In Spanish, the word esperar can mean “to expect” or “to hope”—depending on context. “Archaeology,” writes Bogucki, “is very much constrained by what the modern imagination allows in the range of human behavior.”19 So is evolutionary theory. Perhaps so many still conclude that sexual monogamy is characteristic of our species’ evolutionary past, despite the clear messages inscribed in every man’s body and appetites, because this is what they expect and hope to find there.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The Prehistory of ONow there you have a sample of man’s “reasoning powers,” as he calls them. He observes certain facts. For instance, that in all his life he never sees the day that he can satisfy one woman; also, that no woman ever sees the day that she can’t overwork, and defeat, and put out of commission any ten masculine plants that can be put to bed to her. He puts those strikingly suggestive and luminous facts together, and from them draws this astonishing conclusion: The Creator
intended the woman to be restricted to one man.
MARK TWAIN, Letters from the Earth
We recently spotted a young man strolling down Las Ramblas in Barcelona proudly sporting a T-shirt proclaiming that he was Born to F*ck. One wonders whether he has a whole set of these shirts at home: Born to Bre*the, Born to E*t, Born to Dr*nk, Born to Sh*t, and of course the depressing but inevitable Born to D*e.
But maybe he was making a deeper point. After all, the argument central to this book is that sex has long served many crucial functions for Homo sapiens, with reproduction being only the most obvious among them. Since we human beings spend more time and energy planning, executing, and recalling our sexual exploits than any other species on Earth, maybe we all should wear such shirts.
Or maybe just the women. When it comes to sex, men may be trash-talking sprinters, but it’s the women who win all the marathons. Any marriage counselor will tell you the most common sex-related complaint women make about men is that they are too quick and too direct. Meanwhile, men’s most frequent sex-related gripe about women is that they take too damned long to get warmed up. After an orgasm, a woman may be anticipating a dozen more. A female body in motion tends to stay in motion. But men come and go. For them, the curtain falls quickly and the mind turns to unrelated matters.
