The trouble with sleeping is that you don't know you're doing it, so you can't really enjoy it. Something else people do in bed is coitus, but sometimes it seems as though they neither know what is going on nor do they enjoy it. It happens to them as much as they "do" it.
This is because more than 90% of what people do is unconscious. Some say 98% but how do they know if the unconscious is not accessible to something as mathematical as percentages? The truth is that sex, maybe more than anything else, is a product/victim of evolution -- everything we do is built on something that started when animals crawled out of the water so some way of getting sperm-to-ovum had to happen that protected the little half-bits. Usually the answer was penetration: one side poked its way into the other side so it could deliver its part at the doorway of the ovum.
A lot of things had to happen: warm and responsive blood travel within the receiving creatures, renewing sources (they call them "nurse cells") of sperm, storage of sperm that didn't cook them (they call the cool storage "testicles"), changes to the defence mechanisms of the female body so white blood cells didn't kill the sperm or conceptus, but one aspect didn't change. The primitive deep irresistible desire to do the act: seeking, near-blind, overwhelming desire for penetration. As we know, it's stronger in males and stronger in some males rather than all. This is characteristic of every evolutionary advanced feature. It's so complex and so woven with culture that some don't get any and some get too much.
First, it's not often perceived that sex is dependent on a whole sequence of minute characteristics accumulating over millennia so that one little glitch can throw the whole function off. Second, since so much is unconscious, one can't always figure it out with introspection. At least at the physical level, technical investigation and analysis might help. Third, since so much is unconscious and since so much is entangled with emotion, the whole thing is best addressed with the arts. Artists might be operating on instinct, which they have encouraged and intensified enought to get a bit of access to the subconscious.
Fourth, in terms of survival, a great many individuals are deprived and even destroyed if the survival of the whole group doesn't need them. Thus, gays, sterile people, non-participators on cultural grounds, or people who penetrate but deliver un-viable halves of a new person, may be subject to despair and sorrow, but others will "give birth" in a different way by making cultural contributions to the whole. Or even offering themselves as sacrifices in times that demand them. Thus the moral issue of suicide or the kind of non-moral instinct illustrated by the "stotting Tommy," the phenomenon of a Thompson's gazelle on the veldt where one animal separates from the herd, "stotting" or bouncing to attract attention so that stalking lions will kill it instead of attacking the whole herd. Thus, unconsciously, the ungulates illustrate sacrifice humans may put into a novel.
Since even now we have a hard time achieving conception, though we ask women to gestate each other's conceptus, or to donate eggs to be gestated by a woman who wishes to give birth, or give the nucleus of one ovum to another woman whose ovum has a faulty nucleus so that the baby has three parents. Men in our time have grown used the idea that being a father is both physical and cultural, so that they may willingly "father" a child produced by another man's penetration and become deeply attached to that child. Attachment is another evolved phenomenon that is produced by experience as much as instinct.
In a culture based on materialism where children are considered owned or maybe extensions of the father or mother over generations of succession, penetration becomes a weapon of war. Penetration becomes the same as the thrust of a spear and is laden with the cultural trappings of war. Or maybe penetration becomes something marketable and people who have nothing left but their bodies can sell access to it.
Again, rather strangely, actual penetration or associated intimacy by access to bodies, is a phenomenon of one or two people interacting. Even in an orgy people only have so many holes and so much skin. But in the associated emotional participation, millions may be sharing artful thoughts and images that prepare bodies for penetration. This, in itself, is marketable. Also, advertising in particular has managed to entwine "porn" with sales so that we have "penis cars" and "fuckable" markers for shoes. Often this is subtle enough that we only think of it later when all the seductive images can be hauled into rationality.
The hardest aspect to analyze is desire. The dominant culture in the US has been dictating that only early-teen girls with long blonde hair and slender bodies are the most desirable. Certainly Epstein and his high-class clients believed this. But that ignores the allure of, say, Anna Magnani, and totally denies expertise and deep intimacy between adults. All over America teenaged girls try to be thin, blonde, and mindless, a cultural sinkhole.
Desire arises from the unconscious. It is not rationally decided, though it can sometimes appear as a product of two people knowing each other deeply. If that has happened with someone once, the type may imprint, which is an echo of attachment, so if the lost loved one is big, brunette, and dark, someone like that (either sex) might call the same feelings. But it doesn't have to be physical. It might be a matter of sharing minds.
As we approach Christmas we witness many scenes of birth, meant to imply that there is a supernatural "inconceivable" being who loves us and shows it by "penetrating" us with love and delivering a baby. Handled badly, this can be rape. Handled well, it can deliver near a orgasmic climax of bliss.
But, as always, there is a dimension of ridiculousness. Once a student asked me to explain "orgasm." Knowing that I could be fired for telling the truth but wanting to give an honest answer, I told her it was like a sneeze, meaning it was an uncontrollable bodily response. Fifty years later she tells me it was a very long time before she figured out what I was saying. Some people never figure out the Christian nativity.
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