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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on My Way - Less Wrong
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The obvious reason.
Probably I'm being obtuse here, but I asked because it isn't obvious to me.
Well, the having sex part is certainly nice =).
Seriously, intercourse, marriage, raising children, etc. give the two genders an objective reason to work hard to understand their differences. The challenge is more fun because it has a built-in reward.
Sex is a function of, well, physical sex. This is not the same thing as gender, or gender roles.
It's not clear to what extent the two are directly connected instead of socially constructed, cf. comments such as this or ciphergoth's comments about sexual politics.
ETA: One can obviously make the argument that value is gained from sexual attraction pushing people to connect with others who may differ from them, but given some non-isomorphism between gender and sex vs. arguably larger differences between people from different cultures vs. masculine vs. feminine individuals from the same culture this strikes me as hard to defend as making gender identity particularly useful.
ETA2: Also, I'm pretty sure my boss and his partner would be surprised if I told them that sex and gender differences are an integral or even major part of the fun in sex and romantic relationships.
Indeed, I think gender (and the way it is intertwined with hetero-normativity) is one of the factors causing us to have less sex than we could have.
For instance, suppose that there is some evolutionary-psychology reason which makes biologically male persons like short sexual encounters higher, and biologically female persons value long-term relationships. (This whole discussion is predicated on the existence of biological-sex based psychological traits, after all, so let's go out on a limb). The expected outcome might be that men seek out men for casual hook-ups and women for longer-term relationships. But this is generally not what we are seeing.
Why not? One explanation might be that most people are not even a little interested in same-sex sex. But that does not seem to be the case, consider for example environments like single-sex prisons.
I would instead argue that the reasons is that "men do not have sex with men" and "women do not have sex with women" is a cornerstone of the socially constructed part of gender, and going against this would necessitating people to drop a big part of their identity, which is unpleasant.
On this view, the existence of gender is actually preventing us from optimally partaking of that obvious good, copious sex.