Researchers have confirmed what porn producers already know: men tend to get turned on by images depicting an environment in which sperm competition is clearly at play (though few, we imagine, think of it in quite these terms). Images and videos showing one woman with multiple males are far more popular on the Internet and in commercial pornography than those depicting one male with multiple females.14 A quick peek at the online offerings at Adult Video Universe lists over nine hundred titles in the Gangbang genre, but only twenty-seven listed under Reverse Gangbang. You do the math. Why would the males in a species that’s been wearing the shackles of monogamy for 1.9 million years be sexually excited by scenes of groups of men ejaculating with one or two women?
Skeptics may argue that this arousal could reflect nothing more than commercial interests or a passing fashion. Fair enough, but what to make of experimental evidence that men viewing erotic material suggestive of sperm competition (two men with one woman) produce ejaculates containing a higher percentage of motile sperm than men viewing explicit images of only three women?15 And why does being cuckolded consistently appear at or near the top of married men’s sexual fantasies, according to experts ranging from Alfred Kinsey to Dan Savage?
As far as we know, there is no corresponding taste among women for erotica featuring multiple overweight middle-aged ladies with cheap tattoos, bad haircuts, and black socks having sex with one hot guy. Go figure.
Could this male appetite for multimale scenes be an echo of the porn of the Pleistocene? Keep in mind the variety of societies discussed previously in which women assist and inspire teams of workers or hunters by making themselves available for sequential sex. The same dynamic is hinted at on any given Sunday with fluttering pom-poms, the shortest of shorts, and the highest of kicks ending with sexy young legs spread right down to the Astroturf. While there are other conceivable explanations for such oddities of contemporary life, they certainly align well with a prehistory characterized by sperm competition. 6 Go Trojans!
<p><strong>CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Sometimes a Penis Is Just a Penis</strong></p>We are right to note the license and disobedience of this member which thrusts itself forward too inopportunely when we do not want it to, and which so inopportunely lets us down when we most need it; it imperiously contests for authority with our will: it stubbornly and proudly refuses all our incitements, both of the mind and hand.
MICHEL MONTAIGNE on the penis (his, presumably)
Don’t be distracted by the snickering. The human male takes his genitalia very seriously. In ancient Rome, rich boys wore a bulla: a locket holding a replica of a tiny hard-on. This rocket-in-a-locket was known as a fascinum, and signified the young man’s upper-class status. “Today,” writes David Friedman in A Mind of Its Own, his amusing and erudite history of the penis, “fifteen hundred years after the fall of Imperial Rome, anything as powerful or intriguing as an erection is said to be ‘fascinating.’” Going back a bit farther, we find that in the biblical books of Genesis and Exodus, Jacob’s children sprang from his thigh. Most historians agree that “thigh” is actually a polite way of referring to that which hangs between a man’s thighs. “It seems clear,” writes Friedman, “that sacred oaths between Israelites were sealed by placing a hand on the male member.” The act of swearing on one’s balls lives on in the word testify.
Historical oddities aside, some argue that moderately sized human testicles and lower human sperm concentration (relative to chimpanzees and bonobos) disprove any significant sperm competition in human evolution. True, the reported range of human sperm concentration of 60-235 x 10n per mL pales in comparison to that of chimps, an impressive 548 x 10n. But not all sperm competition is created equal.
