Scientists have discovered that the intimate act of copulation was pioneered by ancient armored fish, called placoderms. The discovery was reported in the journal Nature.
Kinsey was a zoologist specializing in gall wasps when he agreed to teach a course on marriagethat is, sexat Indiana University in 1938. His book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male made the best-seller list.
Magnus Hirschfeld
A physician and sex researcher named Magnus Hirschfeld came into prominence in the late nineteenth century. He worked tirelessly to show that homosexuality was natural. But his efforts didn’t go as far as he wanted them to.
Hirschfeld was born in 1868 in Kolberg, Pomerania (now Kolobrzeg in Poland), into an Ashkenazi Jewish family. He grew up to become a doctor and began studying the relationship between sexuality and mental health in his spare time. He found that the hermaphrodite nature of the human brain was a driving force for the attraction to men and women.
By 1919, he had opened the first sexology institute in the world in a large villa in Berlin. It included sex rooms, medical examinations, and an expansive library of books on the subject. It also performed the first modern sex reassignment surgeries on record. It also produced the film Different from the Others, in which Hirschfeld appeared as himself.
The film is a great place to get a sense of what Hirschfeld’s ideas were like in the early twentieth century. His research, writings, and advocacy were way ahead of their time. But he couldn’t keep the institute open after Germany’s Nazi takeover. A few of its books survived a famous Nazi book-burning bonfire, but most of its valuable collection was destroyed.
Edward Kinsey
Edward Kinsey was born to a family of poor Welsh immigrants and raised by his single mother. He grew up to be a man of great integrity and determination. He was a dedicated scientist and devoted father, as well as a staunch supporter of civil rights. He died in 2023 from cancer, having spent much of his later years fighting the disease.
Kinsey became interested in the diversity of sexual behavior among the gall wasp genus cynips. He was the author of several books on this subject, including The Gall Wasp Genus Cynips: A Study of Sexual Variation (1930) and The Origin of Higher Categories in Cynips (1936). His work was renowned, earning him a full professorship at Indiana University.
The planet’s first act of sex took place 385 million years ago, according to a new study published in Nature. The researchers analyzed fossils of ancient armored fish called placoderms. These fish, which lived in ancient lakes, were the earliest jawed vertebrate ancestors of humans. The male fossils of the placoderm Microbrachius dicki developed bony L-shaped genital limbs, or claspers, to transfer sperm to females. Females, on the other hand, developed small paired bones that locked the male organs in place for mating.
Long describes the resulting mating position as “a sideways, square-dance style.” The discovery is significant because it indicates that internal fertilization and sex began to develop on the early Earth. This was a major step forward in evolutionary development and the first time that asexual reproduction was supplanted by sexual intercourse.
Harold Robbins
Harold Robbins was the playboy of his time, and his roman a clef novels exploited everything from Lana Turner’s lusty murder (Where Love Has Gone) to Frank Sinatra’s rough-hewn beginnings (A Stone for Danny Fisher). He fictionalized everybody from jet-setting race car driver Porfirio Rubirosa to pornographer William Flynn and tycoon Howard Hughes as ruthless cipher Jonas Cord in the blockbuster The Carpetbaggers.
Robbins’s success came at just the right moment, as the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover lifted and gave writers a new freedom to explore sexual themes. He tapped into this spirit with his racy books and became the first big bestseller to sexualise commercial fiction.
His style was flashy and crass, and he threw some of Hollywood’s biggest parties and orgies. But he was also a self-promoter, and his own life was full of wild inaccuracies, including claiming to be raised in a Catholic orphanage and making extra cash as a child prostitute.
His enormous popularity made him a target for lawyers, but his bullish determination to defend his rights resulted in a landmark case that set the precedent that allowed authors like Henry Miller, Anas Nin and DH Lawrence to publish their work. Despite his success, Robbins remained the cocky man from Brooklyn, whose nasal accent echoed working class Brooklyn and who enjoyed having lox and bagels flown in to Beverly Hills for him to eat at his luxurious house.
The Bible
The Bible offers a radically different perspective on human sexuality. It sees it as a gift from God, meant to bring joy and companionship. It teaches that sex is not just for pleasure; it’s about a couple becoming “one flesh.” The Bible also shows that sex should be generous, reciprocal, and respectful.
In the Bible, a man is not just what he has in his sex bag; he’s an image bearer of God who has maximal value and significance before Him. Likewise, a woman is not just what she does in her sex bag; she’s an image bearer of God who deserves to be honored and served.
For this reason, the Bible encourages Christians to be chaste and to embrace lifelong celibacy. It commends those who choose to live this way because it allows them to focus more on the Lord and to help the needy. It also teaches that sex in marriage should be free, generous, and reciprocal.
This teaching was radically at odds with the norms of their time, which encouraged couples to have sex whenever they felt like it. Thankfully, the Bible offers a much better way of viewing sexuality. In fact, the Bible teaches that you can be fully human without ever having sex. This is because sex in marriage is not just for reproduction; it’s also for love and companionship.
