Sex at Dawn полностью

More recently, several researchers have demonstrated that a man’s sperm production increases significantly when he has not seen his partner for a few days, regardless of whether or not he ejaculated during her absence. This finding conforms to the notion that sperm competition has played a role in human evolution and may even reflect an adaptation to monogamy. In this scenario, not knowing what his strumpet of a wife was up to at that damned conference in Orlando leads a man’s body to hyper-produce sperm to increase his chances of fertilizing her ovum when she gets home, even if his worst fears (and possibly, hottest fantasies) are true. Along these same lines, women have also reported that their partners tend to be more vigorous in bed—reporting deeper, more vigorous thrusting—after a separation or if infidelity is suspected.⁹ (The possibility that the men may actually be turned on by the thought of their mates’ possible transgressions appears not to have made its way into the discussion as yet, but see the discussion of porn below.)

The scandalous implications of sperm competition run smack

into the long-held view of sacrosanct female sexuality. It’s a

vision Darwin cultivated in public consciousness, featuring

coy females who surrender only to a carefully chosen mate

who has proven himself worthy—and even then, she’s only

doing it for England. “The sexually insatiable woman,”

declared a terrified Donald Symons, “is to be found primarily,

if not exclusively, in the ideology of feminism, the hopes of

boys, and the fears of men.”¹⁰ Perhaps, but Marvin Harris

offers a different take, writing, “Like all dominant groups,

men seek to promote an image of their subordinate’s nature

that contributes to the preservation of the status quo. For

thousands of years, males have seen women not as women

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could be, but only as males want them to be.”

Despite all the controversy, there is no question as to whether sperm competition occurs in human reproduction.¹² It does—every time. A single human ejaculate contains anywhere from fifty million to half a billion applicants all trying to elbow their way into the only job available: fertilizer in chief. The relevant question is whether those applicants are competing against only each other, or billions more eager job-seekers sent by other men as well.

It’s hard to conjure a more purely competitive entity than the human spermatozoa. Imagine a teeming school of microscopic salmon whose entire existence consists in straining upstream toward a one-in-several-hundred-million shot at reproduction. Longish odds, you might say. But not all creatures’ sperm face such overwhelmingly slim chances. In some species of insects, for example, fewer than a hundred sperm line up for the race to the ovum. Nor are all sperm tiny in comparison to him that sent them. Some species of fruit fly have sperm that measure almost six centimeters when uncoiled—several times larger than the fly himself. Homo sapiens is far down at the other extreme, depositing hundreds of millions of tiny sperm at the drop of a hat.

Here’s a head-scratcher. Why do so many heterosexual men get off on pornography featuring groups of guys having sex with just one woman? It doesn’t add up, if you think about it. It’s more cone than ice cream. And the suggestive strangeness doesn’t end with the counterintuitive male-to-female ratio; it’s male ejaculate that puts the money in the money shot.