Would people still have kids if s*x didn’t feel good?

[sserafim]

I was looking into antinatalism and saw someone on Reddit say that their grandmother in law was saying that raising a child is the most selfless thing you can do because you can't think about yourself, you need to only think of the needs of the child.

However, having s*x apparently feels good, so I assume that most people feel pleasure when procreating. This is another reason why I think that procreation is selfish, because you're engaging in an act of personal pleasure, which then creates life that can be harmed by just simply existing.

This got me thinking: would people still have kids if s*x didn't feel good? If s*x felt unbearably painful instead of pleasurable, would people still have children?

 

[hikikomorizombie]

ofc. ppl are extremely selfish & 1 of the many asinine reasons they have children is to have a customizable 'mini me' doll that they can dress up & raise in their image. or to give them a reason to live, like my mother did, & now she resents her children for being children & needing mothering.

 

[Life_and_Death]

i dont have an answer to your thread. i just wanted to say thank you for kind of censoring the word and i really appreciate it

 

[R_N]

Other mammals do it for pleasure but humans would procreate in different ways if sex was not enjoyable. There would be less people I don't doubt that but we would still reproduce to spread our genes.

And as you most likely know there are means to do so already.

 

[WhiteRabbit]

Yes, people would still have kids. Having a kid is already painful for the woman. The amount of accidental pregnancies would go down though.

 

[sserafim]

Other mammals do it for pleasure but humans would procreate in different ways if sex was not enjoyable. There would be less people I don't doubt that but we would still reproduce to spread our genes.

Don't people have s*x for pleasure as well? The point of s*x being pleasurable is to reproduce to spread genes.

ofc. ppl are extremely selfish & 1 of the many asinine reasons they have children is to have a customizable 'mini me' doll that they can dress up & raise in their image. or to give them a reason to live, like my mother did, & now she resents her children for being children & needing mothering.

They would go through unbearable amounts of pain just to have a child? Why? I don't understand. What do you gain out of having or raising a child? Maybe it's because I'm different from other people but I never saw or had a need to have children…I don't understand why you would want to create new life just for the sake of creating new life.

Existence causes harm to an individual, one can only be harmed by existing. If you never existed, you would never suffer. Why do people want to bring more people into the world? The most selfish part is that parents are deciding something for someone who can't even consent. All of us were born against our will; we never got to consent to existence. This is the most selfish thing I find about procreation. Because our parents wanted children, we were born (and ended up suffering). The parents had children because they wanted to, they never considered the fact that maybe the child never wanted or didn't want to be born.

 

[WhiteRabbit]

Existence causes harm to an individual, one can only be harmed by existing. If you never existed, you would never suffer. Why do people want to bring more people into the world?

Simple. Most people don't see existence as some awful thing to be avoided at all costs.

 

[sserafim]

Simple. Most people don't see existence as some awful thing to be avoided at all costs.

I guess, but procreation is still selfish because they're making a decision for an individual who can't even consent to it, just because *they* want to have kids. And the truth is that existence will inevitably cause one to be harmed, that's just how life is

 

[R_N]

Don't people have s*x for pleasure as well? The point of s*x being pleasurable is to reproduce to spread genes.

You are correct, I am not sure where I said otherwise. I just pointed out that humans would reproduce in different ways like some already do. If sex felt bad.

 

[Dr Iron Arc]

It's very likely that the amount of kids being produced would go down a little if sex were no longer pleasurable but something about continuing the species alone might be inherently pleasing in subconscious ways for all living beings so it wouldn't stop entirely. Case in point some animals with terrifying-looking penises like cats, echidnas, and ducks still manage to find their way into the female versions of all those animals. Don't look em up if you don't wanna get scarred but if those animals are still willing to reproduce then it's gonna take a lot more than just being displeasurable for sex to no longer continue. Salmon are also an example of an animal that chooses to go through reproduction knowing they'll die of exhaustion and starvation to carry it out. Hell, even humans have found ways to fetishize pain and suffering through BDSM and other such kinks so I don't think we'd be safe in that regard either.

 

[sserafim]

You are correct, I am not sure where I said otherwise. I just pointed out that humans would reproduce in different ways like some already do if sex felt bad.

But like what do they gain out of having children though? That's what I don't understand

 

[hikikomorizombie]

They would go through unbearable amounts of pain just to have a child? Why? I don't understand. What do you gain out of having or raising a child? Why do people want to bring more people into the world?

1 of the many asinine reasons they have children is to have a customizable 'mini me' doll that they can dress up & raise in their image. or to give them a reason to live, like my mother did, & now she resents her children for

bc of this^. as well as continuing their lineage/bloodline, even though 99.9% of ppl don't have a lineage worth continuing. me included, every1 in my family would've been 10x better off if we'd never existed, lmao.

 

[R_N]

But like what do they gain out of having children though? That's what I don't understand

Legacy I would say, creating mini yous to live on after you pass away. But there is more to it when child is made, attachment and biological need to nurture them. Sex not being enjoyable wouldn't take mothers instinct away for example.

 

[sserafim]

something about continuing the species alone might be inherently pleasing in subconscious ways for all living beings

Interesting. I wonder why that is…do you have any ideas why?

bc of this^. as well as continuing their lineage/bloodline, even though 99.9% of ppl don't have a lineage worth continuing. me included, every1 in my family would've been 10x better off if we'd never existed, lmao.

My dad wants me to eventually marry and have children to continue the lineage/bloodline, but I don't see why it needs to be continued. The right thing would be for it to die out

 

[R_N]

It's very likely that the amount of kids being produced would go down a little if sex were no longer pleasurable but something about continuing the species alone might be inherently pleasing in subconscious ways for all living beings so it wouldn't stop entirely. Case in point some animals with terrifying-looking penises like cats, echidnas, and ducks still manage to find their way into the female versions of all those animals. Don't look em up if you don't wanna get scarred but if those animals are still willing to reproduce then it's gonna take a lot more than just being displeasurable for sex to no longer continue. Salmon are also an example of an animal that chooses to go through reproduction knowing they'll die of exhaustion and starvation to carry it out. Hell, even humans have found ways to fetishize pain and suffering through BDSM and other such kinks so I don't think we'd be safe in that regard either.

I agree for the most part but I assume bdsm might be a mix of both pleasure and pain so pleasure is still in the picture. Hell even vanilla sex can be painful depending on circumstances but if there is pleasure there is also a will to go through with it.

 

[kawaiiphantom]

I think birth rates would go down a lot, but I think people would still have kids, just less likely to accidentally have a kid I feel like? Since probably only people who really want kids would go through the pain of it. I'm not really sure though. Also I don't really feel like procreation is selfish unless you are intentionally bringing them into a rlly bad situation and only doing it for personal gain instead of wanting to nurture another living thing

 

[sserafim]

I think birth rates would go down a lot, but I think people would still have kids, just less likely to accidentally have a kid I feel like? Since probably only people who really want kids would go through the pain of it. I'm not really sure though. Also I don't really feel like procreation is selfish unless you are intentionally bringing them into a rlly bad situation and only doing it for personal gain instead of wanting to nurture another living thing

Yeah but it is selfish because *they* want to nurture another living thing, so they create living things which *will* inevitably suffer in their lifetimes. It's still about *their* desire at the end of the day so therefore it does make it selfish.

 

[Dr Iron Arc]

I agree for the most part but I assume bdsm might be a mix of both pleasure and pain so pleasure is still in the picture. Hell even vanilla sex can be painful depending on circumstances but if there is pleasure there is also a will to go through with it.

True, the dynamics of pain and pleasure and deriving pleasure from pain or vice versa are complicated indeed.

Interesting. I wonder why that is…do you have any ideas why?

I can't say I definitively know why. I can only speculate that it must stem from whatever reason life itself exists for. Deoxyribonucleic acid is the compound responsible for all of this but it's nothing more than the building blocks of life, the lines of code. If only we could find out who the programmer was but if there really isn't one then it's just possible that these blocks randomly assembled themselves in such a way that happened to prioritizing copying itself over and over again. Even RNA in viruses is enough to motivate viruses to wantonly reek havoc in the microscopic world and reproduce endlessly. DNA might just be a slightly more advanced version of that…

 

[R_N]

To clarify I do agree with you @sserafim, after all I am anti natalist myself. Bringing any child into this world even in "perfect" conditions creates inevitable suffering. Not just for them but their surroundings as well. Does it also create pleasurable moments as well? Yes. But always at a price.

I will end it with a video game quote:
"Rend, slaughter, devour your enemies. There is no other way to survive. You cannot escape your hunger, Warriors of Purgatory."

 

[sserafim]

To clarify I do agree with you @sserafim, after all I am anti natalist myself. Bringing any child into this world even in "perfect" conditions creates inevitable suffering. Not just for them but their surroundings as well. Does it also create pleasurable moments as well? Yes. But always at a price.

I will end it with a video game quote:
"Rend, slaughter, devour your enemies. There is no other way to survive. You cannot escape your hunger, Warriors of Purgatory."

Pain will always outweigh pleasure though, it's not an equal trade-off. There's an asymmetry between good and bad in this world, there will always be more bad than good. There's endless ways to suffer but few ways to feel happy.

Here are David Benatar's arguments:

1. the presence of pain is bad;
2. the presence of pleasure is good;
3. the absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone;
4. the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation

Antinatalism - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[sserafim]

True, the dynamics of pain and pleasure and deriving pleasure from pain or vice versa are complicated indeed.


I can't say I definitively know why. I can only speculate that it must stem from whatever reason life itself exists for. Deoxyribonucleic acid is the compound responsible for all of this but it's nothing more than the building blocks of life, the lines of code. If only we could find out who the programmer was but if there really isn't one then it's just possible that these blocks randomly assembled themselves in such a way that happened to prioritizing copying itself over and over again. Even RNA in viruses is enough to motivate viruses to wantonly reek havoc in the microscopic world and reproduce endlessly. DNA might just be a slightly more advanced version of that…

Hmm, interesting. Why would DNA be a more advanced version of RNA if DNA gets transcribed to RNA? But yeah viruses wreak havoc on and hijack their hosts and they're not even technically "alive". Personally, I don't know why continuing the species alone might be inherently pleasing in subconscious ways for all living beings. What do they gain out of it? Why do they care about whether their species continues or not? I could care less if humanity continued existing or not. Some people like FuneralCry even think that the rational thing would be for human beings to go voluntarily extinct. Maybe humans are just the abnormal ones...

 

[F@#$]

i dont have an answer to your thread. i just wanted to say thank you for kind of censoring the word and i really appreciate it

I was going to say the opposite. But apparently others appreciate the censorship. We all know what the subject is.

 

[Forever Sleep]

Don't people have s*x for pleasure as well? The point of s*x being pleasurable is to reproduce to spread genes.

They would go through unbearable amounts of pain just to have a child? Why? I don't understand. What do you gain out of having or raising a child? Maybe it's because I'm different from other people but I never saw or had a need to have children…I don't understand why you would want to create new life just for the sake of creating new life.

Existence causes harm to an individual, one can only be harmed by existing. If you never existed, you would never suffer. Why do people want to bring more people into the world? The most selfish part is that parents are deciding something for someone who can't even consent. All of us were born against our will; we never got to consent to existence. This is the most selfish thing I find about procreation. Because our parents wanted children, we were born (and ended up suffering). The parents had children because they wanted to, they never considered the fact that maybe the child never wanted or didn't want to be born.

I imagine we have evolved to find it pleasurable in order to encourage us to do it but especially guys I've known who have been non stop horny- the last thing they want is for all the women they knock off to get pregnant. Think of all the child support they could claim!

But, the drive to have children isn't always aligned with sexual drive. Couples who have to use IVF, go through what sounds like not too pleasant procedures in order to conceive. It almost becomes mathematical in terms of the act too- they need to do it at the correct time- whether they're in the mood or not.

The want to have children is a very real one. I'm glad that I managed to avoid it but I've known friends who were desperate to have kids and my Mum was desperate to have children. Some people just have very strong maternal/ paternal instincts.

They likely aren't thinking their child might suffer in its life. I think that's the problem- it all becomes a bit rose tinted. Although- maybe they're right. Not all people end up suffering unbearably.

Back in the olden days, some religions saw sex as dirty though. Couples weren't encouraged to do it for pleasure. It was to create children. Certain rules in Catholicism still very much align sex with the creation of life. Hence their issues with contraception and homosexuality.

 

[Dr Iron Arc]

Hmm, interesting. Why would DNA be a more advanced version of RNA if DNA gets transcribed to RNA? But yeah viruses wreak havoc on and hijack their hosts and they're not even technically "alive". Personally, I don't know why continuing the species alone might be inherently pleasing in subconscious ways for all living beings. What do they gain out of it? Why do they care about whether their species continues or not? I could care less if humanity continued existing or not. Some people like FuneralCry even think that the rational thing would be for human beings to go voluntarily extinct. Maybe humans are just the abnormal ones...

Maybe it's the Deoxy part added to the ribonucleic acid that gives it the extra push it needs to achieve more advanced things. Idk, I'm not a chemist or biologist.

We may never get to know why propagating the species matters so much, we only know that DNA is the cause of it. It's like trying to ask why popped corn kernels creates popcorn. Sure we know how that happens and that it can only happen when certain conditions are met but, why? Why is it corn and not potatoes or asparagus or apples? Why do we exist in a world where this happens and why do we exist at all? What nefarious plot does dna collectivelt have that it needs to exist in the first place? No idea lol.

 

[slightoverlooked]

100 percent. im sure its already a thing lmao. ace ppl probably have kids and i dont hear anyone say they want kids bc of the sex part but bc they want kids. most people believe its their duty as humans to pro-create.

 

[derpyderpins]

I was looking into antinatalism and saw someone on Reddit say that their grandmother in law was saying that raising a child is the most selfless thing you can do because you can't think about yourself, you need to only think of the needs of the child.

However, having s*x apparently feels good, so I assume that most people feel pleasure when procreating. This is another reason why I think that procreation is selfish, because you're engaging in an act of personal pleasure, which then creates life that can be harmed by just simply existing.

This got me thinking: would people still have kids if s*x didn't feel good? If s*x felt unbearably painful instead of pleasurable, would people still have children?

To the actual question: it would cut down a lot, but certainly not all. Lots of people have unintended children because they are too careless to bother with birth control, but they like sex. However, plenty of people have children because they want children, many for the wrong reasons. (Specifically: "I'm not happy now, maybe a child will make me feel fulfilled!" It's very unfair to the child to leave that up to chance, considering they will have to live ~100 years.) As to a percentage . . . I could only guess that there'd be maybe 50% fewer kids.

Look at countries like Japan and South Korea where the birth rate has plummeted. My understanding is that this is largely because women their are choosing not to have children when they are also working full time jobs (which is understandable imo.) Sex still feels good to those people, but they've cut the birth rate by choice, so I guess that's a good sample - being that they have a high average IQ, which probably correlates with giving more consideration to the pros and cons of procreation.

As a comment on what you saw in the reddit thread, that stuff pisses me off. You will hear breeders say both that raising a child is selfless and if you don't have kids you are selfish, but then they will also say having kids is the most magical, bestest thing in the world. I'm sorry, but it can't be both. It can't be "having kids is wonderful, and also I'm making a great selfless sacrifice by having them." I think when they say it's a selfless act, they are showing their hand that "having kids is wonderful" is a lie they tell themselves to keep going.

 

[DarkRange55]

Most likely, but maybe not quite as much. There is an instinctual drive for procreation. There is also artificial insemination.
Also human cloning probably has a future. Assuming we avoid both religious anti-technology backlash and AI apocalypse. What is the benefit / utility of cloning? Well,
What is the benefit of having kids – they are not you, so it's not immortality? And yet, people do it all the time. Cloning would let people have children who are genetically identical to themselves, or have children without having to bother with a person of the opposite sex. Cloning would take test tube babies to the next level (especially if artificial wombs are perfected)! But I don't think it will completely replace traditional reproduction.
The universe may be slowly traversable. If we were just a little more advanced than we are now, but with the same physics (just applied on a larger scale), we could cross to the nearest stars in a few tens of thousands of years. That would be quite doable for machines, or for spacecraft carrying sperm and eggs and artificial wombs, and potentially for humans in suspended animation. Or, if we solve aging, what's a few tens of thousands of years in a very long life?

 

[Ferdinand Bardamu]

This got me thinking: would people still have kids if s*x didn't feel good? If s*x felt unbearably painful instead of pleasurable, would people still have children?

Yes, because the major reason people have kids is so they have someone to take care of them when they're old. Birthrates would decline, yeah, but people would still reproduce.

 

[Final_Choice]

I think it would lower by like 90% but there definitely still are people who have sex just to have kids and they would still have sex in this case.

 

[sserafim]

There is an instinctual drive for procreation.

Isn't that because nature made it feel good?