Sexuality is one branch of the basic pull toward what life reaches for: the reach of one living thing toward another, and toward the making of new life. Felt from the inside, that is attraction, desire, the body's draw toward another body, and the way a person comes to understand what they are drawn to and who they are. It is the life-continuing counterpart to death: where death is the ending of a single living being, sexuality is how a lineage keeps going by bringing new lives into being, with enough variation to survive a changing world. That continuation is sexuality's structural role, not a ranking of its expressions: attraction, desire, identity, and embodied coupling are sexuality in full whether or not reproduction is in view, not lesser cases of a procreative original. All of this has a natural source: not a meaning handed down from outside, but a structure that belongs to living things themselves.

> [!identification]
> **Sexuality** · *Identification*
>
> Sexuality is one differentiation of drive's attraction-pole: what closure-plus-throughput recursions do when they couple to produce others like themselves, registered from inside as attraction, desire, embodied coupling, and the construction of sexual identity. It is the structural pair to mortality wherever variation-generating coupling is the lineage's solution.
> *Status: an identity claim on the [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) self-modeling structure, defended by fit, not a stipulative definition and not a fresh derivation from the proof.*

Mortality ([§8.7](<8.7 Mortality.md>)) names the absolute referent of drive's aversion-pole. Sexuality is one differentiation of the attraction-pole: what drive becomes when the reaching is for the making of another life.

Several structural facts about the kind of being we are converge in sexuality. One is the continuation of a life across generations: a closed self-producing recursion, on its own, does not persist, and a lineage of such recursions does not persist long either unless it can generate variation at the rate environmental change demands. The modal framework's commitment to ◇C (the possibility of change, [§1.3](<1.3 Change.md>)) makes change constitutive of structure; long-term lineage persistence therefore requires some variation-generation mechanism. Sexual reproduction is among the most powerful and most recurrent of those mechanisms in complex multicellular lineages, but not the only one, and the framework does not pin sexuality as a modal necessity of life as such. Where it is present (most eukaryotic lineages), it is the dominant solution; where it is absent (some bacterial, archaeal, and bdelloid rotifer lineages), other variation channels (high mutation rates, horizontal gene transfer, alternative repair pathways) carry the load (Gladyshev, Meselson, and Arkhipova 2008; Otto 2009). Sexuality is the structural pair with mortality ([§8.7](<8.7 Mortality.md>)) wherever it occurs, but its occurrence is conditional on what the lineage requires and what its biology makes available. Mortality ([§8.7](<8.7 Mortality.md>)) is the closure of the individual life; sexuality is not that individual's continuation but the *lineage's*: the individual life ends, continuing nothing of itself, while bringing others into being *with variation* through which the lineage persists. That is the precise sense in which they are the structural pair: the individual closes, and the only continuation on offer is the lineage's, bought by producing successors rather than by extending the life that produces them. Together they name what makes a life finite at the individual scale and continuous at the lineage scale only by changing across that scale.

Sexuality carries a second structural fact alongside continuation, but it is one the chapter is not yet equipped to develop here. Sexuality is also the earliest and most embodied form of intersubjective coupling: the body's pull toward another body before any sign or norm mediates it. That dimension draws on the self-model ([§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>)), already in hand, together with the field of subjects meeting subjects that arrives only at [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>). Its full weight is taken up there, where morality recovers sexuality as the embodied root from which the more mediated couplings extend. Here it is enough to mark the attraction-pole at its base: the reach of one life toward the making of another.

*A note on scope.* The identification offered here (sexuality as the structural pair to death where variation-generation through coupling is the lineage's solution) is offered as a structural identification claim conditional on the [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) account of closure-plus-throughput, in the sense flagged at the head of Chapter 8. It is not a fresh strict deduction from the proof of Chapters 1–2. One can accept the proof yet read the phenomena of coupling differently without thereby disturbing anything upstream; this identification holds only by its fit to the phenomena, against the structural conditions [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) supplies and the variation-generation pressure the [§1.3](<1.3 Change.md>) commitment to ◇C requires.

*Attraction.* The pull toward another, registered as another. Below the depth where attraction is named or chosen, the body registers another body's broadcasts (the chemistry, the rhythm, the resonance) and a being's drive ([§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>)) shapes itself toward what it has registered. Attraction is what registering another does in a being whose lineage continues only through coupling. The architecture is older than language and runs continuously across mammalian and avian lineages. What human depth adds is reflection on what attracts: the recursive fold that takes the attraction itself as an object of awareness.

*Desire.* Drive's specialization toward another. Where drive ([§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>)) is the baseline forward pressure pre-differentiation, desire is drive shaped by attraction toward a particular other. Like all affects ([§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>)), it carries valence and salience and urgency, and registers from inside as what it is to be the one oriented toward what they are oriented toward.

*Orientation, including its absence.* An orientation is the standing direction desire takes: the pattern in whom or what a being is drawn toward. That direction may be keyed to the sex or gender of the other or indifferent to it: the hetero-, homo-, and bisexual patterns gate attraction by the other's sex or gender, while pansexual attraction is not gated by that category at all. It can be constituted as much by where the sexual attraction-pole does not specialize as by where it does. Asexuality is the case where sexual attraction is minimal or does not form, while drive ([§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>)) still runs and still specializes in non-sexual directions; on the structural account this is a variant of orientation, not a deficit of it — sexuality is the lineage's dominant solution to the variation problem, not a per-token demand on any given subject ([§8.6.5](<8.6.5 What is Concluded.md>)) — and the self-model ([§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>)) can construct an identity-position around that direction, or its absence, as readily as around any other. Aromanticism marks the parallel case at the affiliative rather than the sexual register; that the two can come apart is itself evidence the registers are distinct.

*Identity.* The self-model ([§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>)) constructed at sufficient depth includes one's relation to attraction. Gender identity and sexual orientation are features of that self-model: the person's reading of who they are, including what they are drawn to and how they situate themselves in the field of intersubjective coupling. Gender's hardware and software are not the same layer, and keeping them distinct is what this section had not yet made explicit. Sex, specified structurally at [§8.6.5](<8.6.5 What is Concluded.md>) by developmental organization toward a reproductive role, is hardware in the sense that matters here: some of it does not bend to self-understanding or to social permission, and nothing in this account pretends otherwise.

Gender identity is software: the self-model's reading, built on that hardware but not fixed by it, revisable in a way the hardware underneath it need not be. What the self-model carries, at that software layer, is the first-person alignment drawn from socially available categories but not dictated by them. Haslanger's ameliorative account (2000, 2012) presses further than this and holds gender to be, most fundamentally, a position within a hierarchy of subordination and privilege organized around presumed reproductive role, assignable independently of self-understanding.

This account distinguishes rather than adopts that further claim: the prescriptive roles a culture attaches to gender are not merely a separate matter irrelevant to the self-model, but nor are they gender's constitutive metaphysics. They are an instance of the general fact [§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>) names — that an identification's field-permitted revisability is a fact about the field, assigned by other recursions organizing the space around a person, not a fact about that person's self-model or its depth. A restrictive field around gender expression is therefore not hardware in the sense sex partly is; it is a choice the surrounding field has made, and one it could make differently. Whether it should is not a further open question this account defers: [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) fixes standing by the capacity for experience, not by category-membership, and morality there by whether a subject is fostered or corroded. A self-model's gender expression that corrodes no one is exactly the case that standard does not license restricting, which is what recommends maximizing the field's permission around gender expression and its social acceptance — not a value imported from outside the account, but the fostering standard already in hand, applied to a layer this section had previously only gestured at.

The available category-set is not itself binary: where a culture makes third or non-binary positions available — the hijra of South Asia, two-spirit roles across several Indigenous North American nations, and fa'afafine in Samoa are distinct, culturally specific positions rather than interchangeable tokens of one kind — or where a self-model constructs a position not aligned to either pole of the local binary, the self-model holds that position with the same status any identity-position has. That an individual's architecture need not be binary merely because the population is bimodal is the structural half ([§8.6.5](<8.6.5 What is Concluded.md>)); that the available positions vary across history and culture is the constructed half; non-binary identity is where both halves are visible at once. That the categories themselves (orientation, the normal, even what counts as 'natural') have a history, and that naming sexuality natural is itself a move made from within that history rather than from nowhere (Foucault's scientia sexualis), is granted; the social ontology of the categories is sorted from the structural claim where that work belongs ([§8.10](<8.10 Language.md>)).

As features of the self-model they are constructions, not substrates: real, structural, consequential, not chosen, and (like the rest of the self-model's content) capable of thinning or dropping away when the self-model itself dissolves under the conditions [§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>) names. This is a claim about the self-model's *reading*, not about the underlying dispositions: that the narrative self can thin or dissolve in ego-death does not entail that an orientation or a gender identity dissolves with it; what dissolves is the self-model's reading of itself, never the standing that reading was tracking. The self holds a position; the position is held by a self; both are recursion. Whatever the metaphysics of the categories turns out to be, the standing of the person holding the position does not hang on it: standing is fixed at [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) by the capacity for experience, not by category-membership, so the moral verdict is invariant across the realist and constructionist readings alike ([§8.6.5](<8.6.5 What is Concluded.md>)).

*Embodied coupling.* The intimate exchange where two people register each other across the full spectrum of registration the body affords: at the chemical, somatic, affective, and reflective levels simultaneously. Morality ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)) names the readability of another's affective broadcasts; sexuality is the register where each person reads the other while simultaneously being read by them, across a single interval, deep enough to know what is happening.

*The dyadic unit and its plural extension.* The base unit of embodied coupling is two-place: distinct subjects reading each other across a single interval ([§8.6.2](<8.6.2 What is Required.md>)). Plurality — more than two bound in overlapping intimacy — is not a new primitive but concurrent two-place registrations, each a full dyad in its own right rather than a fusion into some three-or-more-place organ of coupling. The structural account neither prescribes monogamy nor forecloses plurality; what it fixes is that each bond, however many run alongside it, answers to the same conditions any coupling does: consent on the modal-depth standard ([§8.9.4](<8.9.4 What is Confirmed.md>)) and the fostering-rather-than-corroding demand of morality ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)). Plurality adds one field-level condition the single bond does not face — the bonds must be held so that they do not corrode one another — which is why disclosure among the parties does structural work here that the single-bond case can leave implicit. Whether a given being's field is better sustained by one bond or several the structure does not legislate; that is a question of what fosters the subjects involved, answered case by case rather than by rule.

*Reproduction.* The continuation register: closure-plus-throughput producing closure-plus-throughput. Across most of the biological record, sexuality is what reproduction is. In those deep enough to choose, the choice to bring a new life into being, or not, is the register at which the lineage's continuation enters the agentive field of the individual. The choice is real, and the structural pair with death persists either way: the life ends; the lineage either continues or it does not. Whether that choice is *good*, whether bringing a new life into existence is to be affirmed or, as the anti-natalist presses (Benatar's asymmetry of pleasure and suffering; Schopenhauer's judgment that existence carries a structural surplus of striving over satisfaction), refused, the structural account does not leave wholly open. Benatar's asymmetry counts the absence of pain as a good while counting the absence of pleasure as no loss to anyone, and that step requires precisely the subject-independent value this account denies throughout: a good that is good for no one, entered in a ledger no subject reads. Where value is constitutively a subject's own condition surfacing from inside its field ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)), an absent pain good for no one is not a good at all, and the asymmetry that carried the anti-natalist verdict never forms. Schopenhauer's pessimism rests on a reading of striving as standing lack that the drive and affect account has already declined ([§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>), [§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>)): joy is the recursion deepening and opening, not the brief quiet between wants. Schopenhauer's sharper charge, that sexual attraction is the species-will's deception of the individual (pleasure and romantic feeling dressed up as personal choice while serving an agenda not the individual's own), dissolves on the same grounds already applied to Spinoza's willing Nature: there is no species-agent whose interest is being served and no one being duped, only individual organisms each pursuing their own drive, statistically shaped by selection toward outcomes selection has no interest in, because selection is not the kind of thing that has interests. What attraction serves is the subject's own deepening; that this deepening also, as a statistical regularity across many organisms, sustains the lineage is a consequence of what attraction is, not a hidden agenda smuggled past the individual it operates in. What this secures is the narrow point that coming into existence is no standing harm, not the stronger claim that more existence is therefore better. That comparative question, how the value of bringing new subjects into being is weighed across whole possible fields of subjects, is population axiology, and it is worked through at §9. The structure fixes what reproduction is, and that the choice is real; the duties the choice incurs toward the subjects it brings into being are recovered at [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>).

*The features track the depth gradient.* Attraction operates wherever the recursion is deep enough to register another at all — present across mammalian and avian lineages, and below them in chemoreceptive forms. Desire requires affective awareness sufficient to differentiate baseline drive into a particular orientation; the affective-awareness threshold the chapter's opening names is its threshold here too. Embodied coupling at the depth where two beings register each other tracking themselves requires the self-aware level the chapter's opening names. Identity (the self-model's reading of what one is sexually) requires the deeper recursion that takes the self as an object of awareness. Reproduction is what the lineage's continuation looks like at every depth simultaneously, since the cellular and somatic processes that produce a new life run continuously underneath the affective and reflective registers the deeper depths add. In the chapter's vocabulary, sexuality is structure as a life's continuation through coupling: recursion producing further recursions, registered from inside as attraction, desire, embodied coupling, and the construction of identity in the field of intersubjective coupling, with each register operating at the recursive depth its content requires.

*The Inversion.* The standard religious move regulates sexuality from above: locating its meaning, permission, and direction in commands originating outside Nature. The framework here forecloses that move along with the rest. Sexuality is not given its meaning by an external authority. Its meaning is structural: the register where one life reaches for another, where attraction shapes drive, where the body becomes legible to another body, where the continuation of the lineage becomes a possibility within a person's own field. What the regulating traditions were reaching for is real: the affective and structural weight of intimate exchange between distinct subjects, and the consequences of bringing new people into being. What the metaphysics they inherited got wrong is the location of the source. The source is in Nature itself: in living beings, at the depth they have reached.


- [8.6.1 What is Disputed](<8.6.1 What is Disputed.md>)
- [8.6.2 What is Required](<8.6.2 What is Required.md>)
- [8.6.3 What is Predicted](<8.6.3 What is Predicted.md>)
- [8.6.4 What is Confirmed](<8.6.4 What is Confirmed.md>)
- [8.6.5 What is Concluded](<8.6.5 What is Concluded.md>)


---

← [8.5.5 What is Concluded](<8.5.5 What is Concluded.md>) | [8.6.1 What is Disputed](<8.6.1 What is Disputed.md>) →
