Sex is Weird 6: Virgin birth
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Look, as far as sexual reproduction without any sex goes, the most famous of all products of misconception is Jesus.
There are four accounts of the life of Jesus in the Christian New Testament.
And this is Dr Meredith Lake, the host of Soul Search on ABC Radio National, a historian who has looked in-depth at the Bible and all its ins and outs.
One of them, the Gospel of Matthew, that one does give you a little bit. It quotes an older text from the Jewish scriptures, it's complicated, written hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus, that talks about a virgin giving birth to a son. But the people who read the original text didn't think it was about Jesus. Not unless they could see into the future, I suppose. And he talks about how Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant, quote, through the Holy Spirit.
So that's Matthew's gospel. And the Christian Bible isn't the only place chock-a-block full of interesting stories about immaculate conceptions and special extracurricular circumstances. There's Romulus and Remus, Krishna, Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec sun god, Huan Di, the yellow emperor, and even the wizard Merlin, whose mum was a nun and whose father was apparently an incubus.
There are even stories of Roman emperors apparently conceived in this way. So it's not unique to the storytelling of Christian and Jewish writers.
Or the Islamic tradition either.
So there's a whole history of stories about women having babies when they thought that wasn't possible and then that child growing up to do something amazing for their communities. they're tapping into a narrative trope there. And so the emphasis is often not on how did the baby come to be? It's more about life out of nothing, an idea of creation when there was no hope and there was no life that somehow by the agency of the divine becoming possible in the world.
But I hear that and I think to myself, it's like nature took one look at humanity's paltry efforts at virgin births as symbols of promise, dreamt up from the depths of hopelessness and said, hold my beer. Sex is weird. And look, Jesus hung out with a couple of representatives of the adult entertainment industry, so I'm pretty sure he knew all about it as well. And look, I heard he was all about sharing the love, right? So I'm sure he'd subscribe to this series if he had a smartphone. Do pray for me. I'm Anne Jones and this is Sex is Weird, a series by What The Duck. We, and I mean almost everything on Earth really, have come to be on this planet is through a whole heap of really weird activities.
Boners, orgasms, stamens, cloacal winking and seasonal dance-offs. Which is sort of why I find it fascinating that humans have an interest in virgin births at all. Because surely being conceived in the Himalayas by a mummy and a daddy snow leopard with dazzling white fur and tails longer than history is actually pretty amazing all in itself. Why is extraordinary conception an apparent pathway to greatness? And does any of this actually have a basis in biology?
What examples of virgin birth are discussed in the episode?
You know, sexual reproduction, but without having sex with someone else. I think that some of the most flexible lovers in all of the world are plant lovers.
Plants are very sexual and they're being sexual all the time.
Dr Michael Whitehead would know. He's an evolutionary ecologist whose PhD focused on sexual deception in plants.
Actually, one of the things we most love about plants is the embodiment of their sexuality, and that's the flowers.
Yeah, so it makes sense that we give them to each other when we're trying to bang, right?
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