The literature on sexuality is divided across several disciplines that often do not speak to one another. The framework engages the principal positions by name; each is taken up again at [§8.6.5](<8.6.5 What is Concluded.md>) once the structural account is in view.

*Sociobiological reductionism.* The sociobiological tradition (Wilson 1975; Trivers 1972; Symons 1979; Buss 1989; later evolutionary psychology) reads sexual behavior, attraction, and gender difference as fitness-maximizing adaptations to ancestral selection pressures. Specific predictions — parental-investment-based selectivity asymmetries, jealousy patterns, preference for cues of fertility and resources — have generated substantial empirical literature and substantial dispute about replication, interpretation, and cross-cultural generality (Eagly and Wood 1999; Stewart-Williams and Thomas 2013). The framework's reading is that the evolutionary pressures the tradition identifies operate on the substrate, but that what sexuality *is* phenomenologically — attraction, desire, embodied coupling, identity — is the first-person perspective on those pressures rather than a fitness algorithm running unobserved.

*Social constructionism.* From Foucault (1976) forward, a tradition has held that sexuality — the very category, not only its expressions — is historically and socially constructed: a discourse produced by specific institutions, knowledges, and powers rather than a natural kind. Butler (1990, 1993) extended the analysis to gender, locating gender in performative repetition rather than in biological or psychological substrate. The dispute with the sociobiological tradition is sharp and unresolved. The framework's reading is that the *content* of sexual categories is significantly constructed — specific identities, scripts, and practices are historical — while the *structural conditions* under which the categories form (attraction, desire, embodied coupling, the self-modeling of one's position in the field) are not constructed but supplied by the recursive architecture sexuality consists in.

*Religious-metaphysical regulation.* The classical religious traditions — Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and others — have regulated sexuality through frameworks that locate its meaning, permission, and direction in commands originating outside Nature. Contemporary defenders (Finnis 1980; George 1993; some Thomistic natural-law traditions) refine the position into rational-natural-law arguments. The framework forecloses the move along with the rest of the inversion: sexuality's meaning is structural rather than externally given. What the regulating traditions were tracking — the affective and structural weight of intimate exchange between distinct subjects, the consequences of producing new subjects — is real; what they got wrong is the location of the source.

*Identity discourse and gender philosophy.* Contemporary identity discourse spans sharply opposed positions: the trans-affirmative literature (Bettcher 2014; Serano 2007) holds gender identity is a robust self-understanding constitutive of who one is; gender-critical positions (Stock 2021; Lawford-Smith 2022) press against the metaphysics of the position; intersex perspectives (Karkazis 2008) complicate both; non-binary identity presses the further question whether the available gender categories are exhausted by a binary at all, and the status of asexuality is separately disputed — whether the absence of sexual attraction is an orientation in its own right (Bogaert 2004, 2012) or, as some clinical framings held, a disorder of desire. The dispute is among the most polarized in contemporary philosophy. The framework reads gender and sexual identity as features of the self-model ([§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>)) — real, structural, consequential, constructed within awareness rather than substrate of awareness, and dissolvable under the same conditions [§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>) names for the self generally. The reading does not resolve the political disputes but it does locate where the metaphysics is supplied.

*Anti-natalism and the ethics of reproduction.* A tradition from Schopenhauer through Benatar (2006) holds that bringing new beings into existence is morally impermissible because the new being bears risks and harms it cannot consent to. The position is sharpened by the asymmetry between the badness of pain and the goodness of pleasure Benatar exploits. The framework engages the issue at the structural level: sexuality is one differentiation of the attraction-pole of drive specialized for producing new beings; whether to exercise the capacity, in agents with sufficient modal depth to choose, is an open ethical question the framework does not foreclose. The structural account makes the act legible without dictating its evaluation.

*The variation-and-reproduction question.* A live biological dispute concerns why sexual reproduction is so widespread given its substantial costs (the two-fold cost of sex; Maynard Smith 1978). The variation-and-recombination hypothesis (Hamilton, Axelrod, and Tanese 1990; Otto 2009), the Red Queen hypothesis, and Mueller's-ratchet-based accounts each press the question from different angles. The framework's reading — sexuality as the dominant solution to the lineage variation-generation problem in eukaryotic lineages, but not as a modal necessity of life as such — is one position in that biological dispute, consistent with the bdelloid-rotifer and bacterial-recombination cases the field continues to investigate (Gladyshev et al. 2008).

*Pornography, commodification, and the limits of consent.* A series of contemporary disputes — over pornography (MacKinnon 1987; Dworkin 1981 vs. liberal accounts), prostitution and sex work, surrogacy, and the commodification of intimacy — turn on whether and how consent under economic, social, and developmental conditions counts as full consent. The framework's modal-depth account of consent ([§8.9.4](<8.9.4 What is Confirmed.md>)) supplies a usable test — whether the will behind the word had enough mapped possibility to understand the act — without resolving the political and policy questions specific cases raise.

*Relationship structure.* Independently of orientation, the number and configuration of simultaneous intimate bonds is contested: whether monogamy is a structural norm, a cultural institution, or one option among several, and whether ethically negotiated non-monogamy differs in kind from both serial monogamy and the plural-marriage structures the ethnographic record documents. The framework's reading ([§8.6](<8.6 Sexuality.md>)) is that the dyad is the base unit of coupling and plurality is concurrent dyads under the same consent and non-corrosion conditions, which locates the structural claim without settling the cultural and normative dispute.

The literature on sexuality divides over reductive-vs-constructionist accounts, the legitimacy of religious-metaphysical regulation, the metaphysics of gender identity, the ethics of reproduction, the evolutionary explanation of sexual reproduction itself, consent under commodification, and the structure of intimate bonds. The framework commits to specific answers on each; they are taken up again at [§8.6.5](<8.6.5 What is Concluded.md>) after the structural account is in view.


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← [8.6 Sexuality](<8.6 Sexuality.md>) | [8.6.2 What is Required](<8.6.2 What is Required.md>) →
