The erect penises and the self-lubricating vagina offer obvious clues to how life works. But you know, there are other sharp skin-objects that could fit awkwardly into other orifices. The big toe into the nose, the finger into the ear canal, the elbow into the rectum... if any of these functions had the capability of passing life-stuff from male to female, they might have been candidates for The Act.

But evolution played out the way it did: all the magic is between our legs. Too bad that our biological duty turned out to be so boring: in, out, in, out. The best you can hope for is a deep feeling of communion with the other, most everything else turns out to be haunted by inevitable dissatisfaction or regret.

Ask any woman, and they're not likely to be impressed by hours of staccato throttling. If you're a man, you're generally judged and graded on the intangibles: attention to detail, the array of interesting activities before intercourse, and the element of surprise. That is, everything but the actual piston-pumping itself. Women are just trying to transcend sex by evolving it beyond its physical limitations, in spite of the best efforts of men to keep it boring.

But we men have had their moments. It's true that males helped humanity become the first-ever species to invent pornography, which is an amazing legacy-defining accomplishment unto itself. It's a shame that porn turned out to be a dead-end, though: highly-stylized images of airbrushed perfection, cycles of predictable licking-pumping-moneyshot repetition. The only way to transcend that endless loop is to make it as weird as possible: leather, fisting, ass-fucking, adding more people, what-have-you.

The people who make movies and put things on teevee are also trying to transcend sex, but in more calculated ways. They know that when you "sell sex," it's a total misnomer... you're really selling everything but. A seductive glance, a flash of cleavage or ass, athletic bodies acting poised for intercourse.: this is all nothing but foreplay. Even if there were no decency laws or FCC, picture-makers would avoid the real thing. The jism-covered towel, the folds of obstructive fat, the contagious venereal disease, the broken hymen, blood everywhere, the tragically unmet expectations, the soul-piercing stink of sweaty and spent organs... there isn't a product in the world, no beverage or body spray or erection pill, that you could sell with any of these things.

American popular culture gets such a bad rap, but it's has done something really amazing: it's improved sex... by taking the sex out of it. Real sex is full of fluids and flab, failure, bizarre and selfish desires for conquest and domination. So I say let kids watch this "sex" on teevee, let 'em. Allow them a few years of being totally deluded about the true reality of sex -- it's like letting them believe in Santa Claus for a few years, they'll likely be disappointed anyway when they learn the smelly truth.

And if certain people would get over their feelings of moral superiority, maybe they'd marvel at what our supposedly detestable Hollywood and Madison Avenue cultural overlords have done. They've essentially hacked sex, and that's pretty neat.