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Title: Science book!
Description: Science book, it is very interesting and powerful book, it is really about pickup and seduction and a LOT more, i hope you enjoy. :)
Description: Science book, it is very interesting and powerful book, it is really about pickup and seduction and a LOT more, i hope you enjoy. :)
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SPERM
WARS
Infidelity, Sexual Conflict and Other
Bedroom Battles
Robin Baker
FOURTH ESTATE • London
First published in Great Britain in 1996 by
Fourth Estate Limited
6 Salem Road
London, W2 4BU
To
K
E
Copyright © 1996 by Robin Baker
J
The right of Robin Baker to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988
...
ISBN 1-85702-356-0
All rights reserved
...
without permission in writing from Fourth Estate Limited
...
F,Y
A,J,K,P,P,R,S, 'W'
and
Thomas, Howard, David, Nathanial, Amelia
and the baby who was never named
Contents
Preface
1
The Generation Game
1
2
1
Normal Service
The Wet Sheet
Topping Up
Conception
5
15
26
32
Sperm Wars
6
7
4
Great Uncle Who?
Routine Sex
2
3
4
5
3
xi
A Chance Affair
A Sperm War
36
48
Counting the Cost
8
9
10
11
Doesn't He Look like His Father?
Making Mistakes
Licking Infidelity
Checkmate
vii
55
61
69
76
Preface
Sex and reproduction occupy a major part of people's time -not
so much the doing, more the thinking and talking
...
Consider the following
...
None the less, riding on the wave of a revolution in sexual
understanding which began in the 1970s but which did not
xi
PREFACE
really gather momentum until the 1990s, these are questions
which this book sets out to answer
...
In this book, my aim is to bring the new
interpretation for the first time within the reach of a much wider
audience
...
My ambition is to help the revolution on its way
...
The
main thrust of these forces was directed at our bodies, not our
consciousness
...
The central force that directed this programming was the risk of
sperm warfare
...
The way in
which these sperm compete is akin to warfare
...
The remainder are infertile 'kamikaze' sperm whose
function has nothing to do with fertilisation as such but everything
to do with preventing sperm from another man fertilising the egg
...
In part
consciously, but much more importantly subconsciously, all of our
sexual attitudes, emotions, responses and behaviour revolve
around sperm warfare, and all human sexual behaviour can be
reinterpreted from this new perspective
...
Most female behaviour is an
attempt either to outmaneuver her partner and other males, or to
influence
which
male's
xii
PREFACE
sperm have the best chance of succeeding in any war that she
promotes
...
That event unleashed a
complex set of instructions for development
...
If our father and
mother hadn't had sex when they did, with whom they did, having
prepared for it as they did, we would never have existed
...
But the details of these
stories are rarely known
...
Most people, of course, are conceived during an act of routine
sex between a man and a woman who are living together in some
form of long-term relationship
...
Such
conceptions might seem humdrum, but even routine sex has its
surprises, as I hope this book will illustrate
...
Many such
stories are told in this book
...
In
that book, published by Chapman & Hall, we presented the results
of recent biological research, much of it our own, about the
repercussions for human sexuality of the risk of sperm warfare
...
If you wish to
read a scientific justification for the ideas and claims made in this
book, then read Human Sperm Competition
...
Nevertheless, it
contains an interpretation and explanation for all the sexual
behaviour that is very much within most people's experience —
behaviour that often seems irrational and inexplicable
...
In order to illustrate these rules and to bring the behaviour to
life, I have written this book as a series of fictional scenes
...
Many
scenes also involve one or other facet of the sperm warfare which
I argue throughout the book is the underlying element in all
sexual behaviour
...
The fictional scenes show people acting out those sexual
strategies that have been the main targets for investigation and
interpretation in recent years
...
Their aim is, after all, to show
people experiencing particular costs and benefits of their sexual
behaviour so as to neatly illustrate
PREFACE
the subsequent evidence and interpretation
...
In writing these stories, I have drawn on less global information
than do the studies and experiments themselves — and although
some stories originate in news reports in the media, most derive
from events in my own life and the lives of close friends and
family
...
Even so, my friends should not waste their time trying to guess
identities, nor should the reader waste his or her time trying to
identify particular news stories
...
Moreover,
every character described could be of any race (and almost any
nationality), and every scene could be set in almost any country
...
For example, I have dedicated two
scenes to masturbation, one to male (Scene 12) and one to
female (Scene 22)
...
Elsewhere, scenes of sexual behaviour
often involve characters masturbating or having masturbated,
without my interpreting their behaviour then and there
...
In writing my interpretations, I have tried not to lapse into the
academic style that is my natural bent
...
I have also avoided
using the words 'probably' and 'possibly' on many occasions
when, strictly speaking, they were needed
...
Not all of my fellow academics will agree with my interpretation
or even with the details of what is going on between men and
women, between sperm and the female tract, between sperm and
the egg, or between sperm themselves
...
So be it
...
Apart from this self-imposed
starting point, my primary consideration thereafter is that the story
should be consistent and interesting
...
To have done so would
have made the book confusing, over-long, even dull
...
Having argued the case there, I feel free here
to tell the story as simply and as entertainingly as I can manage
...
Many of the scenes and
details I describe could, in another context, be considered
pornographic
...
I have a further problem
...
In my view it is most important that I do not strike
any moral stances
...
The
danger is that many people will interpret my lack of criticism of
certain forms of behaviour as meaning that I condone or
encourage
that
behaviour
...
This book could never have been written had it not been for my
scientific collaboration with Mark Bellis
...
For seven years, from 1987 until 1994, we discussed, investigated
and argued about every aspect of human sexuality
...
Although Mark will not agree with all of the ideas I present here,
some of which have emerged since he left Manchester University
to start his important work on the epidemiology of AIDS and other
sexually transmitted diseases, most of the ideas presented here
are as much his as mine
...
Naturally,
he is also totally free of blame for my fictional representations
...
Before they offered their support, I had no
grounds for thinking I could write a book such as this, previously
having written only academic texts
...
By far my biggest thanks must go to my partner, Elizabeth
Oram, who has encouraged and helped me at every step of the
way
...
The book
was conceived over breakfast one Saturday in October 1994,
three months to the day after the conception of our child
...
xvii
PREFACE
As Liz and the book grew, she applied her considerable writing
and editorial skills to prevent me from making many of the
mistakes that would have exposed me as the novice I am in the
popular genre
...
If the final
results are interesting and explicit — but still tasteful — they owe
much to her restraint and advice
...
If the book still contains
elements of pornography or pomposity, the fault lies not with her
advice but with my stubbornness and reluctance to kill words that I
conceived with such difficulty
...
In order to
free time for me to finish the manuscript she allowed me to shirk
many of my paternal and household responsibilities
...
Moreover, she read and reread successive
drafts of each scene and interpretation whenever I asked, even
late at night
...
Her final effort was superhuman! When I failed to complete the
manuscript by the expected delivery date of our baby, she hung on
and refused to give birth for a further ten days
...
xviii
CHAPTER ONE
The
Generation Game
SCENE 1
Great Uncle Who?
The faces in the creased brown photograph stared impassively at
the woman, their gazes spanning the hundred years between them
...
The faces belonged to three young
children, all long dead, frozen in time by some ancient camera at
a moment early in their lives
...
The two
boys at either end were aged about ten and two, the pretty girl in
the middle about five
...
The photograph showed her great-grandmother with her two
brothers
...
The resemblance between them as children was
uncanny
...
The woman looked at the photograph a little longer, then asked
her grandmother to tell her the story of their family 'just
1
THE GENERATION GAME
SPERM WARS
one more time'
...
This family
tree was her pride and joy and she loved showing it and the
photographs to her many grandchildren
...
She
knew that one of the boys in the photograph had not lived long
enough to have children
...
She had been a pretty child who had grown into a
beautiful young woman, chased by all the young men in the
village
...
The baby was her
grandmother, the teller of the story
...
Everything happened
so quickly that, despite gossip, nobody ever knew for sure that the
baby had been conceived illegitimately
...
All were boys and, unusual for their
generation, all had survived
...
He had not been as lucky as his sister
...
Like his sister, he also had five children
...
The other
survivor, a girl, was infertile and died alone, in her fifties, a few
years after her partner
...
The young woman pored over the family tree with her
grandmother
...
Then suddenly
she noticed something that had never occurred to her before:
2
every single one of the fifty people in her generation traced back
to her great-grandmother, the pretty girl in the picture
...
The young woman bent forward to look at the family tree more
closely
...
The most conspicuous was one of her grandmother's
brothers, the great-uncle whose name she could never remember
but who was reputed to have had a very strangely shaped nose
...
Unable to bend forward any longer,
she straightened up and turned away from the paper and
photographs
...
She
winced, then smiled and held her stomach
...
O
ur personal characteristics depend on our genes — chemical instructions as to how we should develop and function
...
And we inherit more than our 'family face' via these genes: we
also inherit many aspects of our physiology, psychology and
behaviour, including much of our sexual behaviour
...
Our approach is simple
...
Our
measure of success will be the number of descendants people
achieve — because this is what shapes future generations
...
They also become
dominated by those people's characteristics
...
For all
she knew, her generation was also dominated by a 'family
3
SPERM WARS
sexuality', passed on to so many people by the dynasty founders,
her great-grandparents
...
Whatever his sexual strategy might
have been, it was unsuccessful and he left no descendants to
inherit that strategy
...
The only factor to shape our characteristics is who in
the past had children (and how many) and who did not
...
But if it hadn't, the younger woman and her fifty or so family
contemporaries would not have lived
...
Each generation has its winners, like
the pretty girl in the picture, and each has its losers, like her two
brothers and great-uncle
...
The generation game has not ended
...
In
our own generation, the game is as active and cruel as ever
...
Whether we know it or not, whether we want to or not, and
whether we care or not, we are all programmed to try to win our
generation's game of reproduction — we are all programmed to
pursue reproductive success
...
Inevitably, some of
us will have had more successful ancestors than others, so that
even in our generation there will be some people who have
inherited instructions for potentially better strategies
...
We are about to start investigating
why it is that some people are more successful than others in life's
generation game
...
As they drift around their
rooms, attending to the minutiae of life, they are naked
...
They are no
longer excited by simply being naked in each other's presence
...
As it is
Saturday night, they know they will have sex before they go to
sleep
...
It is a week since they had sex — last Saturday, in fact
...
In those early days they would have ridiculed
the possibility of intercourse only once in a whole Week
...
Until, that
is, two months ago when they had given up tiling contraception
...
They hadn't
yet contemplated the earnest nightly conception campaigns that
some of their thirty-something friends had delighted in
5
SPERM WARS
describing to them
...
They had both found
mild sexual excitement in the possibility of conception and for a
while their rate had returned to three or four times a week
...
A couple of separate nights
out and, if they were honest, an unexplained coolness between
them had conspired against their ever quite getting round to sex
...
Even now, as they eventually got into bed, they
could both still feel the legacy of the week's coolness
...
Once started, however,
they quickly slipped into their usual routine
...
Then they kiss deeply
...
After a
while, he moves down and sucks her nipples
...
Tonight, as is often the
case, she cannot concentrate and her mind keeps slipping back to
conversations with her sister earlier in the day
...
He thinks she is ready
...
She
moves her hand, finds his penis and gently squeezes, in part to
see how ready he is but primarily to delay his moving into
position
...
He pauses to savour the
sensation and responds with half-hearted massage of her genitals
...
He moves his hand and begins to shift his body into
the missionary position
...
She leaves her hand between them for a few seconds to
stop him pushing too hard, too soon (she is still nowhere near
moist
enough)
...
It takes a while before his gentle
working backwards and forwards makes her lubricants really
start to flow and his penis is able to enter fully
...
But once
she is lubricated and he begins the routine of thrusting, her mind
drifts back to her sister
...
Despite her
abstractedness, years of practice allow her to time the quiet
noises in her throat to the man's thrusts
...
Now, in her mind, it is him on top of her
...
Hut
just as her fantasy begins to take shape and she feels she might
even come, her partner makes a particularly awkward thrust
...
The moment has gone, and the next second
she realises he is ejaculating
...
Impatient for him to remove his now dead weight, she
coughs, gently
...
Both feel
guilty at not having made more effort for their partner's sake and
both feel depressed
...
F
or most people, the commonest situation in which they have
sexual intercourse is at home and with a long-term partner
...
This chapter consists of Scenes 2 to 5, each of which
explores one or more facets of intercourse within a long-term
7
SPERM WARS
relationship
...
We stay with them
and follow their routine sex until the woman conceives and we
have unravelled the full story behind her conception
...
Many of
these will be well known to readers, but I guarantee a few
surprises
...
Anyone who has ever lived in a sexual relationship for a few
years should find familiar elements in the scene we have just
witnessed
...
Here we meet a
couple who have had penetrative sex perhaps five hundred
times in the four years of their relationship
...
Of course, they have been
using contraceptives, but from time to time they will have been
careless and the woman could have become pregnant, but she
didn't
...
Clearly, they have not repeated this particular act five
hundred times in order to have children
...
The average man and woman, no matter whether they
live in the bush of the Kalahari desert or in a multi-bedroomed
executive house, will have penetrative sex about two to three
thousand times in their lifetime
...
This works out at about five hundred inseminations to produce
each child, though the precise figure is unimportant
...
From the viewpoint of reproductive success, people do not have
routine sex primarily to produce children
...
In fact, compared
8
ROUTINE SEX
to other primates, we are probably fairly average in terms of the
number of inseminations per offspring
...
Outside of primates, the lion, which takes three
thousand inseminations to produce another lion, also beats us
fairly easily
...
So why do we,
and all these other animals, mate so often if not to procreate?
How does routine sex help both men and women in their pursuit
of reproductive success?
The explanation usually trotted out is that we (and presumably, therefore, all of these other animals) have sex because we
enjoy it, because it brings pleasure
...
Of course, in those first few
weeks of their relationship when they were having sex every
day, the penetration, the contact and even the prospect of just
being naked together was exciting to both of them
...
But recently, our couple have experienced such
pleasure less often
...
The woman certainly didn't
...
She had experienced far more sexual excitement
from simply flirting with another man the previous Wednesday
than she did from full sex with her partner this Saturday
...
He had a brief pleasurable sensation in the seconds
before ejaculation, but almost immediately afterwards sank into
a guilt-ridden depression
...
So why did this couple have sex this particular Saturday
night, and why will they do it again and again over the weeks,
months and even years to come?
In its most general sense, the explanation for routine sex is
tautological
...
Why? Because routine sex can actually make a
difference to the number and quality of children, grandchildren,
great-grandchildren and so on that men and women might have
...
Moreover, it does so
without the conscious brain knowing and, most often, without
it actually caring
...
In this case, what men's bodies are trying
to do is maintain a population of sperm inside their partner
...
Some female primates, such as chimpanzees and baboons,
actually advertise when they are most fertile each month by
developing large and conspicuous red, crusty swellings around
the anus and vulva and sometimes red skin on the chest as well
...
Often he gives up doing
other things, like feeding, just so that he can keep a close eye
on her
...
Why? Well,
if the male doesn't know when the female is most fertile, he
can't guard her so intensively
...
So, by hiding her fertility, a female
primate gives herself much more control over when and by
whom she conceives
...
This works for women just as well as it does for gibbons
...
On the one hand, her
body creates an environment in which conception is relatively
easy but only if the timing is absolutely right
...
The details of this
strategy for confusion are fascinating
...
Secondly, sperm seem to need about two days inside
the female to reach peak fertility
...
What all this means is that for a
man to have any chance of fertilising a woman, he has to
inseminate her at least once during the period from five days
before she ovulates to about twelve hours afterwards
...
A
day or so either side of this optimum time and his chances
decrease dramatically
...
That way, his sperm would reach peak
fertility two days later on day 14 of her cycle
...
However, the woman's body easily outsmarts such
simple arithmetic: a predictable menstrual cycle is a rarity
rather than the norm, and only occasionally does a woman
ovulate on day 14
...
The total length of the menstrual cycle, from the beginning
of one period to the beginning of the next, can be anything from
about fourteen to forty-two days
...
Moreover, the part of the cycle that varies most is
the part that would be most useful to the male — the number of
days from the beginning of menstruation to ovulation
...
Neither the man nor the woman can predict the most
fertile day of her cycle simply by counting forward from the
beginning of her previous period
...
Even without these
attributes, a woman would still give the game away if she
showed an interest in intercourse only when she was most
fertile
...
First, her body is
prepared to allow her partner to inseminate her at any time
during her menstrual cycle, both when fertile and when
infertile
...
If she does show a day or two of sexual interest when
she is most fertile, it is well hidden amongst decoy phases of
interest interspersed with genuine periods of coolness
...
It is no accident that a
woman is not naturally conscious of when she is most fertile
...
In the face of such a powerful and effective female strategy,
the man has no chance of being able to predict the best time to
inseminate
...
Hence the advantage of routine sex to him as well as to
her
...
One missed
insemination, however, could be critical, and in Scene 2 it was
...
When he ejaculated inside her this Saturday, it was a week
since he had last done so, and his last sperm would have lost
their fertility on Wednesday
...
She did not conceive, and in two weeks' time her next
period will begin
...
We can predict this with some certainty
because, unlike the number of days from the beginning of one
period to ovulation, the number of days from ovulation to the
beginning of the next period is a fairly predictable fourteen
days, varying only from about thirteen to sixteen
...
However, there is an alternative interpretation — that the
woman's body actually engineered the situation to avoid
conception this month, at least via her partner
...
But this
is not the whole truth
...
First, both women and men are less disposed to have sex
while the woman is menstruating
...
We find the same
reduction in rate of intercourse during menstruation in all
primates that mate throughout the menstrual cycle — even in
those, like marmosets, in which no blood flows to the outside,
This reduction in sexual interest during menstruation should not
be surprising, because menstruation is a time of slightly greater
risk of infection to both males and females if they have
penetrative sex
...
The difference can beg
detected statistically, but is too slight to be noticeable to either
the man or the woman
...
Women using reliable contraceptives, including the pill, show
the same slight changes in behaviour
...
The subtle change in a female's willingness to have
sex with her partner at different stages of her cycle is hormonal,
not cerebral
...
Another way is to get rid of
some or all of his sperm
...
My hope, however, is that
after reading the next scene, that damp patch will never seem
the same again
...
She opened her eyes and
looked at the luminous red numbers on her bedside clock
...
Now she felt the first hint of wetness emerging from
her vagina
...
During half-consciousness, her mind drifted back seven
years to her first semester as a student
...
Within days of meeting they
had sex and thereafter did so whenever the opportunity
presented itself
...
When summer was over and
they had each gone to their separate colleges, they had, for a
few months, continued their relationship, taking it in turns at
weekends to visit each other in their tiny flats
...
Invariably, they would stay in bed until the very
last moment
...
Whenever she
was returning from visiting him she could guarantee that no
sooner would she have just settled comfortably in her seat than
she would begin to feel the fruits of their intercourse seeping
out on to her knickers
...
15
SPERM WARS
Now, seven years later, lying in bed, she stirred into
wakefulness
...
As she stood up to flush the cistern she looked down
into the bowl
...
It crossed her sleepy mind as she went back
to bed that maybe she hadn't yet conceived because she had a
problem retaining sperm
...
Tonight, at least, the sheet had remained dry
...
To most people it is an irritation and to some even a
worry, a threat to their fertility
...
The main
part is the seminal fluid introduced by the man, almost all of
which is ejected from the vagina
...
There are also cells from the
inside of the vagina, dislodged by the thrusting of the penis
...
From the human perspective,
it is difficult to see the flowback as anything other; than a
negative, passive event
...
Yet that is just what I want to try to do
...
One of my favourite photographs of recent years is of a
family of zebra: a stallion, a mare and a young foal
...
The foal is looking the other
way, seemingly embarrassed to watch, as its mother ejects from
her
T
16
ROUTINE SEX
vagina a dramatic gush of flowback
...
Women are not as blatant as female zebra,
and it might seem that a dribble down the leg can hardly
compare with the zebra's vigorous response
...
The woman in Scene 3 noticed white globules in the toilet
after she had urinated
...
You can't do this on a
toilet, so instead try urinating into an empty bath
...
Separate your pubic hairs and vulval lips so that the urine will
squirt forward
...
Wait until you can feel
that the flowback is gathering, then urinate
...
(If you are male, see if you can persuade
your partner to let you watch her eject the flowback
...
Women and zebra are not the only two female animals able
to do this
...
How do females do it? Before I can explain what happens in
humans, I need to do two things
...
Secondly, I need to describe what happens to the ejaculate in
that critical first half-hour or so after insemination
...
Imagine that you are a doctor and that you are just about to
give the woman on the bed in front of you an internal
examination
...
First, you part any pubic
17
SPERM WARS
hair that is in the way and separate the main lips so that you
can see the entrance to her vagina
...
If your eyesight is good and you separate the
vulval lips well enough you will see, opening into the top of
the vestibule, the urethra through which she urinates
...
First, note
that the vagina is in contact with your fingers all the way
round
...
And not only is the vagina not a tunnel, it is not even
a throughway
...
It is
also quite wrong to imagine that dead-eye dicks can actually
shoot their ejaculate, through the cervix straight into the womb
...
Of course, there is an exit into the womb, but it is not
straight ahead; to find that exit requires virtually a right-angled
turn
...
The womb,
which is pear-shaped, is balanced on top of the far end of the
vagina, probably just beyond your fingertips
...
If
your fingers are long enough — many aren't — their tips can
feel the cervix sticking through the vaginal roof
...
It is also through
this channel that, in a phenomenal feat of engineering and
elasticity, a baby must pass on its way out
...
The channel through the cervix is not empty
...
This
18
ROUTINE SEX
is the woman's main contribution to the flowback and it has a
starring role in this book
...
She has
complex requirements of her cervical mucus
...
On the other hand, she needs it to allow passage to
sperm on their way in and to her menstrual flow on its way out
...
Most people think of mucus rather contemptuously as a messy,
amorphous substance, probably because their main contact is
with the mucus that comes out of their noses
...
It is wonderful stuff with an immaculate structure
and is absolutely vital to a woman's health, safety — and
sexual power
...
Most of these channels are very narrow, some only the
width of two sperm heads side by side, but they are none the
less the highways through which sperm swim as they migrate
from the vagina to the inner regions of the cervix and beyond
...
After
being secreted, it slowly flows in glacier-like fashion down
through the cervix, eventually dripping into the vagina
...
Bacterial and other invaders are
carried out of the cervix back into the vagina before they can
take hold
...
During menstruation, the menstrual flow simply
adds to the mucus flow
...
19
SPERM WARS
ROUTINE SEX
The demands that women make on their cervical mucus at
particularly great because of their strategy of copulating where
they would seem to have little use for sperm
...
Post-menopausal
women also copulate to confuse men, often continuing to be
sexually active for many years after their last period
...
In fact, women who are apparently postmenopausal can occasionally conceive — at least up to the age
of fifty-seven and reportedly up to the age of seventy (Scene
34)
...
At all times, a woman has to balance the advantages of
letting sperm through and keeping disease organisms out
Clearly, making life easier for sperm makes it easier for disease
organisms too
...
At all times other than during pregnancy, however, ;
sexually active woman may have some use for sperm, and she
then needs to sacrifice some of her defence against disease in
order to allow sperm through
...
any next fertile phase (as we shall first see in Scene 7)
...
At the approach of ovulation, the
advantage of allowing more sperm through her cervix naturally
increases, so she makes things as easy as possible for sperm at
this time
...
Throughout a woman's many and long infertile phases,
cervical mucus is made difficult to penetrate
...
Even those that can
penetrate do so more slowly
...
In contrast, during her short fertile phases, the mucus
changes: it becomes much more liquid and stretchy and the
channels become bigger
...
The only major problem faced by invading sperm during a
Woman's fertile phases is that not all channels are clear of the
blockages referred to earlier
...
This way she flushes out cells, bacteria and
other debris
...
Although the benefit of these changes in the cervical mucus
is clear, they could create a problem
...
Her body overcomes this threat
by making the increase in mucus secretion more erratic and
more spread out than would be necessary just to aid the
passage of sperm through her cervix
...
Even during these
phases, though, she gains some benefit from allowing sperm
passage, because sperm allowed through during a sub-fertile
phase can influence the sperm present at the beginning of
20
21
SPERM WARS
ROUTINE SEX
more days afterwards
...
So, cervical mucus is an adequate sperm filter in its own right
...
The more channels she blocks, the stronger the filter
...
One is the blood, tissue and other debris from
menstruation
...
4)
...
These blocks may last for several days
but are eventually lost when they are carried inexorably by the
cervical glacier of mucus into the vagina
...
Even once it is in the vagina, the mucus's job is not finished
...
Some exits, contributing to the 'wetness' a woman feels on her
vaginal lips
...
When she
eventually becomes aroused during foreplay, her vaginal walls
begin to 'sweat'
...
But when it
mixes with the film of old cervical mucus, the result is a very
effective lubricant
...
We now have all the information necessary to follow the
events that take place from first penetration of the vagina by a
penis to the production of the flowback
...
What I am about to
describe was first filmed by strapping a fibre-optic endoscope to
the underside of a man's penis just before he and his partner had
sex
...
You are having intercourse in the
missionary position and your erect penis (if you are male) Or your
partner's (if you are female) has a camera on its tip
...
As the penis pushes forward into the vagina for the first time,
the vagina walls part and, when the penis is fully in, you can see
the blind end of the vagina some distance ahead
...
At the
moment, with its central, dimple-like opening, it looks like a pink
sea anemone shorn of its tentacles
...
If you watch the screen when thrusting begins, you will see that
each time the penis pulls back the vagina walls dose behind it
...
Whenever the
penis is fully inserted, you can see the end wall of the vagina and
the protruding cervix
...
The far end of the vagina becomes more like a
chamber, slowly filling with air and becoming slippery with
mucus
...
Gradually it looks less and less like a
sea anemone and more and more like a pink, rather broad,
elephant's trunk
...
Its opening
points down to the vaginal floor and cannot really be seen
...
When the penis ejaculates, the spurts of
semen hit the front wall of the cervix and run down on to the floor
of the vagina, forming a pool at the bottom of the chamber
...
After a minute or so, with ejaculation complete, the penis
begins to shrink
...
With the
shrinking of the penis, we lose our camera-bearer and our TV
screen goes dark
...
The first thing that happens — and we might almost have seen
this on our TV screen just before the penis shrank too far down the
vagina — is that the seminal pool coagulates, becoming slightly
less watery and slightly more jelly-like
...
Their destination is the cervical channel, which they can enter
only by passing through the interface which forms between the
cervical mucus and the semen
...
The trunk is
full of mucus
...
Instead,
something much more structured takes place
...
'Fingers' of semen enter some of the
larger channels in the cervical mucus, and grow
...
Sperm frantically swim
into these fingers, and from there stream into the narrower
channels of the mucus, leaving the seminal fluid behind
...
After a few minutes dipped into the seminal pool, the cervical
trunk begins to shrink back to the roof of the vagina,
metamorphosing once more from elephant's trunk to sea
anemone
...
Once the cervix has
withdrawn, those sperm still in the pool are condemned to
ejection and an early death
...
Soon, imperceptible and unconscious muscular
24
ROUTINE SEX
ripples begin to massage the mixture of old semen, mucus, sperm
and other cells down the vagina
...
On average, this happens about half an hour after
ejaculation, but can occur as soon as ten minutes or as long as two
hours
...
Once the flowback
has collected in the vestibule, however, any one of these activities,
or even a cough or sneeze, will rid her of the unwanted material
...
On average, the flowback contains about half of the sperm that
have been introduced — sometimes more, sometimes less
...
Quite often (about one in ten occasions) the filler is so
severe that she ejects almost all of the inseminate; more rarely, her
filter is so weak that she keeps nearly all
...
To a large extent, it is under the control of her body — and not
just her cervical filter
...
How
and why, we shall see later
...
But not
just yet
...
The coolness of the woman's fertile week evaporated
...
After making
up on the Saturday night, they had sex twice on the Sunday, once
in the morning when they first woke and again in the afternoon at
about three o'clock
...
He
had an impressive erection but, despite ten minutes of intermittent
thrusting and encouragement, he eventually had to accept that he
wasn't going to ejaculate
...
Wednesday night was the woman's weekly night out with
girlfriends; Thursday night the man's weekly night out 'with the
boys'
...
On Friday
night, however, they had sex and did so again on both Saturday
and Sunday
...
Then they
abstained until the following Saturday, by which time her
menstrual bleeding had finished
...
In the four weeks we have been following this
couple, they have had penetrative sex ten times and the woman
has been inseminated nine times
...
26
ROUTINE SEX
Men get a fairly rough deal in this book
...
But this at first sight uninspiring scene does give us an
opportunity to watch men doing something fairly impressive
...
Each time he has intercourse during routine sex, he introduces no
more sperm than are needed to 'top up' his partner
...
A small proportion of these sperm, the vanguard, swim straight
through her cervix into the womb
...
As with
the vagina, the walls press closely together, so there is little space
inside
...
At the top of the womb on each
side (where horns would be if the pear shape of the womb were a
bull's face) is the opening to a narrow tube, the oviduct
...
Once out of the womb, the sperm swim a
short distance along an oviduct until they reach a rest area
...
Back in the cervical mucus, another set of sperm swim along
more diagonal channels and stream into tiny crypts in the wall of
the cervix
...
Over the next four to five
days they will gradually wake up and re-enter the cervical
channel
...
The final set of sperm simply stay in the cervical mucus
...
Eventually they die
— or are killed
...
As they advance
through the cervical mucus, these killer cells engulf and digest live
and dead sperm alike
...
Multitudinous
though the white cells may be, they do not pursue sperm into the
cervical crypts
...
Of these, the woman will eject about 150 million in the
flowback
...
In all, about twenty thousand
sperm from each inseminate eventually pass through the oviducts
...
It might seem exceedingly wasteful to introduce three hundred
million sperm when only about a million enter reservoirs
...
As far as topping up the woman is concerned,
the important point is that the size of the reservoirs depends on
how many sperm the man introduces
...
From every insemination, a man and woman contrive between
them to produce a steady passage of fresh sperm through each
oviduct over a period of about five days
...
This is where topping up comes in
...
If he injects more sperm than are needed, they
will be wasted; the reservoirs will overflow and even more
sperm will simply hang around in the cervical mucus and fall
prey to the female's white cells
...
On the other hand, if the man
doesn't fill the reservoirs enough, too few sperm will arrive in
the oviduct or the reservoirs will dry up prematurely
...
This he seems to do with remarkable precision
...
If more than a week has passed since the man last
inseminated his partner, her reservoirs will be empty and he
will introduce a full load of sperm, say four hundred million
...
If
the gap is only three days, he will introduce about two
hundred million, and half a million will top up the half-empty
reservoirs
...
Even after half an hour, he may find it difficult
to ejaculate, like the man in our scene
...
His partner's reservoirs are full
and any sperm ejaculated will simply be wasted
...
In that time, about three
thousand million sperm will have passed from one to the
other
...
So men's bodies inject only the number of sperm needed to
top up their partner
...
29
SPERM WARS
ROUTINE SEX
Imagine that you are a doctor, sitting on a chair, and a naked
man is standing in front of you waiting to be examined
...
Note his navel, his pubic hair, and the penis
hanging down, slightly askew, in front of the scrotal sac containing
his pair of testes
...
The rather swollen knob at the end of the penis is called the glans
and, right in front of you, is the vertical, slit-like opening of the
urethra
...
Fix
the line of his urethra in your mind
...
Fix your eyes at the top of his pubic hair and
imagine you can see inside to where the urethra and the bladder
join
...
These tubes run all the way down to the testes and
each one contains, in effect, a column of sperm
...
This is the prostate gland, which produces the bulk of the
seminal fluid
...
Inside, cells are multiplying, growing and finally maturing into
sperm
...
They are in the sperm tube, but they are still in, or
rather on the surface of, the testis
...
Whereas the vas deferens is more or less straight, the
epididymis is incredibly zigzag and convoluted
...
Each time the man ejaculates some
of his sperm, the rest shunt forward
...
Very approximately, it takes two
months for a sperm to develop and travel from deep
inside the testis and join this queue
...
There is a little queue-jumping as
some young sperm from the back of the queue are shunted ahead
of older sperm at the front, but this need not concern us here
...
While he
was standing in front of you he had no sperm in his urethra, but two
sperm tubes containing in total up to about a thousand million
sperm
...
Eventually, though, sperm will be shunted out of each sperm tube
and into the urethra
...
The man's urethra is now loaded, ready to fire
...
He will also know that ejaculation is imminent
...
When he finally ejaculates, seminal fluid pours from his prostate
into his urethra
...
Now, it is not difficult to understand how the man's body controls
the number of sperm he ejaculates
...
Even after loading, his body can change its mind
...
Any sperm and seminal fluid left in his urethra after ejaculation can
be flushed out at the next urination
...
Given such a link, it is not
31
SPERM WARS
ROUTINE SEX
difficult to see how his body can top up his partner so accurately
...
In the midst of thrusting and at the point of
loading his urethra, he does not ask himself consciously, 'Is this a
hundred-million occasion or a four-hundred-million?' His
subconscious mind and body have done this for him
...
This leaves his conscious mind free to
concentrate on his thrusting — and the woman
...
Slowly he had begun to enjoy himself
...
She had had to work quite
hard but eventually he had ejaculated
...
Eventually, they had reverted to their usual missionary routine
...
She had ovulated Wilier that
evening and her egg was just reaching the place in her left oviduct
where fertilisation would occur
...
They began to burrow through the outer layers of the egg
...
The prize of fertilisation went to the third sperm, which had a
clear run, unhindered by any others
...
The egg had been fertilised by the first
sperm to get through
...
In twenty days' time, an overdue period would prompt her to
carry out a pregnancy test
...
The identity of the father, however, would
never be known
...
Scene 5
Conception
It is Friday night and twenty-one days have passed since the
beginning of her last period — bleeding that signalled a second!
month without conception
...
They were calmed, however, both by the
experiences of friends and by the discovery that a couple must
have unprotected sex for a whole year before they qualify for
medical investigation
...
Now, they have just had
sex and are drifting off into post-coital sleep
...
In the past two weeks, their sex life had more or less followed
the routine they had established since giving up contraception
...
This week, though, had been
slightly different
...
Then, she had sat astride him and manhandled
his penis into her vagina
...
In previous scenes, we have followed sperm from their earliest
life in the testes to the moment they are shot into the woman's
vagina
...
There we left them, waiting for the final stage of their
journey
...
One
by one, they wake up and swim further along the oviduct
...
But usually no egg is present, and the
sperm simply pass through and eventually die
...
Its tail starts to beat more vigorously and, once it
arrives, it often swims frantically in circles or figures of eight
...
After a while, they leave the zone, one by
one
...
Having left the fertilisation zone, each sperm
then travels the remaining distance up the oviduct until eventually
it swims out into the woman's body cavity — which it can easily
manage because the end of her oviduct gapes open, its opening
surrounded by finger-like projections
...
A short distance away from the end of each oviduct, suspended
like a relatively huge planet next to a black hole, is an ovary
...
Like a waiting hand, the
finger-like projections funnel the egg into the tube
...
To achieve fertilisation, a sperm has to do more than simply
encounter an egg in the fertilisation zone, because the egg arrives
in that zone surrounded by three lines of defence — a fortress that
has to be breached by the sperm before the egg will yield
...
Beneath
the cumulus is another relatively thick, smooth
34
ROUTINE SEX
layer, the zona, which is the outer membrane of the egg itself
...
Using its head, the sperm hacks its way through the cumulus
cells
...
With this
chemical attachment serving as an initial purchase, the sperm
again uses its head to cut a way through, this time employing a
pointed spike that has been exposed at the tip of its head
...
Finally,
if this sperm is the first to get through the zona, cross the
underlying space and touch the vitelline membrane, it is engulfed
by the egg in a welcoming embrace
...
If you are a human sperm, there
is no prize for coming second
...
This then travels to fuse with
the similar heart of the egg
...
A new person has been conceived, with
characteristics that are a subtle mixture of his or her two parents
...
After all, the child will spend nine months developing inside her
...
To see what happened, and to work out who
is the father, we need first to go back ten days
...
35
SPERM WARS
CHAPTER THREE
Sperm Wars
SCENE 6
A Chance Affair
The woman was out on her Wednesday night ritual with eight of
her girlfriends
...
About a dozen of them were involved, but not everybody went out
every week
...
Occasionally, a man or two
would move in and try to prise somebody away from the group
...
Even though most of them had a male
partner at home, the group enjoyed an unspoken sisterly
complicity
...
Quite by chance, who should walk
into the bar but the man she had met during her last schoolgirl
summer — the one who, for a few months, had been her weekend
sexual partner during her first term as a student
...
She learned that he now worked at the other end of the
country but was in town for a week on business, staying in a
nearby hotel
...
He still oozed masculinity, promiscuity — and unreliability
...
At that vulnerable stage in her life she had needed
someone she could rely on
...
All the same, HI the
end of the evening she rejoined her group
...
Over lunch, they arranged to
meet for a meal that evening
...
As far as she was concerned, the evening
would be totally innocent and therefore not worth mentioning
anyway
...
All through the evening, it was obvious he was expecting them
to end up in bed back at his hotel
...
But the thought of infidelity never seriously crossed her
mind
...
As a result, she had long cool phases inwards him throughout the
evening
...
On the
return journey to her home they simply exchanged pleasantries
...
She surprised herself
when a sudden feeling of warmth, nostalgia and maybe guilt
prompted her to kiss him briefly on the cheek
...
Somewhat flustered by this momentary surge of passion, she
got quickly out of the car, wished him a good life, and went
inside
...
As he fell into a drunken sleep and began
a night of snoring, her thoughts and dreams raced around with the
excitement
of
the
evening
...
All the next day, at work, she couldn't believe how easy it had
all been
...
The
man, their evening, their conversation and their kiss, as well as
memories of their earlier sex life when she was still a teenager,
were at the back of her mind continually as she worked
...
Her knickers were damp virtually all day and on one
visit to the toilet she masturbated
...
On Saturday night she
more or less insisted that he gave her an orgasm before entering
her
...
She
never expected to and on the occasions when she really wanted
an orgasm she made sure it was during foreplay
...
During each orgasm over the weekend, even during
foreplay, the fantasy in her mind was not of her partner (it never
was these days!) but of a real or imaginary scene from the past
with her ex-boyfriend
...
At no point, however, did she ever contemplate
doing anything more dangerous than fantasise about illicit sex
...
Her
ex-boyfriend was leaving on Thursday and she might never see
him again
...
Maybe she should see
him just one more time
...
Instead of
going out with her friends on Wednesday night, she could spend
the evening with him
...
Easy
...
On Tuesday
38
SPERM WARS
she found the courage to phone just once, but got no answer
...
On
Wednesday morning, her mood changed from fear and guilt to
one of calm confidence
...
After
all, their previous evening together had been innocent enough —
there was no need to feel guilty or nervous
...
At her third attempt, he answered his phone
...
She agreed, and spent the rest of the day
in a state of high excitement
...
She told her partner, as she left him at
seven o'clock, that she felt like going on to a club and so might
be late
...
She was nervous as she arrived at the hotel and the first few
minutes of conversation were very awkward
...
The last six years apart had never
happened
...
After another drink she sat with her
knees touching his, and as the conversation flowed touched him
frequently on his leg or arm with her open hand
...
After eating, he 'just had to go up to
his room' to get a photograph to show her
...
He never did show her the photograph
...
Almost before she could take a breath they were naked
on the floor and he was inside her, ejaculating
...
He did not offer to use a condom or to withdraw, and
39
SPERM WARS
SPERM WARS
it never crossed her mind to ask
...
Penetration had been quick and easy and ejaculation
had been swift
...
He promised that if they got off the floor and into bed he
would make it up to her
...
For half an hour he
caressed and played with her body with an understanding of her
womanhood that her partner had never shown
...
Then they
began all over again
...
Thrusting was slow and long
...
They settled into another post-coital embrace, but their
tranquillity did not last for long
...
It was getting late
Quickly, her fear became all-consuming
...
He urged her to stay the night — to phone her partner and give
some excuse for not going home
...
She just had to get home
...
Then she refused to return
and began to get dressed
...
She even became irritable with him and their parting was an
awkward affair
...
But she did not notice
...
Quietly, so as not to wake her partner, she undressed, washed
herself thoroughly, then got into bed
...
When he was erect, even before he was fully
awake, she sat astride him, inserted his penis, and after a while
managed to get him to ejaculate inside her
...
The next day, her ex-boyfriend left for home
...
The day after that she ovulated and
conceived
...
By the time she discovered her
pregnancy, her night of infidelity had become a distant memory
...
She gradually convinced herself that the
baby was in fact her partner's
...
Nine months later she was to have a daughter
...
As the elder daughter grew she came to look
more and more like her mother
...
However, the differences between them
seemed no greater than between many brothers and sisters
...
Even
she, of course, never knew for certain what happened inside her
body over those few critical days
...
40
41
T
he two scenes (6 and 7) in this short chapter explore first
the promotion and then the process of sperm warfare
...
Scene 7 is not really a scene at all
...
We have just witnessed a textbook scene of infidelity
...
We should note in
passing the unreliable, promiscuous masculinity of the woman's
ex-boyfriend and that his child showed certain more positive
characteristics than the children the woman had with her partner
...
We will discuss later the
significance of these elements
...
Clearly,
the outcome had a major impact on the reproductive success of
all three characters in the scene
...
The same is not true
for infidelity
...
Moreover, she is much less likely to use or insist on the man
using contraception on such occasions
...
We can see a hint of how this might occur,
not only in the scene we have just witnessed, but also in the first
scene involving this couple
...
She was cool towards her partner
during her fertile period and we suggested that her lack of
conception was a success for her body, not a failure by the
couple
...
To achieve this, it had generated a
feeling of coolness towards him for the duration of her fertile
period
...
She
had two opportunities to be unfaithful, first on the Thursday,
42
SPERM WARS
then on the following Wednesday
...
The Thursday evening had been instigated by
her ex-boyfriend and the woman was in an infertile phase of her
cycle
...
Her coolness that evening had kept him at arm's length, even
though he was manifestly hoping for sex
...
As she moved into her
fertile phase on the Monday, the idea of seeing her ex-boyfriend
began to appeal to her
...
Unknown to
everyone, including herself, this was the day that insemination
was most likely to lead to conception
...
Most
of the leading suggestions still came from the man, but whereas
the week before she had made it clear she was not interested, this
time she readily cooperated
...
She accepted
penetration and ejaculation with the minimum of foreplay, and
ignored the question of contraception completely
...
In reality it was simply that, two days in advance of
ovulation, her body was eager to collect this man's sperm
...
Then, by far the most important thing was
to get back to her partner
...
In part, the reasoning will also have been in her conscious
mind, though she will have given herself slightly different
explanations
...
It was vital to this strategy,
therefore, that any infidelity should not be discovered
43
SPERM WARS
Her body generated a fear of discovery and a sense of panic, but
needed to recruit her conscious mind to work out the finer details
of timing and story-telling
...
Surveys suggest that one-off infidelities such as this are rarely
discovered, and even longer-term infidelities have only a fiftyfifty chance of discovery
...
There is one further stage in her body's strategy which her
conscious mind is most unlikely to fathom
...
Consciously,
she will have seen this as helping to avoid detection
...
What her conscious mind will not realise, though, is that having
collected sperm from her ex-boyfriend, her body is now very
keen also to collect sperm from her partner
...
The one thing it doesn't
know is how their ejaculates compare
...
The way for her to discover this is
to pit one ejaculate against the other
...
Once a woman's body contains sperm from two or more
different men, those sperm compete for the prize of fertilising
her egg
...
It is indeed a war — a war between
two (or more) armies
...
Sperm warfare is more common and more important than
most people suppose
...
In other
words, one in every twenty-five owe their existence to the fact
that their genetic
SPERM WARS
father's sperm out-competed the sperm from one or more other
men within the reproductive tract of their mother
...
Every one of us, therefore, is the
person we are today because one of our recent ancestors
produced an ejaculate competitive enough to win a sperm war
...
Occasionally, however, a woman produces two eggs at the same
time and gives birth to fraternal twins
...
There are several remarkable cases on record — most
obvious when the two rivals in sperm warfare are of different
races — in which fraternal twins have different fathers
...
Three sperm arrived at the egg
simultaneously
...
If we
move back down her oviduct to the collection of sperm waiting
quietly in the rest area for their turn to swim up the oviduct, we
find that nine out of every ten are also from the lover
...
We are
back to routine sex
...
Moreover, the level of preparation
depends on the risk of war
...
His body does this very simply by registering how much time he
has spent with the woman he is about to inseminate since they
last had sex
...
Crude though this strategy might seem, it does work
...
If he spends more than 80 per cent of his time with
her, there is virtually no chance of her being unfaithful
...
In other words, as far as the man's body is
concerned, if he has spent less time with his partner since they
last had sex, there is a greater chance that when he inseminates
her her body will already contain sperm from another man
...
And this is just what
he does
...
In
the scene of infidelity we have just witnessed, the woman
returned home on the Wednesday night and had sex with her
partner
...
The average top-up for such a gap is
about three hundred million sperm
...
So the average top-up of
about three hundred million is about right, and that's the number
of sperm his body should have loaded and then ejaculated
...
On the other hand, if one or other of them had been away
from early Monday morning to late Wednesday night, the risk of
her infidelity would have been greater and he would have
injected about five hundred million
...
It
was the first time he had inseminated this woman for over six
years
...
His body judged, correctly of course, that
her body had a very high chance of containing sperm from
another man, and will have responded by loading and ejaculating
six hundred million
...
As far as 'Infidelity Wednesday' is
concerned, sperm wars began with the lover putting a sperm army
into the woman's tract that was twice the size of her partner's
...
By the time the war was coming to its climax and
the prize of fertilisation was nearly ready to be claimed, however,
the lover had a ninefold advantage
...
) What had
happened during sperm warfare to shift the odds even further in
the lover's favour? The first step in finding out is to meet and
appreciate the soldiers themselves — the sperm
...
The head is paddleshaped, oval in outline but flattened and wearing a cap
...
Inside the head, densely folded, is
the package of DNA, the genes that a fertile sperm will deliver to
the heart of the egg
...
These sleek individuals travel effortlessly through the female's
body fluids, pushed forward by elegant waves whipping in slow
motion down the length of their tail
...
A
sperm army is a much more motley collection of characters than
most people expect
...
Yet others, the pin-heads, have a head that is
so small that there is no room to carry the genetic package of
DNA
...
Some
sperm, the real monster troops, have two, three or, very
occasionally, four heads
...
Some
47
SPERM WARS
sperm have short tails, some have tails coiled like a spring, and
some have two, three or occasionally four tails
...
Yet others, like hikers carrying a rucksack, have
bags of cell material on their mid-pieces
...
All, however, have an
important part to play in sperm warfare
...
To find out
how, we need to climb into the woman's body with a micro-scope
and follow the war in detail through all its campaigns
...
SCENE 7
A Sperm War
As the woman and her lover sink to the floor, only moments
away from intercourse, her body already contains sperm
...
Most were ejected in
her various flowbacks, but even so some are still inside her
...
A few ineffectual sperm are at the top of her vagina, carried
there by cervical mucus, which has been dripping out of her
cervix and oozing down her vagina all day in anticipation of this
moment of infidelity
...
As these sperm were lost from the future
battleground in her cervix, they were partly replaced higher up
by the last handfuls of sperm from her cervical
SPERM WARS
crypts
...
However, the numbers being lost were greater than the number of
their replacements, and all day her partner's cervical defences had
been slowly declining
...
Instead, they are sluggardly blockers
sperm whose role is to prevent any later sperm from passing
through to her cervical crypts and womb
...
So, too, can two
sperm side by side
...
These blocking sperm are not her partner's only defence inside
her body
...
These sperm look familiar
...
These are killer sperm, roaming around
in search of sperm from other men to destroy
...
If those chemicals are the same as on its own
head, the killer recognises an ally and moves on to continue its
search
...
Many
are now beginning to move slowly, and large numbers are dying
of old age
...
The more active are more recent arrivals from the reservoirs in
her cervical crypts
...
A few more are scattered along her oviducts
...
These killer sperm in her oviducts accompany the last handful of
the partner's fertile sperm, the egg-getters
...
They are both sleek and athletic
48
49
SPERM WARS
in form but, whereas the killers have average-sized heads, the
heads of the egg-getters are slightly larger
...
But ovulation is still two days away, and war is about to begin
...
Her cervix dips into and stays in the pool, and the
vanguard of his army begins to stream into the channels of her
cervical mucus
...
Some are denied passage through mucus
channels by the partner's blocking sperm
...
The invaders pour through in waves
...
The remainder of the egg-getters, some of me killers and
the youngest of the blockers — a few million in all — head for the
cervical crypts
...
The remainder of the killers travel more slowly
through the cervix into the womb, leaving behind the much slower
blockers
...
Some of the vanguard of the lover's egg-getters do not make it
to the oviduct
...
As soon as a killer from either
man first encounters a sperm from the rival, it is alerted that war
has begun
...
Their aim is to poison the rival's egg-getters and killers using the
deadly cocktail of fluids in the cap which they each carry on their
heads
...
First, as we have
seen, they probe with the tips of their heads
50
SPERM WARS
at every sperm they encounter, comparing its surface chemicals
with their own and checking for similarities and differences
...
Having jabbed several times it moves on, leaving the other sperm
to die
...
In a last-ditch
attempt to kill just one more sperm, it tries to stick its head to a
rival's and apply the last drops of its lethal fluids
...
In this initial skirmish, one or two of the partner's killers do
their job and some of the lover's egg-getters and killers die from
head-to-head combat, their heads coated in the poison
...
In their turn,
they are found by the invading bands of killers from the lover
which accompany his egg-getters
...
Outnumbered by at least a thousand to one,
however, the last remaining sperm from the partner are soon
killed
...
With only a few losses of their own, the lover's sperm
systematically wipe out the partner's last remaining egg-getters
and killers
...
Actually, the role of the second
insemination in this particular sperm war is more complicated
than it seems — but here that discussion would be a distraction
...
The main battle is still to come
...
By doing so, she has staged a real war
...
As soon as the newly introduced sperm from the partner attempt
to leave the seminal pool, they encounter problems
...
The huge number of the lover's sperm and the
matching number of white blood cells are doing their job almost
perfectly, and the partner's sperm are much more hindered in leaving
the seminal pool than were the lover's, a couple of hours earlier
...
As a result, only
a small proportion of the partner's army manages to escape the pool
before the woman ejects her flowback
...
The small vanguard of egg-getters
and killers which head straight into the womb find themselves
having to run the gauntlet of hordes of the lover's killers
...
The entrance
into each oviduct is narrow, only just large enough to allow easy
passage to a descending egg
...
Even those
few that do escape and eventually arrive safely in the oviduct rest
area are still at risk to the lover's killers, which patrol the whole
area
...
But the crypt
entrances too are patrolled by killers and, in any case, inside they
are virtually full of the lover's sperm
...
Clearly, the Wednesday encounter in this war has gone very
much in favour of the lover, and nothing much happens over be
next two days to redress the balance
...
Some drip
into her vagina, carried by mucus
...
Even when some of these blockers are
replaced higher up in her cervix with sperm from the cervical
crypts, the new recruits fail to make good the loss and the blockers
dwindle
...
Then the killers also
begin to decline in number
...
En route, they have to run the gauntlet of
rival killer sperm in the womb, and most of the partner's egggetters fail because these killers are almost all from the lover
...
When the woman and her partner have sex on the Friday night,
there is only one more hour to ovulation
...
Although most of his
sperm head for the now half-empty cervical crypts, a vanguard of
egg-getters and killers head straight for the oviducts
...
It is at this point that the
woman produces an egg from one of her ovaries and a chemical
signal passes down the adjacent oviduct
...
It is now a race, or rather an obstacle race because
there are still killers in the oviduct, mainly from the lover
...
But all else is not equal
...
As the egg reaches the zone of
fertilisation in the oviduct and the first sperm arrive, the odds against the
partner have reduced to five to one, but that is not enough
...
An hour later, with the partner's fresh sperm now overwhelming
the lover's at all points in the woman's tract, the odds in the oviducts
swing heavily in the partner's favour
...
The lover has
made it and the woman's daughter, to be born in nine months' time, will
not have been sired by the man she will call her father
...
54
CHAPTER FOUR
Counting the Cost
SCENE 8
Doesn't He Look like His Father?
As the man drifted back into consciousness, he painfully turned over
his left hand which had been resting, palm down, on the bed
...
As their eyes met, she shook her head, answering
his mute question
...
He had set himself one last task and had to live just that little bit
longer
...
His son was on his way, flying from the
other side of the world, and the man desperately wanted to see him just
one more time
...
His eyes closed and he drifted off once again into semiconsciousness
...
He walked into the room where he
met his lifelong partner and saw her for the very first time
...
The midwife picked the baby up, identified his boyhood, and in
the next breath remarked how much he looked like his father
...
It was the most emotional moment of the man's
life, his own flesh and blood there in his arms
...
Still all he could see was his
partner
...
Just having the one child
meant that they had never needed to stint on their son's comfort,
development and education
...
Their investment of
time and money had been more than repaid by their son's successes
...
But each time, at the last moment, he had
resisted for fear it would break up his home
...
The two of them had always been close
...
He relived the pride he had felt at seeing
him graduate, then watched once more as his career went from
strength to strength
...
He remembered the surges of grand-paternalism as,
one by one, they had given him five grandchildren
...
After his son's
emigration, prompted by a career move apparently too lucrative to
refuse, the picture had taken on a special significance
...
As he never tired of saying, the
picture showed his contribution to the world and to future
generations, a contribution more lasting than any work of art
...
Now,
very soon, they would inherit a large part of his wealth
...
He was sure it was his son, and he looked so
well, so successful — and so strangely young
...
He
had done it
...
His partner knew he was dead
...
Now he was gone
...
After a while, she called for a nurse; then,
after a few more moments of contemplation, left the room to wait for
her son
...
After she had broken the
news to him, the pair of them went in and stood over the man's body,
now totally cold
...
While openly weeping, her son cursed the airport delays and
heavy traffic that had made him too late
...
He
cursed her infidelity and lamented the day that she had saddled him
with her secret
...
But most of all, he cursed her for making
him hate himself today
...
Why am I bothering? — he's not even my real
father
...
Such
behaviour, however, is only advantageous if the person concerned
manages to gain the benefits of infidelity without incurring its even
greater costs
...
It consists of Scenes 8 to 11, each of which explores one
or more of the costs and dangers of infidelity
...
In this first scene, we examine
57
SPERM WARS
the reproductive repercussions for a man of being unknowingly tricked
into raising another man's child
...
It is not known
how often such comments and comparisons are accurate
...
But, as life turned out, it might have been better if he hadn't —
he might have been more likely to retrieve his situation, reproductively
...
For him there were no descendants; no
dynasty
...
Between them, the two had tricked him into
dedicating all of his reproductive effort into raising a child who wasn't
his, just like the small bird that is tricked into raising a monstrous
cuckoo chick
...
Recent studies have
shown that, all else being equal, increasing one's wealth and investing
more into each child can increase reproductive success just as much as
having more children
...
Eventually, such a child should
produce more grandchildren or great-grandchildren than a child who
received less investment from his or her parents
...
Wealthier,
healthier sons have more opportunity to inseminate girls before they
choose a long-term partner, are more likely to obtain an attractive,
fertile and faithful partner, and are more likely to have the opportunity
for infidelity
...
The greatest reproductive success is achieved by people who
strike the best balance between the pursuit of wealth and status and
the production of children
...
It also
applies to other animals
...
The
best balance, of course, can be elusive
...
Spend all your time having children and
none accumulating resources, and your strategy again fails
...
The single-child strategy, which is the ultimate in investment,
can be successful as we have seen — but it can also fail
...
If that child dies through
accident or disease or is infertile through some misfortune of
genetics or infection, the single-child strategy is a total failure
...
For the woman in the scene, however, the strategy worked
wonderfully
...
Moreover, through his receipt and use of the higher-thanaverage family wealth, he was able to achieve a status in terms of
health and wealth that made him a popular target for attractive and
fertile young girls (Scene 18)
...
He
might even have tricked other men in the same way that his genetic
father had tricked the man who had just died
...
Had the woman had more than
the one child, the reduced investment in each could have led to her
59
SPERM WARS
having fewer grandchildren
...
The strategy also worked well for the genetic father
...
Biologically, his success contrasts with the failure of
the man who raised his, the genetic father's, child as if it were his own
...
He could have been more persuasive
in changing his partner's mind about not having more children, but he
wasn't
...
He could even have left his partner
and tried a long-term relationship with another woman who would have
given him children, but he didn't
...
Had the child he was raising been his own, his character and his
responses to the challenge of child-rearing would have been
advantageous
...
But because the child was not his own, biologically his
genetic package of characteristics was a failure
...
The experience of the dying man in Scene 8 is by no means rare
...
This is also the level found in industrial Western
societies (see Scene 18 for further details)
...
So far, the nearest thing to such a study comes from the paternity tests
carried out by child support agencies
...
Internationally, child
60
COUNTING THE COST
support agencies are reporting a non-paternity rate of about 15 per cent
...
The non-paternity level for children conceived will be even
higher
...
Almost certainly
this happens primarily when her partner either knows or has a good
chance of finding out that he is not the real father
...
Although properly controlled DNA fingerprinting studies have not been
carried out on humans, they have been carried out on a wide range of
apparently monogamous birds
...
So it would seem that the
average male bird has even less reason to be reassured by a passing
resemblance to its offspring than has the average man
...
A few minutes more would see her
home, and her spirits were sinking fast
...
She had spent the evening at her sister's, about fifteen minutes' walk
away, seeking peace and asking advice
...
'Take the children and go,' she had said
...
'
61
SPERM WARS
Still standing under the light, the woman fingered her cheek bone
...
She took a deep breath, braced
herself, and walked the remaining distance to her front gate
...
Her partner didn't look up when she walked into the room, his gaze
staying firmly fixed on the TV screen
...
She
recognised the atmosphere only too well, and knew she had to be
careful
...
In the end, she
could stand the silence no longer and asked, as calmly as she could
manage, if the children had gone to bed without fuss
...
Her children had gone to bed fine
...
She knew better than to contradict him
...
Since then, he
hadn't missed an opportunity to voice his new-found doubts — to her,
to the children, to the neighbours, in fact to anybody who would
listen
...
'Come here,' he ordered
...
'Come here,' he repeated, even more forcefully, still not looking at
her
...
Running away only made him worse
...
He remained seated
...
She said she hadn't been with anybody, only her sister
...
He should phone her sister if he didn't believe
COUNTING THE COST
her
...
She told
him he was drunk and crazy, that there was no talking to him any
more, and that she was going to bed
...
She saw the wild look that always came into his eyes before he
attacked her
...
He said he knew she was screwing around
...
He just wanted to know who it was, so that
this time he could kill him
...
He demanded even more loudly to know who she
was screwing
...
Ignoring her, he yelled back that whoever it was he wasn't going to
have a free ride
...
She whimpered 'No', but it was no good
...
As
new bruises were added to old, the pain was familiar but more intense
— so intense that it was almost a relief when he stopped beating her
to tear off her underwear
...
Almost as soon as he had inseminated her he stood up, telling her
that if he ever found out who she was seeing he was a dead man
...
Now, he was going to bed and
she could sleep on the floor where she belonged
...
Over the next few weeks, she considered legal action for
violence and rape but eventually decided that her best option was to
have nothing further to do with him
...
Later, she heard that only
two weeks after she had moved out, a girl of about nineteen had
moved in
...
The woman stayed with her mother far longer than either
62
63
SPERM WARS
of them wanted
...
Having been deserted
by his previous partner after a barren relationship, he had no children
himself
...
But no sooner had she
given birth to his daughter than his attitude changed
...
After a particularly savage
beating from his stepfather, her son left home to live with his
grandmother until he could support himself
...
Her elder daughter, once in her early teens, simply ran away
and never again re-established contact
...
Once her son and elder daughter had left, her
relationship with him seemed to improve
...
T
here are pros and cons to both fidelity and infidelity
...
What is always disadvantageous
is making mistakes
...
Another is to misjudge a situation and
be unfaithful when it would be better to be faithful — and to be
faithful when it would be better to be unfaithful
...
The people who do best in life's generation game are
those who judge their situation correctly and then respond
appropriately
...
First, he may be tricked into devoting a lifetime of wealth and effort
into raising another man's child (Scene 8)
...
Thirdly, he risks being deserted by his partner if she
judges the other man to be a better prospect — in which case, she
may either take their children with her or leave them behind
...
If she takes his children, they may be raised by a stepfather,
which could be reproductively costly
...
But if his ex-partner tries to raise their children on
her own, this too can be costly
...
The
same risk exists if his partner leaves their children for him to raise
single-handedly
...
Humans aren't the only animals known to behave more
aggressively towards their stepchildren
...
Lion prides contain two or three males and up to eight
females and their young
...
If they succeed, the first
thing they do is kill the cubs, the pride's legacy from the previous
males
...
Some monkeys that live in harem groups — one male with
several females — behave in the same way
...
Even
monkeys that live in much larger groups, consisting of many males
and females, show similar behaviour
...
On occasion,
however, he may do the exact opposite and go out of his way to help
a female look after such young
...
Once the
female produces a baby that could be the male's, he behaves more
aggressively towards
65
SPERM WARS
her older offspring
...
There are two ways in which a man may try to reduce the chances
of his partner's infidelity
...
As noted in Scene 6, on the one hand he
can spend so much time with his partner that she has very little
opportunity to be unfaithful
...
His two main threats
are first, desertion, and secondly, violence — towards her, her lover,
or both
...
Such behaviour is not uncommon
...
They are given as the
reason for over half of reported cases of the abuse and murder of a
partner
...
Studies of
other animals, mainly birds, have shown that males rarely respond to
a partner's infidelity with aggression, though they may behave
aggressively towards the other male
...
Even so, they are still less predictable than
humans in showing aggression towards an unfaithful partner
...
One possibility derives from the
differences in size and strength between men and women
...
Potential
victims can usually give as good as they get
...
This physical difference gives men more potential than
the males of other species to be violent to their female partners
...
But if it is misjudged, either in
timing or in vigour, the reproductive costs may greatly outweigh the
reproductive benefits
...
First, as long as a male (or a female)
needs the partner's cooperation in having and raising children, then
that partner's continuing health and fertility are essential
...
Secondly,
there is the danger of such vigorous retaliation on the part of the
victim that it is the aggressor who eventually ends up the more
damaged
...
This man showed a level of aggression towards his partner unusual
among animals
...
Male birds, for example, on seeing their partner
having sex with another male, fly straight at that male and knock him
off
...
Male rats and
monkeys respond similarly
...
However, if he sees her mating with another male, he re-inseminates
her immediately
...
Such rapid re-insemination is an important strategy for success in
sperm warfare (Scene 21)
...
In
addition, the first male's army has the chance to distribute itself
throughout the female's tract in an optimum way — blocking
cervical channels, filling cervical crypts, and organising the next few
days' passage of killers and egg-getters
...
Studies on rats have shown that virtually every second counts
...
Speed is
everything
...
The male's penis becomes erect and he may even load his urethra
with sperm
...
Men seek to avoid the costs of their partner's infidelity by being
vigilant for signs, minimising opportunities, and threatening
desertion or retaliation
...
Only if infidelity actually occurs,
however, are the threats usually carried out
...
In Scene 9, separation was costly to both the man and the woman
...
The daughter, too, may have done so,
though her fate is unknown
...
Starting again with a
new and younger partner could have been a better strategy than
staying with an unfaithful older partner
...
Although deserting her first partner was costly to the woman
through its effect on her children, she probably made the best of a
bad job — in so far as her reproductive survival was concerned,
anyway
...
He might even have turned on her children,
acting on his mistaken conclusion that
68
COUNTING THE COST
he was not their father — in which case, their prospects would have
been no better or worse with their real father than with a stepfather
...
However, by
leaving her violent partner when she did, she at least managed to
produce a second family, this time with every chance of having
grandchildren
...
Having
picnicked in the sun in a secluded hay-field, they had been carried by
sexual excitement to the brink of infidelity
...
Now, as passion and frustration subsided, so did the
awkwardness
...
Soon they began to relax
...
Reluctantly,
they eventually packed up and drove back to their home town
...
As soon as the man walked through his front door and exchanged
greetings, he sensed a strangeness in his partner's mood
...
Over dinner, his
partner showed no interest in his day
...
All
evening, she busied herself, spending scarcely any time with him
...
When asked
how her day had been, she shrugged and said it had been normal
...
The highlight had been an hour's
sunbathing early in the afternoon
...
At the end of the evening, as they went
upstairs, she complained of how hot the day had been and said she
felt like a long bath
...
He thought of the other woman,
their picnic, his near-infidelity, and her promise of other occasions
and better moments
...
When his partner came into
the room he was visibly ready for sex, but she ignored him and
busied herself tidying clothes
...
She
also switched off the light before undressing and getting into bed, but
she probably needn't have worried
...
When he began his sexual overtures, she complained of her
tiredness
...
For a moment she stiffened and held his head as he worked with
his lips down from her breasts to her navel
...
He told her to relax and offered to lick her in just the way she liked
...
But it was too late
...
He nuzzled her pubic hair, which was sweet-smelling and still
slightly damp from her bath
...
With hardly
any further foreplay she took hold of his penis and guided him into
position
...
Intercourse was long
...
On the other side of town, the man's near-mistress from
70
COUNTING THE COST
the hay-field was also having problems with her partner
...
They each
had a cat curled up on their lap
...
He was not happy that she had been on a
business trip all day with another man
...
Now, quiet
at last, he sought reassurance
...
She replied that it had been OK, said
truthfully that they had talked mainly about work on the way down,
then lied that she had slept most of the way back
...
The woman shrugged, saying she had
had no choice
...
Then, in an inspired moment, she said she was glad they had driven
...
It had been so hot — and the
man had smelled really bad all day
...
She complained that the man had really annoyed her over
lunch
...
At times, it had been really difficult not to tell him what
she thought of him
...
Suddenly, she had an idea
...
Making up the story as
she went along, she told him of a dream she had had while dozing in
the car on the way back
...
In graphic detail, she
described how, in the
71
SPERM WARS
dream, the cat now on his lap had been giving her oral sex
...
She had got really excited and nearly
come, feeling embarrassed when she woke in case the driver had
noticed her flush
...
Complaining that it was a long time since he had obliged her, she
urged him to do so now
...
She didn't climax from his licking,
but pretended that she did
...
H
umans are not, of course, the only animals to indulge in oral
sex
...
Monkeys also touch a female's genitals, sometimes inserting their
fingers in to her vagina, then smelling and licking them on
withdrawal
...
They are seeking the answer to three questions
...
If a woman's secretions smell or taste particularly unpleasant, the
male may lose interest in penetration altogether
...
Such information is most useful when a man is
contemplating sex with a new woman
...
In many mammals, the smell of the female's secretions is clearly
different and more pleasant to males during her fertile phase
...
In one
experiment in the USA, a group of volunteer women each wore a
tampon overnight on different
72
COUNTING THE COST
days of their menstrual cycle
...
The smell of each tampon was ranked on a scale from 'very
unpleasant' to 'very pleasant'
...
On average, the smell was slightly, but not
consistently, more pleasant during the fertile phase
...
As long as a woman's secretions pass a man's health and fertility
test, the main piece of information he is seeking is whether she has
recently had sex with another man
...
As we have already seen, crude adjustments are
made on the basis of what proportion of time he has spent with the
woman over the past week or since their last intercourse (Scene 6)
...
This method works, but it is crude
...
In Scene 10, the man came home to a partner who, at some time
during the day, had clearly been unfaithful to him
...
Most important of all, however, she had also
had a long bath to try to remove all traces of her lover from her pubic
hair, thighs and vulval lips
...
Her body had ejected her lover's flowback many hours ago, but
some traces of semen always remain in the vagina, sometimes for up
to a day
...
Her body favoured the
73
SPERM WARS
lover and wanted to give his sperm as easy a victory as possible
...
Consequently, when he began to nuzzle her vulva, and the risk of her
infidelity being discovered increased, she changed her strategy
...
On the other side of town, the woman had returned home to a
suspicious partner
...
As a
result, she had the opportunity to both reassure and mislead her
partner, not only verbally (by criticising the man she had been with)
but by forcing him to smell and lick her vulva so as to confirm her
innocence
...
Together, the two scenes of oral sex we have just witnessed
illustrate the interplay of reassurance and subterfuge that is a
hallmark of routine sex between couples
...
In the short
term, this information can help men to prepare for sperm warfare
...
In the long term,
it can help them to assess the desirability of desertion and, if their
partner produces a child, to judge the probability of the child having
been fathered by someone else
...
Of course, people do not always realise that they are indulging in
oral sex for the above reasons
...
Most often, in the absence of
infidelity, what a woman thinks she is doing is seeking sexual
stimulation
...
As in so much of sexual behaviour, the
74
COUNTING THE COST
mind consciously pursues superficial stimulation at the behest of a
body aiming to achieve much more potent ends
...
Nevertheless, one action is a sexual stimulus, the other is not
...
If this were not the case, males and females would be
continually responding sexually to the most irrelevant signals
...
Failure to seek this information before intercourse cost the male in
four ways: it meant a greater risk of disease, more chance of
inseminating an infertile female, less chance of winning sperm wars,
and a reduced chance of combating infidelity
...
If
she was uninterested, she could simply walk away
...
Such advance preparation would make the process of
insemination itself more efficient and less damaging
...
The same arguments apply to the male
...
Males who
responded by becoming aroused will have missed fewer
opportunities for intercourse than males who did not
...
All of these responses were shaped long before there were
humans
...
We
also, male and female alike, inherited a predisposition to find such
behaviour stimulating
...
Otherwise, she would spend the evening with friends
...
He had told his partner that a long-term visitor from the
other side of the world, on discovering his interest in chess, had
challenged him to a match and had offered to cook him an authentic
ethnic meal into the bargain
...
The evening had been perfect, a memory for a lifetime
...
Altogether it came and went, if with
increasing difficulty, four times
...
Now, though, their party was over, and ahead of him were two
prospects he could do without — running the gauntlet of arrest for
drunk-driving and, even worse, the guilt and discomfort of having to
fabricate the evening's events to satisfy his partner's curiosity
...
It wasn't really the prospect of his partner
leaving him, though he would miss their two children
...
Maybe it was his partner's
threat to spend every penny he had rather than let him squander it on
another woman
...
He was sure she
didn't mean it
...
When his young lover finally surfaced from her sleep, she asked
him not to go, gently at first, then with mounting irritation
...
It was midnight
...
Reluctant though he was to
swap the warmth of her bed for the chill air of her room, it really
was time to go
...
Their affair had begun half a year earlier in a dark summer wood
when, in an unplanned, abandoned moment, they had stripped each
other naked and she had helped him to ejaculate
...
Although they worked in the same
building, they rarely met during the day, taking great care to hide
their liaison from everybody
...
They always went straight to bed
...
Even so, they
often had sex twice in a session
...
His lover was eleven years younger than him, but he had
learned more about sex in six months of snatched moments with her
than he had in ten years with his partner
...
These gave him routine, almost infallible, alibis
which freed him to call in on his lover sometimes on his way to
work, sometimes on his way back
...
This freezing late-January night was his
76
77
SPERM WARS
told him he must go
...
He always parked two streets away
...
Thirty minutes after leaving his lover, just after
one o'clock in the morning, he was home — and his partner was
waiting for him
...
Taken aback, he apologised
for being so late
...
But he
had won in the end, he added, seeking conviction in detail
...
The man felt his mouth
freeze open
...
He couldn't believe his bad
luck
...
How was it that, of all the nights to break
his silence, he had chosen tonight?
The man's mind raced as his face reddened and his underarms
prickled with sweat
...
Then he lied that it had been his assistant's birthday
...
He
knew how much she hated him going on such nights and worried
about him drinking and driving, so he had thought it best not to tell
her
...
Pausing, phone in hand, she
asked him for his assistant's number
...
In any
case, the others wouldn't be back yet, because they had gone on to
another club
...
She stared at him again
...
He said this was
silly
...
It wouldn't happen again
...
She moved towards him until their faces were almost touching and
stared into his eyes
...
Why didn't he smell of smoke and beer? She paused, then
accused him of infidelity
...
He proclaimed his innocence yet again and
objected to her refusal to believe him
...
Then she told him to
take off his trousers
...
She insisted
...
Angrily, she began to unzip his trousers
...
As he dropped
his trousers and underwear, he hoped against hope that there would
be nothing for her to see or smell
...
She swore at him,
slapped his face, told him to leave her, their children and their house,
and said that she never wanted to see him again
...
At first, he didn't resist but at the door he refused to leave
...
He spent an uneasy night, unable to
sleep partly through discomfort, partly through worry about the
future, but most of all because he was afraid
...
He left early, before she came downstairs, but returned home at
mid-day
...
His
partner told him she could never trust him again and that she couldn't
live with someone she couldn't trust
...
He said the woman was an ex-girlfriend who had
emigrated years ago and then, just last week, had contacted him out
of the blue
...
He had agreed,
79
COUNTING THE COST
SPERM WARS
not expecting anything to happen after all this time
...
He was really sorry
...
He'd had time to think and the fear
of losing her and their children had made him realise that all he really
wanted was her, his home and their family
...
Was it really worth putting the children through a separation? All
because of a night's weakness on his part that would never happen
again?
In the end she agreed that he could stay but said he would have to
sleep on the bedroom floor
...
Or that she would stay faithful
...
In fact, he was allowed back in her bed after only a few days and
they had sex again after six weeks
...
She then met a man of her own age and ended their
relationship
...
The first, another girl eleven years his junior, conceived
during their affair
...
Just briefly, he considered leaving his partner for this younger woman
but after some hesitation the girl herself decided she did not want
him
...
As
good as her word, as soon as she met another man she left, taking the
children with her
...
His
final infidelity had given
him gonorrhea and she departed just in time to avoid being infected
herself
...
With
treatment, he recovered from his infection but was warned by his
doctor, correctly as it turned out, that he might no longer be fertile
...
The cost of supporting his two children combined with
losses from two silly financial gambles reduced him almost to penury
...
After this, life slowly began to improve
...
But when she began a second family,
relationships in the household became strained
...
Luckily,
she proved to be a good stepmother, treating his children in the few
years before they left home as if they were her own
...
And many,
though not all, of the dangers are the same as for a man
...
Secondly, there is the danger that he
will eventually leave her for the other woman, reducing his support
for her still further
...
Thirdly, there is the greater risk of contracting
sexually transmitted diseases, because her partner is at greater risk
...
Unlike a man, she is in no danger of being tricked into
raising any children by her partner's lover
...
This conclusion is as applicable to monogamous birds, monkeys
and apes as it is to humans
...
They are significantly more aggressive, and
significantly less forgiving
...
They may attempt to intervene between their mate and
another female
...
However, since their physical
commitment to preventing infidelity is less than the male's, they are
less likely to desert if their partner is unfaithful
...
Women do sometimes wound or kill a partner if he is unfaithful
...
But again, they are less likely to do all of these things
than are men and are more likely to overlook discovered
indiscretions
...
Arguably, male animals are never quite as subtle over their
infidelity as females, maybe because the costs of discovery are less
...
The male and
female, the epitome of contented monogamy, were first seen as they
hopped side by side across a lawn, pecking up morsels of food
...
As soon as the bush shielded her from her partner, the
female flew in an instant into dense vegetation nearby
...
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COUNTING THE COST
A few seconds later, male and female hopped back into each other's
view, past the bush
...
Nearly as appealing is the film, shown worldwide, of a female
monkey foraging on the ground for food while being watched
attentively from a high branch by her consort
...
He sits down, innocently picking at himself, hiding his
erection from her consort
...
In an
instant she stands and presents and the male inseminates her
...
Maybe a female dunnock who flies into vegetation is no more
subtle than a male who hides there, waiting
...
And maybe a woman who has sex with the
window-cleaner while her partner is at the shops is no more
sophisticated than a man who has sex with his secretary in a
cupboard at the office party
...
As far as
humans are concerned, the best we can use as evidence is that, taking
thousands of instances into account, the man is more likely, on
average, to have his infidelity discovered than the woman
...
Had he been more cautious and
washed himself before returning home, he might have escaped
detection
...
But he did neither, and suffered the consequences
...
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SPERM WARS
Had the man's infidelity not been discovered, he would probably
have done better reproductively: at the very least, he would have
had the chance of a third child with his partner
...
Nor did he manage to compensate for this loss by siring a child
via infidelity or via a second longer-term partner
...
He nearly attracted another fertile partner through his infidelity, but
failed when it came right down to it
...
Even if he had remained fertile, his age and reduced circumstances
made him less attractive to fertile women
...
Eventually, they would give him
grandchildren
...
Had the woman not discovered her partner's infidelity, she would
probably have done worse reproductively
...
But all the time she was with him,
she would unknowingly have been vulnerable to sudden desertion
and decreased support
...
Instead, her
discovery helped her to take advantage of his support for five more
years, then pick her moment to leave him for another man and a
second family
...
Reproductively, infidelity has the potential to benefit both men
and women, as we shall see later in this book
...
On top of this, however much
a person may suffer from their own infidelity,
84
COUNTING THE COST
they are likely to suffer even more if their partner is unfaithful —
especially if they fail to detect it
...
As we noted earlier, the reproductive
successes of each generation will be those people who, consciously
or subconsciously, judge correctly when it is and when it is not
advantageous to be unfaithful
...
The
reproductive failures will be those who misjudge their situation, fail
to hide their own infidelity or fail to prevent or detect their partner's
...
85
SECRET ANTICIPATION
CHAPTER FIVE
Secret
Anticipation
SCENE 12
A Double Life
Another day at work was over, and the man on the fifth floor was just
leaving for home
...
He smiled
...
The lift stopped on the third floor and a young girl stepped in
...
She was new to the section, an extra
secretary for the man who was the target of the graffiti
...
She saw the words immediately
...
They smiled at each other and she
blushed, but nothing was said
...
Thirty minutes later, he drove into his garage
...
Even as he was locking the
bathroom door, he was handling his genitals, encouraging an
erection
...
As he pumped himself, he searched through his mind for a
sexual image
...
He tried undressing her again, this time from the back, but it
still failed
...
OK, so the
lift breaks down between floors
...
But there was no need for an 'and'
...
The whole exercise had
taken about two minutes
...
It was as if he had a double life — sex with his partner on Saturday
and Sunday, sex with himself on Tuesday and Thursday
...
Of course, his sex life with himself was not entirely routine
...
A goodnight kiss with a new girl, or a heavy but unconsummated
petting session at a party, had both at one time or another sent him
into a toilet to seek relief in ejaculation
...
Such
highlights apart, though, his sex life with himself was as much a
routine as his sex life with his partner
...
There was
little urgency, little excitement, and little feeling of satisfaction —
just a feeling of relief
...
For twothirds, their very first ejaculation will have been triggered by
self-stimulation
...
Moreover, virtually all will have done so
by the age of twenty
...
Yet this is just what it
is
...
How often a man masturbates depends on how old he is and how
often he ejaculates for other reasons
...
This varies from man to
man, depending on the size of his testes
...
From
almost immediately after puberty to the age of about thirty, an
average man produces around three hundred million sperm a day and
ejaculates between three and four times a week
...
If a man under thirty has intercourse three
times or more a week, he will rarely masturbate
...
Men are not the only mammals to shed sperm through
masturbation
...
One
of their habits is to affectionately clasp a person around the knee with
their front limbs and to rub their genitals up and down the dismayed
person's leg
...
Just like men, the males of these species will often masturbate
between routine inseminations of females
...
It is the means by which an active, or hopeful, man tailors his next
inseminate to its likely circumstances
...
Not only that, but he can also adjust what
proportion of those sperm will be blockers, killers and egg-getters
...
The ejaculates produced are not identical
...
But, apart from a man's age,
only one major factor — time since last ejaculation — affects the
number shed during masturbation
...
This
seems to be the rate at which sperm exceed their sell-by date as
blockers, killers and egg-getters
...
Most are killers when they
are young and blockers when they are old
...
Blockers, however, can be old
...
To block a cervical
channel, a sperm needs to have just enough energy to swim out of the
seminal pool and travel a little way into the cervical mucus
...
It can even die if it wants
...
Egg-getters also change with age
...
As a result, an egg-getter's life is
divided into two phases of activity
...
Then, during its brief phase of fertility, it has a
second burst of energy-when it reaches, then swims through, the zone
of fertilisation
...
The two columns of sperm queuing to be ejaculated (Scene 4) are
not just a homogenous, characterless mixture
...
The ones at the back, way down in his testes, are the youngest
...
Even so, when he places his seminal pool at the top of a
woman's vagina, the oldest sperm tend to be introduced first and go to
the bottom of the pool
...
The younger sperm, being more active, will be the first to enter the
cervical mucus
...
Very old
sperm cannot leave the pool at all and are doomed to be ejected by
the woman in her flowback
...
Much depends on how deeply the cervix dips into
the pool
...
Masturbation between intercourses usually means that a man
inseminates his partner with fewer sperm than if he had not
masturbated
...
As a
result, just as many, if not more, manage to escape the seminal pool
and stay in the woman
...
All the same, a man needs to inject some old sperm as blockers —
as many as are needed to top up the population of blockers in his
partner's cervical mucus
...
Given any
gap between successive intercourses of from thirty minutes to three
days, he can introduce into his partner the perfect ejaculate to top up
her population of blockers
...
This
happens because there are only so many channels in the cervical
mucus, and once he has enough old sperm to block these, any
90
SECRET ANTICIPATION
further blockers are redundant
...
Beyond a certain point, therefore, the
man's best policy is to shed the oldest part of his column of sperm
before inseminating a woman, rather than leaving them for her to eject
in her flowback
...
If the gap between inseminations exceeds four days, the ideal
inseminate is produced by masturbating two days before the next
intercourse
...
Scattered among these younger sperm are egg-getters, in
a ratio of about one egg-getter to ninety-nine kamikaze types
...
The remainder will reach their
peak at different times over the five days after insemination
...
If he has guarded his
partner closely since they last had sex, he needs to introduce into her a
full quota of blockers but only a few killers and egg-getters
...
If he has
spent less time with her, so that the risk of sperm warfare is greater, he
needs more killers and egg-getters
...
The number of blockers stays the same, but he introduces
more of the younger sperm, the killers and egg-getters
...
Subconsciously, the brain must play a major role in this
anticipation
...
The man in Scene 12 most often masturbates on Tuesdays
and Thursdays in routine anticipation
91
SPERM WARS
of sex on Saturdays
...
The result is that he rarely inseminates his partner with
an ejaculate older than three days or younger than two
...
More often than not, of course, an army is unnecessary:
no war takes place, and all he really needs is to introduce a few million
egg-getters of different ages
...
The major reproductive problem a man encounters with routine
masturbation is that there is an unpredictable element to routine sex
...
For example, thanks to his masturbation routine, the man in Scene
12 arrives for intercourse each Saturday night with an ideal ejaculate
waiting in his tubes — a balanced mixture of blockers, killers and egggetters
...
On Sunday,
the man now has in his tubes an ejaculate that is rapidly going past its
best
...
If he waits for the next intercourse, he
will introduce in his partner an ejaculate that is on the old side of its
prime, with too many geriatric blockers and many ageing killers and
egg-getters
...
Neither alternative is ideal and could put him at a disadvantage if
either of those ejaculates really does have to fight a sperm war
...
One
way she can maneuver her partner into injecting a sub-optimal army is
to change their sex routine unexpectedly
...
Scene 13
Multiply, But Don't Divide
The evening flight had taken three hours
...
Their rooms were
all on the same corridor
...
They all had an early start in the morning
...
The room was very
hot
...
Handling his cigarette dextrously with one hand
and his genitals abstractedly with the other, a kaleidoscope of thoughts
began to pass through his head
...
Remembering
their last intercourse, two nights ago, he mused over whether she had
really climaxed
...
If so, it was a pity
their mutual sexual act had been superseded
...
His thoughts turned to his companions and his strategy for the next
two days
...
The two most desirable
women in the organisation were both on the trip, and he had two
nights in which to try to bed them
...
He imagined
93
SPERM WARS
SECRET ANTICIPATION
them naked, writhing over his body, each begging him to enter her
first
...
He stayed on the
bed for a while, enjoying his fantasies and the growing sensation in
his genitals
...
Later, as he drifted off to sleep,
he wondered how well the next two evenings would match his
fantasy
...
After talking for ten minutes, he sent his love to the children, blew
his partner a kiss, and rang off
...
Perhaps his wasn't a bad job, after
all
...
Now all he had to do was look
forward to the evening with his three colleagues
...
The evening began well but ended badly
...
However, as soon as
they hit the city bars, it was obvious she preferred the other man, his
boss
...
He made a few vain attempts
to get between them but she virtually ignored him
...
But after a few drinks she began complaining of feeling tired and
unwell
...
At the hotel, she made
her excuses and went straight to her room
...
All he had left for the evening were his fantasies
...
It was like being a
teenager again, masturbating nearly every day for a week or so at a
time
...
At two in the morning he heard his boss
and the woman come back and, as far as he could
tell, both went into his boss's room
...
The following evening was quite different
...
Without hesitation, she responded warmly
...
Then suddenly, almost as if a switch had been
flicked, she began to respond to his advances
...
She became
very drunk and by the time the four of them arrived back at the hotel,
he thought she was either going to pass out or throw up
...
Waiting until the boss and the other woman could see what was
happening, she grabbed his arm and virtually dragged him into her
room
...
Her tirade scarcely faltered, even when he
undressed and then entered her
...
He needed many minutes of thrusting before he began to feel like
ejaculating
...
Throughout his sexual
performance, she never once stopped talking
...
Two hours later, he tried to have sex with
her sleeping body
...
She wanted to sleep — but first,
she had to be sick
...
He was just in time to see the second woman
closing the boss's door and crossing the corridor, naked buttocks
peeping out from the clothes she was clutching round her front
...
There was an uneasy
politeness, and nothing was said of the night's events
...
The woman whose bed he had shared the night before spent most of
the flight in the toilet, being sick
...
Responding to her
questioning, he denied that he had found either of them attractive
...
Two months later, the woman who had slept with both men on
the business trip announced her pregnancy
...
Six months after the business trip, he met the woman
and her partner at a party
...
T
he role of masturbation in a man's pursuit of reproductive
success is not limited to its role in routine sex (Scene 12)
...
As we discussed in Scene 12, most of a man's sex life with
himself is just as routine as his sex life with his partner
...
But infidelity
introduces a non-routine element into his sex life with his partner —
and, therefore, into his sex life with himself as well
...
The ejaculate waiting in his
sperm tubes is tailored to top up his partner, and so is relatively rich
in blockers
...
The woman he is about to inseminate
has an above average chance of containing sperm from another man,
especially if she has a regular partner
...
These may or may not need topping up,
depending on how recently she has had sex, but blockers are not a
lover's main concern
...
Blockers
are at best a luxury; at worst a hindrance
...
The
ideal inseminate for infidelity is one that has been waiting to be
ejaculated for no more than about twenty-four hours
Another situation in which the ideal inseminate is twenty-four
hours old or less occurs when a man has no regular sexual partner
...
) In this
situation too, he needs to keep his sperm column young and in a state
of continuous readiness — intercourse and sperm warfare could be
just around the corner
...
Frequent masturbation maintains such an ejaculate —
hence the appropriate urges experienced by single men
...
Among humans, it is most often
conducted in private
...
The
graffiti artist in the lift in Scene 12 has his counterparts all over the
world
...
So strong is this social
disapproval that many cultures and religions actually outlaw the
activity
...
The irony, of course, is that the graffiti
artist and all his counterparts world-wide will almost certainly
practise masturbation themselves
...
He cannot, for example, alter their usual sex
routine
...
As we have seen, a sudden
increase in his masturbation rate could mean he is anticipating
infidelity
...
Assuming, again, that he had always been secretive about his
masturbating, he has two options
...
But if he does this, he injects inefficient sperm armies into
his lover
...
It
is, of course, no threat to a man's strategy if his partner detects an
occasional episode
...
A man need worry only if his partner detects so many
occasions that she is able to work out his whole masturbation
routine
...
Then, masturbation patterns need to
be hidden not only from the partner but also from other males
...
Then his body urged him to increase his masturbation
rate in anticipation of infidelity — with the friend's partner! Just in
case such a situation might arise, it is far better
for a man to hide his masturbation routine from everybody in the first
place
...
All adolescents know that they
are each on the lookout for intercourse
...
The secrecy which surrounds masturbation is therefore
understandable, given its function in the context of reproductive
success
...
Since the aim of
masturbation is to give the male an edge over others in sperm
warfare, he gains most if he masturbates but can dissuade those
around him from doing so
...
The world-wide tendency to criticise, even
victimise, other people for masturbating while continuing to
masturbate oneself is thus as strategic as masturbation itself
...
This is, and has been (probably for many thousands
of years), an important factor in many people's sex lives
...
The more men and
women drink, the more they both seek intercourse — or, at least, the
less they resist it
...
Men find erection more difficult — the 'brewer's droop'
syndrome — and women find their vaginas, and often their clitorises,
less sensitive
...
Thus, the more men
drink, the more they want sex but the less able they are to have it
...
It is just that, beyond a certain point, they may not enjoy it
much
...
All of the patterns are still there: for example, women still
show a menstrual cycle of varying sexual interest
...
He groaned inwardly and
wiped the ejaculate off his body with the top sheet
...
He turned over, away
from the rapidly cooling wet patch
...
At times during his early teenage years, he had even worried
about going to bed at all in case he ejaculated
...
Eventually, he had discovered
that if he masturbated before going to sleep when away from home,
wet dreams rarely happened
...
Now, in his early thirties, they were a rare event
...
Then his
partner had reacted badly on discovering the mark on the sheet,
claiming it was a slight on her sexual attractiveness — and how
could he be feeling like sex if he was ill, anyway? He wondered if she
would react the same way this time
...
Within a
minute, he had drifted back into sleep
...
Most often, this first occurrence is a wet dream,
but for a few unfortunate boys it occurs in public
...
After the first
few occasions, however, almost all spontaneous ejaculations occur
in private, at night, while asleep — as wet dreams
...
So, how do they help a man in his pursuit of reproductive
success?
Wet dreams can occur at any time of life, but are most common in
the teens and early twenties, and are most likely after periods of
abstinence from intercourse and masturbation
...
The adolescent's body aims to ejaculate at least three times a
week, and if he omits to do so via masturbation (or intercourse, if he
is lucky), wet dreams act as insurance
...
Later, they occur much too rarely to be
part of the three-a-week system
...
He will still get
virtually nightly erections during REM sleep (the deepest kind) and
dreams, but his body seems to inhibit ejaculation
...
A high temperature, for example, during flu or other infections,
can kill or damage these waiting sperm
...
Humans are by no means the only species to ejaculate spontaneously
...
In men, it is
sleeping with a partner that most often seems to mark the change
from the function of wet dreams as a back-up in his three-a-week
system, to their being rare events
...
Secrecy is important to the success of male strategy,
and it is probably this need for secrecy that has caused men's bodies
to avoid wet dreams as sexual outlets once they have a partner
...
Since a man has much more control
over when and where he ejaculates during masturbation, wet dreams
are a suitable back-up for masturbation only in young men without a
partner
...
He welcomed the brief moment of relaxation
...
Now, as the sun dipped towards the horizon
behind him, he still needed another half-hour to get home
...
As he
gathered speed and the fields and hedgerows raced past him, he
could scarcely believe his luck, both bad and good
...
The good luck was that he had
been given an unexpected twenty-four-hour leave
...
A three-hour ride? Nothing to it
...
For a moment she
was stunned when, just as it was getting dark, the back door opened
...
Otherwise, she was alone in the house
...
Pleased, because she
missed his company during the long weeks between visits home
...
Unnerved, because if he
104
had arrived an hour earlier he would have found another man in the
house
...
Her position in such pleadings
was particularly vulnerable because her elder daughter was not his,
and he knew it
...
As
a twenty-two-year-old farm girl, she had allowed herself to be
coerced into sex with the man for whom she worked
...
Even now, the man's eyes still stared at her in her dreams and
from her daughter's face
...
She was banished, first to live with her
grandmother for a few months during the most obvious phase of her
pregnancy, and then to a confinement in the house of a tyrannical,
moralistic midwife
...
And he
had done this despite the opposition of his own parents and despite
the prejudice of the villagers in whose community they lived and
worked
...
Maybe if war hadn't broken out, they
would have had another child
...
He enjoyed the camaraderie of army life, but constantly worried
about what his partner was doing back at home
...
In fact, her relationship with this
other man had so far been totally platonic
...
Who knows what would have
happened if the girls had gone to bed at their proper time, instead of
staying up as unwitting chaperons?
After a welcoming hug and kiss, she told her partner to wash
105
SPERM WARS
away his cyclist's sweat while she prepared what food she could
from a temporarily thin larder
...
She protested that the last
thing she wanted at the moment was a baby
...
Maybe it didn't
matter anyway, she said, because her period was due any day
...
An hour later he was gone, cycling the
three-hour journey back to his barracks and imminent relocation
...
A few months later, during the hottest week in March for
twenty years, his son was born
...
E
ach of the three scenes in this chapter deals with a situation in
which a different woman appears in some way to fail
...
In
Scene 15 we encounter a woman who is apparently convinced that
the last thing she wants is to conceive
...
Fifty years later it is clear that her body had
engineered a very successful failure — a real bonus in her pursuit of
reproductive success
...
Her spur-of-the-moment reasoning was
that it was so long since her last period that her next must be due any
day
...
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Just about the only reliable element in the cycle is that once a
woman has ovulated she will menstruate fourteen days later (but see
below)
...
Particularly crucial to her strategy
is the tremendous variation in the number of days from the end of
menstruation to ovulation
...
Another less well known feature is that even apparently normal
cycles are by no means always fertile: a woman experiencing such
cycles may not in fact be ovulating at all
...
There are at least three different types of infertile menstrual cycle
— and most women experience them all
...
In the second, she
menstruates normally, but still does not produce an egg
...
This curtailment prevents a fertilised egg from
implanting
...
Only if such infertile phases
persist for long periods, such as several years, might they indicate a
problem
...
The proportion of cycles that are fertile varies in a fairly
predictable way throughout a woman's life
...
And even once she has begun to have periods, few
cycles are fertile
...
Even at her peak,
when around thirty years old, still only about 80 per cent of cycles
are fertile
...
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SUCCESSFUL FAILURE
By fifty, women more or less cease to ovulate, though there are
unconfirmed reports of women giving birth up to the age of seventy
...
These changes prepare her body to produce an
egg but, about one or two days before ovulation can occur, her body
goes on hold
...
This holding period is an opportunity to collect sperm, perhaps just
from her partner, perhaps not — perhaps just from one man, perhaps
from two or more
...
Most of all, however, it will depend on how it feels
about trying to produce a baby in the current circumstances
...
She was wrong
...
In the absence of her partner for the foreseeable future,
it had momentarily considered collecting sperm from another man
...
Consciously, the woman thought it was a bad
time to conceive, but her body knew better
...
Many mammals, such as squirrels, sheep and bears, breed only at
a particular time of year
...
In contrast, most of the larger monkeys
and apes, living in more uniform tropical environments, will breed
at any time of year
...
Humans are just the same
...
There is a second, smaller peak in early autumn (September)
...
In the southern hemisphere, the birth
seasons are the same as in the northern
...
Just as these seasonal birth peaks reflect peaks of conception nine
months earlier, so do these peaks of conception reflect peaks of
ovulation
...
There, women are
more likely to produce an egg in May/June and December than in
any other month of the year
...
In October, even if the woman's body had been on hold,
she might not have responded to intercourse by ovulating
...
Moreover, she was thirty-four years old, it was eight years
since she last conceived, and her body rarely had the chance to
collect sperm
...
Fifty years later, her son had not only survived, he had given her
five grandchildren
...
Without her son, she
would have had only two grandchildren, half the average
...
The man, of course, did not fare quite as well as the woman from
their partnership
...
Then there would have been a very real danger that
accident or infertility would rob him of all descendants within a
generation or two (Scene 1)
...
So from the
point of view of his reproductive
108
109
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SUCCESSFUL FAILURE
success it had been a good decision to take on this woman, despite
the cost of raising her daughter from another man
...
met her current partner and they began living together almost
immediately
...
More than anything,
they were waiting for his promotion — but it never came
...
Part
of her motivation had stemmed from her secret hope that a family
would draw them back together again — because as their debts had
mounted so their relationship had deteriorated
...
To her dismay, she hadn't conceived
...
As it turned out, her
fears were unfounded
...
Then, nearly three months later, her partner lost his job
and within a week she miscarried
...
The house was repossessed and they were forced to move from one
rented accommodation to another
...
Their current flat was cramped
...
Eventually, her
partner had got another job, less well paid than the first but at least
with prospects
...
During the worst of their deprivations they rarely had sex, and
whole months sometimes passed without intercourse
...
But it was now two years since her miscarriage, and
still she had not conceived
...
They still
SCENE 16
The Stress of It All
As the woman fingered the piece of paper in her hand, tears began to
roll down her cheeks
...
Seven years ago, when she and her partner had first started living
together, the future had looked bright
...
Maybe they shouldn't have overstretched themselves
financially with their first house
...
Maybe they should have seen the danger signs earlier and drawn in
their horns when they began to slip into debt
...
Promotion and solvency were always
just around the corner
...
As she sobbed, it
seemed to her as if life had been one long chapter of stress and
unhappiness
...
In her late teens she had become
involved with a brilliant young man
...
He had been continually critical of her body and general
appearance and had refused on principle to use, or allow her to use,
any forms of contraception other than rhythm and withdrawal
...
After a year of despair,
she finished with him, counselled herself out of her eating problems,
and eventually qualified with distinction for the career she had
always wanted
...
Suddenly, she stopped crying, screwed up the paper and threw it at
the wall
...
She scribbled a note to her partner
and walked out of the door
...
When the man
answered, she gave him the message he had been waiting all month to
hear: if his offer was still open, she was ready to leave her partner and
move in with him
...
Thirty minutes after that,
they were in his house in the suburbs
...
His house was nothing
special, but compared to the pit in which she was living it was a
palace
...
She spent most of the day in tears and most of the night having
sex
...
Her new partner wanted to accompany her, but she
wouldn't let him and took a taxi instead
...
As she collected her clothes and other possessions,
the arguments and recriminations reverberated around the bedroom
...
Then, begging her not to go, he told
her how much he still cared for her
...
As he
sobbed, she suddenly remembered the athletic, ambitious and
arrogant young man she had once found so attractive
...
However, almost
immediately afterwards, she turned on him again, announced it was
still over, and left
...
Sexually, they were very active — until she began to feel
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SUCCESSFUL FAILURE
sick every morning
...
They had
no idea when it had happened until a routine scan told her the baby's
age
...
Her ex-partner refused to leave them in peace, and from time to
time throughout her pregnancy caused great stress
...
In due course she gave birth, albeit slightly prematurely, to a
small but otherwise healthy daughter
...
Surrounded by
conflict, the woman lapsed into a deep post-natal depression and
began to neglect and even to mistreat the baby
...
The woman returned to work, leaving her new
partner to take the major role in raising the child
...
The woman
emerged from her depression, her new partner found employment
again, and they were able to afford child care
...
Now with a good job and rejuvenated
physically, mentally and financially, he wanted to press his claim for
the baby he insisted was his daughter
...
The
new partner cooperated, confident that the results would end the
argument once and for all
...
He was devastated
...
Within weeks of the result, the woman left to share her old
partner's new and much improved lifestyle, taking her daughter with
her
...
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I
n Scene 15, we met a woman who enhanced her reproductive
success by conceiving when, consciously, the last thing she
wanted was another child
...
Most people think of family planning and contraception as modern
inventions
...
Even 'deliberate' contraception is not that
new
...
Chemical contraception, as in the pill, isn't even a
human invention
...
In fact, the
female body was planning families and avoiding conception for tens
of millions of years before humans had even evolved
...
For women and all other mammals, the natural mediator between
bad conditions and the avoidance of reproduction is stress
...
But there is another interpretation: that the stress
reaction is a friend — a means by which the body prevents itself from
doing anything disadvantageous when times are bad
...
And, to a woman, the avoidance of
conception is an invaluable ally in her pursuit of reproductive
success! How can this be?
The key paradox is that a woman does not necessarily achieve
greatest reproductive success simply by having as many children as
possible as quickly as possible
...
Twins might seem a good way of increasing
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SUCCESSFUL FAILURE
reproductive success, but there is more than twice the danger that both
will die
...
Women inherited a basic problem from their primate ancestors —
it is very difficult to carry more than one child at a time when walking
long distances
...
Of course, the limitation was, and still is,
particularly crucial in those cultures in which women are responsible
for collecting and carrying large quantities of food, water, firewood,
or other materials
...
Under
such circumstances, the greatest reproductive success is achieved by
those who avoid having another child until the previous one can not
only walk but can keep up
...
Children are most likely to survive and grow into healthy,
fertile adults if they are born into a favourable environment
...
Children then have the lowest risk of contracting diseases
and the greatest resistance to those they do get
...
Even now, the chances of a
child from a poor family dying before reproducing are double those of
a child from a rich family
...
There is a general principle, considered briefly in Scene 8 in
connection with the benefits and dangers of a 'one-child' family:
namely, that for any given woman in any particular situation there
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SPERM WARS
will be a size of family which will give her the greatest number of
grandchildren
...
Equally, if she tries to have a larger
family, she risks an overcrowded household and spreading herself
and her resources too thinly
...
The challenge
that faces every woman is first to identify the optimum family size
for her circumstances, then to ensure that she has that number of
children
...
Life is a
mosaic of situations
...
Those who time their conceptions to coincide with the
good times will produce the most grandchildren
...
An untimely
conception may damage her health and situation so much that she
may never again be able to conceive
...
Under such strained circumstances, there is an
increased risk of ill-health and subsequent infertility
...
The
woman in the scene, by delaying her first child until circumstances
improved, managed, eventually, to have three children for whom she
had the space, time and resources
...
Had she tried to reproduce earlier, she
might not only have failed but might also have forfeited her chances
of conceiving in the future
...
This happened not because
they consciously wanted to avoid conception — on
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SUCCESSFUL FAILURE
the contrary — but because they lost interest in each other
...
Their bodies were manipulating their emotions
to reduce the chances of conception
...
This is because abstinence is in general
disadvantageous as an overall contraception strategy — for the
following reasons
...
Since neither partner can afford
to give up routine sex for too long, both men and women have
mechanisms other than abstinence which, despite continued sexual
activity, reduce the chances of conception when the situation is
unfavourable
...
One
of these is widely known: the influence of lactation on ovulation
...
This is the case even if she
resumes her periods
...
However, most of the ways in which she avoids reproducing at
inappropriate times involve stress
...
The stress reaction manifests itself in many ways
...
The physiological stress caused by such nearstarvation is contraceptive — ovulation, and often menstruation, are
inhibited
...
Although a few
anorexics (5-10 per cent) die as a result of their behaviour and a few
more (15-20 per cent) continue to be anorexic throughout their lives,
the majority (75 per
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SPERM WARS
cent) emerge from the condition to live a normal, healthy and
eventually reproductive life
...
Even
so, the more a woman is stressed the less likely she is to ovulate
(Scene 15)
...
Finally, she is more
likely to miscarry, particularly during the first three months of
pregnancy
...
Even then, about 20 per cent are miscarried during the next three
months
...
The death of a partner, a partner's infidelity, or the
outbreak of war, for example, are all known to increase the chances
of miscarriage
...
At first, it might seem odd that a woman has so many different
ways of avoiding having a child
...
But this
apparent excess of responses is not an error in female programming
...
For example, circumstances may be
favourable when she ovulates but no longer so by the time the egg
reaches her womb
...
Or circumstances may be favourable at the time of implantation but
may become unfavourable a month or so later
...
Even if circumstances remain favourable throughout early
pregnancy, they may yet deteriorate before the baby is born
...
First, there are the well known spells of
'nest-building' — strong urges to prepare the environment into which
the baby will be born
...
These spells often manifest themselves as
phases of worry, depression and irritability
...
Any major deterioration in a woman's
circumstances at this time can lead to pathological depression and the
later rejection, or even abuse, of the baby
...
So widely, in fact, that
many legal systems around the world accept that a woman may not
be responsible for her actions in the phase immediately after giving
birth
...
In huntergatherers, people who live by hunting and foraging rather than by
cultivation, about 7 per cent of children are killed by their mother
...
Such behaviour is not restricted to humans
...
Anybody who has kept pets such as rabbits,
gerbils, hamsters or mice will know that if the mother is at all stressed
soon after giving birth, she is likely to kill, even eat, some or all of
her litter
...
She opts instead to delay her attempt until
circumstances improve
...
But men, too, have many of the same problems
...
During hard times, a man should want
to avoid raising children just as much as his partner
...
The woman's body
will plan their family to their mutual benefit
...
Then, a man needs
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SPERM WARS
SUCCESSFUL FAILURE
a contraceptive mechanism of his own
...
In this situation, if the woman meets
someone her body deems to be genetically superior to her partner, she
may be tempted into trying to have a child with another man
...
Obviously, her
partner would gain no such benefit
...
Somehow,
he has to prevent the situation just described from happening
...
Without
knowing it, the man in Scene 16, the woman's original partner, was in
this situation in the weeks before her desertion
...
And men have a very
sophisticated mechanism by which they can do just that: they wage
war on their own sperm
...
It seems that these sperm might actually be programmed to destroy a
man's own egg-getters
...
The other has a pear-shaped head and is
called a pyriform sperm
...
When men are stressed, they produce much greater numbers of these
so-called family-planning sperm
...
But if she is unfaithful and sperm warfare occurs, her
partner's family-planning sperm can help his conventional killers
overcome the other man's egg-getters
...
Had he
responded to stress by abstaining from routine sex, there would be no
such chance
...
He managed to prevent her becoming pregnant throughout
her weeks of infidelity
...
As we have now seen, the bodies of both men and women have a
range of natural methods, mainly triggered by stress, by which they
avoid having children when times are bad
...
But they do not — in fact, exactly the
opposite is true
...
Historically and geographically, the
number of times a woman gives birth in her lifetime is linked closely
to the chances of her children surviving to adulthood
...
If she does
not, few or none may survive to adulthood
...
In contrast, as we saw
earlier, when survival prospects are good a woman gives birth to
fewer children and lavishes much more of her time and resources on
each
...
Again, she avoids having children during bad
times and only conceives when circumstances are really favourable
...
But because
women in different circumstances have different expectations, they
are stressed by different levels of deprivation
...
It is a woman's expectation of living standard that determines
the number of children she attempts to have
...
As it does so, it influences just when she has
each child as she strives to reach her preferred total
...
For most of human history,
from about one million years ago until as recently as ten to fifteen
thousand years ago, all people lived as hunter-gatherers
...
Societies were
made up of small, scattered bands of people
...
The children of huntergatherers had an excellent chance of survival
...
Of these, two or three
survived
...
In the most
fertile areas, large and concentrated communities developed, living
on a carbohydrate-rich diet
...
The average number of children was about seven or eight, but double
figures were commonplace
...
As with the hunter-gatherers, on
average, only two or three in each survived
...
In Western
Europe this decline in birth rate was again the product of natural
family planning, for it preceded by up to a century the availability
and use of modern contraception
...
Many women will read this discussion of natural family planning
with some cynicism, wondering how, if their bodies are so wonderful
at family planning, they managed to conceive at precisely the time
they least wanted
...
As we have repeatedly seen, a woman's body may interpret its
circumstances very differently from her brain
...
Nevertheless, her
body actually went out of its way to become pregnant
...
It would, of course, be wrong to conclude that the body is always
right
...
The very fact that in every generation some people achieve a greater
reproductive success than others indicates that some bodies make
more mistakes than others
...
Yet recently, brains have been given greater
power in this question of contraception
...
But this change in control may not, as we have seen, influence
the total number of children a woman may have
...
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SCENE 17
How Forgetful
As the taxi pulled up, the woman heard her partner opening the front
door
...
Holding her breath, she waited to see if he would come back
into the room to say goodbye
...
He would
be gone for four weeks, and they were parting on bad terms
...
He wanted another child — preferably a
son — but she didn't
...
Now
in her early thirties, the woman wanted to return to her career
...
His
disillusionment seemed to have stripped him of his health and energy
and he had been off work for six weeks, returning only a month ago
...
She knew that what he
really needed to speed his recovery was peace and quiet but, in spite
of herself, she just could not oblige
...
He had insisted on sitting
around downstairs instead of keeping out of her way in bed
...
They had even argued over the new window-cleaner
...
Good-looking, confident
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SUCCESSFUL FAILURE
and flirtatious, he had once commented on the bikini she was wearing
in the garden
...
Despite his return to work, their relationship had failed to improve
...
He had sulked
all month
...
She had refused, and they hadn't spoken since
...
The day after he left, two things happened
...
They made
up over the phone as best they could
...
It happened just a week into his trip
...
Just as she had finished showering and drying her
hair, the door-bell rang
...
He had called round to see if she had heard from her partner recently
— because he hadn't
...
She invited him in and, after they had
discussed the reason for his call, politely offered him a coffee
...
Once, much to the
irritation of their respective partners, they had indulged in a flirtatious
conversation at a drunken New Year's party
...
Gradually, their conversation turned to the
problems they were each having with their respective partners
...
All she knew was that at some
point she became aware that only her hastily tied bath robe separated
her body from his eyes and that he was watching her intently, waiting
for glimpses of her nakedness
...
She laughed exaggeratedly at his comments and
contrived reasons for bending and twisting in front of him, pretending
not to notice as her robe loosened and the bulge in his trousers grew
...
She
sat opposite him, breasts scarcely covered
...
In a final move, she lifted her legs on to the chair, deftly
pushing her bath robe between her legs to cover herself
...
Minutes later they were having intercourse on the floor and ten
minutes after that he had gone, suddenly embarrassed by what had just
happened but telling her that her body had been irresistible
...
Surely it couldn't have been her
doing all of those things — acting out such clichéd events
...
As the week progressed, she was to have many
moments of fear — fear that somehow her partner would find out
what she had done and fear that she had caught something
...
But for most of the week that had just begun, she was simply
to feel a height of sexual restlessness and excitement that she hadn't
experienced in years — and would never experience again
...
She masturbated
again the next morning
...
She was inside the house and up to her bedroom in
seconds, standing in front of her bedroom mirror, back to the window
...
Feigning surprise at seeing him she waved unconcernedly, then busied
herself with tidying the room, deliberately choosing jobs that involved
much stretching and bending
...
She complained of the heat and, looking
down at her nakedness, laughed that she had no money on her
...
No more windows were cleaned on her road that afternoon until,
after her best climax during intercourse for years, she left to pick up
the children from school
...
That weekend, which she spent with her two daughters, it
was as if she suddenly woke up from a dream
...
On the Monday, she told both lovers that it had been fun but a
mistake, and she was no longer available
...
When her partner returned, two weeks later, she told him about
forgetting to start her pills on time but let him have unprotected sex
anyway as a coming-home present
...
She never did have her period
...
Her partner was
thrilled, even when the child turned out to be another girl
...
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SPERM WARS
M
ost readers will recognise the seduction of the young
window-cleaner as a cliché (as, later, did the main character
in Scene 17 herself)
...
If the man involved is not a window-cleaner, he is an
electrician, a plumber, a builder, a TV repair man or (in Britain, the
biggest cliché of all) a milkman
...
Indeed, so hackneyed is this scenario that there is a danger, if we
are not careful, of missing the important point: namely, that the
behaviour has become hackneyed precisely because it is so common
...
Why should the woman in the scene, and so many like her, suddenly
throw herself at two male visitors to her home? What is the
significance of the saga of her contraceptive pills? And how did she
benefit from her behaviour in terms of reproductive success?
When this scene began, the woman genuinely believed that she
didn't want another child
...
Then, in the midst of what, sexually,
was the most active week of her life, she 'forgot' to take contraceptive
precautions
...
Her brain was then simply coerced into finding a
convincing reason why they, as a couple, should avoid conception
...
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SUCCESSFUL FAILURE
In her eyes, her partner had decreased in stature over the years
...
Now his health also was
failing, and he was proving less than robust
...
In effect, her body had decided that a third child should be
fathered by somebody with signs of a more robust genetic constitution
than him
...
A woman is less likely to use contraception when she has sex with
somebody other than her partner
...
The first time the woman in Scene 17 had sex
with her partner's boss or with the window-cleaner, it would have
been difficult to insist on their wearing a condom
...
In any case, she wasn't dependent on these men and on
condoms
...
But she forgot
...
We have already discussed (Scene 6) how
women become more interested in infidelity at this time
...
By the time her partner returned and accepted an
unprotected intercourse as a coming-home present, the woman will
already have been two weeks pregnant
...
This is the final touch by which they can confuse the
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SPERM WARS
males around them
...
This would allow each of them to make
some assessment of who could and could not be the genetic father
...
This explains why our main
character was keen to have unprotected intercourse with her partner
on his return
...
Given such a short-lived and ideal opportunity for undetected
infidelity, the woman's body made a shrewd move in collecting sperm
from more than one man
...
First, she halved
her chances of being unlucky enough to collect sperm from a man
who just happened to be infertile (10 per cent of men, largely due to
sexually transmitted disease — Scene 11), despite appearing to be a
suitable genetic father (Scene 18)
...
She
might never again have such a perfect opportunity to conceive a child
with better genes than her partner could provide — not without
leaving him, anyway
...
When a woman has sex with two men over a short period of time,
she has three ways of influencing which of them fathers any child that
may result
...
Secondly, she can
retain a larger sperm army from one of the males (Scenes 22 to 26)
...
If a woman uses a barrier method, such as cap or condom, with one
man but not the other, she can prevent the former from entering sperm
into warfare at all
...
Indeed, our main character made full use of modern
contraception in ensuring that she did not conceive via her partner
...
All they had
to do was win a sperm war
...
But it has provided her with a powerful and efficient tool with which
to enhance her natural ability to time when and via whom she
conceives
...
But in the hands of a woman's urges it is a powerful new
weapon by which she can increase her reproductive success
...
The naked
woman moved slowly off the bed so as not to wake the young man
sprawled next to her
...
The
tiles of the patio were hot to her feet
...
The blissfully
cool water washed the remnants of her recent intercourse from her
thighs and pubic hair and, as she swam the length of the pool, carried
away her flowback
...
She watched his naked,
tanned and muscular body run across the hot tiles and dive not quite
perfectly into the water
...
After a few minutes together, enjoying the
water, she asked him to go
...
The woman also left the pool
...
There was no danger of her nakedness being seen
...
When the
young man appeared at the french windows to shout his farewell, she
was on her way back to the patio
...
For a woman only
months from her fortieth birthday and with three children, one now in
her mid-twenties, her body was in impressive shape
...
In
five years, he was probably her best find yet
...
Ideal for student during summer vacation'
...
Her choice was
based on the student's looks, intelligence, maturity, self-confidence
and sexual aura
...
The result was that for two days a week, over
about three months each summer, she had the sexual companionship
of a young man nearly twenty years her junior
...
This year she had hired two men, both medical students, whom she
had found equally attractive
...
As she stretched out in the sun on the lounger, she toyed once
again with the fantasy of having both young men in bed with her at
the same time
...
As she drifted in and out of
a sun-drenched sleep, she reflected on the events that had given her
such a good life
...
She had been out with her
mother, shopping around for a new pair of jeans
...
The town was a forty-five-minute bus ride away from their home, even
on a good day
...
The bus never came
...
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SPERM WARS
He wasn't really a stranger
...
Her father
worked for him as a gardener cum handyman, helping to maintain his
house and its grounds
...
All she knew was that
he was about fifty years old, very rich, and apparently had no
children, despite having lived with the same woman for about twenty
years
...
She had also heard them talk about infertility and
women's problems, but had taken little interest
...
At
fourteen, she was well developed and already attractive, with a
maturity and self-confidence that would have graced a twenty-yearold
...
She liked and felt comfortable with this man and had no hesitation, a
week later, in accepting another lift from him when he drove past her
at the school bus stop
...
Her schoolfriends teased her a bit about it, but it didn't
bother her
...
Her lover was a boy of seventeen whom she and her friends
had worshipped from a distance for months
...
She
became the envy of her friends as she described in great, though
sometimes imaginary, detail her sexual adventures with this young
idol
...
She was in his car the day before his partner was
diagnosed as having terminal cancer
...
He did not reappear until a few weeks after his partner's death
which, she discovered later, had been the day after her fifteenth
birthday
...
Soon, they
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SHOPPING AROUND FOR GENES
actually discussed which days he could do so, and she would wait for
him
...
Then, they
became adept at cramped sex on the cold and badly sprung back seat
...
It would be like being in bed
...
On their way
home from school, waiting at traffic lights, she had put her hand on
his thigh and leaned across to kiss him on the cheek
...
But within a week of that kiss
she was in his bed, experiencing for the first time the difference
between sex with a man of fifty and sex with a boy of seventeen
...
Neither
knew of the other's existence
...
She refused to discuss paternity with anyone except her parents and
her father's employer
...
Her father's employer was told that the
baby was his, as well it might have been
...
But he also felt genuine affection
for her and for the child he believed was his
...
On the strength of this extra
income, her parents volunteered to look after the child, a girl, while
their daughter finished her education
...
This time he
provided money for her to have a college education
...
Even so, twice a term she would arrange to
meet her benefactor at his city apartment for a weekend of sex and a
taste of the high life
...
In her third year, faced with a choice
between months of hard revision and a tempting offer from her
benefactor, she left college
...
At her urging, he sold his mansion and
bought the wonderful house in which she now lived
...
They also had a further two
children, both boys
...
Her partner was
without doubt the father of her elder son, but she could not be sure
who was the father of the younger one
...
Moreover, if he had
been a month later taking her to bed, so too might have been the
surgeon, a family friend who had treated her predecessor for cancer
...
Then, aged sixty-five, he died of a heart attack
...
She inherited the house and more than enough money to
live very comfortably — she continued to pay for her children's
education, travelled when she wanted and indulged in occasional
luxuries, like young gardeners
...
Many were widowed
or separated and most were rich
...
However, she
stubbornly refused to allow anybody to live with her permanently
...
Her daughter, now aged twenty-five and living abroad with
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SHOPPING AROUND FOR GENES
her partner, had just announced her first pregnancy
...
She
took great pride in all her children, particularly her sons — not
because of what she had done for them, which in truth was very little,
but for what they were and for what they had done for themselves
...
But they were both good-looking and intelligent,
precociously mature and confident, yet still gentle and caring
...
Earlier, in their mid-teens, they had been in the habit of bringing
home friends from school to stay for a while during the vacations
...
In two weeks' time,
her sons would begin their summer vacation
...
Mischievously, the woman
wondered if they would swim naked with her this summer — and, if
they did, whether their girlfriends would join them
...
It was time to shower and dress so as to be ready
for her evening's escort
...
I
n congratulating herself on her life, the woman in this scene was of
course measuring her success on a hedonistic scale
...
And even on a biological scale, she had done rather well
...
Yet mate selection is complex,
particularly for a woman
...
The scene we
137
SPERM WARS
have just witnessed is the first of four in which we shall explore two
matters — the problems that people, particularly women, face when
selecting a mate; and the methods they employ in solving those
problems
...
First, through her choice of long-term partner, she
engineered an environment conducive to the easy and successful
raising of children (from the point of view of being in a position to
offer them every opportunity, anyway)
...
As
a result, she produced children with the looks and ability to make the
most of the comfortable environment into which they were born
...
She made the
most of her daring and cunning, her composure and good looks, and
successfully walked the tightrope of disease, discovery and
desertion
...
On the one hand, she needs a man
who can help her raise her children
...
The better the environment and the better the
assistance, the more fully each child will achieve his or her genetic
potential
...
She
could probably persuade many men of her choice to give her their
genes — it takes only a few minutes of sex, after all
...
Most men in
most societies have not the time, the energy nor the resources to help
support more than one woman and her children at any one time
...
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SHOPPING AROUND FOR GENES
An equally difficult problem is to identify which of the few
available men would make the best long-term partner
...
Much of
the woman's choice, therefore, is limited to young and unattached
men who have not yet proved themselves as long-term partners
...
Surveys of many cultures around the world consistently show that,
in looking for a long-term partner, women prefer men who have, or
have the potential of, wealth, status, stability and durability
...
The same holds true even in today's
industrialised societies
...
One man may be wealthy but uncaring;
another may be of high status but unstable; yet another may be poor,
but stable and caring
...
Of course, she does not have to stay with her first
partner
...
In choosing a man to help raise her children, a woman is only
secondarily impressed by looks, whereas in choosing a short-term
partner for sex, looks are much more important
...
She is also
attracted by symmetry in his physical features
...
As such, they imply a genetic
constitution that would also be desirable in her children
...
They have two main options
...
This can succeed, but only if
they successfully avoid the disadvantages of infidelity that we have
already discussed (Scenes 8 to 11)
...
As we have found in so many aspects of reproductive success,
women's behaviour and experience are mirrored by other animals
...
One of the most revealing
studies of the problem concerns a bird, the blue tit
...
Those lucky ones paired to genetically superior males with
the best territories are totally faithful
...
They sneak into the better males' territories,
solicit intercourse, then return unobserved to the partner they have
just cheated
...
Actual levels range from 0
per cent in the nests of the most favoured males to about 80 per cent
in the nests of the least favoured ones
...
On average,
about 10 per cent of children are not sired by their supposed father
...
Actual figures range from 1 per cent in high-status areas of
Switzerland and the USA, through 5-6 per cent for moderate-status
males in Britain and the USA, to 10-30 per cent for lower-status
males in Britain, France and the USA
...
Anthropological studies have shown precisely the same
pattern
...
So in all ways, men of wealth and status have the
potential to be reproductively more successful than their lower-status
contemporaries
...
It is as if
the female always gives her partner some chance of paternity so as to
retain his help in paternal care
...
Moreover, when we look at which children are most likely to belong
to their partner, women show a clear pattern
...
The reasons, though, are slightly different for
first and last
...
Sometimes he knows this and takes on the woman and her
child anyway (Scene 15), for reasons we have discussed (Scene 9),
but sometimes he doesn't know
...
Subsequent children, however, are more and more
likely to be the product of infidelity
...
Having selected him, she then
has to recruit him into the chosen role
...
If she cannot attract her first choice,
she then has to compromise yet again
...
The woman in Scene 18 was successful because a rich
and successful man, thirty-five years older than herself, picked her
out from the crowd
...
She succeeded
once again because these
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SPERM WARS
SHOPPING AROUND FOR GENES
men considered sex with her to be worth the risk
...
So, what was it about this woman that men found so attractive?
What criteria do men use in choosing partners and lovers, and how do
these criteria differ from those used by women?
Basically, men select women for their health, fertility and fidelity
— though not consciously, of course
...
Nevertheless, the features that men's bodies are programmed to find
attractive are precisely those that do reflect this potential
...
An important feature is body shape, particularly the ratio of waist to
hip
...
This preference is remarkably constant both throughout
history (to judge from statues, paintings and 'girlie' magazines) and
from culture to culture (to judge from rock-paintings and figurines)
...
But in all
cultures, they prefer women with waists significantly narrower than
their buttocks
...
In addition to shape, men all over the world also respond strongly
to clear eyes, healthy hair and skin, and the shape of the face,
particularly its symmetry
...
Men of most cultures also respond to
breast size and shape, though actual preferences vary and there is no
simple link between the appearance of a woman's breasts and her
ability to lactate and sustain a child
...
Such traits, though, are relatively easy to
fake, at least for short periods
...
As long-term partners, women tend to prefer men who
are older than themselves
...
Unless he is very wealthy,
however, a man older than about fifty becomes less and less attractive
to a younger, still fertile, woman — because of the increasing risk
that he might die before any children she has with him become
independent
...
This way, they get more children from their investment
...
Hence the frequency with
which the most successful of men leave their middle-aged partner and
their first family to set up home and begin a second family with a
much younger woman
...
This is because she can judge a man's physical quality
more easily when he is at his physical peak
...
Consequently, older women are most likely to target young men for
acts of infidelity from within a secure long-term partnership, and are
less likely to choose them as long-term partners
...
She could have invited any of her 'gardeners' to live
with her for a while and perhaps give her another child — they had
all been carefully chosen for their genetic potential
...
Nor need she have short-changed
her new child
...
Many rich
women do
...
Choice of a long-term partner can still
influence their reproductive success, but now of course it is not via any
children that they might produce together
...
Wealth, status and the
potential to be a good stepparent or stepgrandparent now become of
primary importance to both sexes in their choice of a partner
...
We can see quite clearly that nowhere is the conflict of interests
between males and females greater than in the selection and
recruitment of a partner — at any age
...
Competition is fierce
...
If a person settles too readily for a
poor compromise, they may miss the chance of a much better
compromise later
...
He or she may then pay
the price of having to settle for a worse compromise, or even of failing
to attract anybody at all
...
There is a fascinating consequence of the criteria women use for
mate selection — particularly their preference for, and greater fidelity
to, men of wealth and status
...
They do
this not only through their long-term relationships, but also because
they have the same above-average opportunities to sire children with
the partners of other men as did their fathers
...
The greatest number of children ever claimed by a man is 888 (by an
ex-emperor of Morocco); that by a woman, sixty-nine
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SHOPPING AROUND FOR GENES
(over twenty-seven pregnancies)
...
A successful son, therefore, can give a woman far more
grandchildren than can a successful daughter
...
Since
wealth and status, as well as the genetic potential to achieve wealth and
status, can be inherited, we might expect higher-status couples to
produce more sons than lower-status couples — and they do
...
Usually the
bias is statistical rather than obvious — about 115 boys for every 100
girls — but sometimes it can be impressive
...
So why don't all women produce an excess of sons? Actually, to
some extent they do
...
But because boys are more likely to die during childhood, by
the time the survivors start to reproduce the proportion is about equal
...
Why?
The answer is that a son is a much more precarious reproductive
option than a daughter
...
If
they are not reproductively competitive, sons are a poor option
...
There are two ways in which a daughter is the
safer option: first, although relatively few daughters produce large
numbers of grandchildren for their mothers, relatively few fail to
produce any; second, a mother can be certain that all of the
grandchildren produced through a daughter are hers
...
Thus, only when there is a very good chance that a son will not
only survive but will also be reproductively competitive against other
males is it worth producing a boy
...
Nor should we be surprised that, in between these two extremes,
most women compromise and show no bias towards either sex
...
Just how she will
have achieved this bias is not known
...
Nor does it seem likely that high-status males introduce an excess of
'male' sperm into their partners but an excess of 'female' sperm into
their lovers
...
Either her body biases the proportion of male
and female sperm allowed through to the fertilisation zone in her
oviducts, or she is selective about which embryos she allows to
implant following fertilisation
...
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SHOPPING AROUND FOR GENES
To most people, the whole process of mate selection is a minefield
of distractions and pitfalls, particularly during late adolescence as a
boy or girl searches for their first long-term partner
...
She did so by virtue of the excellent genes she herself had
received from her parents
...
Her daughter had
already begun to produce grandchildren; her sons had great potential,
not only to produce their own families but also to be the targets of
other women's infidelities
...
In later generations, her
genes would mark more of the population than would the genes of her
less successful contemporaries
...
SCENE 19
Fair Exchange
It was Saturday night and the two couples were sitting cross-legged in
a circle on the floor
...
Each of them was privately tingling with nervous and
sexual excitement
...
They had known each other for seven years
...
The first couple, despite five years of unprotected sex,
had no children
...
In recent years, for
different reasons, each couple's relationship had been foundering
...
When they first met, they had seemed perfect for each other
...
She was effervescent,
open and liberated, always dressing provocatively
...
often
...
Once regarded as an item, they gained great kudos from
being each other's partner and, despite their earlier promiscuities, had
settled into a serious relationship
...
She was ovulating, had no blocked tubes and seemed normal
...
At first, they responded to their problem with intense sexual
activity, but after a further year of failure they gradually lost interest in
routine sex
...
She now saw his size and power as futile, boorish and
selfish
...
The couple with children were very different
...
What little social kudos they had came from their association with the
childless couple
...
The woman was demure, sympathetic and maternal
...
When he was not working they were hardly ever out of
each other's company
...
Their situation had been aggravated
when his employers, dismayed by his lack of ambition and charisma,
moved him sideways to a lower-profile position
...
For his part, having pushed his
partner into full-time motherhood, he now found her demure quietness
dull and unattractive
...
But over the weeks the impact of the
images had worn off
...
Even that
source of excitement, though, had eventually begun to wane — until
tonight
...
In the video they had just
watched, the men had thrown their car keys into a pile in the centre of
the room
...
Soon the room was full of naked, copulating bodies
...
At first they all treated the
suggestion as a joke, but as they became increasingly drunk they
began to talk about the possibility seriously
...
They devised a card game, based on chance, not strategy, that
required the winner to remove an item of clothing
...
A run of wins left the smaller of the two men naked almost before
the others had started
...
As he settled back to
watch the two women progressively expose more and more of their
femininity, he became increasingly proud of his erection
...
In a late run, it was his partner who was
next to be naked
...
An immediate suggestion that the
rules should be changed so that partners did not have sex with each
other was defeated by the alternative idea that they should still have
sex, but in full view of the other couple
...
Laughter, self-consciousness and
a rapidly dwindling erection almost ended the enterprise
...
The intercourse they had,
while still being caressed by the other couple, was the most exciting
either had ever experienced
...
He should now have sex with the already naked and prostrate
woman rather than with his own partner
...
The woman was to relive this moment
many times over the next few years
...
It was instead an
overwhelming sense of welcome
...
He had been so aroused that he ejaculated within seconds
...
The childless woman, who had
perhaps wanted all this to happen more than any of them, began to fret
that she would not have her turn
...
At the childless woman's suggestion,
he entered her from behind as she knelt down, bending forward over a
chair
...
He could scarcely wait for his friend to
withdraw before taking over
...
A month later, both women
discovered they were pregnant
...
But
they were quite wrong
...
The couples were to stay together for another five years
...
As the children grew, however, both relationships once more
deteriorated
...
The man began an affair with the other woman
...
Eventually, though, they confessed their infidelity,
both couples separated, and the unfaithful pair began to live together,
along with the woman's three children
...
By
now he was convinced that he was infertile
...
He was often unfaithful
...
In the years to
come, he unknowingly sired two more children via his promiscuity
...
If they failed, they suffered
...
Partner-swapping
is not particularly common in Western society, but it occurs often
enough to form a recognisable part of the rich mosaic of human
sexuality — a part, moreover, that promotes sperm warfare
...
What circumstances can lead such behaviour to actually improve a
person's reproductive success?
The answer lies in the way criteria for choosing partners and lovers
can change with time during the course of a person's life
...
Excitement and fear will have been relished in equal
proportions — the excitement of imminent infidelity will have been
tempered by fears concerning their bodies and their sexual
performances
...
Would the reproductive
benefits of their planned actions outweigh the reproductive costs?
The more extrovert couple had an easy decision
...
Each thought
their partner might be sterile, and here was a golden opportunity to
have sex with someone of proven fertility
...
The other couple had a more difficult decision, though consciously
neither would probably have appreciated their body's logic
...
Even two
children might be too many for them to raise successfully without an
improvement in circumstances
...
His friend's partner offered just such a possibility
...
Her friend's partner had potential, argued the woman's body
...
Maybe, if she had a child which he thought
might be his, he would help her financially
...
On top of all that, her
body could see a benefit in conceiving via this man: not only was he
very attractive to women, he had also achieved a higher status in life
...
Of course, some of the potential costs of infidelity were still there
for both couples — risk of disease, for example
...
All of the characters knew and agreed to what
was going to happen, so there was no need for deception and hence no
risk of discovery
...
Both relationships were already
unstable, and the risk of anybody being deserted by their partner
because of the night's events would have seemed no greater than
before
...
And as it turned out, all four were
correct
...
The childless woman
conceived
...
The other
woman struggled initially, but eventually wrested the first man from
his partner, benefited from his wealth, and successfully raised three
children
...
Only for the other man is it less
easy to see the value of his decision
...
But he didn't
...
Eventually, he was deserted by his partner for a man
with whom she had first been unfaithful with his consent
...
At first sight, his may not seem much of a success story
...
He still saw them often and gave them
what help he could
...
If he
hadn't agreed to that night's events, he might have struggled to raise his
two children
...
He might still eventually have been deserted by his partner, but in less
favourable circumstances
...
Indeed,
a key factor in the less extrovert man's success was that his friend did
turn out to be a good stepfather
...
Mostly, however, it was because his ex-partner
tolerated her new partner's infidelities
...
In effect, she traded his sexual freedom for a
guarantee that, no matter what happened, she and her three children
would be financially protected
...
But if
things had turned out differently, and the previously childless man had
failed to win those two sperm battles, he would have lost out in a big
way
...
He was a sperm wars
specialist, producing too many sperm
...
Put the specialist in a monogamous situation and he was subfertile
...
Multiple sperm entered the egg
simultaneously and dense concentrations of deadly chemicals were
released by the surrounding sperm hordes
...
But
send his sperm in to battle, and he was virtually invincible
...
On that night of sexual revelry, the less extrovert man produced
small armies, rich in blockers (Scene 7) and family-planning sperm
(Scene 16)
...
Then he could use long-term,
routine sex to produce children at long but measured intervals when
times were good (Scene 16)
...
Even so, he would probably
have produced more children with his partner had he been more
successful socially and financially
...
We discuss the existence of these two male types in Scene 35
...
These sexual responses were important factors in
determining the outcome of the scene we have just witnessed
...
The unconscious
motivation was the same for both of them
...
As things turned out, theirs was a fair
exchange
...
The man had engineered the visit and they had been looking
forward to it for days
...
The woman had made a point of telling her partner where she was
going and who she was going with
...
He was steady and reliable, both as a partner
and as father to their two children, and she didn't want to lose him
...
He was a challenge,
and he was attractive
...
In contrast, the man had not bothered to tell his partner
...
In fact, his partner no longer seemed to care what he did and
appeared to welcome his days away
...
Not that it bothered him much — in fact, he would
almost have welcomed her infidelity, taking it as a licence to pursue
infidelity himself
...
After a year of platonic acquaintance, they knew
a lot about each other
...
Yet, somehow, even this incompatibility
was attractive
...
On a few occasions, like today, they had even greeted each
other with a friendly kiss
...
One day they would have a proper affair, snatching and
engineering sex when
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SHOPPING AROUND FOR GENES
they could
...
Their business completed by mid-day, they decided to enjoy their
freedom and the weather and to buy food and drink for a picnic
...
He was looking for somewhere
secluded
...
Eventually, growing hungry, she decided she had teased him
long enough
...
Rows of freshly mown hay lay silver-green in the intense
sunlight
...
She said it would do
...
She was wearing a loose cotton dress and, knowing
from the minute she got up in the morning she could engineer a
picnic, had brought a straw hat with her
...
Even
so, sitting there in the field in the heat he looked uncomfortable
...
The denouement came when she accused him of having something to
hide
...
Even so, he felt slightly silly as he removed his shoes and
socks and even sillier when he stood up, took off his shirt, then in one
movement pushed down his trousers and pants
...
Avoiding
any reaction to his nakedness, she simply commented that he would
be much more comfortable now and busied herself with the picnic
...
She shook her head, saying that she would burn, even in dappled
shade
...
After a few moments, she took it into her mouth and
slowly worked backwards and forwards
...
After twenty seconds or so, she took it out, formed a tunnel with her
hand, and began very slowly to pump
...
Convinced by now that they weren't going to have intercourse, he
needed little encouragement
...
As she watched him pump, her gaze switched from his penis to
his face and back again
...
He came quickly, turning sideways so as not to spray her
...
Then
she saw the final three spurts emerge more slowly and drip on to the
grass in front of them
...
Almost immediately it was over, he felt depressed and a little
cheated
...
For her part,
she felt relieved that his urgency was now gone
...
H
umans are not the only mammals of which the female smells,
licks or sucks the male's penis as part of courtship
...
So do rats, dogs and many others
...
Sometimes (as in this scene — which involves the same couple as in
Scenes 10 and 26) the male responds by ejaculating in mid-air, rather
than in the female
...
As we have already discussed (Scene 10),
however, any behaviour that has evolved to be sexually exciting
usually has repercussions in terms of reproductive success
...
In effect, a man seeks or allows oral sex as a display of health or
fidelity
...
From
time to time, the benefits of such display outweigh any cost
...
Moreover, he gained more than he would have done
from saving those sperm for inseminating his partner later in the day
(Scene 10)
...
Whether a man stimulates himself or whether he is
stimulated by a woman, the number of sperm he sheds is the same
...
Often, of
course, as in this scene, a man does not know until the last minute
whether he is going to have intercourse or ejaculate in mid-air
...
After shedding sperm, the man in Scene 20 had an even younger
and more killer-rich ejaculate waiting in his tubes than he had before
...
The problem
comes when he returns home to his partner
...
The
point is, however, that if his partner really is faithful, he can afford to
introduce into her body the occasional sub-optimal ejaculate
...
Men's bodies seem to work to the following rule: 'If I have
161
SPERM WARS
had the opportunity to be unfaithful, then while I was away so too has
my partner
...
So, when he inseminated her later that day, he had the inseminate
he needed
...
Once a man enters a phase of
infidelity, therefore, similar ejaculates become appropriate for both his
partner and his lover
...
So the man lost little, if anything, by ejaculating on to the grass —
except, of course, that ejaculating on to grass does not fertilise eggs
...
But even that may not be as lost an opportunity as it might at first
seem
...
Since, as we
saw in Scene 6, women are most likely to have sex with a lover during
their fertile phase, a man has little to lose reproductively by leaving his
mistress to decide when they should have sex
...
In order for this strategy to pay off, his behaviour in the field
today needed to increase his chances of gaining those future rewards
...
The woman's body did not want his partnership, only his genes
...
She would commit herself to having his child
only if these qualities out-weighed the potential costs of infidelity
...
From her body's point of
view, this afternoon was to be a test of his potential — the final
collection of facts, the final balancing of the
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SHOPPING AROUND FOR GENES
equation
...
First, there was his body
...
Like most
men, of course, he assumed her main interest would be in the size of
his penis and muscles
...
The best indication of a man's health and
hormones is the ratio between his waist and buttocks
...
Firm, tight buttocks are a
good, though of course not perfect, indication of his health and
fertility
...
Not
until he began to kiss her after the incident with the car was her body
finally reassured that he was not impotent
...
The best way to check for
infection was to examine his penis closely
...
Absence of rashes and sores and a reasonably
pleasant taste are a good sign of health, and her body knew this
...
A liquid, whitish ejaculate with
a normal smell is a sign of health, whereas discoloration, particularly
bright yellow or orange, or a bad smell, are often signs of infection
...
In those few minutes the woman collected an abundance of
information about the man, much of which would have been hidden
from her if she had simply had sex with him
...
It is not only during her first encounter with a potential lover that a
woman might gain from tasting a man's penis
...
Partners who were
once healthy may become diseased
...
She can also use oral sex to taste or smell infidelity (as can a
man — Scene 10)
...
Not only a man's
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SPERM WARS
partner but also his mistress can gain from oral sex
...
There are a number of other ways in which a woman might gain
from making a man display his ejaculate — again, not only on her first
encounter with a potential lover, but also from time to time as part of
routine sex
...
She should also scrutinise more
closely a partner who unexpectedly cannot ejaculate or who produces a
small ejaculate
...
Even discovering this is useful to her (Scene 13),
but, much more importantly, the explanation may be that he has
recently been unfaithful
...
For
example, many men would have difficulty ejaculating in front of their
partner in the first hour after inseminating a mistress
...
Despite this scrutiny, a man can still gain from deliberately
ejaculating in front of his partner from time to time
...
He can also reassure, or
mislead, his partner over whether he has recently been unfaithful
...
This is
precisely because most men do not display their ejaculate very often
— and when they do, they pick their moment
...
Consequently, they never get a chance to learn how to
recognise a departure from normality
...
In particular, he should avoid
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SHOPPING AROUND FOR GENES
placing his penis in his partner's mouth or displaying his ejaculate too
soon after being unfaithful
...
The more unexpected she can make those moments,
the more information she is likely to collect
...
She fanned her face with her hand
...
Nodding and smiling, he mimicked her hand movement in unspoken
agreement
...
Under a clear blue sky, the road ahead of them snaked up and round
the side of a hill
...
She
shouted her intentions to the driver and his male companion in front,
then stood up, poking her head and shoulders through the sun roof
...
A short distance
ahead, just disappearing around the first corner, was a similar car
containing the other three members of their group
...
The girl tried to attract her attention, but the sound of the wind
drowned her shouts
...
As
the noise of the engines died, it was replaced by the cicadas' loud
singing
...
Six of them had been travelling
together for weeks, seeing as much of the
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SPERM WARS
SHOPPING AROUND FOR GENES
continent as they could, as cheaply as they could
...
Their nights had been spent at beach bars, intoxicated by cheap
alcohol, cheap drugs and good company
...
After a few minutes' walk, they arrived at the top of a high cliff
overlooking sand and sea
...
The girl had
one arm round the woman's waist, her other round the stranger's
...
Once over the brow of the cliff,
they had to make their way down a long, zigzag path, steep and
obscure enough to deter the casual holidaymaker
...
They had inside information — the young stranger had been born in
the area
...
The path was very narrow
...
They exchanged greetings, but she was
concentrating so hard on not falling off the cliff that she failed to
notice the close interest they took in her and the rest of her group
...
Elated by her
surroundings and excited at the afternoon's prospects, she was feeling
particularly frisky
...
After allowing the water to lap around their feet for a few moments
the group moved on, following their local friend
...
As they drew nearer, they could see that the rocks had
'nudista solo' crudely aerosolled in white paint, high up on their
surface
...
Ensconced under a parasol, stretched
out in the shade were two naked women
...
A short distance out to sea a small
boat-load of tourists travelled slowly past
...
Wearing nothing except a straw hat, he was perched on a folding chair
...
He was
watching the naked women closely
...
An
overhanging cliff face shielded the beach from above, and a curve in
the seaward rocks hid it from boat-bound voyeurs
...
The local man was no stranger to nudity and had welcomed
this chance to take his new friends to the nudist beach
...
What he did not know was that at one
time or another since coming on holiday, both women had had sex
with each of the men, as well as with each other
...
The younger girl began some horseplay with
two of the men, splashing them, jumping on their backs, and grabbing
at their genitals
...
She began to follow, but soon turned
and swam back to the beach
...
Soon, they were all
stretched out naked in the sun, passing around a bottle of wine and the
first of that afternoon's joints
...
The girl was lying with the
other woman, resting her head on the other's stomach
...
The women stayed like this for nearly an hour, sometimes
166
167
SPERM WARS
talking, sometimes drifting in and out of sleep
...
As she looked around, she could see that some
of the men were also asleep
...
Fast
asleep, his arms and legs were gently twitching
...
The girl whispered in her friend's ear
...
There, the girl watched and waited while the woman knelt by his
head and bent forward to kiss him on the lips
...
As the two women
kissed and stroked his body, every part of him relaxed — except one
...
After a few minutes, the girl sat astride
his groin, massaging his body with her hands and gently massaging
his penis with her vaginal lips
...
At first, they feigned
an air of casual disinterest
...
Eventually, however, their erections betrayed their true feelings
...
No stranger to this position, she slowly but expertly rose
and fell as if impaled on his erect penis
...
Her movement lifted her bottom in the air as if in
display to the man sitting behind her
...
He moved quickly across to
the woman and, with the minimum of foreplay, entered her from
behind
...
Because of their positions, the two women were facing each other
...
But they didn't
...
The girl
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SHOPPING AROUND FOR GENES
was disappointed when, just as she was building to a climax, the
stranger ejaculated inside her too soon and began to fade
...
Hardly had he penetrated her than she climaxed
...
Thrusting as best he could,
he was finding it difficult to build up to ejaculation
...
He was helped even less when the man put
his hands round the girl's waist and tickled her ribs, making her
laugh
...
Then, at the very last moment, he felt the girl
being pushed to one side and his penis slipping out of her vagina
...
The prostrate man was more than a little irritated
...
His
annoyance grew when, with the girl still laughing, the man who had
spoiled his fun entered her and began a long but gentle intercourse
...
While the girl's third lover in ten minutes was slowly building to
his climax, the events around her became a blur, even after she had
stopped laughing
...
The one man who had not yet had
intercourse seemed to be urging him to get off
...
Briefly, voices became raised
...
She protested a little as he lay down on top of her and opened
her
169
SPERM WARS
legs, but he took no notice
...
Resigned to her situation, the girl at first didn't
mind his thrusting, for she was very wet with the previous men's
semen
...
It was a relief when he ejaculated and
removed himself
...
One after another, they went in and out of the
sea, alternating short spells of swimming with longer spells of
sunbathing, drinking and smoking
...
But the
group's orgiastic activity did not really resume for another hour —
when the girl announced she wanted the man who had not yet had sex
with her
...
This time round, however, the frenetic atmosphere had gone
...
But no intercourse was rushed;
thrusting, when it occurred, was long and slow; on occasion, a man
and a woman would stay just coupled together, without thrusting,
while they talked, smoked or drank
...
There was almost
continuous sexual activity, but the urgency had evaporated
...
The last to inseminate the girl was the local man
...
She had gone for a swim, then returned to the beach to enjoy the last
of the day's sun
...
Despite all of the afternoon's activity,
her vagina was still hungry
...
She
walked over to the prostrate local and sat astride his stomach, facing
away from him so that she could talk to her female friend
...
170
SHOPPING AROUND FOR GENES
As she and the woman conversed, the girl's hands idly played with
the young man's penis
...
It was a sense of completeness, not excitement, that she felt
when he was inside her
...
All the time, despite their other activities, their bodies were
making subliminal movements, producing a tiny, gentle, but
continuous thrusting of his penis inside her
...
Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, her feelings
changed — she noticed the tingle of a potential orgasm
...
He, in his turn, gradually
increased his thrusting
...
Then, for the second time that afternoon she stared into the
eyes of the woman in front of her
...
The
girl climaxed, and within seconds so did the man
...
They were all tired, both from their
sexual exertions and from their various drugs
...
What they didn't know was that they had been
stolen by the lads who had watched them arrive at the beach, hours
earlier
...
The cars had been their travelling homes and had contained all their
luggage, as well as their passports and money
...
Without their passports they had immediate trouble with the local
bureaucracy, not least when they tried to obtain money
...
They
171
SPERM WARS
snatched sleep when and where they could
...
When pressed, she
explained that her contraceptive pills had been in the luggage but
that everybody had been so preoccupied with passports that she
hadn't liked to mention it
...
But she immediately worried for her friend
...
As soon as they returned, the girl recruited the help of the local
man, the first and last to inseminate her on the beach four days
earlier
...
By then, the two cars but not the luggage had been
recovered by the police — and the girl was pregnant
...
I
n Scenes 18 to 20 we discussed the problems women face in
selecting a mate
...
What circumstances could favour such
abandoned behaviour from the point of view of a woman's
reproductive success, and what are the repercussions likely to be?
In most societies, relatively few people take part in an orgy in
their lifetime, perhaps no more than 1 per cent according to a recent
British survey of nearly four thousand women
...
The classic examples, of
course, are historical — for instance, the well documented orgies of
ancient Rome
...
Taken as a whole, extreme orgiastic behaviour is relatively
uncommon, but in a less extreme form equivalent behaviour is not
so unusual
...
At the other extreme is
conventional infidelity in which a woman allows two men to
inseminate her over a slightly longer time span and not in each
other's presence
...
Having selected two or more men (by the
criteria we discussed in Scene 18) as suitable genetic fathers for her
next child, she calls their sperm to battle
...
As long as
this latter benefit outweighs any associated costs, such as a greater
risk of disease from having sex with two men instead of one, she
will gain from her behaviour
...
After all, a daughter will not produce an
ejaculate, competitive or not
...
But not much, because both sons and daughters will inherit genes, to
be passed on to their grandsons, great-grandsons and so on, for all
the qualities the woman has selected in the man who wins the war —
including his genes for a competitive ejaculate
...
In pursuing this strategy, a woman encounters a major problem
— the men she selects to compete will rarely be given an equal
chance to demonstrate their prowess at sperm warfare, because
when the time interval between inseminations is relatively long, the
outcome of that warfare is determined more by when she ovulates
than by the competitiveness of the two armies
...
Not because his army would have been any more or
less competitive, but simply because his sudden flood of new sperm
would have reached the egg just in time, rather than just too late
...
The ultimate would be if two inseminates could be mixed together in
the seminal pool before any sperm were allowed to leave
...
But this could only happen if a woman
had two men's penises in her vagina at the same time and both
ejaculated simultaneously
...
Interestingly, this problem of timing can be turned to a woman's
advantage
...
Essentially, the closer
together she allows different men to inseminate her, the more weight
she gives to the competitiveness of their ejaculates; the further apart,
the more weight she gives to their other qualities (especially if her
body times ovulation to favour the man whose qualities she prefers)
...
Most often, when a woman pursues a sperm warfare strategy there
are hours or even days between inseminations by different men
...
This suggests that, most often, women have clear
preferences based on the qualities discussed in Scene 18
...
In Scene 21 the two women allowed, even encouraged, two or
three different men to inseminate them within minutes
...
These women had selected five potential fathers for their children
...
At first glance it might seem strange, from the viewpoint of
reproductive success, that the woman in the scene who suspected she
was infertile nevertheless pursued a sperm warfare strategy just as
enthusiastically as the younger girl
...
We might
also have expected that, knowing her suspicions, the men would be
less interested in inseminating her than the girl
...
And what difference there was
could have been due simply to the girl being the younger of the two
(Scene 18)
...
Why?
The explanation is that nobody really knew whether the woman
was infertile or not
...
Even so, despite her suspicions she may still
have been fertile
...
But then, with the right
man in the right circumstances, she may conceive
...
All her body can do in its pursuit of
reproductive success is assume that it really is just a question of being
inseminated by the right man at the right time, and motivate her
accordingly
...
Not
many seemingly infertile women take this promiscuous route to
conception, but some do
...
So too was their bisexuality (Scene 31)
...
Although in large part this prowess will depend on the
competitiveness of their ejaculates, a number of other factors will
inevitably have influenced it — some more than others
...
As it happens,
coupling position probably makes little difference to the eventual
outcome
...
As we saw earlier, the pool stays
there as the penis is withdrawn, partly because it quickly coagulates
around the cervix and partly because the vagina closes behind the
withdrawing penis, holding the pool in place
...
Even then, this is only
a danger if the man withdraws too quickly after insemination
...
This is
because of the cervix's neat design
...
In the rear entry position, the cervix
is either underneath the seminal pool, like a plughole in a sink, or it
sticks up and hangs back down, like a coiled spring 'walking'
downstairs
...
Moreover, no matter how a
woman
changes her position after insemination, gravity will ensure that even
a coagulated pool of semen will slide into a new position
...
The main differences between coupling positions concern not their
influence on sperm retention but their influence on a couple's
vigilance and vulnerability during intercourse
...
Moreover, the rear-entry position allows at least the man to be
more vigilant (Scene 34)
...
All of the men should have
introduced as many sperm as possible, as it should have been clear
that warfare was imminent
...
However, the men did have a problem of strategy because there
were two women to inseminate
...
Precisely how many sperm
they deployed will have depended in part on how long it was since
they last had sex with each woman
...
In such a circumstance, we should expect the average man to inject
about 450 million sperm into the first woman and about 350 million
into the second
...
If any of them had been a sperm war specialist, such as we met in
Scene 19, he would have had an immediate advantage
...
But there
could have been another anatomical feature separating the men —
penis size, as well as testis size, could have made a difference
...
What most people don't realise is that there is more to its
function than simply delivering sperm to the top of the vagina
...
Its shape is no
accident, nor is the backward and forward thrusting that accompanies
penetration
...
In humans, it is
particularly effective at removing any seminal pool or any as yet
unejected flowback that may still be present
...
As it then begins to pull back, two things
happen: any material behind the vertical flanges at the back of the
glans gets dragged back down the vagina; and any material ahead of
the penis gets sucked further down the vagina, ready to be pushed
through at the next forward thrust
...
It may even help to remove some mucus and
blocker sperm out of the cervix
...
The larger the penis, the more effective the removal
...
The stranger, the first to inseminate the younger girl, was in pole
position — the man with maximum opportunity to deploy his army
and make life difficult for all who followed him
...
More than any of the other men, he had most to gain
from injecting more of his sperm now (say six hundred million), and
saving fewer (say two hundred million) for later
...
Any delay might
have given another male the chance to physically oust him and
deposit his own sperm inside
the girl first
...
Having succeeded in being first to inseminate the girl, what the
stranger should then have done, but didn't, was try to delay the next
man as long as possible
...
(The man
who was first to inseminate the older woman succeeded in doing just
that, despite triggering aggression
...
She moved immediately from the stranger to the next
man
...
He would, of
course, have been helped in his urgency by having watched the girl's
previous intercourse
...
While he was
waiting his turn his penis would have been erect and ready for action
...
He could have
ejaculated really quickly, reducing as much as possible the stranger's
head start, but the disadvantage of this option was that he would have
shot his sperm straight into the stranger's seminal pool
...
Because of his delay, he was displaced and
relegated from the possibility of being second to not inseminating her
at all — at least, not in the first round
...
Rather than wait his turn,
therefore, the third man successfully engineered events to inseminate
the girl second, not third
...
The fourth man then had no real alternative
...
Her vagina already contained a seminal pool from two
different men
...
In this he succeeded, for
the girl eventually felt her vagina becoming dry
...
But the cost of
removing the pool was that he lost time, and sperm from the first two
men had precious extra seconds to swim into her cervix and prepare
an ambush for the fourth man's army
...
The second round,
though, was quite different
...
Why?
It is important to realise that winning the first sperm battle inside
the girl did not necessarily guarantee claiming the prize of
fertilisation
...
If she ovulated not two but four or five days
after the orgy, the situation could be very different
...
By four or five days after the orgy, most of the sperm from the
first skirmishes would be dead or dying
...
They would be the last to lose their fertility
inside the girl, which meant that if ovulation was delayed they would
have a good chance of claiming the egg
...
The fact that each man divided more or less all of his initial store
of sperm between the two women during his first two inseminations
would not prevent him from pursuing a back-up
180
SHOPPING AROUND FOR GENES
strategy
...
In the
five hours or so from first insemination to last on that abandoned
afternoon, each man will have mobilised a further sixty million
young sperm
...
In the second phase of activity, the men were trying to do two
things
...
They were going to inseminate few sperm
anyway and so needed as easy an escape route into the cervix as
possible
...
Their
problem was that if they inseminated either woman too soon, they
would have fewer sperm and might in any case not be the last
inseminator
...
Each man, once coupled to a
woman, stayed in position as long as he could, thrusting as slowly
and for as long as possible, his body trying to judge the best time to
deposit his ejaculate
...
One by one, each
man made his decision and ejaculated his last
...
As far as they were concerned, they
simply felt different levels of excitement as one by one their
opportunities came to enter and inseminate one or other woman
...
When their bodies wanted to remove as
many traces of the previous ejaculates as possible, they experienced
only just enough excitement for erection
...
During spells when it was best to wait
a while, they temporarily lost interest and their
181
SPERM WARS
erections dwindled
...
In this complex interplay of reactions and interactions, the man
with the best chance of victory would be the one whose body best
timed his own inseminations, most interfered with other men's
inseminations, and best judged when and when not to couple and to
thrust
...
The women's role, in trying to further their own
reproductive success, was to give each man maximum opportunity to
prove himself — and maximum chance to make mistakes
...
In the second round, they benefited
most by allowing the men to play musical chairs with their vaginas
...
By
allowing such lengthy coupling without any other overt sexual
activity, each woman was testing each man's ability to guard her
vagina from other men, maintain an erection, and judge the best
moment to ejaculate — all qualities she would like in sons and
grandsons
...
Not until each body decided it had given the men
maximum opportunity to show their prowess at sperm warfare would
it have lost interest in simply coupling
...
Instead of the quiet, gentle
feel of a penis in their vaginas, they will have looked for the right
moment to begin a headlong rush into orgasm
...
The girl climaxed twice, once immediately she was entered by
the second man and once right at the end, while
182
SHOPPING AROUND FOR GENES
she was impaled on the stranger
...
She was still showing
favouritism — and the person she favoured was the stranger
...
For the
moment, the question of interest is why she preferred the stranger
...
In this,
women are typical primates
...
Similarly, female macaques are
known to go out of their way to allow male newcomers to their troop
to have sex with them
...
Of course, a female primate does not allow every male stranger to
inseminate her
...
The point is that, if two males satisfy her criteria equally,
she is more likely to prefer the stranger
...
If
the new male eventually achieves a powerful position in the troop's
hierarchy, he is more likely to behave favourably towards her and her
offspring if there is some chance he is the father
...
Whatever the reason, she did
favour his sperm
...
Secondly, she climaxed with him, and only
him, during the second phase of sexual activity
...
But this is not in
fact a contradiction — as will become clear in Scene 25
...
Going into her own room, she undressed, put on her
dressing-gown and went downstairs to pour herself a coffee
...
She switched on the
television, picked up a magazine, and began idly flicking through the
pages
...
Fifteen minutes passed, the television just a quiet noise in the
background
...
The occasional image or headline
caught her eye as she mechanically turned the pages, but essentially she
was lost in her own thoughts — like butterflies, dancing around in her
head, chasing each other in and out of her mind
...
But suddenly the idea
was there
...
She put down the magazine and stared at the fire
...
Even having decided, she waited until she had
drunk the last of her now cool
184
coffee
...
Quietly,
she walked past her daughter's bedroom to her own, and bolted the
door
...
Maybe she would look at the pictures she had secreted away, but
she couldn't quite remember where they were
...
Two or three years ago, she had used the handle of her partner's
table tennis bat, but then had spent days imagining splinters and germs
...
In the end she decided not to bother with
anything and simply to follow her usual routine
...
Her
left hand went across to her right nipple
...
She began to masturbate
...
Other, random,
non-sexual thoughts kept intruding
...
Old
favourites like being undressed, licked and caressed by another woman
or being worked on by two men got her started, but didn't take her very
far
...
Lubricant was spreading over her genitals and her fingers
...
The images had
now gone and her focus was entirely on the sensation between her
legs, under her moving fingers
...
Her body tensed, poised on the brink
...
In silent climax, her thighs
and genitals spasmed, quickly at first, then at increasingly long
intervals
...
It was done
...
Maybe 7 out of 10
...
Downstairs,
she put the phone back on the hook, poured herself a glass of milk and
returned to the warmth of the sitting-room and the drone of the
television
...
It didn't happen that often, perhaps
only three or four times a month
...
When she did masturbate, the orgasm was usually fairly
good
...
Occasionally, he
could give her a 5 out of 10 with his hands, but with his penis it was
usually about 2 out of 10
...
Masturbation had first added sexual colour to her life in her late
teens
...
She
scarcely knew when she had climaxed — 1 out of 10 at the most
...
Her partner didn't know she masturbated
...
They had been friends for years, having met long
before they had each met their respective partners
...
She had felt quite daring when she admitted that yes,
she did 'sometimes', but was then totally deflated when her friend
announced that recently she had been masturbating virtually every
night
...
This had
seemed particularly surprising because at the time her friend had been
suffering from a prolonged bout of cystitis
...
For a week after that conversation, she had attempted to emulate
her friend and masturbated every night
...
Even then, the second night was hard work
...
186
THE CLIMAX OF INFLUENCE
When her partner returned from his night out, she was curled up on
the settee, watching television
...
As they lay down, she felt like
intercourse
...
She tried a half-hearted flirtation but her partner responded with that
edge of irritability which by now she knew meant 'no chance'
...
O
f all aspects of human sexuality, the female orgasm has
probably been the most enigmatic
...
Some never have an orgasm
...
Yet others have an orgasm
nearly every time they have intercourse
...
Women who never orgasm readily
conceive
...
Every orgasm is a bit like every other orgasm, a bit like most
other orgasms, and a bit like no other orgasm
...
Women differ far more than men over when, how and how
often they climax
...
Each scene illustrates a situation which
will be very familiar to some women, and totally beyond the
experience of others
...
But
when and how often they make use of that function will differ from
woman to woman — for very good reason
...
In these five scenes, though, we are
concerned primarily with the way that orgasm has a different
influence
187
SPERM WARS
THE CLIMAX OF INFLUENCE
on a woman's reproductive success depending on the situation in
which it occurs
...
But as we have already seen, pleasure is not in
itself a function (Scene 10), but a by-product of function
...
As that urge is gratified, the
sensation generated is pleasure
...
A woman feels like an orgasm whenever
her body judges it will enhance her reproductive success
...
We begin, perhaps surprisingly, not with orgasms associated
with intercourse (Scenes 24 to 26) but with orgasms generated by
masturbation
...
The average rate of masturbation is
just under once per week — slightly higher in the week or so before
ovulation, slightly lower at other times
...
The commonest method of female masturbation is to stimulate the
clitoris, usually with just the fingers
...
On occasion, a penis substitute may
be inserted in the vagina-again, as a complement to clitoral massage
...
Women have even been known to recruit a cat or dog to lick
their genitals during masturbation
...
Because of the confusion that has surrounded the function of
the female orgasm, similar confusion has surrounded the role of the
clitoris
...
All female mammals have a
clitoris, the tip (or 'bulb') of which contains many nerve endings and
is very sensitive — more sensitive, in fact, than the tip of the penis
...
Often, it is also grooved and
carries urine away from the female's body during urination, much as
the penis does in males
...
They are not stimulated directly as a male thrusts,
because the rear-entry position usual for primates means that the
clitoris is forward of the point where the penis enters the vagina
...
This is
very different from the situation in most other monkeys, as well as in
apes and humans, in which the clitoris is much smaller than the penis
and is often concealed in folds of skin
...
Even species which sometimes couple
frontally (some monkeys, orang-utans, chimpanzees, gorillas and of
course humans) do not necessarily stimulate the clitoris during
intercourse
...
Moreover, small, semi- or totally concealed
clitorises are difficult for a male to find
...
Women are not the only female mammals to masturbate
...
Chimpanzees have been seen inserting leafy twigs in their vaginas,
then brushing them against vertical
188
189
SPERM WARS
THE CLIMAX OF INFLUENCE
objects, causing vibration
...
Female porcupines have been seen to stand astride a stick
then run, causing the stick to vibrate and so stimulate the clitoris
...
Moreover, once the chimp has discovered this substitute for
masturbation, she will periodically solicit clitoral massage by
presenting her rear-end to the person's hand
...
A few minutes after massage
begins, the cow's cervix is seen to gape open and move
...
Film taken by a tiny camera placed inside the
vagina of a masturbating woman shows that when she climaxes, her
cervix also gapes, dipping into the vagina at the same time
...
Orgasmic tenting
of the cervix, combined with climactic events inside the cervix itself,
are the key to the function of masturbation, for they have three main
consequences
...
Mucus
flows slowly from the cervix all the time, but orgasm speeds it up —
almost equivalent to the difference between a 'runny' nose and
sneezing
...
This quickly increases
the size of the mucus 'glacier' flowing through her cervix (Scene 3)
...
Then, when
tenting ceases, a part of the older section of the enlarged glacier is
squeezed into the vagina, like toothpaste out of a tube
...
This
shedding of mucus, however, does more than simply enhance vaginal
lubrication
...
This is an effective way of fighting
infection
...
Secondly, masturbation increases the acidity of the cervical mucus
...
New channels form through the mucus and at the same time material
from the top of the vagina is effectively 'sucked' into the tip of the
'elephant's trunk' of the cervix (Scene 3)
...
When the climax ends, part of this acidic mucus (plus any
disease organisms it contains) will be ejected back into the vagina as
described above, but some will remain in the cervix
...
For a while after
masturbation, therefore, and maybe even for days, sperm are less able
to swim through the mucus channels and disease organisms are less
able to invade and multiply
...
This is due not only to the
increase in acidity we have just discussed but also to orgasm
triggering about half of the cervical crypts (Scene 4) to void their load
of sperm from the last insemination
...
Moreover, because many of these new blockers are high up
in the cervix, their influence may last for days — persisting until the
cervical glacier carries them down into the vagina
...
The critical
factor seems to be how many of her cervical crypts still contain
sperm
...
Consequently, masturbation twenty-four hours after
intercourse, when many crypts contain sperm, strengthens the filter
more than masturbation forty-eight hours after intercourse, when
fewer crypts contain sperm, and so on
...
Presumably, after the second masturbation, few if
any crypts contain sperm
...
We have already noted the tendency for a woman to feel like
masturbating more often during the fertile phase of her cycle than at
other times
...
All the same, she may still feel the urge to
masturbate at other times
...
She also still needs to confuse her partner
(Scenes 23 and 26)
...
There is another way,
not as common as masturbation, but experienced by a number of
women
...
192
THE CLIMAX OF INFLUENCE
SCENE 23
Dark Secret
The purple haze hanging in the air seemed quite natural, as the
woman walked around the supermarket
...
Ahead of her,
stretching for miles into the distance, the meat aisle was completely
empty of people
...
Just
beyond the bacon she stopped by a big display of grinning pigs' heads
...
So why was she
so hot?
For a while she stood with her legs apart, trying to let cool air
reach her hot, tingling groin
...
An attractive woman in shop assistant's uniform suddenly
appeared in front of her
...
'Why did you take these out of their pack?' she asked
...
I was hot, so I took them off
...
'Mmm, I like the smell,' she said, her beautiful eyes peering at the
woman over the flimsy garment which she still held over her nose
and mouth
...
She breathed deeply through the woman's
knickers a few more times, then continued, 'And you will smell just
like this
...
Let me see if they're yours
...
'
The woman refused and backed away
...
Standing in a semicircle with the assistant at
193
SPERM WARS
the front, they began to hem her in
...
A man in the crowd came
forward, pushed himself behind her and pinned her arms so that she
couldn't move
...
She tried to speak, but the man put his hand on
her throat
...
Her still
beautiful but now demonic gaze never strayed from the woman's eyes
as she gradually revealed more and more of her body
...
Her top half was that of a beautiful woman, with perfect breasts
...
The naked hermaphrodite stepped towards her
...
In one movement, the hermaphrodite
tore off the woman's dress and pressed itself against her — breasts
against breasts, penis against groin
...
The
woman tried to struggle, rocking from side to side
...
She was going to
be raped
...
More sounds escaped as the woman struggled still
harder
...
The face left her nipples and began to lick its way over her belly
towards her groin
...
In the middle of her contractions, she woke up
...
It was a month since she had last climaxed at night
...
This had been a good one — 9 out of 10, she thought
...
As her body made its descent back to normal, she
drifted back into sleep
...
Here, we consider whether nocturnal orgasms are equally
important for women
...
By the age of twenty, only about 10 per cent have
ever experienced a 'nocturnal'
...
The majority of women, however, never experience (or
at least remember) such an orgasm
...
In fact, for the women who have them, nocturnals usually
produce the strongest climaxes of all
...
Nocturnal orgasms are nearly always associated with dreams,
although these dreams are not always sexual
...
Often it seems that the impending orgasm triggers the sex
dream, rather than the other way round
...
The climax was already on its way and the dream was
manufactured by her brain simply to accompany her body's build-up
...
Most often, people dream of
situations that reflect their own usual sexual activity, though lesbian
scenes for women who have never had a lesbian relationship are
relatively common — more common than homosexual scenes for
heterosexual men
...
The clearest observations are of female dogs
...
On some of these occasions, mucus wets their
vaginas and they have rhythmic contractions of their genitals, just
like women
...
Both types help a woman's body in its battle
against infection
...
And both strengthen her cervical filter, as long
as there are sperm in her cervical crypts
...
Not
surprisingly, therefore, nocturnals show a link with the menstrual
cycle similar to that shown by masturbatory orgasms
...
The most
likely time is about a week before ovulation — precisely when all of
the benefits of nocturnal and masturbatory orgasms are greatest
...
Women who use the
contraceptive pill show no such peak in the menstrual cycle for
either type of orgasm
...
A consequence of this link between ovulation and the timing of
nocturnals and masturbation is that these two types of orgasm have a
seasonal peak
...
As
nocturnals and masturbation are more likely to occur in the week or
so before a woman ovulates, they also are both more likely to occur
in some months than others
...
And as in the menstrual cycle,
the peaks are more pronounced for nocturnals than for masturbation
...
Most of these derive from the relative
ease with which a woman can keep the two types of orgasm a secret
from her partner
...
The
opposite is probably true for women — nocturnals are less difficult to
hide from a partner than masturbation
...
But even if he had been
awake, he still could not have been certain that she was having an
orgasm rather than simply dreaming
...
Given that both types of orgasm are advantageous if they occur
at the beginning of the fertile phase, nocturnals are probably the
better option — being less likely to betray the woman's fertile phase
to her partner
...
Many women have both types of orgasm, but differ in whether
they have more masturbatory orgasms than nocturnals or vice versa
...
Together, the two types of orgasm
help a woman's body to give an advantage to the man it would most
like to win sperm warfare
...
When she is next inseminated, a woman still has a variety of
options
...
SCENE 14
Another Successful Failure
'Did you come?' the man asked, panting, as, propped on his arms, he
held himself above her body
...
'I thought I was going to, but then it
just went and I couldn't get it back
...
'I thought you did, just before / came,' he panted, his intonation a
mixture of disappointment and irritation
...
But I did enjoy it
...
'
The couple relaxed in their usual post-coital embrace and sank
back into their own thoughts
...
This time, he had really gone for it
...
Maybe
she wasn't as wet as she could have been, but she was flushed
...
It had been putting in his penis that had stopped her
...
Even then, he had done his best to get her back
...
He had delayed as long as he could
...
He could sense
198
THE CLIMAX OF INFLUENCE
that she was becoming bored and impatient rather than excited
...
It was wishful thinking rather than a lack of awareness that
had made him suggest she had come just before he ejaculated
...
A year or so ago he had had a brief affair with a younger
girl
...
As long as he had given her a
bit of foreplay and as long as he didn't ejaculate too quickly, she
would come
...
His partner, however, rarely
came while he was inside her
...
But, try as he might, he had totally failed to find any
magic formula
...
And he had done exactly what he had done
tonight
...
Tonight, it had failed
...
At other times, if he
tried to bypass foreplay, she would complain
...
She hadn't really expected him to want sex tonight and
now she wished he hadn't
...
There were times when she really wanted a penis inside her
and wasn't particularly bothered about having an orgasm
...
Tonight, what she had
really wanted was an orgasm
...
A few more seconds of foreplay and she would have
come
...
But no, all
he had wanted was to feel himself inside her, with no thought for her
at all
...
And by the time his penis
had started to go in, she had
...
All excitement had gone and his interminable thrusting
had killed it stone-dead
...
Sometimes she found herself
looking at women in supermarkets, wondering what their climaxes
were like
...
As she had waited
patiently for her own turn to pay she had had this image of the
woman, naked on a bed, hair streaming about her shoulders, having
energetic intercourse and screaming in ecstasy
...
If she did climax during
intercourse itself, which happened once a month if she was lucky, it
was always a fairly tame affair; nowhere near as powerful as those
during foreplay or those she gave herself
...
If it happened, it was a mildly pleasant
bonus, but not really worth agonising and making a big effort over
...
She would much prefer her partner to give her an
orgasm when she felt like it, then satisfy himself inside her
...
Should she
really have to tell him every time? The man next to her really wasn't
measuring up too well at the moment
...
Some nearly always climax during intercourse; some never
do
...
Taking
women as a whole, it is more common to fail to climax with a penis in
the vagina than to succeed
...
Even when they do,
she usually climaxes during foreplay (35 per cent) or post-play (15
per cent), not during intercourse itself
...
There are several elements of interest in the scene we have just
witnessed
...
Another is his observation that
during his affair, his lover climaxed during intercourse much more
easily than his partner
...
But these elements are the subjects of later scenes; for the
moment, the main issue is the common lack of female climax during
intercourse
...
The nature of this preparation has
just been discussed (Scenes 22 and 23) in connection with nocturnal
and masturbatory orgasms
...
Whichever option her body has taken, we know that she will settle
down to intercourse with a certain level of protection against disease,
a certain level of vaginal lubricant,
201
SPERM WARS
THE CLIMAX OF INFLUENCE
a certain strength of cervical filter, and a certain population from
nought to millions of sperm in her oviducts, womb and cervical
crypts
...
Precisely what state of cervical filter is ideal varies
according to her circumstances
...
It will also vary according to
whether or not she is contemplating infidelity (Scene 26)
...
In particular, it differs according to
whether she wants the inseminator to have an advantage or
disadvantage in any sperm war that might be about to take place
(Scene 26)
...
So in order to
illustrate this principle, let's concentrate on the woman in Scene 24
...
Ovulation (if it was
going to occur this cycle — Scene 15) was therefore between seven
and twenty days away, and the intercourse that had just finished
would not make her pregnant
...
As far as we
know, infidelity during her next fertile phase was unlikely — but, as
always, was not impossible
...
Given her situation, all the woman needed from her intercourse
was a small number of young sperm to store in her cervical crypts
(Scene 4)
...
When, sometime during those next
few days, her body decided what cervical
filter would be ideal for her next anticipated insemination, she would
have all the raw materials necessary
...
)
Moreover, the younger the sperm she could collect now, the longer
her flexibility of choice would last
...
Before intercourse, her cervical filter was strong because of the
presence of menstrual debris (Scene 3)
...
A few infertile sperm might still have been in her
oviducts and a few of her cervical crypts might still have contained a
number of, albeit fairly geriatric, sperm
...
It is at this stage of the menstrual cycle that many women would
either masturbate or have a nocturnal orgasm (Scenes 22 and 23),
thereby helping to rid their cervical mucus of the last of the menstrual
debris, top up their vaginal lubricant, and empty their cervical crypts
of geriatric sperm
...
It would also, on balance, slightly strengthen their
cervical filter — in particular, it would give them extra protection
against invasion by any disease organisms carried in the next
inseminate
...
The woman in Scene 24 might have been due for a nocturnal,
perhaps even later on in the night in question
...
But an unexpected intercourse intervened before this could happen,
and when her partner initiated foreplay, her cervical filter was not
ideal for the inseminate she was about to receive
...
However, she did have
another option, and this was the one she pursued
...
A 'foreplay orgasm' performs all of the functions of a nocturnal or
masturbatory orgasm, and for the woman in Scene 24 would have
been a perfectly adequate last-minute substitute
...
In part she needed him to provide
stimulation
...
But he did not
...
The simple answer, is
that he would benefit most from his partner climaxing during
intercourse, not during foreplay
...
This is often the case, which means that a
woman cannot always rely on a man's cooperation when her body opts
to have an orgasm during foreplay
...
Having failed, her
next best response was not to climax at all
...
When a woman has no orgasm during intercourse, then the number
and types of sperm she retains are dictated by the cervical filter in
place before the intercourse began (as is her resistance to invasion by
disease organisms)
...
By not having an orgasm
during intercourse, therefore, a woman's body is in effect saying:
'Don't change a thing
...
Just let him inseminate you and your cervical filter will do the
rest
...
When her best strategy was thwarted, her body,
by avoiding an orgasm during intercourse, did the next best thing
...
(Precisely why will be made clear in the next scene
...
204
205
SCENE 15
Correcting Mistakes
They both found it difficult to relax
...
Suddenly,
for no obvious reason, the man's penis began to stir and within
minutes it was hard against his partner's back
...
He wanted sex again
...
She found herself hoping he
would, assuming her interest was because she had failed to climax
during their recent foreplay
...
So
clear were her feelings that when her partner hesitantly put his hand
between her buttocks to stroke her genitals, she forestalled him by
turning over to face him
...
As he slipped in, she was so wet from their previous intercourse he
felt almost as if he wasn't touching the sides
...
There was hardly any sensation on his
penis except wetness
...
She on the other hand, almost as soon as he entered her, felt the
first sensation that told her she might come
...
Then came the fantasy
...
She was lying
naked
on
top
of
her,
SPERM WARS
black hair flying everywhere as she contorted her body, now to rub
their genitals together, now to kiss her all over
...
The noises in her
throat were becoming more urgent, more rhythmic
...
By now, the man realised his partner was heading towards an
orgasm
...
He responded
with his own sounds
...
But he still wasn't certain he was going to ejaculate
...
It wasn't his partner underneath him but the
flirtatious seventeen-year-old from work
...
Between the guttural
and rhythmic sounds from her throat she was telling him how
wonderful he felt and how he mustn't stop
...
As she did so, he briefly lost his
focus, but still managed to ejaculate in the next half-minute
...
For
him, their combined climax had given a sense of achievement and
satisfaction
...
But he didn't
...
A
t first glance, the couple in this scene have behaved very
strangely
...
Even without a climax, the
inseminate collects at the top of her vagina to form a pool, her cervix
hangs into the pool, and sperm leave to escape into her cervical
mucus (Scene 3)
...
Usually, a climax during
intercourse weakens her cervical filter greatly, allowing many more
sperm to leave the seminal pool, penetrate the cervical mucus, and
hence be retained
...
A multiple orgasm (in which a woman has
two — or even more — climaxes without 'coming down' in between)
has an even greater effect on sperm retention
...
First, when a woman climaxes during intercourse, her cervix
gapes in just the same way as it does during masturbation (Scene 22)
...
Any blocked channels in her cervix are effectively
bypassed and rendered ineffectual
...
Now, however, it is dipping up and down in seminal
fluid, thereby mixing the pool
...
Thirdly, the climactic contraction and rippling of muscles in the
womb and vagina during orgasm generate pressure changes in the
womb and cervix
...
This stronger upsuck of semen into channels that are already
increased in number and enlarged by the orgasm does two things
...
Fourthly, a woman's climax during intercourse voids many of
her cervical crypts of old sperm
...
Effectively, therefore, an intercourse orgasm creates
more storage space for sperm to occupy
...
As a rough guide, she
retains 50-90 per cent of sperm if she has a climax during
intercourse compared with 0-50 per cent if she does not
...
In effect, then, when she feels
like climaxing during intercourse, her body is saying to her: 'We
have made a mistake in our preparation for this intercourse
...
We need many more of the sperm that are on their way than we
shall get if we don't do something
...
That way we
shall let in more sperm and eject fewer in the flowback
...
We should expect, therefore, that an orgasm during
intercourse will be effective at bypassing the filter only if it occurs
after the man has ejaculated
...
Even if she climaxes about a minute (two minutes at the most)
before the man ejaculates, the orgasm will still permit large
numbers of sperm to bypass her cervical filter
...
The peak of the cervical activity that affects sperm
retention actually occurs one to two minutes after her subjective
climax
...
As long as the seminal pool is in place before her
cervical activity peaks, her filter will be bypassed
...
There is no need for the man's
penis to be in her vagina, and it makes no difference whether it is he
who stimulates her to orgasm during this post-coital phase or
whether she stimulates herself via masturbation
...
We can now discuss why, in Scenes 24 to 25, as the night
progressed the woman's needs changed as far as orgasms were
concerned
...
On the night in question we followed the woman and her partner
through two sexual episodes
...
She also needed to minimise the risk of
infection
...
This
would both improve her resistance to infection and make life
difficult for the older, least motile sperm in his ejaculate
...
Even so, it was not too late
...
At the beginning of the second sexual episode (Scene 25), the
woman's needs were still the same — small numbers of young
sperm at minimum risk of disease — but the circumstances had
changed
...
This was just what she had wanted
all along, and it was this offer that made her body interested in a
second insemination
...
First, her cervical filter was now stronger than before because of
the influx of blockers from the first insemination
...
Secondly, she still had the seminal pool from the first
insemination at the top of her vagina
...
Her solution to these two problems was straightforward
...
That way she
would retain a large proportion of the very young and desirable
sperm from the second seminal pool
...
Her body generated the necessary urges
...
Secondly, she felt like an orgasm during intercourse
...
In this discussion we have, inevitably, considered only one
specific sequence of events — the sequence relating to the woman
in Scenes 24 and 25
...
First, a woman prepares for her next anticipated intercourse by
having a nocturnal or masturbatory orgasm — or by not having a
nocturnal or masturbatory orgasm — whichever is appropriate, as
explained above
...
On the other hand, if she has not
anticipated correctly, she should aim to correct her mistake by
having an orgasm at some time during the episode
...
The fact that orgasms during foreplay are
more frequent than orgasms during intercourse suggests that a
woman is more likely to err on the side of having too weak a filter
than too strong
...
It is easier to encourage a
man to help her climax during foreplay (strengthening her filter)
than to help her climax during intercourse (weakening her filter)
...
Even
then, however, she has a fall-back strategy: orgasms after the man
has withdrawn are a substitute for intercourse orgasms, permitting
her to bypass her filter whenever she needs or wants to (again, as
just described)
...
The
best moment for her to climax as far as the man is concerned,
though, varies much less
...
He will have masturbated or not, as
appropriate, to suit his body's own best
211
SPERM WARS
interests
...
But there is a limit to how much time and effort it is worth him
putting into getting a woman to climax during intercourse
...
Secondly, the cervical
sperm filter which he can sometimes try so hard to bypass may on
some occasions not actually exist
...
In this case, the man
gains little if anything from making a great effort to encourage her
to climax during intercourse
...
First, he has to judge
whether the woman has a filter that is worth bypassing
...
If she has a
significant filter, his best option is for her to have an orgasm during
their sexual episode
...
If he opts instead to try to get her to climax during
intercourse, he may have trouble succeeding, and if so he will have
to decide how long it is worth carrying on thrusting
...
Or he can just
abandon all attempts to bypass her filter and hope that this is an
occasion when there is no real filter to bypass
...
Except on those rare occasions
when the same outcome, bypassing the filter, suits them both, each
is forever trying to maneuver the other into
212
THE CLIMAX OF INFLUENCE
doing something that is against their body's interests
...
A woman may insist on a foreplay orgasm, then cooperate or
hinder as the man tries to inseminate her within a minute or so
afterwards
...
She may cooperate by waiting until he is
about to ejaculate, then climaxing with him
...
She may climax so quickly that he is unable to ejaculate
within the critical minute that follows
...
Once the man has ejaculated, the woman can
either avoid climaxing before ejecting the flowback, or she can
cooperate by helping him to give her a post-coital climax
...
It might, at first, seem strange that, given the competitive nature
of intercourse, men and women appear to make it easier for each
other to judge how near they each are to their climax
...
When climax
comes, it is clear from the sounds, which would seem to indicate a
cooperation between a man and woman that might belie our
interpretation of intercourse as a contest
...
Sometimes, of course, the sounds really do give an accurate
indication of what is happening
...
But it is precisely
because the sounds are sometimes honest that on occasion both men
and women can use them to trick the partner
...
That they often succeed in fooling the
partner is evident from another survey — which found that the man
invariably reports a higher frequency of simultaneous orgasms than
his partner
...
The scene we have just
witnessed was one of those relatively infrequent occasions when
both the man and the woman had the same requirements from their
intercourse, and cooperation was in their mutual interest
...
The female
orgasm is about to enter the arena of sperm warfare
...
She had finished her period only a week ago
and this was the second time since then
...
A minute earlier she had been
soaping and rinsing her breasts, with nothing more erotic on her mind
than whether she should clean the bathroom this weekend or suggest
her partner do it while she was away
...
Now, after five minutes of successful cooperation between her
fantasies, her finger and her clitoris, her breathing was easing, her
heart was slowing down, and she was wallowing in the combined
warmth of bath water and post-climactic glow
...
She wondered if it
214
THE CLIMAX OF INFLUENCE
was because she had given up the pill recently, having convinced her
partner that she really wanted another child
...
She mused over the way that two nights ago, only a
couple of hours after she had masturbated, she had then more or less
insisted that her partner give her an orgasm during foreplay as well,
gently resisting his attempts to penetrate until he complied
...
She was doing well
...
Early Sunday morning, just before she woke, she
had a nocturnal, her fifth orgasm that week
...
The remainder was spent
travelling, on the long drive to and from her parents, who had
volunteered to look after her two daughters while she was away
...
He still wanted to have sex
...
But she was tired and managed to put him off
...
Her companions were to be her boss and two other
colleagues, one of whom was her new lover
...
They
had known each other for nearly a year, ever since she had joined the
company
...
Slowly, they had grown close
...
In their early
thirties, both had young children and both were now in long-standing
but increasingly stale relationships
...
Within a few months of meeting, they
had freely acknowledged their physical attraction to each other
...
It hadn't
been difficult
...
They were both opinionated and competitive, with strong likes and
dislikes
...
Whenever they talked about principles, attitudes or just life in
general, they would argue
...
She was pale and prone to sunburn; he
was swarthy and worshipped the sun, often spending hours naked in
his secluded garden
...
She was obsessively tidy; he still had the
air of an adolescent, putting his feet on tables and dropping his
crushed beer cans on the floor
...
They each found the other's traits to be irritating but attractive, each
seeing in the other characteristics which moderated their own
polarity
...
On that day, in a
field in searing sun, she had given him oral sex and promised that one
day she would have his baby
...
She just hadn't expected the opportunity to arise quite so soon
...
Her future lover
had then made her promise that if they had the chance, they would
have sex while they were away
...
He visited her hotel room
almost as soon as they arrived early on the Monday afternoon, but
she sidestepped his advances, pointing out that this was their only
chance to see the city during the day
...
By
late afternoon, they felt extremely close as they arrived back at the
hotel
...
The meal and the socialising were a strain because they had to
maintain a facade of distance
...
It was midnight when they arrived back at
the hotel
...
She
tried to persuade him that they needed a good night's sleep and that
maybe they should wait until tomorrow night
...
She had seen him naked before, but it was the first time he had seen
or really touched any of the more exciting parts of her body
...
With scarcely any foreplay, he tried
to enter her
...
He ejaculated
immediately, with scarcely a thrust
...
He apologised and said
that next time he would be more considerate
...
But she didn't throw him out of
her bed and within fifteen minutes he had stroked, kissed, licked and
massaged her into a climax
...
Half-way through the night, as a sperm war was being fought inside
her body, she told him to go back to his room
...
Over the next two days, they maintained a professional
distance, both during the day and while socialising in the evenings
...
By the time they left to fly home they
had had
216
217
SPERM WARS
intercourse six times, and on three of those occasions she had
climaxed while he was inside her
...
She arrived home late that Thursday night, feeling very tired, very
guilty and a little nervous
...
Sometime during the
night, she had a nocturnal
...
He sought her out at every opportunity and tested her
ingenuity to its limit
...
Their trip had been fantastic, she told him, but now
they were back things had to return to normal
...
They had had a
good time and it seemed they had got away with it
...
If he wanted to remain close to her, he had to forget
sex
...
She felt guilty at the look
of hurt on his face as she spoke, but her tirade worked
...
That evening, the last she and her partner were to have on their
own before collecting their daughters, she bathed, masturbated, and
then appeared naked in their lounge urging her partner to give her
another baby
...
That pleased him because these
days she rarely climaxed with him inside her
...
As
she gave him the public version of her business trip, sperm warfare
resumed inside her body and continued all night
...
As they drove to her parents' the next day, a sperm entered the egg
which had just arrived in one of her oviducts
...
She had kept her promise to him
...
We watched them in a hay-field on a sunny
afternoon as she gave him oral sex and promised one day to have his
baby (Scene 20)
...
Now, we have just watched the woman's body manipulate sperm
warfare in a way that made sure she kept her promise
...
Her body had decided that as the
genetic father of her third child, her lover was the best compromise
around (Scene 18)
...
We have seen the effects of having a
masturbatory or nocturnal orgasm in the days before intercourse, and
of not having one; of climaxing, and of not climaxing, while a
seminal pool is at the top of the vagina
...
As a result, she
conceived a child who was fathered by her lover, not her partner
...
Having reached its decision over the best father for its next child,
her body set about engineering paternity
...
Her
body dictated the sequence and timing of these urges according to
who was the next most likely inseminator
...
Of all of the weapons used
by a woman in her pursuit of reproductive success, her orgasm
sequence may well be the most important, particularly when she
promotes sperm warfare
...
In Scene 6, the woman
masturbated more often than usual in the week before infidelity with
her ex-boyfriend
...
Closer inspection, however, shows that this is too simple an
explanation
...
On no occasion in these two scenes did they have
these orgasms when their very next intercourse was likely to be
with their lover
...
Of course, women do have nocturnal and masturbatory orgasms
just before having sex with a lover, but these are often 'mistakes'
...
At the time she had her nocturnal, though the next most likely
intercourse was the 'one for the road' suggested by her partner on
Sunday night
...
Her nocturnal was a 'mistake', but one she could later correct, as we
shall see
...
Usually, that preference is for the lover, not the partner — otherwise,
she
would
not
risk
all
the
potential
costs
of
infidelity (Scenes 8 to 11)
...
In the current scene, the woman's body had decided that the
lover would be a better genetic father to her child than her current
partner, but a worse long-term partner
...
This
meant she would have to have sex with her partner both before and
after her infidelity
...
Consequently, she could not avoid sperm warfare
...
Her best option, therefore, was to make
life as easy as possible for her lover's army while still giving it a
contest to win
...
The woman's body initiated its strategy a week before the anticipated
infidelity
...
Her
body's technique was first to make her feel like masturbating a day or
so before each anticipated routine intercourse, and this strengthened
her cervical filter
...
This orgasm strengthened
her filter still further
...
On neither occasion did she feel like an orgasm during
intercourse itself
...
Her
nocturnal on the Saturday night was a continuation of her body's
strategy
...
The
nocturnal prepared a strong filter, ensuring that even if he had
insisted, she would still have managed to keep down the number of
his sperm in her tract — especially if she also had yet another
foreplay orgasm during the episode
...
When the woman was eventually inseminated by her lover
220
221
SPERM WARS
THE CLIMAX OF INFLUENCE
on the Monday night, she contained only a small army of her
partner's sperm, just as her body had planned
...
She tried to delay the
first intercourse with her lover for another day to give her partner's
army time to decrease in size still further, but her lover would not be
delayed any longer
...
That way, she could correct the 'mistake' of her earlier
nocturnal preparation and bypass her filter
...
Having been thwarted in his attempts
to have sex with her on so many previous occasions, his absolute
priority was to ejaculate inside her
...
His urgency prevented her body from bypassing her strong filter
during intercourse, and at first few of his sperm managed to escape
from the seminal pool into the cervix
...
With the seminal
pool still in position, his huge army now bypassed her filter and
flooded her cervix and womb
...
And she had satisfied her body's urge
to collect as many sperm from this man as possible
...
An hour later, when the woman's lover offered to top her up with
a small army of young sperm — his second inseminate — she
accepted and they cooperated to produce an intercourse orgasm
...
The combination of
his first relatively huge army and his second small, young army had
an easy victory while she later slept
...
On her return home, she contained a large and
powerful army from her lover
...
She succeeded
...
Secondly, she had a
nocturnal
...
This was to be the insemination that deceived her partner into
thinking he could be the father of any child conceived that month
...
As a result, few of her partner's sperm made it through
her cervix into the battlefield
...
There was never any doubt that this particular war would be
won by the woman's lover
...
Her body achieved its aims by
subconsciously orchestrating the sequence of moods, motivations
and responses that would best serve her reproductive interests
...
The behaviour and responses of this woman during her infidelity
were fairly typical
...
During phases of infidelity,
the rate increases to about every other day
...
When they anticipate it will be with their lover,
they occur less often
...
On average, they are more likely to climax
during or after intercourse with a lover (33 per cent of occasions)
than they are during or after routine intercourse with their partner (22
per cent of occasions)
...
These differences mean that on the whole not only does a partner
encounter a stronger filter than a lover, he is also less likely to
receive help in bypassing that filter
...
When a
woman is not being unfaithful, she helps her partner to place a large
sperm army inside her on 55 per cent of occasions
...
The really impressive part of a woman's strategy, however, is the
way she manages to engineer a strong bias over sperm retention in
favour of her lover without betraying any hint of infidelity to her
partner
...
Secondly, her
main weapon against her partner is to increase her frequency of
masturbation and nocturnals, but because these orgasms are secret,
the change passes undetected by him
...
Yet again, her favouritism cannot be detected by her
partner
...
If a man knew exactly when and how often his
partner masturbated or had nocturnals during their routine sexual
activity, any change in pattern could alert him to the fact that her
body might be anticipating infidelity
...
Her strategy for influencing the outcome of
sperm warfare, therefore, just like a man's, depends on being able to
change her masturbation and nocturnal patterns without being
detected
...
And again, just as for men, it is the involvement of
masturbation and nocturnals in infidelity and sperm warfare that has
generated in women the subconscious urge for secrecy and privacy
...
For
all the same reasons that we discussed for men (Scenes 12 to 14), the
urge for privacy and secrecy over masturbation shown by most
women is often matched by their curiosity, suspicion, distaste, and
even prejudice regarding the practice in general
...
Just like a man,
a woman will sometimes do so in full view of her partner without
them then carrying on to have intercourse (Scene 20)
...
We have already discussed facets of this situation
with respect to oral sex (Scene 10), but often a man stimulates the
woman with only his fingers
...
Such open orgasms, without intercourse immediately following,
have exactly the same consequences for sperm retention as a
woman's private masturbation and nocturnals
...
The result is that all three reduce sperm retention
at her next insemination, even if this does not happen until days
later
...
His subconscious mind
registers that, if she does have sex with another man over the next
day or so (for example, through infidelity or rape), at least she starts
that intercourse with a strong filter, and any army placed in her tract
will be reduced
...
Moreover, if, as is most likely, her next
intercourse is with her partner, his preparation will have been
counter-productive — he will have strengthened her filter against
himself
...
Unlike the climaxes
between sexual episodes that we have just discussed it is always
him, never another male, who is going to suffer lower sperm
retention
...
It is probably for these reasons that, as in many scenes in this
book, most men would prefer to enter a woman and begin
intercourse without trying to help her climax during foreplay
...
A man is most prepared to cooperate over foreplay orgasms when
he has least to lose, that is, when the woman either has no sperm in
her cervical crypts or when the inseminate he is about to produce has
little chance of becoming involved in sperm warfare; and when he
has least choice, that is, when the woman refuses to allow
penetration until she has had an orgasm during foreplay
...
Even
having helped the woman
226
THE CLIMAX OF INFLUENCE
to climax during foreplay, however, a man often shows great
urgency in his attempts to penetrate and inseminate — because if he
succeeds within one to two minutes of the woman's climax he can
still bypass her cervical filter (Scene 25)
...
Indeed, most of the behaviour
described in this book is similarly subconscious, the product of
genetic programming rather than cerebral rationalisation
...
Men have to
learn many things, from the basics of penetration to the subtleties of
the female orgasm
...
Both sexes also have to learn the strategic subtleties of infidelity
and the prevention of infidelity; and how to select a mate, how to
court and seduce the selected mate, as well as how to avoid
unwanted attention
...
Scenes 27 to 29 are
concerned with how men and women learn these necessary sexual
subtleties
...
He pushed
them away, on to the floor
...
At long last, he had done
it
...
He had come close twice before
...
On that occasion, he had been content just to
ejaculate, and hadn't really tried to enter her
...
Convinced that
he was inside the girl, he had happily thrust away until he ejaculated
...
This time, however, he had definitely
succeeded
...
Admittedly it had been quick; at the most a few seconds, once he
was inside her
...
As on the
previous occasion, the prods of his penis had failed to find the girl's
vagina — though he wouldn't have known
...
But when
she had taken hold of his penis and guided him in, the sensation was
so different that he realised he must have been somewhere else —
again, probably between her buttocks
...
As he lay in the dark by her side, his sense of achievement and
satisfaction knew no bounds
...
She said, 'Great' with a sarcasm that would have deflated anybody
but a first-timer
...
But when he homed in on her, she had changed her
mind
...
His conversation had been a little immature and naive, but his witty
stories of achievement and failure had impressed her
...
As
soon as they were in the dark room, he had more or less ripped off
her underwear
...
Even
when she helped him inside her, he had ejaculated as soon as he was
in
...
She felt embarrassed, annoyed and
sexually frustrated; she vowed that, next time, she would take more
notice of her first impressions
...
When the bolt on the inside held, the
prospective intruder urged whoever was inside to hurry up,
reminding them that they weren't the only ones who needed the
room
...
It was so dark that neither could really see the other
...
Embarrassed
229
SPERM WARS
LEARNING THE GROPES
that she had really allowed such a nonentity to have sex with her and
eager to put the experience out of her mind, the girl lied that she
needed to go to the toilet, and would he please help her to look?
Reluctantly, he pulled his pants and trousers up from around his
knees, fastened his zip, and got off the bed to help her
...
He had been astounded that this girl, whoever she was, had
agreed to come into the bedroom in the first place
...
Even once he had got
her into the bedroom, he was so certain that she would change her
mind any second that he had taken off her tights and knickers with the
speed of light, while she was still compliant
...
He asked what colour her knickers were
...
He suggested
they switch on the light, but she told him to forget it, she would go
without
...
As the young man stumbled over the clothes towards her, the door
opened and she was gone
...
By the
time he was out of the door, the girl had escaped down the stairs and
immersed herself into a conversation
...
He
was nearly thirty, ten years older than her
...
Good-looking and
reasonably successful, he told her he had managed to come to the
party only because his partner had gone to visit her mother for the
weekend
...
When he suggested, as people began to leave, that she
should let him drive her home, she accepted
...
She spent the rest of the night, all the next morning and
part of the afternoon being kissed and stroked, pampered and
stimulated
...
In between their love-makings she slept and
dreamed of a long relationship with him
...
She remained the man's lover until she discovered that, as
well as his partner, he was having sex with at least one other girl
besides herself
...
At about the same time, her flatmate started seeing the young man
to whom she had lost her knickers on the night of the party
...
She could believe her friend when she said that at first he had known
nothing
...
All he had to do now was
learn what to do with it — then, she thought, he might become quite
good
...
230
231
S
exual technique does not come instinctively to a man
...
In this respect he is no different from all male birds
and mammals
...
If a male is ever to persuade a female to allow
insemination, he has to pick up the subtleties of courtship and
stimulation
...
Male birds, for example, first have to learn how to stand on a
female's back, then how to bend their tails to press against her
genitalia before transferring sperm
...
Even as intelligent an animal as an adult male chimpanzee
is totally inept if denied sexual opportunity during adolescence
...
In the company of a
female, an inexperienced adult male such as this becomes aroused
and erect but has no idea what else to do
...
Thus, if any male mammal is not to miss the first of his
lifetime opportunities to inseminate a female, he needs to practise
during adolescence — and human males are no exception
...
And it can have an important
influence on a man's level of reproductive success
...
In many cultures, sexual experimentation by
young, even pre-pubertal, boys and girls is openly encouraged or at
least condoned
...
The youth in Scene 27 had his first
chance to learn sexual technique at sixteen years of age
...
Two years later he missed his first
opportunity to inseminate a girl because he had not yet learned
either how to find her vagina with his penis or what it felt like once
he was inside
...
Of course, a man has to learn much more than simply how to
gain a woman's sexual interest, how to retain that interest
long enough to get the opportunity for intercourse, and where to put
his penis when the moment THE GROPES A man who can also learn
LEARNING finally arrives
...
But a
woman's body does little to make it easy for males to learn the
necessary techniques
...
Why? The answer
lies in mate selection, and the way in which women collect
information about men
...
There we considered the importance of a man's
status, behaviour, looks, fertility and sexual health
...
In order to collect information about a man, a woman in effect
needs to set him a series of tests
...
She needs to set tests that are challenging but
not impossible
...
A woman's body and
behaviour have been shaped to present such a test
...
Learning is always more difficult when a given behaviour does
not always elicit the same response
...
This is true
from the earliest moments of courtship to the occurrence of orgasm
during intercourse
...
This variability allows the female to set challenging, but
232
233
SPERM WARS
LEARNING THE GROPES
passable, tests for those males who satisfy their other mate-selection
criteria
...
As an example, let us consider the position of the clitoris
...
It can be stimulated by
some part of the male's anatomy during intercourse — usually the
penis — but unless the male knows exactly what to do it does not
have to be
...
This is as true for humans as
for any other mammal, and it is not surprising in view of our
conclusions concerning the function of intercourse orgasm (Scene
25)
...
If his own
behaviour sometimes does and sometimes does not stimulate the
woman, a man can only learn how to exploit this most powerful
source of sexual stimulation either from a great deal of trial and error
or from direct education by a woman
...
On the night of Scene 27, the girl was looking for a long-term
partner (Scene 18), and as part of her selection procedure her body
was eager to test her chosen male's competence at intercourse
...
He failed dismally
...
The girl probably preferred the
older man for many reasons, but one was undoubtedly his superior
sexual technique
...
But the advantages a woman gains from selecting the
more competent men are biological as well as sensual
...
Yet we
have argued (Scenes 22 to 26) that a woman's control in this respect
is a major weapon in influencing her reproductive success
...
A competent man simply helps her to climax when she does want an
orgasm
...
An experienced and competent man
is therefore a help, not a threat
...
Basically, a woman uses a man's approach to foreplay and
intercourse to gain information about him
...
This tells her that other
women have also found him attractive enough to allow intercourse
...
Mixing her genes with his,
therefore, may produce sons or grandsons who are also attractive to
women, hence increasing her reproductive success
...
If a female sees one or
more other females mating with a particular male, she also is more
likely to mate with him
...
But the
faster they are able to learn, the fewer opportunities for insemination
they will miss in their lifetime, and the more children they are likely
to father, with more women, than their slower-learning
contemporaries
...
Making the most of early opportunities for
sexual practice gives a young boy the edge over his contemporaries,
and ensures that in generations to come he will have more
descendants in the population
...
If a
girl or woman finds a man sufficiently desirable as a short- or longterm partner in other respects, she may tolerate inexperience, a lack
of consideration, and other sexual shortcomings
...
In Scene 27, the
flatmate undertook to educate the young man in the niceties of
intercourse
...
While
educating him, she was also testing his ability to learn sexual
techniques
...
Importantly, in educating him to help her to climax, she was not
educating him to help other women to climax — or, at least, not to
the same extent (Scene 36)
...
In this discussion, we have concentrated on the sexual
development of young males as they struggle to pass the tests created
by women in the name of mate selection
...
For example, a girl has much to learn
about how to masturbate and when to do so — or not
...
Finally, she has a
great deal to learn about the techniques of deception and reassurance
within relationships
...
Failure to learn sexual technique quickly is unlikely to
make a woman miss opportunities for insemination as clearly as
inexperience may do for a man
...
Not least, the efficiency with which she learns will
influence her ability to make the most of sperm warfare
...
First, we
look at the dangers and repercussions of the way in which women test
male sexual prowess in the early stages of courtship
...
Ahead of them, squirrels skittered off the path and birds
flew into the bushes, sounding their alarm calls
...
One of the two boys had recently passed his driving test and had
borrowed his mother's car for the day
...
At first,
they had made their way along the narrow path in pairs, the darkhaired couple at the front, the second boy and his girlfriend behind
...
But when the path widened out,
they broke up
...
Then they had run
off, chasing
236
237
SPERM WARS
LEARNING THE GROPES
each other among the trees
...
Leaving the two boys to their games, the girls continued round a
bend in the path
...
Had the
girls known what was to happen over the next few hours, they might
have thought that the dark pine plantation into which the river flowed
looked menacing
...
The river was shallow, and the pebbles on its bed made the water
babble soothingly as it flowed along
...
Even better, just before the river bent under the bridge and
into the plantation, the water formed a large shallow pool just over a
metre deep
...
The dark-haired
one stopped at the edge, quickly stripped to his swimming shorts and
jumped in, immediately at ease in the cold water
...
Profanities flew amidst the shrieks of shock and laughter
...
The second boy watched from the river bank and slowly stripped
down to his shorts
...
He couldn't
swim and in truth had a phobia about water
...
There was no way he could go into the water with
the others
...
He secretly envied the dark-haired boy; envied his muscular bulk,
his athleticism — and his ability to swim
...
At parties they would cluster around him, hanging on his every
word, laughing loudly at his jokes, each trying to make him notice
her
...
He, on the other hand, was still a virgin
...
She
didn't mind his fingers inside her and she happily played with him until
he ejaculated, but not once in three months had she let him have
intercourse
...
She was in many ways the most attractive girl in their year at school
...
None of
these escorts had ever lasted long, and rumour had it that she was still
a virgin and something of a tease
...
Today, however,
his persistence had been rewarded when at last she had accepted his
invitation
...
As he watched the two
girls playing with and making up to the lad in the water, he grew
more and more jealous
...
They urged him to join them, pointing out that it wasn't
really very deep
...
Even his girlfriend, embarrassed by how badly he was
measuring up to the other boy, became annoyed
...
A few months ago she had had sex
with him, but he had dropped her almost immediately
...
At this moment she was much more
concerned about flirting with him than with her boyfriend
...
They scrambled out, grabbed hold of his
feet and hands and, despite his obvious fear and genuine pleadings,
threw him into the pool
...
Eventually, his girlfriend came and sat with him and soon
everybody was out, warming up in the sun
...
There was another
chase, and an uneven wrestling match which he easily lost
...
He threatened recrimination, went down to the river,
cupped his hands to get a handful of water, and threw it at the two
girls amidst shrieks of laughter
...
Then they jumped in after him and the
fray continued
...
Amidst all the splashing
and shouting, he heard his girlfriend say she was going to pull down
the dark-haired boy's shorts
...
As soon as he realised what was happening, he grabbed his
shorts, shouting, 'No
...
The other boy
watched, a jealous half-smile on his face, wishing something like this
would happen to him once in a while
...
The idea of losing his shorts to
the two girls appealed to him, but he still fought and protested
...
It was the other boy's
girlfriend who completed the job, waving her trophy excitedly in the
air
...
The dark-haired boy and the other
one's girlfriend collapsed in a heap into the water
...
The naked
boy was so busy playfully wrestling with the other boy's girlfriend
and getting aroused that he didn't notice what was happening on the
bank — until his own girlfriend reappeared
...
After listening to the jokes and the accusations of cowardice for
not standing up, he turned to his girlfriend, urging her to get his
clothes for him
...
False irritation crept into his voice
and, eventually, he announced that he didn't care who saw him 'with
a hard-on' and that his girlfriend was going to pay
...
His
girlfriend stood for a second, frozen with excitement and indecision
...
The boy gave chase
...
They were both
breathless
...
Still visibly excited, he
was on the verge of losing control
...
She said he had to
find them
...
She
pretended to give in, saying she would show him where they were,
but as soon as he let her stand up she went to run off again,
laughing
...
She protested that he was hurting her
...
They disappeared into the trees
...
Disappointed at his departure, she redirected her arousal
towards her boyfriend
...
Once he was
standing up, he pulled her cold, wet body against him and kissed her
...
They walked a short way until
they found a secluded spot on the river bank and lay down hidden
from the path by vegetation
...
For the first time since they had met they could actually see
each other's nakedness, instead of fumbling with each other in the
dark of his mother's car
...
She assumed that, as
he had always restrained himself in the past, he would do so again
...
He kissed and
stroked her rapidly warming skin
...
He fiddled
inexpertly with her genitals, she held his penis in her hand
...
When she
complained, he said he just wanted to rub himself against her
...
He urged her to let him, and eventually
she relented
...
She said no
...
He asked why she had let
his dark-haired friend have sex with her but wouldn't let him
...
Anyway —
and she said this with more honesty — he hadn't given her much
choice
...
Lying naked in the sun, on top of a naked
girl, his penis no more than a thrust away from her vagina, he was
more aroused than he had ever thought possible
...
Now he learned
what her preference was despite the fact that he had actually (forced
her to have sex
...
He wanted sex with her, and he was going to have it
...
If she could still like his friend
despite his forcing her, she would still like him
...
As soon as the girl realised what he was trying to do, she told him
to stop and began to struggle
...
They struggled as he tried both to hold her down
and to find her vagina
...
Slowly it dawned on the girl that, unlike his friend, he
didn't know what he was doing
...
He was trying everywhere but the right place
...
But it was too late
...
He still wasn't inside her,
and he couldn't hold off ejaculation any longer
...
He had risked all, and failed
...
Then her emotions
took over
...
At every step
during the last few hours he had dwindled in stature in comparison
with his friend
...
As she pulled on her bikini and moved to stand up, he shrank still
further in her eyes
...
242
243
SPERM WARS
LEARNING THE GROPES
He apologised, said it wouldn't happen again, and begged her not to
tell anybody
...
He must think she was stupid if
he thought she or anybody else would believe that, she told him — he
was going to get what he deserved
...
Even if she had found them, the others wouldn't have been
interested as they had just acted out a drama of their own
...
She had taken him into the darkness of the plantation
...
Both were high on the emotions of the past few minutes
...
There was no
question in the boy's mind but that when she had shown him where
his clothes were, they were going to have sex
...
Sexual excitement always aroused in him
aggression and an urge to dominate, even hurt
...
He wanted sex with this girl, but he
also had a strong urge to humiliate her in the same way as she had
tried to humiliate him
...
The rumours about her were true
...
Fingers, but not penises, had been in her vagina
...
Yet, at the same time,
she had a high level of sexual motivation
...
More than anything, she relished her mounting tension as she
waited for the moment to deny penetration to a male who had
aroused himself with her body
...
He had, after all, had sex with
nearly all of her friends over the past Bar
...
When she pretended just one time too many that she couldn't
remember where she had put his clothes, and then laughed at him,
she gave him the excuse he was looking for
...
Still thinking he was joking, she repeated
that she couldn't remember and complained that he was hurting
...
For a few moments
she was shocked, but still thought it was play
...
He was going too far and hurting
her too much
...
He grabbed hold of her
hair, raised her head off the ground, and asked again
...
When he released an arm, she indicated a
fallen branch ahead, about waist high
...
Then he marched her over to the fallen
branch, pushed her stomach against it, forced her to bend forward,
and asked where
...
He saw them,
and then told her he would teach her not to mess him about again
...
So
244
245
SPERM WARS
LEARNING THE GROPES
far, everything had been physical, not sexual, and although she was
in pain and surprised at how powerless she was to resist his strength,
she was still exhilarated rather than afraid
...
Almost before she could find the words to ask him what he
was doing, he was inside her
...
When she tried to cry out, the sound stuck in her
throat
...
Each thrust was agony
...
He didn't, but at least he ejaculated
quickly
...
He told her how good it
had been and that she was the best yet
...
She resisted
...
He stroked her head, kissed her tears, and told her that
he really hadn't meant to hurt her; that he thought she had wanted it
to be like that
...
She stopped crying, went very
quiet, and began sucking her thumb
...
Three
thoughts kept going through her head: she had been raped; she was
no longer a virgin; and her vagina could take a penis after all, even if
it hurt
...
Just once, she accused him of
raping her
...
She said it wasn't a bit like rape, it was rape
...
He apologised, said he had
brought some and that they were in the pocket of the trousers she had
hidden
...
Eventually, they
got dressed and made their way back to the river to join their
friends
...
Only the dark-haired boy chattered as if nothing had happened
...
The driver's girlfriend triggered their conversation by saying
that she had been raped
...
Her friend then described her afternoon
...
Then they told each other the rumours they had heard about
his treatment of some of their friends
...
Not very seriously, they considered reporting him
to the police, to stop him raping others
...
They talked
through the possible scenario at the police station, but decided that
the experience might be worse than the actual rape
...
The driver's girlfriend had no more to do with him, and within
days began going out with another boy who had his own car
...
She
never missed an opportunity to tell her friends how pathetic he was
and how she couldn't understand why she had gone out with him in
the first place
...
The day after the other girl lost her virginity, she went on the pill
and, after turning the dark-haired boy down twice, eventually agreed
to go out with him again
...
She
gained the appropriate kudos and
246
247
SPERM WARS
LEARNING THE GROPES
aroused the jealousy of her friends for having landed the boy they all
wanted
...
Eventually they began to live together
...
In the years that followed, they re-enacted that
and similar scenes with mutual consent
...
They enjoyed devising
outrageous scenarios to generate fear and humiliation as a prelude to
it
...
a man who is usually a complete stranger to his victim (Stone 33)
...
If a woman
says no, but the man forces intercourse anyway, then the intercourse
was a rape
...
One of the problems is
that, in many aspects of life, people often say no when what they
really mean is 'See if you can persuade me
...
On
two of these occasions they appeared to mean it, and on three they
didn't
...
Secondly, the other boy had a genuine fear of the water,
said no when invited to join the Others, and pleaded not to be thrown
in
...
Thirdly, the dark-haired boy at first did not want to lose
his shorts, said no, and fought to keep them
...
Nevertheless, he
continued to say no and to struggle
...
She \aid no
and struggled
...
Yet she continued to struggle and say no
...
Although she
had enjoyed the rough and tumble, she said no at the first indication
that the boy intended to force intercourse, and struggled and pleaded
thereafter as best she could
...
At first sight, the second and fifth of these events fit into one
category, and the remainder into another
...
As far as date rape is concerned, there is a further
complication — the reaction of girls who have been date-raped in the
weeks that follow their experience
...
Such behaviour
has many facets, most of which are illustrated in the scene — and all
of them involve an interplay between mate selection by females and
the display of quality by males
...
In their pursuit of reproductive success, the
judicious use of rough and tumble can have important benefits for a
woman — and a satisfactory performance can be equally beneficial
to a man
...
In fact, they both gain
...
Occasionally, however, such games can be
dangerous
...
This is date rape —
when intercourse is forced by a man on a woman who has at least
found him attractive enough to 'date', and often attractive enough to
kiss and 'pet'
...
Presumably, the
fact that all of these women had claimed the man had attempted rape
means that at the time they said no and meant no
...
If he failed, then nearly nine out of every ten of the women
(87 per cent) refused to have any more to do with him, just like the
girlfriend of the less popular boy in the scene
...
In the
discussion that follows, we shall make no further attempt to
distinguish between the two — that is a job for the legal profession,
not a biologist
...
In Scene 27, we discussed how much men and women have to
learn in order to get the most out of their earliest sexual
opportunities
...
This testing is an important process — a woman uses it to identify
which men will give her sexually competent sons and grand-sons
...
Nevertheless, even in
the scene, both girls survived relatively unscathed and both came to a
decision about their respective partners
...
So what were these tests, and what insight do they
give us into the function of rough-and-tumble sex play in humans
and other animals?
250
LEARNING THE GROPES
Before we can answer this question, we have to be clear over
precisely how a man and woman's interests differ when they begin
such behaviour
...
Once a man and woman have established a long-term
relationship, the costs and benefits that they each experience from
intercourse become similar (Scene 16), even though the (unction
may differ (Scene 2)
...
Apart from the chance of contracting disease, which
is a risk they share, their potential costs and benefits are not at all
the same — especially if there is a strong possibility that their first
intercourse together may also be their last
...
From the viewpoint of reproductive success, and disregarding
here any social pressures to which the man may be exposed, the
siring of a child with a woman other than a long-term partner need
not be expensive for him (Scene 13)
...
A single intercourse need have no
greater cost than that involved in fending off future claims for help
and support if she does have a child
...
If he does not take each opportunity to inseminate a new
woman as it arises, he may never get another chance
...
A man's
reproductive success depends to a significant extent on his ability to
make the most Of one-off opportunities
...
For her, conception
is a major event
...
The man
251
SPERM WARS
concerned might desert her (Scenes 8 to 11, and 16)
...
Together, these two dangers mean
that an incautious, one-off intercourse can considerably reduce a
woman's reproductive success
...
Caution and selectivity are of maximum
importance
...
The primary situation
in which a woman might abandon caution, though not usually
selectivity, is when she has a one-off opportunity to collect sperm
from a particularly desirable man
...
In this book, we have seen several women
behaving in this way (Scenes 6, 17, 19, 21 and 26)
...
Once
a woman has a long-term partner, the costs of one-off intercourse are
reduced as long as her infidelity remains undetected (Scenes 9 to
11)
...
She does not have this freedom, however,
if she does not have a partner
...
In past generations, women who were not so were less
successful reproductively than those who were
...
Men, on the other
hand, are genetically programmed to be urgent and single-minded
about one-off sex
...
All men alive today are the genetic descendants of the more urgent
of male ancestors, not their more complacent contemporaries
...
This difference automatically means that the two sexes approach any
potentially sexual situation with a conflict of interests
...
His
only alternative is to try to force insemination whether she wants it
or not
...
Again, the situation
is not that simple
...
So, too, can aggression
and a level of physical trauma
...
This is an emotive issue — so emotive that it is probably best
broached by first considering the courtship of animals Other than
humans
...
II we watch domestic
cats we see females clawing, scratching and spitting at prospective
suitors
...
Witnessing such behaviour, it is difficult not to feel sorry for the
females
...
Yet, despite their resistance, female cats and dogs do eventually
allow one of their persistent and aggressive suitors to mate
...
Their bodies are on hold, waiting for the
right male to inseminate them before they produce an egg (Scene
15)
...
Rough-and-tumble sex play in humans is similar
...
So women whose sons and grandsons also
have this ability will enjoy greater reproductive success
...
The young men in Scene 28 spent much of their time chasing
and wrestling with each other, doing their best to display their
strengths and hide their weaknesses
...
To test this, she has to resist first verbally, then
physically
...
This is, of course, a dangerous game
...
Resist too much, and the male may inadvertently
cause real rather than superficial damage
...
Even in mink, the level of trauma that stimulates a female to ovulate
is set at a level just high enough to test the male's ability to
overcome her defences, but not high enough for her to suffer longterm damage
...
Once a woman has tested a man's ability to
force himself on her, she need not do it often thereafter
...
Of course, in this as in most features of human sexuality,
people vary (Scenes 35 to 36)
...
For
others it is an essential element even up to the level of
sadomasochism, if they are to accept the other person as a suitable
partner
...
Their intercourse on that first afternoon was rough, painful
and humiliating for the girl, yet through the experience she
recognised the boy as a compatible partner
...
We can now understand the decisions made by the two girls in the
scene in the days and weeks that followed the writs by the river
...
She was already attracted to him, as were most other women, and her
body perceived that his qualities made him seem a good candidate
for giving her reproductively successful sons and grandsons
...
In contrast, the other boy lost stature in his girlfriend's eyes at all
levels as the afternoon wore on
...
Mainly, however, he failed in an absolute sense DO live up to his
girlfriend's criteria for acceptability
...
The basic cause
of his double failure was inexperience
...
Instead, however, he opted for force
...
254
255
SPERM WARS
SCENE 29
How to Con
Outside the car, it was very dark and very cold
...
After pulling off the road among the trees, he
had left the engine running and the heater on while they climbed into
the back seat
...
The girl's
breasts were exposed, her knickers were around her knees and his
hand was between her legs in the warmest place in the car
...
As
he kissed and nibbled the side of her neck, his ear rubbed against the
car window, cold and wet with condensation
...
But on the first two occasions,
each with a different girl, he had missed his chance
...
She wasn't — and she wouldn't let him
have sex without a condom, which he didn't have anyway
...
She said she had been promised that once before, would
never trust a boy again, then immediately lost interest and asked him
to drive her home
...
Offering a
lift to a girl he scarcely knew, he had been amazed to find that before
they were even half-way home he was being seduced into finding a
quiet spot for them to enjoy themselves
...
When he said he
256
LEARNING THE GROPES
didn't have one, she pushed him away
...
With both girls, he had only the one opportunity for intercourse
...
He had vowed never to miss
another opportunity, and ever since his second experience had
carried a condom with him
...
If he failed this
time, it wouldn't be because he wasn't prepared — or so he thought
...
As he tore off the foil, the girl took off her
knickers and got herself into as comfortable a position as she could
...
But it wouldn't go
...
He held it up in the blackness to try to work out which
way round it should go, but could see nothing
...
He began to panic as he felt movement deep in his penis
...
It was fine now, he lied,
and with the unrolled condom still balanced precariously on the tip
of his penis he moved into position and entered her without help
...
With
supreme will-power he fought off the ejaculation that was so near as
he entered and revelled in the excitement of an unprotected
intercourse
...
The girl
swore and, in panic, tried to find the condom inside her
...
He apologised
257
LEARNING THE GROPES
SPERM WARS
profusely, admitted the possibility that he might not have put it on
properly, but suggested that perhaps they had just been too vigorous
in their love-making and she had pulled it off him
...
The condom would still have stopped him from shooting the
sperm into her womb and it did have a chemical on it that killed
sperm
...
Being relatively naive herself, the girl believed him
...
At great
financial expense, he practised until he could don a condom in any
light, in any position, and with either hand
...
Each time, frustrated
by the reduced sensations of wearing the rubber, he rolled the
condom down such a short way that it came off almost immediately
he began to thrust
...
Four of the
girls did not ovulate after their 'accident'
...
However, the 'accident' with the condom and
the prospect of pregnancy and motherhood just before the most
important exams of her life stressed her so much that, when the
fertilised egg reached her womb, it passed straight through without
implantation
...
Nevertheless, the young man's misuse of condoms did make him a
father, but through accident, not design
...
Naively reassured by
his story of the condom working like a cap, she had patiently waited
for seven weeks for a period that never came
...
In the modern world, they also
have to learn how to use contraception
...
He nearly missed a third
through his lack of experience with condoms
...
Nevertheless,
they do supplement her natural methods of family planning, thereby
giving her even more control over when and with whom she
conceives
...
Not least, they
are a useful weapon in her manipulation of sperm warfare
...
The idea of hindering or killing sperm as they leave the penis is
not new
...
The sheath has
been known since Roman times and was in use in many parts of
Europe by 1700
...
By the
1890s, all of the barrier methods of contraception in use today were
openly on sale in the United Kingdom
...
In the
1980s, about 50 per cent of couples in countries such as
258
259
SPERM WARS
Britain were relying on the man for their contraception
...
The perhaps surprisingly high incidence of withdrawal as a means
of contraception during routine sex is in part a reflection of how men
feel about using condoms
...
Of course, when
asked why they don't like using condoms, men say that they simply
don't enjoy sex so much with them on — the 'Wellington boot'
syndrome
...
This difference between the sexes
in attitude towards condoms reflects a very important consequence of
their use — by preventing sperm from entering the vagina, condoms
negate a man's reproductive benefit from intercourse much more than
they negate a woman's
...
When a man and a woman are in a long-term relationship,
the timing, spacing and number of children that are best for one
partner are usually also best for the other
...
Since the use of condoms is one way that both partners
can avoid conception, we might expect both the man and the woman
to be equally appreciative of their use
...
Why?
The main reason is that, as we have already discussed (Scene 2),
conception is not the main function of routine sex
...
Condoms do not spoil a
woman's subconscious rationale for having routine sex, but they do
spoil a man's
...
Obviously, however, if the sperm a
man ejaculates do
260
LEARNING THE GROPES
not take up residence in the female's tract, they provide him with no
defence against sperm warfare
...
Not least, men are much more
likely to advocate taking the occasional risk
...
As we have already discussed (Scene 28), a woman is normally more
cautious and selective over casual sex than a man
...
For example, if
she is without a long-term partner, intercourse can help her gain a
man's attention in her search for one
...
Casual intercourse can thus be an
avenue to protection and financial or other help from a man who she
judges might be a suitable long-term partner
...
None of these benefits from casual sex require
her to conceive
...
Only when she is specifically after a particular man's genes
(Scenes 6 and 26), or when she is trying to maneuver him into a longterm partnership by becoming pregnant (Scene 18), does she benefit
from conceiving as a result of casual intercourse
...
Condoms even help to reduce one of the potential costs of
casual sex, the risk of infection
...
Otherwise,
though, the pressures on a man are quite different from those on a
woman
...
Briefly, intercourse with as
many women as possible is one of the main ways whereby a man can
enhance his reproductive success
...
A man suffers very few costs from casual
sex that might erode this potential bonus
...
If a
longer-term relationship with the mother is in his reproductive
interests, he may decide to offer paternal care
...
The major problem a man encounters in trying to bolster his
reproductive success via casual sex is the difficulty of finding
enough women to cooperate with him
...
When such opportunities do arise, they are
programmed to let as few pass by without insemination as possible
(Scene 28)
...
Subconsciously, his body realises the futility of casual sex with no
chance of conception — just as, again subconsciously, a woman's
body realises the power of casual sex with no chance of conception
...
Why?
One possibility is that a man's body is actually fooled by this
relatively recent invention into doing something that is against its
reproductive interests
...
Perhaps,
despite the evidence from his conscious brain, his body refuses to
accept that a condom inevitably negates this assumption
...
Men still make all the same
topping-up (Scene 4) and warfare (Scene 6) adjustments to the
number of sperm they ejaculate during intercourse whether they are
wearing a condom or not
...
This suggests that a man's body still 'thinks' his ejaculated
sperm may have a job to do — even if it is merely 'wishful thinking'
that on this occasion the condom may have accidentally come off or
burst
...
Relatively few generations of men
have been exposed to the use of condoms
...
But even if we
found that men actually reduced their reproductive success through
their use of condoms, we should expect things to change over the
generations to come
...
At first, it seems counter-intuitive that condoms could ever
enhance a man's reproductive success
...
One way would be if a man could use condoms to trade
opportunities with a woman
...
He could then use the protected occasions to convince the
woman that he really is a suitable mate
...
Another way would be if the greater protection against infection
that condom use affords more than made up for any missed
opportunities to inseminate
...
It
is possible that a man who uses
263
SPERM WARS
a condom strategically throughout his sexual life will on average
stay healthier and thus enjoy a greater reproductive success than a
man who does not
...
If a hundred couples used condoms
properly for a whole year, no more than three of the women should
become pregnant
...
This is nearly half the number (seventy-five) who conceive if they
use no modern form of contraception at all
...
Whether the failures are true
accidents or whether the men concerned, like the young man in
Scene 29, deliberately use condoms carelessly is not known
...
There
is little doubt that many men use condoms during casual sex in all
three of these ways
...
On top of that, he used condoms to increase his number
of casual encounters
...
With a
condom in his pocket, though, he was able to take full advantage of
opportunities with six other girls
...
Quite possibly, he would not have had this
child or any of his other opportunities had he not offered to wear a
condom
...
There is an
intriguing possibility that on average men are already using
condoms to enhance rather than reduce their reproductive success
...
First, try to have unprotected
intercourse whenever possible
...
Thirdly, while wearing a condom,
continue to make all of the necessary topping-up (Scene 4) and
warfare (Scene 6) adjustments just in case the Condom bursts or
comes off
...
Perhaps, through this strategy,
learned and instinctive dispositions have already combined to allow
the men who are prepared to use condoms to achieve a greater
reproductive success than men who are not
...
Of course, as far as casual sex is concerned the offer
of withdrawal gives a man far fewer opportunities for insemination
than the offer of a condom
...
There
are two main reasons
...
Secondly, it provides less
protection against infection
...
This is illustrated by the fact that withdrawal as
a means of contraception has an even higher failure rate than the
condom
...
In practice, however, up to forty women would conceive
...
Mainly,
they happen because men often fail to withdraw as promised
...
Quite possibly, the
relative success of the two ploys depends primarily on how
experienced is the woman
...
In
fact, most women are rarely deceived more than once, either by the
false promise of withdrawal or by a carelessly positioned condom
...
Although, naturally, humans are the only animals to use condoms,
they are not the only animals to use withdrawal
...
To
what extent this behaviour is simply the male using his penis to
remove material from inside the female's vagina (Scene 21), and to
what extent it indicates a tacit agreement between the male and the
female not to inseminate — as in humans — is not known
...
CHAPTER TEN
One Way
or Another
Scene 30
Best of Both Worlds
The young teacher looked up from his marking as his two
daughters, aged six and seven, skipped over to kiss him goodnight,
herded from behind by his partner like two frisky lambs
...
Most of the time the household spoke his language but in
moments of tenderness or anger any one of them might slip into the
mother's tongue
...
She put her legs over his knees and they sat, eyes on
the screen, idly stroking each other's hands and legs
...
How could he tell her that their whole world might be on the verge
of collapse?
'I am Preggnent and its Yours,' the scribbled note had said,
thrust into his hand during the morning break
...
' The girl was fifteen and
only slightly more illiterate than most of her contemporaries at the
school
...
She had asked him for a lift one
hot summer's night after school
...
It was hot
that night and he hadn't bothered to change out of his shorts before
getting in his car to set off home
...
He should have
told her to stop when she began to stroke his thigh as he drove
...
But
he didn't
...
Looking back, he remembered how expertly she had handled
his clothes and his genitals and doubted that she was a stranger to sex
...
Maybe she had set up other men, other teachers,
then tried to blackmail them also
...
But maybe she and her father
were serious and he would have to either pay up or own up
...
He wasn't yet
thirty and his finances were in a terrible state — still not recovered
from his years at college, his year abroad, and his year of teacher
training
...
Although she had managed to get a part-time job
once their youngest daughter had started school, they were still in
debt
...
His only
option, if the girl was serious, was to deny ever having had sex with
her and hope that nobody had seen them that evening
...
If it was merely
a case of his word against hers he would have little to worry about,
financially or legally
...
Theirs was a free-and-easy relationship and she
had the sexually liberated attitude much more typical of her culture
than his
...
Though she didn't know the whole story, she knew he had not been
totally faithful to her
...
But she
had forgiven him and within a month they were back to normality
...
No, his stomach was not churning from fear that his partner
would discover his past indiscretions with women and girls
...
His panic was that in defending himself against the
girl's note, he might provoke people who knew the other half of his
very active sex life into talking
...
His homosexual activity went back as far as he could remember
...
The games they
played were 'their secret' which his mother 'wouldn't understand' and
which would make her 'very angry'
...
He liked the smell and feel of his uncle's body, the way their genitals
reacted to each other's touch, and the way he could help his uncle
discharge
...
His first homosexual experience with someone his own age was
with his cousin
...
Within
minutes they both had erections and within the hour he was
educating his cousin in some of the techniques he had learned from
his uncle
...
268
269
SPERM WARS
He was still thirteen when he first had sex with a girl
...
And he had a lot
to show her
...
The
young girl came back, week after week, to have him stroke and
stimulate her, each time allowing him to go just that little bit further
...
Each week her climax was just that little bit
stronger, and each time they had the opportunity she wanted more of
the same
...
Before the year was out, she had
asked him for vaginal intercourse as well and by the time he was
fourteen his sexual education was complete
...
For a year, he lived with
another man in a more or less monogamous relationship, though
both of them were occasionally unfaithful, mainly with other men
but from time to time with women also
...
For his exchange year, he went abroad to study the foreign
language he intended to teach
...
They were lovers within days, even before
he had found the local gay community
...
Before the
end of the year, she too had conceived
...
On balance, though, most of his sexual activity while
abroad was with women
...
He kept in touch with
both mothers of his children by letter, sending what little money he
could
...
No sooner had he arrived than the woman who was now
his partner turned up on his doorstep with their five-month-old
daughter
...
Occasionally, he still picked up a casual lover at a gay bar,
but his partner had never found out and as far as he knew she had
never suspected his bisexuality
...
He vowed to
himself that he would never do anything sexually that might
prejudice his career or make it more difficult for them to get out of
debt
...
But
then, in successive years, he had succumbed to the charms of two
student teachers
...
The second, a young man, she did not
...
Then, a year ago, he had responded to the tentative
advances of another male member of staff and had begun a longterm homosexual relationship, which was still continuing
...
It was uncanny how similar his new
lover was in his moods, behaviour and responses to the girl he had
impregnated within a few months of arriving abroad
...
For these diversions, they drove to the anonymity of the
nearest large city, about thirty minutes away
...
With his male lover, he had visited the city to look for child
prostitutes
...
It was difficult to know who was the most unnerved by the
encounter
...
He relaxed a little when, back at school on the Monday, the
two boys approached him and said that they wouldn't tell if the
teachers didn't tell
...
One evening, when he called round on his lover, the
two boys were still there
...
From then on, the four had met for
group sex more or less weekly
...
Just a week ago, they had asked an extortionate amount
...
Now, there was also the note from the girl and he was
scared, really scared
...
The girl wasn't lying and,
moreover, was determined to have the baby
...
He
denied both paternity and ever having had sex with her, but was
legally forced into a test of paternity
...
They accused the
teacher and his lover of forcing them to take part in homosexual
orgies against their will
...
She stood by him
during the early stages of the paternity case but left him when the
homosexual scandal broke, taking their two daughters back to her
own country
...
Within a week of her
departure, the paternity test confirmed him as the father of the
schoolgirl's child
...
He spent only a short time in jail, but II
WHS long enough for him to contract HIV from homosexual
activity with other inmates
...
M
ost readers of this book will be exclusively heterosexual
...
The men will have
sex over their lifetime with about a dozen women — and the
women with about eight men
...
A minority, though, will pursue their reproductive success in a
quite different way
...
Others will be very
promiscuous, having hundreds if not thousands of sexual partners
in their lifetime
...
And there will be some men
who will direct part of their sexual activity towards forcing women
they have never met before to have sex with them
...
The conventional majority often find it difficult to understand
the minority who show these alternative strategies
...
The sometimes
unpalatable truth of the matter is, however, that such minorities are
pursuing reproductive success just as vigorously and strategically
as the conventional majority
...
Each of the seven scenes in this chapter focuses on an area of
human sexuality in which people pursue an uncommon but often
successful reproductive strategy
...
Any discussion of homosexuality is bedevilled by the ambiguity
of the words that are used
...
A heterosexual is a man who only ever has
sex with women
...
A
bisexual is a man who has sex with both men and women
...
At first sight, homosexual behaviour might seem a strange way
to pursue reproductive success
...
The evidence, in fact, indicates the
contrary
...
Men who are attracted to other men do still reproduce — and on
the whole they reproduce very successfully
...
This does not mean that we have all
inherited a predisposition for homosexual behaviour
...
Nevertheless, it
does mean that none of us would be the person we are today if one
of our ancestors had not shown homosexual behaviour — and
reproduced
...
First, homosexual behaviour is not peculiar to humans
...
Male
274
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
monkeys show the same range of homosexual behaviour as men,
from mutual caressing and masturbation to anal intercourse
...
Secondly, as far as humans are concerned, homosexual behaviour
is shown by only a minority of men — at least in the largest and
most industrial societies
...
For
two-thirds of those men, that contact is intimate and genital, often
involving anal intercourse
...
for example, male monkeys who have anal intercourse with oilier
males do not reduce their rate of intercourse with females
...
The vast majority (80 per cent) of
those who have sex with men also have sex with women
...
Finally, there is now convincing evidence that homosexual
behaviour is inherited
...
In
the scene we have just witnessed, the man's uncle was more likely
to have been his mother's brother than his father's; his cousin was
more likely to have been the son of one his mother's brothers or
sisters than his father's
...
Boys genetically inclined towards
homosexual behaviour may not show that inclination in some
childhood situations but may do so in others
...
The converse could also be true, though it should be
less common — boys without the genetic inclination may
nevertheless be seduced or forced into homosexual behaviour
during childhood
...
This discovery provides an important clue for biologists in their
attempt to understand the evolution of homosexual behaviour
...
Of course, a lifetime of exclusive homosexuality can
have no reproductive benefit — but bisexuality can
...
If so,
homosexual behaviour joins the ranks of a number of other human
characteristics that are advantageous when a person has inherited a
few of the relevant genes, but disadvantageous if they have
inherited more
...
In the tropics, a single level of the sickle-cell gene is
advantageous, endowing its possessor with increased resistance to
malaria compared to people without the gene
...
Of course, this comparison between the genetics of homosexual
behaviour and the genetics of sickle-cell anaemia should not be
misinterpreted: there is no implication here that the former, too, is a
disease
...
We can think of bisexuals as having a small
number of the genes for homosexual behaviour, and exclusive
homosexuals as having a larger number — bisexuals have a
reproductive advantage relative to heterosexuals; exclusive
homosexuals never reproduce, and have a
276
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
reproductive disadvantage compared with both heterosexuals and
bisexuals
...
The man in Scene 30 had two children
with his long-term partner, probably about average for the society in
which he lived
...
Such early
reproduction may not seem very advantageous, but it can be
...
A person can have a higher reproductive rate than another
either by producing more children over a lifetime or by producing
the number of children but earlier
...
It is difficult enough to compare the reproductive success of
different categories of men, such as bisexuals and heterosexuals,
even if we limit our comparison to long-term partnerships
...
And our
attempt becomes impossible when we try to compare their further
success via short-term relationships with a number of women
...
Yet it is precisely this
avenue to reproductive success that seems to be the most important
to bisexuals
...
Multiple partners, both male and female, are a feature of male
277
SPERM WARS
bisexuality
...
For some
the figure can be in the hundreds
...
Since, on average, a
bisexual man will inseminate more females over his lifetime than
will a heterosexual man, a bisexual man is more likely to have
children with different mothers
...
There
are probably three main ways why it might
...
Over 80 per cent of men who are
ever going to show homosexual behaviour have done so by the time
they are fifteen, and 98 per cent by the time they are twenty
...
To appreciate the difference in competence between
boys with homosexual experience and their heterosexual
contemporaries, compare, for example, the man in Scene 30 with
the man in Scene 27
...
In contrast, even at thirteen the bisexual in Scene 30 could
seduce girls into intercourse
...
The result was
that, before his thirtieth birthday, he had fathered four children with
three different women — more than most men in his society manage
from a lifetime of heterosexuality
...
Experience with multiple male partners of different
character types gives the bisexual an edge when interacting with
multiple female partners of different character types (Scene 36)
...
Experience with one gave him experience at
handling a relationship with the other
...
When the reverse is true, experience
gained with a man of a particular character type can help the
bisexual to get the most out of a relationship with a woman of a
similar character type
...
The final way in which homosexual activity can aid
heterosexual success is via infidelity from within a long-term
heterosexual relationship
...
Although bisexual men
decrease their homosexual activity markedly as they leave
adolescence and begin relationships with women, their
homosexual inclination rarely disappears completely
...
There is some advantage in practising infidelity with a man
...
A woman who does not
know her partner's true sexuality is likely to assume that he is
heterosexual — because the majority of men are
...
Even on those occasions when her
partner's relationships with men are sexual, a woman has less to
lose, at least initially, than if he is unfaithful with a woman
...
For example, he will never
need to reduce his support for her In order to help maintain his
lover's child
...
So homosexual behaviour during adolescence and beyond can
give a man considerable reproductive advantages over his
heterosexual contemporaries
...
There are costs to
bisexuality which can negate the benefits
...
Even before
the advent of AIDS, homosexual behaviour brought with it an
increased risk of early death from sexually transmitted diseases,
such as syphilis
...
Another cost is genetic — and here there is another parallel with
sickle-cell anaemia
...
This is because,
compared with people without the genes at all, those with a small
number will produce descendants with a higher proportion of
individuals with a larger number
...
Yet another cost arises because a proportion of the heterosexual
majority display homophobia — a prejudice against people who
show homosexual behaviour
...
We
encountered a similar if less extreme prejudice in Scenes 12 and 13
in relation to masturbation
...
Inevitably, some
homophobes are also hypocrites, displaying
280
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
public homophobia while secretly behaving bisexually
...
Whenever we encounter such common prejudice, it is usually
because the target is in some way a threat to the people showing the
prejudice
...
The
reproductive advantages enjoyed by bisexuals mean that they
should — for that reason alone — be regarded as a threat by the
surrounding heterosexuals
...
So, just as we discussed for
masturbation (Scene 13), one defence for the surrounding
individuals is to try to reduce the bisexuals' reproductive advantages
through threat and intimidation
...
In which
case, the important question becomes whether the total costs are
greater than the total benefits, or vice versa
...
When they are rare, they are more successful
than heterosexuals
...
The reasons are as follows
...
As we have noted, earlier and better learning of
sexual technique gives bisexuals a competitive advantage over other
men in gaining sexual access to women
...
As the proportion of bisexuals in the
population increases,
281
SPERM WARS
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
not only does the advantage of bisexuality decrease, but the costs
increase
...
As far as the genetic risk is concerned, the more common the
genes for homosexual behaviour the greater the chance that any
two people will carry those genes, and thus the greater the chance
that a man and his partner will produce sons and grandsons who
are exclusively homosexual and will therefore fail to reproduce at
all
...
More people, both heterosexuals and bisexuals, will
become infected
...
Thus, the chances that
any given bisexual will have an early death are greater
...
The result is that the genes for bisexuality increase
in proportion in the population
...
If the behaviour
becomes too common, the reproductive rate of bisexuals falls
below that of heterosexuals, and the proportion of bisexuals in the
population begins to decrease once more
...
Moreover, it stabilises at
precisely the level at which the average success of bisexual
behaviour in each generation is just the same as the average
success of heterosexual behaviour
...
The only difference between the two
is that the reproductive success of bisexuals is more precarious —
they have a much greater chance of not reproducing at all
...
On average, the greater risks and
the greater potential just balance each other
...
The situation would be very different, of course, if the costs of
bisexuality were never as great as the benefits, no matter how
common the bisexual genes became in the population
...
In such societies, the
benefits of bisexuality could always outweigh the costs, no matter
how many people used the strategy
...
Is it
conceivable that there have ever been societies in which there
were sufficiently few costs to bisexuality? The answer is yes
...
In particular, they
harbour and facilitate the spread of those sexually transmitted
diseases which generate the main costs of the strategy
...
For example, from the
Middle Ages until the twentieth century syphilis was the major
sexually transmitted killer in the larger societies
...
Since the members of such communities
were the offspring of the survivors of past epidemics, they
inherited their ancestors' natural, perhaps genetic, Immunity
...
When they did have such contact, few escaped
exposure to disease no matter what
282
283
SPERM WARS
their behaviour
...
Consequently,
before they encountered the outside world and were exposed to
measles, smallpox, syphilis and now AIDS, such small isolated
societies enjoyed long periods with little danger from disease
...
No
matter how common bisexuality became, its exponents would still
have reproduced faster than heterosexuals
...
And it should be no
surprise, either, to find that, when the majority of people are
bisexual, homophobia either becomes much less common or
disappears completely
...
Anthropologically, in 60 per cent of human societies
bisexuality is both common and socially accepted
...
The women also accept that their
long-term partner will from time to time have sex with other men,
and they tolerate their partner's homosexual infidelity more than his
heterosexual infidelity
...
But even in these
societies, where all male adolescents have phases of homosexuality,
sometimes within short-term 'monogamous' relationships, exclusive
homosexuality over an entire lifetime is very rare
...
Moreover, it is so successful a strategy that it has completely
displaced the heterosexuality that is the norm in larger, more
disease-prone societies
...
Reassuring herself for the fourth time
that evening that the spot on her chin had almost gone, she carried
on towelling herself dry
...
Which one of them would make
the supreme effort and put it back in the cabinet this month? It was
a week since their periods had finished — strange how they tended
to coincide — and neither of them had yet managed to put the
packet away
...
Even after a year together she still got excited at the prospect of sex
with her partner
...
As she walked naked from the steamy bathroom to the dry heat
of the bedroom, her partner was already lying on the bed
...
How much better it was to lie down next to a soft,
smooth, yielding and compliant woman than a muscular, urgent
and selfish man
...
As
they did so, their hands slid expertly over each other's bodies,
lightly stroking here, lightly caressing there
...
Taking it in turns, they moved down each other's
bodies, kissing and licking as they went, each doing to the other
what she most wanted to be done to herself
...
As she did
so, she raised her bottom in the air, presenting herself to her
partner's tongue
...
Whenever she felt
like an orgasm, this never failed to take her to the brink
...
They kept each other on a high for minutes as
they neared the edge but never crossed
...
Finally, unable to wait for release any longer, she lay back
alongside her partner
...
As they kissed, their fingers stroked and probed
each other's wet vaginal lips, then massaged each other's clitoris
...
As the girl felt the flush spread
over her chest, throat and face she saw the same happening to her
lover
...
For
one brief, wonderful moment they hovered on the brink, then
climaxed more or less simultaneously
...
They settled into their usual post-orgasmic
embrace, hands now idly stroking each other's body
...
Normally, they slept for only fifteen minutes or so after sex,
but when she woke nearly an hour had passed
...
Nevertheless, she was
beginning to fret
...
Eventually, she could delay no longer and made to move
off the bed
...
Sliding off the bed and going in search of
clothes, the girl said she wished
286
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
she could stay but really did not want to be late for the third week
in a row
...
She reminded her that in the beginning they were never out
of each other's company
...
Coming back into the room, she reassured her companion
that once her exams were over, they could return to how they had
been
...
Before she left, her lover made her promise she wouldn't be
late
...
Once alone, the woman got up, still naked, and switched on ionic
music
...
A moment of fear struck
her when she saw the letter on the shelf, reminding her to have a
repeat cervical smear tomorrow — abnormal cells, was that
serious? In an attempt at self-distraction, she picked up the framed
photograph of herself and the girl on holiday the previous summer,
both tanned, drunk and happy
...
He was now ten years
old, but it was several months since she had seen him
...
If only he knew, she thought, that the boy almost certainly
wasn't his but, most likely, the product of a wild evening she had
spent in a hotel room with two men and a girl while he had been
away
...
It was only an hour since her last climax, but the
minute she felt that sensation she knew she would masturbate
before the evening was over
...
She was
late
...
287
SPERM WARS
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
Looking around the tables, she wondered if he would still be
there
...
She didn't really want to deceive her partner,
especially now
...
Somehow, though, she didn't
feel quite as guilty about a clandestine meeting with a man as she
would with another woman
...
In fact,
her current lesbian relationship had been so rewarding that she
had begun to think she would never feel like sex with a man
again
...
Throughout childhood and adolescence she had
persuaded girlfriend after girlfriend to take off their clothes and
get into bed with her
...
At first she had just been curious about heterosexual sex, but
after a few experiences had actually begun to enjoy it, in its own
way
...
Compared with her girlfriends,
first the boys and later the men had seemed so gullible, so easy to
manipulate and deceive, that she had found it difficult to respect
them
...
As long as she
was in the mood, she could virtually guarantee that another
woman could give her an orgasm
...
So what
was she doing in this restaurant, clandestinely meeting a man?
She really didn't know, except that perhaps she was ready for
another experience — and this man really was rather attractive
...
She waved back and went to
join the hand's owner
...
Afterwards, she went into the sitting-room to relax with a
bottle of wine, music and a book
...
There
had been something strange about her lover's manner
for the past day or so and it was bothering her
...
She
phoned, asking to speak to her, intending to suggest that she came
and joined them
...
She was told,
however, that neither the girl nor her friends were there
...
There was an inquisition when the girl eventually returned —
late, but not unduly so
...
Eventually, she convinced her partner she was telling the
truth, but there was still an atmosphere between them when they
went to bed
...
Afterwards, as
the weeks passed, their relationship developed in a way that she
had only thought possible with a woman
...
Her
ingenuity was stretched to the limit
...
Her
repeat smear again indicated abnormal cells — and she began the
stressful process of having further tests and waiting for results
...
The woman had begun to suspect that her young
lover was unfaithful to her, and increasingly they began to argue
...
But she still couldn't be certain about her
partner's infidelity — right up to the moment, that is, that the
latter broke the news of her pregnancy
...
For a time, the woman was ill with stress and loneliness
...
But then, in! the depths
of depression, she met a man who had just been) deserted by his
partner and family
...
A year later, she
had his child — a daughter
...
Once her son became independent of his father, he came to see
her
...
Although the woman died relatively young, in her
sixties, it was not before she had enjoyed fifteen contented years as
a doting grandmother
...
This is because there are many similarities between male
and female bisexuality and relatively few differences
...
For example, on average across societies there are fewer
bisexual females than males — a trend that is also shown in most
animals
...
In large industrial
societies, in which only about 6 per cent of men show
homosexual behaviour, about 2-3 per cent of women do so
...
This difference means that on
average we should each need to go slightly further back in our
family tree to find a female bisexual than to find a male
...
Not only are there fewer female bisexuals than male, but on
average they begin their homosexual (lesbian) activities a little
later in life
...
Some do not have their first
lesbian experience until they are in their forties
...
Only 4 per cent of bisexual women have more than
ten homosexual partners in their lifetime compared with 22 per
cent of bisexual men
...
A common pattern, shown by the girl in the scene, is for
a woman to stay in a homosexual relationship for one to three
years before moving on to a heterosexual relationship
...
Compared with these minor differences between male and
female homosexual behaviour, there are many important
similarities
...
Fewer than 1 per cent of women in any
society are exclusively homosexual throughout their lifetime
...
All
human societies contain bisexual women; moreover, female
bisexuality is genetic and inheritable
...
In fact, there is one species of lizard which consists only
of females
...
They take
it in turns to mount each other and to stimulate each other's egg
production
...
When we compare
290
291
H
SPERM WARS
the reproductive success of female bisexuals and heterosexuals,
we reach precisely the same conclusion as we did for men (Scene
30) — as a strategy for the pursuit of reproductive success, female
bisexuality is a real and successful alternative to heterosexuality
...
Just as for men, the net advantage of
bisexuality tends to be greatest when the behaviour is rare
...
In many ways, we know more about the costs and benefits of
female bisexuality
...
For example, we know that by the age of twenty a
bisexual woman is four times more likely than a heterosexual to
have a child, and that even by the age of twenty-five she is still
twice as likely
...
By the end
of their reproductive lives, however, bisexual women tend to have
fewer children than heterosexual
...
6 children
for bisexuals and 2
...
The trends for earlier but
fewer children for bisexuals just cancel out, giving them the same
overall rate of reproduction as heterosexuals
...
Just like male
bisexuals, females are at greater risk of contracting sexually
transmitted diseases
...
By the age of twenty-five
they are more likely to exhibit abnormal cells in cervical smear
tests, and by thirty they are more likely to have cervical cancer
...
Sexually transmitted diseases,
such as herpes and genital warts, can be passed directly from
woman to woman during love-making
...
The fact that female bisexuality is less common than male
suggests to an evolutionary biologist either that women have less
to gain from bisexuality than men or that they have more to lose
— or both
...
For example, not only do
male bisexuals seem much more likely to be at risk to disease,
they are much more at risk to violence from homophobes than are
female bisexuals
...
The conclusion, therefore, is that if women do not have more to
lose from bisexuality than men, they must have less to gain — and
this should not be so surprising
...
Homosexual
experience at the appropriate time can confer precocious sexual
competence on both sexes, but does so much more clearly on
males
...
The main things that a woman has to learn about sex are those
techniques that allow her to get the most out of long-term
relationships (Scene 18)
...
She also needs to learn how
to make the most of her orgasms in a way that will give her the
greatest control over sperm retention and warfare (Scene 26)
...
Moreover, they are best practised within the context of a
relatively long-term monogamous relationship with a woman —
which is one of the key features of female homosexual behaviour
...
This allows her to exploit the
advantages of infidelity and sperm warfare (Scenes 21 and 26)
while reducing the risk of having to pay the costs (Scenes 9 and
11)
...
Bisexual women are inseminated just as
many times over their lifetime by a man as are heterosexual
women
...
Not only do bisexual women promote sperm warfare more
often, they seem better able (though the finer details have not
been measured) to control sperm retention and thus the outcome
of that warfare
...
They thus
create stronger cervical filters (Scene 22)
...
But they are more likely to have a bypass orgasm (Scene
25), negating the effect of their cervical filter
...
This is
because the stimuli women give each other during lesbian sex are
very similar to those given by a man during foreplay
...
After that, in
decreasing order of frequency, come the stroking and massaging of
the breasts, the licking and sucking of nipples, oral sex, and the
pressing and rubbing together of the genitals
...
Elsewhere, objects are sometimes used, either to
stimulate the clitoris or to insert in the vagina
...
In
the more industrialised societies, of course, commercially
available vibrators and dildoes are sometimes used
...
In one American survey,
only 3 per cent of lesbians said that they regularly used penetration
to stimulate their partner during sex
...
Moreover, the
orgasms women give each other are much more likely to occur
during the fertile phase of their cycle
...
If they were
going to ovulate that month (and they might not —Scene15) it
would be within the next few days
...
Interestingly, this peak of orgasm frequency during the fertile
phase of a lesbian's menstrual cycle is mirrored by peaks of
homosexual activity by other female animals at a similar phase of
their cycle
...
It has been shown experimentally that such mounting
behaviour is hormone-linked, so that changing the hormone
balance during menstrual cycle alters the timing of mounting, and
can even stop it altogether
...
This suggests that,
like
294
295
SPERM WARS
the other animals described above, a lesbian's motivation to have
orgasms with her partner is also under hormonal rather than
cerebral control
...
This is not really any different from our conclusion for the
advantage of bisexuality to men
...
Unlike a man,
a woman cannot increase her reproductive success simply by
having more sex with more men
...
In this, a bisexual woman is aided
by a precocious ability to promote and manipulate sperm warfare
and by a longer-term ability to make better use of infidelity
...
The net result, therefore, is that female bisexuals and
heterosexuals have similar reproductive success — but achieve it
by different means
...
When women live together, they often
synchronise their periods
...
In a fascinating series of
experiments carried out in the USA in the early 1980s, each
woman in a group of volunteers agreed to have the underarm
secretions from another woman rubbed under her nose every
other day for a few months
...
In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion over
296
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
whether menstrual synchrony is a real phenomenon
...
In some groups of women, the menstrual cycles
become more similar, in others, more different
...
Groups in which few are
ovulating, particularly if some are on the pill, lend to synchronise
...
It is as
if the women's bodies are trying to ovulate as many days apart
from each other as possible
...
If a group of women all ovulated at the same time,
even the most unaware of males might notice the behavioural
changes associated with the fertile phase (Scenes 1, 6, 10 and 22)
...
The fact that the two women in Scene 31 were synchronised
suggests that they had not ovulated in recent months
...
With the
beginning of the younger girl's heterosexual activity, we should
expect her first to ovulate, then to desynchronise her cycle from
her female lover
...
It was uncanny the way she could tell
something about the person at the door just from the way he rang
the bell
...
She got up off the bed and
pulled on her bath robe over her underwear
...
On her way down the stairs, she did some quick mental
arithmetic
...
This would be the tenth —
maybe she should also make it the last
...
And he looked distinctly uncomfortable
...
She told him, then pointed
out that it was more if he didn't want to use a condom
...
She stood back to let him in, told him to go
on up, and closed the door
...
Once in the room, she asked him which it was to be, condom
or no condom
...
'Money first,' she told him
...
To settle him she told him her
name, or rather a name, and asked for his
...
Despite herself, she laughed
...
Embarrassed, he explained he was a student, that he had
only just left school and couldn't get out of the habit of giving his
family name when asked
...
When he said it
298
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
she asked if it was his first time ever or just the first time he'd paid
for it
...
He wasn't sure
...
She didn't ask him to elaborate — just told him to relax and leave
it to her
...
She didn't react at all when she saw that his penis was limp
and small, as if it had been hiding under his clothes
...
It was many minutes before she felt any reaction on
his part, despite her soothing talk and practised hand
...
His look of dejection and embarrassment touched her
...
It was just nerves
...
After he had gone, she dressed
...
A few minutes later she was walking out of her front door
and on to the street
...
As she watched the familiar route unfurl, her thoughts drifted buck
to the student and she marvelled at the way education seemed to
slow down a person's sexual development
...
In fact, it was when she was at college, about
fifteen years ago, that she had started on her career
...
Short of money, as were many of her
fellow students, she had exploited her looks and joined an escort
agency
...
By
299
SPERM WARS
the time she graduated, she was earning so much money from sex,
had accumulated such a large clientele of her own and, frankly,
was enjoying herself so much that she saw no point in embarking
on any other career
...
A chance encounter gave her a brief spell
making hard-core pornographic films
...
She laughed to herself as she remembered the contortions
necessary, amidst a dozen naked men, to get a penis in both hands
and all three orifices and still leave room for a camera
...
She didn't entirely give up having sex with
other men, but pretended she had — and got away with it
...
After the judge died, conversations with some of her fellow
professionals led her into trying the streets for a while
...
It had certainly paid well
...
After a few close shaves, a bad
experience with a particularly violent customer had put her in
hospital for a few days
...
She only left when
her looks began to fade and she could no longer compete in open
parade with the younger girls
...
Anyway, she was still
attractive enough for most to accept her price rather than walk
away when they saw her
...
She knew she had been lucky and
that she should quit while she was winning
...
She had been beaten up a few times, but no serious
damage had been done
...
For all these years
she had been making as much money each night as most people
make in a week, or even a month
...
But even so, she
could have retired years ago and still have lived comfortably off
the interest from her savings
...
She would be loath to
leave it all behind
...
The taxi pulled up outside her home — a large detached house on
the outskirts of town
...
She went upstairs, douched herself, then had a
bath
...
Before going down to join him, she looked in on her four children,
each in their own bedroom
...
She liked to think that the two daughters, now
ten and eight, were fathered by the politician and the judge, but she
couldn't be certain
...
Many of the clients were
men of wealth and status and there were several she wouldn't have
minded being his father
...
She gave up working for a while specifically to conceive his child,
but she became pregnant so quickly they still couldn't be entirely
certain he was the father
...
An ex-student and
an ex-client, he had volunteered to look after the children
in exchange for his keep and sexual access
...
301
SPERM WARS
After the meal the couple drank, and talked
...
B
iologically, a prostitute is an individual who offers other
individuals sexual access in exchange for one or more
resources
...
Nowhere is sperm warfare more rife than in the reproductive tract
of active female prostitutes
...
And, from time to time, the winner
of that war claims the prize of fertilisation
...
Often, like the woman in the scene, they
reproduce very successfully
...
Anthropologically, only 4 per cent of
societies claim not to contain any
...
It is difficult, though, even in these societies, to
estimate what proportion of women engage in prostitution at some
time during their lives
...
Such estimates,
however, are unreliable and are probably underestimates
...
Part of the problem lies in the lack of a precise definition
...
Throughout human history and culture, there
are examples of men giving the woman (or her family) a 'gift'
around the time of their first intercourse, without the
302
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
woman being categorised as a prostitute
...
Even on the wedding
night, money may be demanded by the woman or her family
before intercourse is allowed to take place
...
In principle it is
difficult to know where to draw the line between a traditional
prostitute exchanging insemination for money and a woman in a
long-term partnership exchanging insemination for support,
protection and 'gifts'
...
At one extreme, there are clear acts of
prostitution — like the female empid fly who trades sex for food
...
While she unwraps and then eats her meal, he is allowed to mate
...
Once he has gone, the male waits for the
next male to bring her food and to mate
...
Migratory birds occupy a position at the other extreme of the
prostitution scale
...
Females arrive
later and inspect the different territories and the males who defend
them
...
Eventually, a female will allow a particular
male to have sex with her
...
If the male is ousted by another, the female does not
leave with her former partner, but allows the new male to mate
with her in exchange
303
SPERM WARS
for being permitted to carry on living in what is now his territory,
The female is intent on living in a particular territory and is
prepared to mate with any male who successfully lays claim to
that territory in order to do so
...
As such it is little
different from the behaviour of the majority of women around the
world, few of whom would consider themselves to be prostitutes
...
The young
gardener in Scene 18 is an example
...
Most men are only too willing to have sex with a woman
without any reward other than the sexual opportunity itself
...
Only when a woman is eager
to collect a particular man's genes might she be prepared to pay in
some way for the privilege
...
For her, prostitution is a way
of life
...
By her mid-thirties she had
had four children and had earned more than enough money to
give them a comfortable and healthy environment in which to
live
...
What all of the fathers had in common
was that they produced very competitive ejaculates: sperm armies
able to defeat those of many other men
...
In
later generations, many people in the population
304
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
would inherit her genes because of the competitive success of her
male descendants
...
It is just that prostitutes
exploit this technique more often than any other category of
women in the population
...
The success of prostitution as a reproductive strategy means
that most of us will contain the genes of a prostitute among our
ancestors
...
As a way of life, however, prostitution has many risks
...
This factor
alone can condemn a prostitute to early infertility and death
...
Prostitutes report men trying surreptitiously to remove the
condom that they have agreed to wear
...
So
strong is the male body's preference for insemination that, like the
woman in Scene 32, many prostitutes are prepared to settle for
simply exploiting the situation by charging more for intercourse
without a condom
...
Prostitutes attempt to reduce this risk by gathering together in a
brothel or massage parlour, by paying a man or men to watch over
them and provide protection, or simply by having a chaperon
(often their mother or father)
...
Despite
sometimes having to pay rent on the room from which they work,
or for protection, prostitutes have an earning capacity that most
other people can only fantasise about
...
In part, this is as a result of exploitation: young girls are first
introduced to the drug scene and then 'encouraged' into prostitution
as the only means of earning enough money to support their habit
...
Such sad cases inevitably incur the costs of prostitution
without reaping the benefits
...
In
ancient Greece and Rome, almost all men inseminated a prostitute
at some time in their lives
...
In the UK in the 1990s, 10 per cent of men between
forty-five and fifty-nine years old have paid for sex at least once in
their lives
...
As a reproductive option for men, prostitutes provide a target for
insemination that is quick and easy
...
He may
also gain in other ways, depending on his situation
...
Men
without a partner are simply including prostitutes in their search for
females to inseminate
...
Men already with a partner are using
prostitutes as targets for their infidelity
...
Thus, although insemination is easy, as we
have just seen, the reproductive benefits are relatively low
...
In addition,
even during long periods of unprotected sex, prostitutes are less
likely to conceive in any given month than a woman who is having
only occasional sex with a single partner
...
It could also be due to sperm
warfare
...
A man needs to inseminate prostitutes many, many more times
than he does a conventional mistress in order to produce a single
child outside of his long-term partnership
...
Nevertheless, from time CO time a
man will succeed in this, passing on to his child in the process the
genetic program that made his ejaculate so successful at sperm
warfare — prostitutes are unsuitable targets for men who are not
sperm war specialists (Scenes 19, 30, and 35)
...
Clearly, such a man
experiences all of the disadvantages just discussed for a prostitute's
clients
...
The man in Scene 32 traded his financial
and lifestyle benefit for effectively looking after her, her home and
her children
...
His lifestyle probably also
meant that he would have a chance to inseminate other women as
well
...
The potential gains were
high, but so too were the potential costs
...
Given that prostitution and the use of prostitutes are both
reproductive strategies with high potential benefits and
considerable potential risks, prostitutes share many similarities
with bisexuals (Scenes 30 and 31)
...
So it is possible that,
as we concluded for bisexuality, prostitution is an advantageous
strategy only as long as it remains relatively uncommon, at least in
societies in which its costs are high
...
At the same time, the spread of disease would greatly
increase
...
Without a genetic analysis similar to that which has been
carried out for bisexuals, however, we cannot be certain — and
there is an alternative interpretation
...
If this interpretation is correct, the corollary is that
women who judge the situation correctly and become prostitutes
should have a higher level of reproductive success than other
women
...
This is the
subject of the next two scenes
...
As he walked, he could hear the sound of traffic a block away on the
main road running through the town
...
Turning away
from the square, he saw at the end of a narrow road the beacon he
was seeking
...
He phoned home, checked with his partner that she and their two
children were well, and told her he would see her the following
night
...
After checking the flick-knife in his back pocket,
he lit up a cigarette and settled back to wait
...
His throat dried and tightened
in a mixture of excitement, fear and anticipation
...
The girl at the pavement bar was crying
...
Two tables away, laughing
drunkenly with his friends, was this holiday's sexual partner
...
Scarcely more than an hour ago, they had had sex on the
grass in the nearby park
...
All week, since they first met, he had
used a condom
...
As
if that hadn't been cruel enough, no sooner had he withdrawn than
he had gloated that she was the second that
308
309
SPERM WARS
night — that an hour earlier he had been in the same spot with
another of the girls from their group
...
But he
didn't mind carrying on having sex with her for the rest of the
holiday, if she wanted
...
Now, after the anger and the tears, she had the sudden
urge to speak to her boyfriend at home and to seek the reassurance
that at least he still cared for her
...
She told her friends she was
going to the phone
...
The man had been leaning against the wall in the shadows for
about fifteen minutes and was smoking his second cigarette when
he saw the girl appear at the end of the road
...
He waited, fully expecting someone to be with the girl
...
His luck was in, yet again
...
Then she was in shadow and he heard, rather than saw, her
coming towards him
...
His penis sensed action — beginning to stiffen into
the rod of iron that hadn't once let him down
...
He reached into the back pocket of his
trousers for the knife
...
She barely noticed the
man as she passed him in the blackness, but a second later she was
grabbed from behind, a strong arm around her throat
...
As he held her, she glimpsed a group of people
walking past the end of one of the other roads
310
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
leading away from the church
...
From that first moment, everything seemed to happen at the speed
of light
...
Speaking softly, in a language she didn't
understand, he moved his arm from her throat to her waist and
made her bend forward, as if to touch her toes
...
Within seconds of
making her spread her legs, he was inside her
...
For a few seconds, he paused before withdrawing
and for one panic-stricken moment she thought he was going to kill
her
...
Within a minute he was back in his car, driving to his hotel, two
towns away
...
Then came the tears
...
She saw no one
...
She fell on to the bed and spent the night half in shock,
half in sleep
...
Two days later, while she was still
agonising over whether to tell her friends or the police, she
conceived
...
Daunted by the prospect of explaining what had happened to
police who did not speak her language, and worried by how her
boyfriend might react if he ever found out, she told no one about
the rape
...
On discovering her pregnancy, she first considered an abortion,
but with her boyfriend's reassurances that he would help
311
SPERM WARS
raise what he thought was their child, she decided to keep it By
the time her baby was born, she had managed to convince herself
that it was probably his anyway
...
Her son's father
was in fact a predatory rapist from a distant country
...
If they say that rape yields
reproductive benefits, they are accused of encouraging the act
...
If they dare to suggest that female behaviour may
sometimes invite rape, they are accused of violating womankind
just as surely as if they had committed the act themselves
...
Are historians accused of encouraging warfare
if they conclude that a country benefited from a war? Are they
accused of condoning warfare if they conclude the behaviour has a
biological basis? Are they accused of violation if they conclude
that a country invited invasion? Or are they, on the other hand,
congratulated for incisive historical analysis and for aiding the
prevention of future conflicts ?
Prevention of socially unacceptable behaviour, be it rape or
warfare, demands a proper understanding of the circumstances
that trigger such behaviour
...
The value will lie instead in
identifying the circumstances that facilitate rape or war
...
The only reliable pathway to understanding
the situation is via objective analysis, even if en route some
conclusions may be unpleasant, unpalatable or socially 'incorrect'
...
The rape in this scene was a sexual event
312
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
Which had a reproductive outcome
...
The rapist's weapon — in this case a flick-knife — was
used as a means of coercion, not to inflict physical damage
...
As testament to the reproductive
nature of their behaviour, such rapists usually select victims who
are at their peak of fertility, aged between twenty and thirty-five
...
On a minority of
occasions, however — albeit those which receive the widest
publicity — a woman is not only raped but is also physically
harmed, mutilated or killed
...
As
testament to the non-reproductive nature of their behaviour, such
rapists are more likely to select older women, from their late
thirties onwards — women who are past their peak of fertility
...
Here we are concerned solely with sexual events in which the
woman is not physically harmed by the rapist, at least not so
much that she is unable to conceive from the intercourse or later
give birth (though she may suffer psycho-logical consequences)
...
Moreover, such rape often involves sperm warfare
...
We have to ask whether rape can be a successful alternative
strategy in the male pursuit of reproductive success
...
Anthropologically, rape of the type
described in Scene 33 is common in nearly 50 per cent of
societies and is reportedly rare in only 20 per cent
...
Such estimates are, of
course, very approximate and confounded not least by the fact
that, as in our scene, very few rapes are actually reported
...
So widespread is rape and so often do children
result from rape that all of us could probably find a rapist among
the past five generations of our ancestors
...
The males of species as diverse as
insects, ducks and monkeys are all known to force copulation
under certain circumstances
...
Without that hook — for instance, if it is removed by
an experimental biologist — the female always escapes a male's
attempt at force
...
Females are attracted to the bigger males and
allow them to mate without being forced
...
Even so, they are relatively unsuccessful
and are lucky to force a mating more than once in their whole
lives
...
In this insect, therefore, rapists are males
making the best of a bad job, having been born small and
relatively unattractive to females
...
More often than not, rape is an extra option for males who are
in all other respects reproductively normal and attractive
...
They chase any female who is still
fertile and who has been left unguarded by her mate, and attempt
to force insemination
...
At other times, like the girl in Scene 33, they may simply allow
the male to mate
...
Not
only do rapists produce young with their partner, they also
produce a few through forcing copulation on other females
...
As we shall soon see, it is crucial for our understanding of
human rape, particularly the response of the female, to know
whether rapists have an above — or below-average reproductive
success
...
There have
been a few, albeit rather weak, claims that rapists are, in fact,
like the scorpion fly, making the best of a bad job
...
Other much more thorough studies have
shown that age for age, social status for social status, and
physical attractiveness for physical attractiveness, rapist are no
less likely than non-rapists to have a partner and children
...
Whether they realise
that potential, however, depends on whether they succeed in
making the potential reproductive advantages outweigh the
potential costs
...
Not only is there the ever-present possibility of infection, there is
also a real danger that rape will trigger strong and often violent
retribution
...
Secondly and more importantly, they are at
risk to retribution both from their victim's partner and from the
315
SPERM WARS
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
society in general
...
Vigilante groups against rapists are by no means uncommon,
particularly in large cities
...
The male members of a lion pride, for
example, will band together to repel attacks from marauding
gangs of bachelor males intent on gaining sexual access to the
females
...
In most modern human cultures, however, most of the
defence against rapists is institutionalised
...
Rape is clearly a dangerous reproductive strategy
...
As a result,
the successful rapists amongst our ancestors, those who left most
children and thus whose genes we are now most likely to possess,
were those who were the best judges of circumstances; those who
most accurately assessed (subconsciously) whether the potential
reproductive benefits of an opportunity to rape really outweighed
the potential costs
...
When we consider women and their physiological response
to being raped, we encounter an unpalatable conundrum
...
On the other hand, if being raped is
advantageous, she should be more likely to conceive from it than
from routine intercourse
...
It
suggests that, like the girl in Scene 33, a woman is more likely to
conceive from rape than from routine sex with her partner
...
But this is unlikely for two reasons
...
Secondly, the difference in conception rate
between rape and routine sex is greatest during the least fertile
phases of the menstrual cycle — during menstruation and again
three or more weeks after menstruation
...
However reluctantly, therefore, we should accept that a woman
is more likely to conceive from rape than from routine sex
...
We have already seen that rather violent roughand-tumble sex play can trigger ovulation in mink (Scene 28)
...
Although a
woman is more likely to conceive from rape than she is from
routine intercourse with her partner, there are other, less
traumatic, situations in which she is equally likely to conceive
...
Another is during
snatched moments of infidelity (Scenes 6, 17 and 19)
...
The
physiological mechanism for conception is also likely to be the
same in all three situations — ovulation in response to intercourse
(Scene 15)
...
But why should she want to make the most of a one-off
opportunity to collect the genes of a rapist?
It was to answer this question that we needed to consider earlier
whether human rapists have an above- or below-average
reproductive success
...
If she can collect such genes, she will increase her reproductive
316
317
SPERM WARS
success via male descendants who inherit the same potential for
success
...
This conclusion does not mean, as people often assume, that a
woman should therefore seek to be raped
...
If she conceives to an
inept rapist, doomed quickly to be caught and to suffer social
retribution and incarceration, her male descendants would inherit
unsuccessful characteristics
...
The only way a woman's body can select out the most
successful of rapists is to do everything possible to avoid being
raped
...
Whether she should also try to fend off the
rapist physically will depend on her assessment of the danger of
being physically damaged
...
A woman who follows this overall strategy is unlikely to
fall victim to any but the most cunning, determined and competent
of rapists
...
Our discussion should not end here
...
In particular, we need to discuss whether rapists are a
genetic minority, like bisexuals (Scenes 30 and 31), or whether
all men are potential rapists
...
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
The only remaining question to answer here is why the rapist
In Scene 33 was the winner of the sperm war inside his victim's
body
...
First, the girl's
boyfriend, because he normally used a condom, failed to enter an
army until it was too late
...
Secondly, all week her holiday partner had also
been using a condom
...
On the night of the rape, her holiday
lover actually inseminated her
...
In addition, he had just inseminated another female and, as it was
their first intercourse, he would have given her a large inseminate
...
In addition, she had
ejected the flowback from that intercourse before being raped
...
Moreover, his perm
were confronted with only a minimal cervical filter and a small
army of killers
...
Admittedly, the holiday lover had an hour or so's
start, but ovulation was still two days away
...
Another set of rapist genes
will have been passed on to the next generation
...
A flock of large black birds flew noisily
out of the trees as the five soldiers threw themselves to the ground
...
Quietness returned
...
They waited for a while, then crawled along the roadside on their
knees and elbows, seeking the cover of trees just ahead of them
...
A few minutes
ago, one of them had noticed a house
...
A sniper in
the house might just have had one chance for a shot at them
through the trees as they passed
...
The house was small and in poor repair, but obviously
inhabited
...
It was
very hot and the group of three were soaked in the sweat of
exertion and tension as they paused by the front door
...
Nevertheless, the
soldiers remained tense and alert
...
Adrenaline still coursing
through his veins,
320
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
the soldier in command asked the grandfather who else was in the
house
...
The
soldier hesitated, very much on the edge
...
The old man
looked at his partner, then said they were dead, shot by people
like them
...
The pair moved tentatively towards me only other exit
from the room
...
As they
reached the doorway, there was a sudden movement in the room
beyond
...
One of them reached for the curtain just as they heard the
back door burst open
...
There was the sound of scuffling, then the curtain was
thrown back and the two soldiers appeared, pushing a woman in
her late twenties in front of them
...
As she
raised herself to her knees, her daughter ran to her and clung
round her neck, sobbing
...
'You lied, you're dead,' he said
...
'And now we're going to kill you,' continued the soldier, 'but
maybe not yet
...
'
He ordered the others to check the house, inside and out
...
The others returned
...
The soldiers knew what was coming, and began to relax
...
Their commander looked at the mother and her twelve-year-old
daughter, sobbing in each other's arms
...
The mother shouted hysterically, clutched her
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ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
SPERM WARS
daughter, and begged the soldier to take her, not the child
...
Then, prodding the mother with his gun,
told her to stand up and take off her clothes
...
He had chosen the
location carefully, so that while standing behind her he could still
see the room
...
Throughout the intercourse, he was coolly
vigilant, only losing his concentration during ejaculation itself
...
Then he walked over to retrieve his gun and told the soldier who
had been holding it that he was next
...
Throughout her forty-minute
ordeal, the woman occasionally sobbed but, afraid that they might
turn on her daughter instead, did not once ask them to stop
...
The soldiers allowed her
daughter to run over and join her, but made her stay naked, not
allowing the grandmother to take over her clothes
...
Inevitably, somebody eventually
suggested that maybe they should have the daughter anyway
...
Two of them voiced their disapproval
and swore at their companions for even considering the prospect
...
He told the other two they
could abstain if they wanted, but he was going to make the most of
their find
...
When three of them had raped the young girl, their commander
decided it was time to leave
...
Turning to the grandfather, he asked the old man if he had really
thought he would forget to do what, on first arriving, he had
promised; then he shot him
...
He paused, finger on
trigger, then smiled
...
Two children were conceived that day, one by the mother and
one, against all odds, by the twelve-year-old girl
...
No sooner were they clear of the house than they
were all dead, gunned down by guerrillas
...
W
e have already discussed the presence of predatory rape
in the male sexual repertoire (Scene 33)
...
Any child sired in
this way is a bonus, an addition to those fathered via a
conventional long-term relationship
...
Rape is a risky strategy, and incompetent
rapists lose out rather than gain from their behaviour
...
Having been raped, however, a
woman may gain, reproductively, by then conceiving
...
Before examining
gang rape in humans, we shall first look at the phenomenon in
other animals
...
But the most detailed
information is available for birds, in which gang rape is
particularly common and has been described for many species
...
Intercourse in birds involves the male
balancing precariously on the female's back, then bending his tail
under hers
...
Male and female sacs are similar,
and sperm are transferred by the male and female pressing their
sacs together once the male is in position
...
Moreover, she can avoid
accepting his sperm simply by not everting her genital sac
...
Females who do
not comply have been known to die in the melee
...
A gang is also more able to brush aside
the female's defences, either her own or those of guarding males
...
On discovering a female and her partner, some of the gang
chase and keep away the guarding male, while the others rape the
female
...
The benefit of gang rather than individual rape to male birds,
therefore, is that through cooperation they each increase their
chances of inseminating an unwilling female
...
Whether a male gains an overall
advantage from being a gang member depends on how these costs
and benefits balance out
...
If he is a member of a gang of four, he has only a one in
four chance of fathering any child produced by their activities, so
only if the gang as a whole manages to inseminate more than four
times as many females as the male could on his own is his
membership worthwhile
...
A group of ten will not be twice as effective
324
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
at raping females as a group of five — yet a male in the larger
gang has only half the chance of winning sperm warfare of a male
in the smaller
...
Some
estimates suggest that 70 per cent in industrialised societies are
gang rapes
...
Inevitably, human
males gain all the same reproductive benefits from gang
membership as other male animals
...
In our discussion of predatory rape in Scene 33, we left open
one very important question
...
One is
that rapists are a genetic minority, like bisexuals (Scenes 30 and
31)
...
Of these two possible explanations, the
latter seems likely to be nearer the truth — because in wartime the
incidence of all forms of rape, including gang rape, increases
dramatically
...
First, having routed
its enemy, a successful army has effectively removed the males
who might otherwise defend the women
...
Thirdly, because of the ever present risk of
imminent death, the prospect of social recrimination for rape
seems trivial
...
325
SPERM WARS
The increased incidence of rape during warfare is due to more
men becoming rapists, not to a limited number of men raping
more often
...
Unpalatable though this might
be, it should be no more so than that other facet of male
behaviour highlighted by war — that all men are potential killers
...
Yet, in a wartime scenario, they found it within themselves to
commit both
...
As we discovered
in Scene 33, we all possess the genes of rapist ancestors
...
First, let us consider wartime killing
...
Similar behaviour is shown
by many social animals, from insects to primates
...
One social group was observed over a period
of several months systematically murdering individuals from the
other group, until none were left
...
Only the distance from which the people
could kill each other was different
...
Distasteful though it might be to accept, most people are alive
today only because at some time in the past the wider society in
which their ancestors lived successfully waged war
326
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
and killed people
...
History books are full of civilisations and
societies that have been annihilated by their neighbours
...
Whereas in wartime, many people are
continually encountering circumstances in which the benefits of
killing another person far outweigh the costs, in peacetime far
fewer people encounter such circumstances
...
We have all inherited our genes from those men
amongst our wartime ancestors who took their opportunities to
reproduce when they could, •von when it involved rape
...
Those men In Scene 34 who decided not to rape the young
girl did not live to produce more children who would inherit their
compassion, whereas one of the men who raped her did produce
a child to inherit his lack of compassion
...
Wartime rape and murder also combine to shape our
characteristics in the process known as genetic infiltration
...
The invading armies annex lands and rape the
women
...
By this means, whole genetic
stocks can be infiltrated and diluted almost out of existence by
more successful genetic lines
...
Wartime rape is one of the key elements in
this ebb and flow of genes across the earth's surface
...
Biologically, it might seem strange that the men in Scene 34
considered a twelve-year-old girl a suitable target
...
Authenticated records show that women
have conceived at all ages between seven and fifty-seven, with
unconfirmed reports of women conceiving up to the age of
seventy
...
Pre-pubescent girls may ovulate before their breasts and
pubic hair develop and before their first show of menstrual blood
...
In between, as we have discussed
at length (as in Scene 2), men are totally unable to judge whether
and when a woman is fertile
...
Unable to decipher female fertility, the
male body has responded evolutionarily by a blanket approach —
inseminating whoever and whenever it can
...
Faced with four
females, one a baby, one twelve years old, one in her late
twenties and one in her sixties, all of the men in Scene 34 wanted
to inseminate the woman in her late twenties, three wanted to
inseminate the twelve-year-old, and none wanted to inseminate
the older woman or the baby
...
The two who were raped both ovulated and conceived
...
This was almost predictable for the
mother, but was against the odds for the daughter
...
The chances for the daughter conceiving, however, were
probably no higher than one in fifty
...
Inevitably, one of the features of gang rape is that it
generates intensive sperm warfare in the victim
...
He was the one
whose egg-getters got a head start in reaching the oviducts,
whose killers were first to take up their positions in the womb,
and whose blockers had the chance to establish themselves in the
cervix
...
In Scene 34 the odds will have favoured the soldier in
command because he was the first to inseminate both females,
but any one of the doomed men could have left a descendant to
perpetuate his rapist genes
...
The
two women at the table looked around, suddenly feeling
Conspicuous — but they had drunk enough not really to care
...
She'd
seen quite a few men's packages in her time, she said, and her
partner's were by far the biggest
...
Finally, they had decided it was time to meet
up again, so the other woman had invited her friend,
329
SPERM WARS
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
her partner and their two young children to stay for the weekend
...
Now that they were drunk, what they really wanted to talk
about was sex
...
The other woman wasn't sure that she would like big testes
...
His penis seemed a bit
small, too
...
Sometimes she wished
it weren't quite so big
...
She didn't know what it
was inside her that he kept poking, but it was certainly
uncomfortable
...
Most of her friends, she said, were down to once a week, but,
even after all this time, she still had a job to keep him down to
two or three times a week
...
That would be no good for her, her friend said
...
Fortunately, her
partner also had a low sex drive — they were lucky if they
managed it twice a month now
...
As for masturbation — they had never talked about it
...
The taller woman laughed and then
expressed her amazement that they had never talked about it
...
Maybe he didn't always tell her, but she thought he
did usually
...
The other woman hesitated,
summoning the courage to ask what for her was a big question
...
Without any surprise or
self-consciousness, the taller woman replied that she came
sometimes — but her partner expected her to come every time
...
Ever since, if she didn't come, she
faked it
...
If she didn't fake it, he would never stop
...
She
found some consolation in her friend's answer, but not much
...
She knew it was her turn to reciprocate
but couldn't decide whether to tell the truth or not
...
In fact, she didn't
think she had ever had an orgasm
...
Admittedly, he had tried —
at least in the early days
...
If
anything, she used to get embarrassed rather than excited
...
Once or twice she had felt something during intercourse but it
had never amounted to anything
...
In a matter of fact way that shocked her friend, the taller
woman asked if it was any better with other men
...
There hadn't been any other
men, she said
...
When told never, she
expressed disbelief, astounded that anybody could get to thirty
and only ever have had sex with one man
...
When asked if she meant when she was younger or
if she had had other men since living with her partner, she
laughed at the innocence of the question and said both
...
She'd even had sex with
someone else while she was pregnant with her first child
...
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330
SPERM WARS
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
Unsure of how she felt about her friend in the light of these
revelations, the other woman tried to think of a suitable
response
...
Her own partner hardly ever
let her out of his sight and she was sure he would know if she
even thought about being unfaithful
...
Not too
much, but a bit
...
He was never around when she needed him — for all she
knew, he could be having a different woman every week
...
He could take his pick
...
In any case, if she did, it would give her far
less chance to enjoy herself
...
Apparently
taking no account of the latter's confessed fidelity, she told her
what she should do if she wanted a partner who would give her
orgasms
...
She hadn't realised until she had seen him
holding hands with another man in a bar a few weeks after they
had finished
...
Try and find yourself one, she
urged
...
He put down his drink and balanced himself
awkwardly with arms outstretched, fists on the table
...
Why didn't they come with him? He
could give them a night to remember
...
The taller woman told him to drop dead
...
He fell backwards on to the
floor, then got to his feet and swore at them before
staggering back to the bar
...
Deep down, she observed,
men were all the same
...
If they had half a brain as well as
genitals they would really be quite dangerous
...
Virtually all men ejaculate (whereas not all women
have orgasms)
...
Virtually all men have nocturnal
orgasms at some time in their lives (whereas 60 per cent of women
do not)
...
There are roughly four different strategies
...
The two other strategies described by the
women in the scene represent the two ends of the male spectrum of
sexuality
...
One specialises in sperm warfare, the other in
avoiding sperm warfare
...
Just which
strategy a male is programmed to adopt will depend largely on his
rate of sperm production — which in turn depends on the size of
his testes
...
The testes of all mammals originate
inside the body in the same position as the ovaries — and in many
species that is where they stay
...
In yet other species, the testes descend during the
breeding season, then go back inside the body for safe keeping
once the breeding season is over
...
The main compensation is that, because they
allow the sperm to be stored at a lower temperature than
333
SPERM WARS
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
if they were stored inside the body, it is easier for the sperm to
keep fitter and healthier for longer
...
On average, taller and heavier (but not obese) men have larger
testes
...
This
difference is genetic and heritable
...
Moreover, small testes are less vulnerable and less likely
to be damaged than larger ones
...
The sexual strategy that a man does
best to pursue, therefore, is dictated to a large extent by the size of
his testes
...
Interestingly, they don't ejaculate more sperm during
masturbation
...
The converse is true, in all these respects, for men
with smaller testes
...
Men with smaller
testes, on the other hand, are programmed to specialise in mate
guarding, fidelity and the avoidance of sperm warfare — warfare
which, because of their small armies, they would be likely to lose
...
Just as for bisexuality, evolution seems to have produced a
balance such that men with large testes and men with small do
equally well
...
Into
this population comes a man with large testes who not only
claims a partner of his own but also tries to inseminate other
men's partners
...
Every time he
inseminates another man's partner he is likely to win the sperm
war because he introduces a larger sperm army
...
As
a result, at each generation men with large testes produce more
children than men with small
...
But this success eventually becomes self-defeating
...
First, they are no longer assured of
winning sperm wars because the women they inseminate are
being inseminated by other men with large testes
...
Thirdly, the greater promiscuity in
the population puts everybody at greater risk to disease,
particularly the most promiscuous — such as themselves
...
Not least this is
because such men are less at risk to disease and their smaller
testes are less vulnerable to accident and damage
...
We have met this situation before
(Scene 30) and the outcome should be the same
...
In Scene 35, the man with large testes was raising two
children
334
335
SPERM WARS
who may or may not have been his
...
The man with
small testes was raising one child, which was certainly his
(according to his partner)
...
On average, however, the two types of
men should produce equal numbers of children
...
These employ a 'mixed' strategy by which they try to strike
the best compromise between mate guarding and sperm warfare,
but specialise in neither
...
In effect, as
long as a man pursues a reproductive strategy appropriate to the
size of his testes and his rate of sperm production, he should on
average do just as well as other men with different-sized testes
...
This should not be surprising, given that the
penis does have a role in sperm warfare — the removal of any
seminal pool from the vagina (Scene 21)
...
After all,
penis size is important only on those rare occasions when a man
has sex with a woman very soon after another man — so soon that
the latter's seminal pool is still at the top of her vagina
...
This explains why there has been much more pressure on sperm
war specialists to have larger testes than to have a larger penis, but
it does not explain why any man should have a small penis
...
There is also an upper limit — that beyond which a man
would be unable to thrust without damaging the woman
...
On the one hand, a smaller penis is no disadvantage in terms of
sperm retention
...
This is because
even when a penis of below-maximum size withdraws after
insemination, the vaginal walls close behind it (Scene 3),
effectively pushing the seminal pool to the top of the vagina
...
On the other hand, a smaller than maximum penis may even be
an advantage, particularly during routine sex
...
On these occasions, a
smaller penis will be an advantage if the previous seminal pool is
better left in place
...
In many ways, therefore,
a smaller than maximum penis endows a man with greater
flexibility than does a larger one
...
Testis size and penis size vary not only between males within a
population, they also vary between populations and races
...
The number of sperm inseminated during intercourse
varies accordingly
...
In other words,
populations
with
larger
genitals
(on
337
SPERM WARS
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
average) should contain more men pursuing sperm warfare than
populations with smaller genitals (on average)
...
In some species of primate, such as chimpanzees, females often
mate with several males and nearly every conception involves
sperm warfare
...
Linked with this difference, chimps have much
larger testes relative to their body size than do gibbons
...
Not only primates but many other groups of animals have been
shown to have testes of a size appropriate to the risk of sperm
warfare
...
drunk, then moved in
...
Even when
she had gone to the toilet, always a dangerous moment, she had
come back to him
...
With an honesty born out of drunkenness, they had
traded increasingly personal details, such as how often (hey each
masturbated and how many partners they had each had
...
She began to look sad and emotional
...
Without her experiences, she wouldn't be the
person she was now: so worldly, so relaxed and so attractive
...
With that,
he had stroked the side of her face with the back of his fingers
...
She smiled and apologized as he wiped the tears from her
cheeks
...
There were still people in the room, but the pair of
them were now oblivious
...
Then he moved
down and traced round the edge of her low-cut dress, briefly
slipping his fingers inside so that they brushed over an erect nipple
...
His moment had come
...
Unhesitatingly, she let him lead her
...
Maybe, at last, he was becoming competent at the sexual arts
...
In fact, apart from this girl's
relatively tiny breasts, she could almost be his last partner
...
It was a year since his second partner had
left him, a year of celibacy, anticipation and nothing but
masturbation
...
It wasn't the first party he had thrown since she had left
...
But it was the first at which he had managed to keep
anybody's attention for more than about ten minutes
...
A friend of a friend, she stole his attention
immediately
...
His hands, lips and tongue began
to move over her body, with varying degrees of lightness and
strength
...
She used to lie there as he caressed her, getting more and more
excited as he spent more and more time massaging her clitoris until
she eventually climaxed
...
Then suddenly she seized him
by the neck and kissed him passionately, almost violently
...
Rolling her on to her back, he forced his hand between her
legs
...
He had rarely had such a
problem with his ex-partner
...
Thrown from his usual routine, he placed his fingers in the girl's
vagina instead
...
But instead of allowing him to
gently move his fingers up and down, in and out of her vagina, as
did his ex-partner, she responded by vigorously rubbing her pelvis
against his hand for a few seconds
...
Next, in a movement he
had never come across before, she seemed to grab his penis with
her vaginal lips and virtually suck him in
...
He tried to start
thrusting but the girl was thrusting too
...
But then,
she had usually climaxed during foreplay, if she was going to
climax at all
...
He kept coming out
...
In the end, he gave up trying
340
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
to thrust and left all the movements to her, patiently and politely
waiting for her to climax before he ejaculated
...
Then, suddenly, she stopped - no
contractions, no apparent release or relief, no anything
...
Without
waiting for him to ejaculate, she removed herself and lay
breathlessly on the bed, leaving him erect, wet and frustrated
...
Desperate to
inseminate her, he tried to keep her interest, but it didn't work
...
He
assumed she was going to the toilet, but as she got to the door she
said goodbye
...
He protested that he hadn't yet come
...
Her boyfriend was coming to pick her up and take her
home
...
She smiled, shook her head, and went
...
He ushered
the last few people out and went back to bed
...
He couldn't believe he had missed his
chance
...
It wasn't that he was inexperienced just that he had never met anybody like this girl before
...
During their fifteen years together they
had produced two children
...
She had been totally passive
...
Because of their lack of
foreplay, she was rarely wet when he tried to enter her
...
Once he was fully inside, she then
liked him to ejaculate quickly
...
On more than one occasion, she had
actually made him stop and withdraw because he was taking too
long
...
When he was thirty, he had his first opportunity to be
unfaithful
...
They went back to his office and
lay uncomfortably on the uncarpeted floor
...
She was offended by
his lack of consideration and disappointed that she wasn't going
to get an orgasm
...
Pushing him
away, she said that maybe sex wasn't such a good idea after all,
and left
...
She, too, took offence at
his initial urgency
...
For
example, in all his time with his partner he had neither touched
nor seen her clitoris
...
Two things his mistress did share with his partner were a
mild liking for having her nipples sucked and a strong dislike of
having his face between her legs
...
He never did in fact see her clitoris
...
She didn't like him to
touch the clitoris bulb directly, preferring him to
342
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
massage and squeeze the area around it
...
He became expert at judging the right
moment to move from using his fingers to using his penis
...
Somehow, though, he always had the
feeling that she was faking it
...
It ended when his mistress met someone nearer her own
age
...
He was now
relatively experienced at the deceptive techniques of infidelity, but
was still not fully convinced that the female orgasm was a reality
...
Most of the time he was with her he felt like her puppet
...
Eventually, she let him into her bed on condition that he did not try
to penetrate her
...
At first he had no idea what
he was doing
...
Yet she was virtually insatiable, wanting him to lick her
genitals, thighs and anus for twenty minutes at a time so that she
was covered in his saliva
...
A year later, on what was their tenth assignation, she was still
insisting that he could only have his excitement as long as he did
not penetrate her
...
For two nights, he let her tell him what
to do but on the third night, as they lay naked and he had his head
between her legs, his excitement and frustration at last took him
beyond the threshold of reason
...
Then, while kissing her face and
343
SPERM WARS
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
mouth, he slipped his penis into her vagina
...
She became violent, hitting and
scratching him whenever she could free a hand
...
When it
was over, she called him a bastard - but didn't throw him out
...
Over the remaining week, they had
sex every night
...
She conceived that week but three
months later miscarried when her partner, having been denied sex
for well over a year, decided to leave her rather than bring up
somebody else's child
...
After the miscarriage,
though, he could not face the prospect of years of having to force
sex, and finished the relationship
...
His partner
had been told of his affair by his mistress's, and three months after
finding out she left him for another man, taking their two children
with her
...
The first was afraid of sex
...
They drank excessively
...
He didn't realize her similarity
to his last mistress until, at their last meeting, she asked him to rape
her
...
Unlike his last mistress, however, she
did not come back for more and he never saw her again
...
He had
been out celebrating with a small group of friends from work
...
Almost immediately the party was under way, the female
host had disappeared to her bedroom
...
Then,
seemingly unnoticed by her very drunk partner, she openly took
the hand of one unattached man after another and led him away to
her bedroom
...
She took him upstairs and, without locking the
door, removed his trousers and underwear
...
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she began to give him oral sex
...
Eventually sounding frantic, she pulled him on
top of her and scrambled with her hands to insert his penis
...
The violence of her reaction was such
a shock to him that his erection began to fade
...
But just as she was
building up to a second crescendo and his own ejaculation was
only seconds away, her partner burst into the room
...
With apparently little surprise and with
minimal aggression, her partner proclaimed that now it was his
turn
...
His third experience was with an exotic woman with whom he
had sex about five times
...
She had refused to let him enter her
without extensive foreplay
...
The third time, she told
him she would do it herself
...
Years
later he was to realize that, had he
344
345
SPERM WARS
already experienced the woman who was to be his second longterm partner, he would probably have been able to excite this
woman
...
After twice watching his
exotic lover masturbate, he began to feel fairly incompetent
...
He tried this, failed,
and was thrown out, never to be invited back
...
The first time they had sex she was so upset by
his urgency that he almost forfeited his second chance
...
After two or three
years of education he became quite proficient
...
Unlike his first mistress, however,
sucking her nipples did little for her
...
She liked the bulb itself,
once lubricated, to be rubbed and massaged directly
...
Rarely, very
rarely, did she have or even want an orgasm during intercourse,
saying they were so weak they weren't worth having
...
If she
changed her mind or if for some reason he was unable to excite
her, she would openly masturbate to satisfy herself
...
As far as he knew, none of his
other partners had experienced them
...
Tonight's events had proved him wrong
...
He would never understand women
...
Some women (2—4 per cent) never orgasm;
others (5 per cent) have multiple orgasms, scarcely coming down
from one climax before building up to the next
...
Some prefer to be totally passive in their build-up to
climax during intercourse; others prefer to be more active
...
Finally, 40 per
cent have nocturnal orgasms, whereas others cannot even imagine
such an event
...
Some women have sensitive
nipples; others do not
...
It is not quite true that no two women are the same - but to
many men it often seems that way
...
It works
because, as we have seen before (Scene 27), men have to learn
their sexual technique
...
However, he wasn't quite
the failure he imagined himself to be
...
He had two children with his first
partner and one with his second (assuming they were all his)
...
At different times during his life he
had the opportunity to impregnate seven other women, and to
varying degrees he had failed each time
...
On others, he failed to handle the
relationship either well enough or for long enough to have a
347
SPERM WARS
realistic chance of paternity
...
Eventually, her body
allowed him to fertilize one of her eggs
...
Had he
impregnated her earlier, he might successfully have deceived her
partner into raising another's child
...
His failure to capitalize on opportunities to reproduce with
these seven women was due in every case to some combination of
surprise, shock and misjudgment
...
As he
moved from woman to woman he tried to extrapolate from his
past experiences
...
To some extent, his approach
worked - his gradual accumulation of experience with different
females slowly increased his awareness and competence in the
sexual arts
...
In some species, experience gained by a male with one female
can readily be extrapolated to another
...
Then, not only do individual females
confuse their partner through unpredictable swings of mood and
behavior (Scene 2), but also the female population as a whole
manages to confuse through variety
...
First, she can set each man a much more challenging test of
experience and competence (Scene 27)
...
Because women are so different, a man will only have
encountered her type before and thus know how to treat her if he
has had a lot of experience
...
On the other hand, if her priority is to find a man who
is genetically more attractive (Scene 28) she may prefer someone
whom many other women have found attractive (Scene 27)
...
The result is that she has
more time to assess the man as a long-term partner
...
One took longer to
decide how she felt about him, but was able to keep both the
number of inseminations and sperm retention down to a minimum
in the process
...
One finally rejected
him, and the other conceived but later miscarried
...
In the scene,
two of the women (his first mistress and his second long-term
partner) evidently found the man's other qualities attractive
enough to tolerate his initial sexual incompetence
...
This could have been self-defeating, if
his increased competence had made it easy for him to seduce
other women
...
His first
partner pursued the ultimate version of such a strategy
...
As a
result, she made him miss one opportunity for infidelity and
slowed him down in taking advantage of another
...
Different though women
may be in their individual sexuality, therefore, we can
nevertheless still recognize a number of broad categories
...
We have met evolved balances of genetic categories before in
earlier scenes
...
When too common, each
category has a success rate that is below average
...
The incredible variation in
female sexuality is simply the most complex example we have yet
encountered of such a balance
...
So, what are these different categories? More importantly, are
the categories different simply for the sake of being different, or is
each category linked to other aspects of sexual behavior? The latter
seems the more likely
...
For example, some orgasm patterns will help the women
concerned get the most out of the promotion and exploitation of
sperm warfare
...
Very crudely, while
accepting that the tremendous variation in female sexuality largely
defies categorization, we can make life easier for ourselves by
recognizing four main types
...
Although only about 5 per cent of
women have absolutely the whole range, an additional 25 per cent
have all except multiple orgasms, and an additional 40 per cent
again have all except multiple orgasms and nocturnals
...
In particular, they
can vary the frequency with which they have and do not have every
type of orgasm so as to take maximum advantage of the men and
opportunities which present themselves
...
Although as a whole this first category of women is probably the
largest (about 75 per cent), there is tremendous scope for women to
differ within the category
...
These
differences probably reflect variety for variety's sake, as we have
discussed
...
Variation in emphasis on one or the
other outlet allows women to differ
...
In addition to differences between women within
the category, each woman also has so much scope for varying her
own behavior (from phase to phase and man to man) that she need
never become predictable
...
Either they do not have solitary
(masturbatory and nocturnal) orgasms or they do not climax in the
presence of men
...
In compensation, they gain
by being slightly less common
...
The full range of sperm
manipulation is still possible (via orgasms during foreplay,
intercourse and post-play - Scenes 22 to 25), but it becomes much
more important to the woman that she chooses a sexually competent
man
...
They also
have the full range of sperm manipulation
...
The third category consists of those 10 per cent of women who
climax virtually every time they have penetrative sex
...
An orgasm more than one to two minutes before the man allows
low sperm retention; any time thereafter allows high sperm retention
...
In compensation, as mentioned above, such a woman
gains by not educating her partner in sexual techniques that would aid
his infidelity
...
They are, however, well suited to the relatively safe process of
selecting a mate and making the most of that relationship
...
But since sperm numbers are far less important for
conception than they are for warfare, in the absence of any possibility
of the latter it does not really matter how many sperm such a woman
retains from each intercourse
...
Admittedly, ejaculates containing few sperm are often
sub-fertile, even if the woman retains them in full
...
It is rather because the clinical conditions that
cause some men to introduce few sperm (perhaps only tens of
millions instead of hundreds of millions) at the same time render
their ejaculates sub-fertile
...
But then, of all the
categories of women, they are also the least likely to encounter
sexually transmitted diseases
...
Just how they do so will depend on their anatomy
...
However, it is often part of the programming
of such women that their clitorises are relatively insensitive to
stimulation
...
Clitorectomised women, for example, may still have
nocturnal orgasms
...
This is that a woman should seek a partner whose approach
to sperm warfare complements her own
...
Similarly, the large-testicled man in
the same scene was a good choice for the woman with a varied
orgasm pattern who could gain the most from infidelity and sperm
warfare
...
First, her partner's
specializations for sperm warfare meant that his large sperm armies
gave the armies from her other lovers a good run for their money
...
The final point to stress is the one we have stressed in other
scenes in this chapter - on average the different categories of women
should all reproduce equally well
...
Consequently, no woman should
be hindered in her pursuit of reproductive success by the orgasm
regime with which she has been programmed - as long as her choice
of mate and subsequent behavior are compatible
...
His stiff
fingers touched the hand of the woman sitting next to him outside
their home
...
Eventually, everybody had come,
some of them traveling for days to be there
...
Including themselves, there
were five generations present
...
The old man looked at his partner's face, his eyesight as keen as
hers was faded
...
But, for a
moment, what he saw was the smooth, beautiful face, clear, dark,
mischievous eyes, sensuous mouth and gleaming teeth that had so
fired his senses over seventy years ago
...
She had been a wonderful
partner, mother and grandmother, the perfect companion throughout
354
SPERM WARS
life
...
He had had many opportunities to be unfaithful, and at times had
been tempted, but he had always resisted, so afraid had he been of
disease and of losing his princess
...
But he had turned her down
...
She had succumbed
to the sexually transmitted disease which had become the scourge of
their community and which she had probably been harboring on the
night she offered herself
...
Somehow, ever since, it had never
seemed worth taxing their ageing bodies with the effort - they
couldn't have been closer, sex or no sex
...
Once again, the old woman smiled her one-tooth smile
...
She squeezed her partner's hand
...
No longer need she be troubled by the
reality of his frailty and his recent deterioration
...
She still remembered, more clearly and accurately than
him even, the first time she had surrendered her body to him as they
swam naked in a lake
...
She had never really felt tempted
356
FINAL SCORE
to be unfaithful
...
There had been long
spells in their life when she had found him irritating and arrogant,
but he was always kind, considerate and fun
...
She asked him once again to tell her who was there for a start, could he see all their children?
He looked around the huge group of people gathered outside their
home
...
The children
were running and chasing, many laughing, a few arguing or crying
...
Most were drinking, eating morsels of food, and
anticipating the main meal
...
One by one, the old man located their five children
...
They were all there
...
Now the grandchildren, she urged him
...
He picked out
the dozen he knew best, all in their forties, then had to rely on his
partner to supply the names of the younger grandchildren, some of
them still teenagers or younger
...
Even so,
when she told him a name, he said they were present
...
Twentythree surviving grandchildren
...
Now, she missed
their camaraderie
...
Most of their generation
had either died young from disease or
357
SPERM WARS
accident or had been infertile, or had lost many of their children
before they reached adulthood
...
The old man said he hoped that she wasn't going to ask him to
count their great-grandchildren
...
He could see the oldest, now nearly thirty, with her new-born, their
most recent great-great-grandchild
...
He sat back and relaxed, freed
from his task of child-counting
...
She squeezed his hand
again, then let him go, concentrating on the noise and conversation
around her
...
A gang of naked children ran
across the clearing as a group of young men, naked apart from a
belt around their waists, emerged from the forest
...
The food for their feast had
arrived
...
This final scene is a reminder that with the right
person in the right situation, the best way to achieve the greatest
reproductive success can sometimes be within a monogamous
relationship
...
Our huntergatherer ancestors (Scene 16), from the savanna of Africa to the
forests of South America and South-East Asia,
358
FINAL SCORE
from the aboriginal outback of Australia to the Eskimo heart-land
of Canada, almost always formed long-term male-female
partnerships, most of which were monogamous
...
Often a person had two, or even three, successive
involvements
...
Only during the fifteen thousand or so years of dependence on
agriculture did many human cultures switch to polygamy
...
Even
polygamous relationships, however, are long-term and involve deep
ties between the male and each of his females
...
Not until the advent of urbanization and industrialization over
the last few hundred years has there been a wholesale swing back
towards monogamy, or serial monogamy
...
The woman in Scene 37 made a good decision, not to be
unfaithful
...
She had only done a little better, however, than
her close friend who had had a much more varied sex life
...
Had she opted to be faithful, she might have been less
successful - again, reproductively -than she was
...
They each pursued the best strategy for their circumstances
...
He did have much to gain (Scene 13), but he
also had much to lose (Scenes 9 and 11)
...
She
was fertile, faithful and a good mother and grandmother
...
Although the majority of people do not pursue a lifetime of
pure monogamy, most (with few exceptions - Scenes 19 and 30)
achieve the greater part of their reproductive success within longterm relationships
...
But all carry risks if badly executed or if the
individual does not have the weaponry of physique or character to
carry them through
...
Their reproductive
strategy of faithful monogamy had, for them, been a total success
...
It is irrelevant that neither of them actually engaged in sperm
warfare
...
Everyone's body - with no exception - is similarly alert
...
When the likelihood is low, some preparations are
made but they are minimal (Scenes 12 and 22)
...
More often than not, the contemplation is mere fantasy and the
preparations unnecessary - no war ensues
...
When war does break
out, each person's body will have done its best to make sure
that it is well prepared and that there is a chance the war will
work to its reproductive advantage
...
Yet, if the phenomenon
did not exist, human sexuality would be far less colorful
...
Women would not have orgasms,
there would be no thrusting during intercourse, no sex dreams or
fantasies, no masturbation, and we should each feel like intercourse
only a dozen times or so in our entire lives - those few occasions
when conception was possible and desirable
...
Over the millennia, sperm warfare has helped to shape society
...
The social development
was the emergence of child support agencies as governments
tried to shift financial responsibility for the children of women
without partners away from society and on to the absent father
...
In the past, most such claims of non-paternity would have
remained unresolved
...
361
SPERM WARS
FINAL SCORE
It is interesting to speculate how a world of child support
agencies and paternity tests might change sexual strategy and the
role of sperm warfare
...
First, men will find it more
difficult to have sex and run (Scenes 13 and 29)
...
Secondly, women will find it much more difficult to trick men into
raising children who are not theirs (Scenes 6, 8, 13, 16, 17, 18, 26,
31, 33 and 35)
...
Although these two ancient strategies will become much less
successful, alternative strategies, uncommon today, will become
more successful
...
Not only might they gain
genetically, they might also gain from obtaining long-term
financial support from a number of men (Scene 18)
...
But no longer need women risk
dependence on meager support from the state as a result of their
strategy
...
In fact, they will have less need for a
partner at all
...
In their turn, men could exploit this
potential earning power of women
...
Often, they may even calculate that
the extra income their partner could generate through having other
men's children could actually help them to raise their own children
more successfully
...
Men
will still try to avoid sperm warfare by guarding a mate (Scene 9)
and women will still try to recruit a partner to help with all the
other, non-financial, aspects of raising their children (Scene 18)
...
The reproductive life of
both men and women will centre on a succession of relationships,
each lasting just long enough to produce one or two children
...
Poorer men, when they do get a chance
to inseminate extra women, will be under pressure to make
themselves even more untraceable than at present
...
Nothing - short of
castration, brain surgery or hormone implants - can remove a
person's subconscious urge to have as many grandchildren as they
can
...
Similarly, nothing will prevent a woman
from subconsciously trying to collect the best genes and recruit the
best support for her children that her genes and circumstances will
allow
...
The legislation has successfully reduced the mean
number of children (to 1
...
But in so doing it has also
changed the sex ratio (through selective abortion and infanticide Scene 16) to 1
...
Why? Intrinsically, the
coercion impinges more on a woman's potential reproductive
success than a man's
...
In contrast, the only way a woman can
generate more grandchildren than her contemporaries is by having
such a successful son
...
Whatever people's conscious reasons
for wanting sons so badly in modern China that they are prepared to
kill their daughters, their biological response is precisely what would
be expected if they were trying to enhance their reproductive success
...
Whatever the effect on society of future scientific
and social developments, sperm warfare and its associated behavior
seem destined to be an ever-present feature
...
364
Title: Science book!
Description: Science book, it is very interesting and powerful book, it is really about pickup and seduction and a LOT more, i hope you enjoy. :)
Description: Science book, it is very interesting and powerful book, it is really about pickup and seduction and a LOT more, i hope you enjoy. :)