Note: this article discusses pornography. Nothing graphic or outlandish - purely sociological, but if you’d prefer not to read about that - I am letting you know at the outset.
It is difficult to imagine something more wholesome than a baby. Children are, in a way, the benchmark for what wholesome is.
If you were asked to think of content that was unwholesome, one subject that would immediately come to mind is: sex.
It seems noteworthy then for those interested in symbolism, cosmology, religion, or sociology (life in general) to observe that these are only oppositional concepts when it comes to practical day to day social conventions. In reality, they are directly related.
Hot and cold are apparent opposites, but are in reality extensions of one thing: temperature. Likewise, our first instincts for the most wholesome thing and the least wholesome thing are actually part of the same process. The baby is the completion of the sexual act. Children come from sex.
You can never escape your time period. One hallmark of ours is being at the tail end of a novel campaign - part technological, part philosophical - to decouple sex from reproduction. To address this, we now turn to the ultimate non-reproductive sex “act” (literally, it is acted): pornography.
In the modern world, most of us have been around pornography, although it often eludes any serious thought. One typically unconsidered aspect of pornography are the meta-themes that run through it. Without going into any detail, we may observe some general concepts and frameworks that are an integral part of its various categories.
Themes clearly emerge: firstly, transgression of social boundaries, “rules,” or things considered “standard” in the sexual domain (these were classically addressed by early psychologists and anthropologists as social taboos).
There is also an apparent fascination with someone’s first time experiencing something - that’s as much detail as we’ll go into; you can elaborate for yourself.
Being students of this unfortunate time period, it is perhaps worth considering this second theme more deeply: why is this the case? Ostensibly, someone eating an apple for the first time is a similar literal visual stimulus as someone eating an apple for the tenth time - so, there is something non-visual at play here.
In my view, the theme running through pornographic categories and pornographic media in general is the fantasy of seeing a person altered - of seeing a person have an experience that changes them. One cannot “unhave” a powerful experience. Such things can change a person, right there in front of you.
This is also the general romantic fantasy. Perusing general romantic “stuff” has a similar theme: an unforgettable love, “I’ll never forget you”, a first love, your last love (eternal), something that - again - changes a person fundamentally and permanently. That’s the fantasy.
I believe the basic element of this desire is fundamental and normal. Its normal expression is found in the union we started with. In its natural normative state, sex does change someone forever—it gives them a child. It’s hard to think of “making your mark” on a life more than that. That would be the ultimate manifestation of this impulse.
Absent that natural completion of the sexual act (reproduction), and in a time where sex has even become decoupled from romantic love, one must resort to some form of “oddity” to get that same effect from casual sex - something novel, strange - a circumstance, practice, what is called “kink”, participation or initiation into a social taboo, and so on.
Linguistically, it’s interesting that “casual sex” was the term chosen. It sounds like a stand-up comedy bit, but the “casual” clearly does not refer to the actual sex - which is supposed to be so exciting and epic that it’s worth orienting your life around, or at least going to great lengths to seek out.
To the average casual sex haver (the proper clinical term), obtaining and having sex is actually far more “formal” than two people in a marriage having sex. Casual sex requires a whole operation to obtain - at least in a way that is far more complex than a husband simply being with his wife as a matter of course in their daily life.
If the “casual” doesn’t refer to the obtainment or the act itself, it clearly refers to the only other option: the aftermath. The “casual” is that: nothing happens. Nothing happens afterward. In a nice linguistic visual coincidence, casual sex is really just non-causal sex.
Once again there enters the infant - here, triumphant. The ultimate “effect” of sex, who must be extricated from the mental (and, sorry, often the physical) landscape for the possibility of casual sex to even exist.
The ultimate wholesome thing. Also, the literal embodiment of sex.
This is me below, by the way. You may notice the baby. You did not think I was just some guy writing this—no, of course not. I am some guy with... a baby (official).
I used to not have a baby. Now, I have one. I guess that’s how it works.
To wrap up the above section before moving on: we can see the varieties of weird or atypical sexual fantasies as a cohesive folder - their shared theme being the desire to change an individual. This runs through atypical sexual practices people engage with in real life right through into pornography.
Some examples: exposing someone to something new, setting them along a particular path, altering their course, changing their mind in some way - often by exposure to new or heightened levels of pleasure, altering their social standing (even if it’s just in private) and so on.
It would be quite a coincidence then that sex, unhindered, actually produces a sort of “ultimate change” in a person: changing a maiden (girl) into a mother (woman), or a boy into a father. Clearly, this is not a coincidence. Absent that natural “change,” other changes step in.
You can go through basically all sexual deviances, fantasies, oddities, and so on, and parse them this way. For example: ownership, making someone “yours.” Well, you really “own” a piece of someone after you make a child with them. It’s not just bedroom talk; it’s actually real.
As a humorous example of this being found in pornography (keeping it tame), ‘Girls Gone Wild’ used to have commercials on TV and was very successful. The fantasy is that the girls “become” wild, and you watch. The fantasy is the transformative process, as described above.
Likewise, folk expressions almost always reveal something about mass psychology, because they cannot be forced. They are intuitively adopted and spread. One relevant one here that is functionally universal and long-lasting is “mind-blowing sex.” We’ve all heard that term before.
That’s because it intuitively resonates with the above concept. What does it mean to have your “mind blown”? Some horizon is expanded, something new is introduced, you are changed. People subconsciously understand this, so they use and adopt this term - almost as a necessity.
All this is downstream of the absent baby. The transformation of maiden into mother is a kind of sublimation or refinement - a wholesome conclusion to sex. When that potentiality is intentionally blocked (it’s beyond our scope here, but simply “not getting pregnant” is philosophically distinct from “intentionally not getting pregnant”), there are only so many things that can attempt to mimic that transformative process - most involve a type of debasement.
II. What’s the Deal with Babies? (Baby as Signifier)
The baby, as a symbol, bridges these two worlds: the world of sex and the world of the wholesome - which are normally, as we just covered, in extreme opposition.
It also calls to attention the fact that both these worlds exist.
The baby then acts as a transitory sign between these two worlds, and implies - by virtue of its presence - the existence of both. Like a waiter, who by his station implies the existence of both a kitchen and diners - or, a psychopomp, such as Anubis, who, as a bridge between here and the underworld, visually calls to mind the existence of both those worlds: that of the living and that of the dead.
However, unlike the above examples, the baby himself is not transitional. The waiter is not “the point” of the restaurant. The psychopomp is just a guide, a bridge. This is qualitatively unlike a baby, who calls to attention his place as the natural focus, a zenith of attention.
A baby is never really “just there.” His existence in a place or mental landscape highlights both the realms he bridges and himself. He changes the landscape he inhabits and alters the signification and meaning of all things in it, simply by existing, by being part of that world.
This is the real fuel for the “no babies / no children” social spaces phenomenon. In individual cases, yes, there are places a baby or children should not be - it’s often fine to exclude them. But as a large social phenomenon, what drives it is their implication, what they (the aforementioned babies) mean and signal.
Several modern semioticians (myself, my dog - currently present on my couch) have explored the baby as a signifier by seeing how babies may or may not inhabit constructed worlds. One of the easiest and most readily presentable constructed worlds (itself a matrix of meaning and implications) is the sitcom: a closed repetitive universe.
Seinfeld surely holds some record, the biggest, most popular, or something (see footnote: “I made it up”) sitcom ever. The characters occasionally interact with babies - as much as some may try to avoid them, people do naturally have babies somewhere, sometimes; it’s still a part of life.
Although there are babies on Seinfeld - several, in fact - do we ever actually see one? Without checking, it feels like we do not. The baby is there as a concept, but cannot be shown. There may be a practical reason for this - such as not trying to bring a baby into a TV studio (thanks).
But, it feels like there is something deeper. Babies are antithetical to the universe we inhabit here in Seinfeld. They just don’t “fit.” And this is how they’re dealt with conceptually - “you gotta see the baby” “why? who cares?”; they are oppositional characters. Antagonists.
Really, in the universe of Seinfeld, the baby is almost something like a villain.
It’s impossible to imagine any of the characters in Seinfeld having babies. It would be their exit from the show. George could not have a baby and remain George, but he also could not remain part of the Seinfeld paradigm itself. “A baby,” with its implications, jams this universe.
It’s easy to appeal to the characters themselves to explain this, but that isn’t why. Babies are not antithetical to the Simpsons universe. There are characters that are odd, single, unwholesome, but they could have a baby. It’d be weird, but it wouldn’t shatter the show’s universe.
Likewise, on King of the Hill, although it might be extremely odd, even the most unfit character could theoretically adopt a baby. It might change them entirely and might be bad writing, but the show could theoretically continue. The symbolism of the baby operates in this world without deconstructing anything. The baby has a place in the symbolic network of this universe.
Like a show (or any art form), individuals also have their own internal universe, enmeshed with their own axis mundi(s), signs, and signifiers all pointing to each other - to navigate and create meaning. Some of these universes cannot withstand what “a baby,” as a symbol, does.
As a slight footnote, here’s a statue of Eros. Erotic love - but it’s a baby. Please briefly discuss this amongst yourselves.
III. Having Sex for Nine Months
To conclude our brief foray into the semiotics of the baby, we must dovetail briefly with general philosophy and theology - specifically: teleology, the study of TVs (just kidding).
Teleology is the study of things according to their telos (like: “tell us”) - the purpose they serve in terms of what they do, rather than the cause which created them. So, to put it casually, we might say the telos of baking is to get a cake. The telos of a cake is to be eaten.
Several philosophers and theologians have observed that the natural telos of sex is to make a baby (groundbreaking stuff). This may be true, although in my view I would carve out room for sex having other purposes. A married infertile couple has sex, naturally, for a purpose.
Rather than say the “ultimate purpose” of sex is to create a baby, I would reframe it and say (considering what we covered above) that birth is the ultimate wholesome complete conclusion of the sex act. You have sex, and then it concludes in a totally wholesome and wholistic fashion with: birth.
The above image is kind of an art history joke, by the way. Because the woman would be perceived as sexual, but it’s called The Birth of Venus. So, it’s both topics at once. That’s the whole thing we’re talking about here. Are you having a good time?
So: the wholesome conclusion of the sex act is birth.
This gives us some interesting space to play with our framing of language and terms here, to potentially elucidate something about how we imagine these things (thinking, as in Wittgenstein’s language games. Seems like he never had kids by the way, probably would have been a good time for them).
If birth is the conclusion of sex, this means: that’s when the sex really ends.
If a couple has sex, and birth is the conclusion of that act, then, they’re still “in the middle” of that act when the woman is one month pregnant, six months pregnant, and so on. It’s not really over. We could say they’re actually “in the act of having sex” the whole time.
Although we know what we mean by “in the act of having sex,” we actually do talk of other activities this way. If a woman is in the kitchen, with all her baking tools and ingredients laid out, mixing things, and we walk in the room and ask, “Are you baking?” she would say: yes.
Then, after she combines them all, and puts them in the oven, the cake has two hours to bake. Another person comes in, she’s sitting there reading a book. “Are you baking right now?” She would say: yes. She is still in the act of baking. The baking act has not concluded.
We go on a walk. “I have to keep an eye on the time; I’m baking something right now.” The conclusion of the baking is when the cake is produced.
Here’s the cake on the table. “Are you baking right now?” Now, she would finally say: “no, I am no longer baking”.
Here’s a fruit cake from 1490 B.C.:
If we discussed sex this way, the couple walking down the street with the woman three months pregnant would still be “sexing.” It’s possible to mentally extend the timeframe out from the “end of sex” as we conventionally mean it and drag it all the way to the actual birth of the child (its true conclusion).
Although this seems strange, it probably means something that we have no colloquial term for this. Are you... reproducing? Gestating? Baby-ing? It’s difficult to immediately summon an action word here. All our usual terms refer to states or attributes, not actions (“I am pregnant”, etc.).
Very few people today see this act through to its logical conclusion as a couple in a way that would call attention to this: for example, having sex in your house, then the woman giving birth in that same house. The birth happens in a different place, under different wildly conditions.
If you imagine the place where sex generally happens and the place where birth generally happens (hospital) in the popular sphere, they’re as different as possible. Lighting, materials, tone - it would be hard to imagine two human spaces more different. Plus, there’s other people there (in the hospital).
Maybe that’s fine, or good, but the disconnect seems significant - especially considering that it’s difficult to bridge this gap linguistically.
It seems to reinforce the gap we started with. Baking produces a cake. If you had to start the baking process in a dark, private, blanketed room - and then had to finally obtain the cake in a cold clinical brightly lit towering building on the other side of town a few months later, it might subconsciously facilitate a disconnect.
Likewise, let’s say we had an adjective: “bakingy”, meaning “of or related to baking.”
An alien comes here. You explain baking and what bakingy means.
The alien says, “Oh, well, baking produces a cake - so cake is a very bakingy thing. It must be, like, the most bakingy thing.”
With regards to sex and a baby, we find ourselves in the strange position of having to explain: no. It’s the opposite.
Actually, although “bakingy” means “related to baking,” the cake - which baking produces - is the concept most antithetical to baking. It’s like, the least bakingy thing.
Also, there’s no normal word that makes that association.
There are logical reasons for this of course, but it clearly means something deeper.
Jokes typically highlight something intuitively true: that’s why they’re funny. For our first kid, I was at the midwives with the baby. He was very cute; we were kind of carrying him around showing people. I said:
“People already love sex - wait until they find out it makes these.”
An extended footnote:
We briefly touched on the baby as a signification psychopomp, bridging two worlds. It’s highly relevant to our general operation here to point something out:
A psychopomp guides people between this world and the next.
Typically, this is guiding the dead to the underworld - such as Anubis, I suppose also Mercury, maybe even Orpheus.
In Christendom, we have this, but it’s flipped. At “the center,” we don’t have a figure guiding souls to the underworld. We have one guiding souls to the “upper world.”
It’s sort of an inverted psychopomp. Instead of guiding the dead to the underworld, he guides the living to heaven.
Being theologically loose (folk theology moment), this figure’s bridging of these worlds is done as a baby.
A baby as heavenly psychopomp is at the center of Christendom.
The largest (in popular culture) Christian holiday centers around a baby as the bridger of this world and another.
Two worlds in apparent opposition, reconciled by: a baby. A nice conclusion to our presentation of the baby as an apparent bridge between other concepts and domains.
One of my comics anthologies deals primarily with babies - that’s Babyology. Our most recent large art project, also theological, can be found here.
With regard to section III. Having Sex for Nine Months, after discussing with my wife she made a fair point; the completion of the sexual act is conception not the actual birth of the child. The child is already made and alive at conception. With this in mind, it makes sense that pregnancy becomes something different and separate from the sex.
Also as to Eros as child, two things, Eros could be symbolic of an “infantile” love such as infatuation and has potential to grow into “Agape”…debatable. But in this context of “sex makes babies”, Eros, being sexual, it makes sense that it is depicted by its telos.
sex is Procreation or it's death.
porn is ontologically evil.