Sex and Maturity

Sex and Maturity

There is a strange medical condition that we have to endure or cope with that other animals are not afflicted by. We are all affected by it and take it for granted, but it is unnatural to the point of cruelty. I refer to the age at which puberty occurs. It comes much too early. We reach the age of sexual maturity well before the age of personal maturity. We are still growing, physically and mentally, when we become sexual beings, capable of becoming parents. We are too young to be parents yet old enough to become parents. But that is only the half of it: we are afflicted with all the attributes of a sexually mature animal—bodily manifestations, sensations, desires, and needs. Other animals arrange things more sensibly: they wait to become sexual until they are mature enough to handle it. Sex is a biological imperative, all-consuming, inescapable; so, it is wise to delay it till the organism is old enough—fully grown, mentally capable. At least able to feed itself and survive independently of parental care. But we humans have to grow into adults and be burdened with a sex life simultaneously. Imagine if a tiger cub had to learn how to hunt from its mother while also coping with its mating instincts! It shouldn’t be able to reproduce before it can find food and shelter and fight off predators. That looks like a complete balls-up on the part of the genes—what were they thinking? And yet in our case it’s par for the course: kids expected by nature to act as parents. No wonder we don’t allow nature to take its course where the onset of sexual maturity is concerned; nature has to be curtailed and corrected. It’s bad enough having to study for exams (etc.) with raging hormones, but it is impossible to be a decent parent at age thirteen or younger. Puberty shouldn’t happen before age eighteen at the earliest. That would be the rational course.

Let’s devise a thought experiment to drive the point home. Suppose the age of sexual maturity occurred at around thirty years of age, well after personal maturation has concluded. All schooling is finished, the mind has fully developed, pair bonding has already occurred, and a family is on the wish-list. Everything is in place for a happy family and healthy safe children. Wouldn’t that be an awful lot better? No abortions, no teen pregnancies, no unwanted babies—and a stress-free life up to that point, at last where sex is concerned. As it is, we have to cope with conflicting urges from an early age, sexual and other. We are pulled in different directions, divided in two. All because nature didn’t do its sums right. What if a harmless drug could delay puberty a few years, till the child was more mature? The human race would benefit enormously, not to mention the individuals who are expected to live through this tumultuous phase of life. It is hard enough to make it in this world without having to suffer the insistent pangs of sex and romantic love. It is as if the genes just couldn’t wait to get started with this reproduction business, no matter what it would do to the well-being of the creatures charged with accomplishing it. We might almost see it as an illness, genetically transmitted, that cries out for a cure (call it Reproduction Therapy). Surely, if some children were reaching puberty at five years old, we would advocate medical intervention, so long as it was safe and not too expensive (a matter of a pill every now and then). But that is exactly the situation we humans have been living with since recorded history began—premature sexual maturity. There are premature births and there is premature intercourse (pre-mature). What if giving birth in one’s early teens regularly caused the death of the mother—wouldn’t we intervene to alter the course of nature? I don’t recall wanting to be sexually mature at the age of thirteen; I’d have been happy to wait a few years for that initiation. It was thrust upon me after a tranquil childhood. What is biologically natural isn’t always good. Other animals don’t have to put up with it, so why should we? It’s like caterpillars growing wings before they become real butterflies—cumbersome at best, fatal at worst. No, you remain a caterpillar until it is time to pass to the next stage, a flying insect; you don’t have an attribute at a stage when you don’t need it and it causes problems. The metamorphosis that is human development has failed to coordinate reproductive maturity with animal (personal) maturity.[1]

[1] I see this paper as an essay in the philosophy of sex not in sexual philosophy. But I think of it as forming a general subject of philosophical reflection on sex, a neglected subject—call it phil-sex or sex-phi. I envisage a rich field opening up. On the present topic, we would be investigating the ethics of puberty delay. Then there are the theological implications of designing a species so incompetently.