Tuesday 15 May 2012

La Petite Mort

I was reading a rather "prescriptive" post on sexual liberalism today, which made my stream of consciousness wander around the subject. 
Not exactly related to that post..this question popped in my mind:
I've read that most mammals and some non-mammals, too, experience sexual pleasure,and some, like humans, even have orgasm. I can accept that as an evolutionary reward system for reproduction. Sex is not something like food that life depends on, and probably most of times, if not all, it takes a lot of energy to be performed.. of course for the female part it takes much more than that(the pregnancy, the labor and the rest..), if done by the purpose of procreation. So, there must be a rather huge reward to pay off these costs. 
Evolutionary speaking, that makes a lot of sense. What I'm curious about, even if considering non-mammals who perform sexual activity to procreate, as having a sort of pleasure or reward system for that, what is the reward for other types of reproduction, like the nonsexual ones, it takes a lot of work to continually reproduce..say, for a bacteria. Why even bother? or is there "a kind of" orgasm in cell division too(of course it's rather a controversial subject as it is highly implausible for a bacteria to be conscious in the first place)? But how is it paid off?

Trivia : "La Petite Mort" = "The Little Death" in french is a metaphor for "Orgasm".