem to remember that happened once when I was a kid, which is how my father came to be talking about it at the dinner table one day. I mean, it didn't happen with my dad's sausage, it happened somewhere else and was in the news at the time. I believe it was bacon, but I don't remember which brand.

There are several reasons why I like my proposal better than yours. One is that the pill, or any other form of birth control short of surgery, is not 100% effective. I seem to remember the pill is about 90%, unless they have improved it over the years. None of them are effective at all if you don't use them.

Poor people have access to free birth control right now, at least in Michigan. You just go to your local Health Department, fill out some papers, and they give it to you for free. When I had my vasectomy, some forty years ago, they even paid for that, and I wasn't even poor. I wouldn't have known about it if my doctor hadn't told me. If poor people are not using birth control, it's either that they don't want to or they don't know about it, it's not that they can't afford it.

Unwanted pregnancy is only part of the problem with sex in America today. The other part is that we spend way too much time obsessing about it. Part of the reason for that is that it's used so much in advertising. People use it to manipulate each other in other ways too. It's not just the sex, it's all the social crap that goes with it. Delaying puberty wouldn't just delay sex and pregnancy, it would delay having to put up with all that social crap in the vain hope that it will lead to you getting laid. It's like that famous sports guy said: "Spending all night with a woman never hurt a player's game. It's spending all night looking for a woman that hurts a player's game."

Let's face it, neither of our proposals is likely to be adopted any time soon, but they're interesting to talk about anyway. Someday, after we're long gone, somebody might find our old blogs and declare that we were geniuses, way ahead of our time. Too bad we won't be around to bask in our well deserved glory.