A Rebellious People

[Belacqua]

Sex is meant to be an act of procreation

I think there's no doubt that sex evolved as a means of procreating, and giving our genes the best chance of surviving. So in that sense I agree that it's "meant to" be that way. 

One interesting thing about human culture, though, is that a lot of the things we evolved to do have been put to uses which aren't evolutionarily advantageous. The things we evolved to do lead us to play and enjoy ourselves and enrich our lives over and above genetic survival.

So one example is that we evolved to run and jump and be generally agile. That's useful if you want to escape a sabertooth tiger. But those abilities have, thanks to our culture, been put to use in things like ballet. I don't think there is any evolutionary advantage to ballet; it is only an enrichment of culture and a pleasure due to its beauty. We're glad we are able to use our evolved traits for reasons other than what they evolved for. 

We evolved to be good at pattern recognition and the discernment of subtle color variations. These are good for survival. The same physical abilities make the visual arts possible. The subtlety of our visual perception isn't "meant to" be moved by a great painting, but we have managed to develop that pleasure anyway. And I think we can all agree that the human world would be poorer without employing our abilities in ways we weren't "meant to" use them. 

The word "aesthetics" refers to all the senses -- the opposite is "anesthetics." So I think that the pleasures of sex are analogous to the pleasures of the arts. And like all the arts, it is more than mere sensory pleasure, in that it draws us closer to others, lets us understand people unlike ourselves, and just generally makes life better.