by Tom Hickman
Women gain additional benefits: intercourse helps to keep their skin elastic, meaning fewer wrinkles, stabilises their menstrual cycles and reduces hot flushes during the menopause – women who have sex age more slowly than women who don’t. But men gain additional benefits of their own. Regular sexual activity reduces the risk of prostate cancer and, in older men, the likelihood of developing benign enlargement of the prostate. And regular activity is an aid to their longevity: a study which tracked the mortality of about a thousand men over a decade concluded that those who had sex twice a week had half the risk of a fatal heart attack compared with those who had sex once a month.
THE ‘PRECIOUS SUBSTANCE’ REVISITED8
SCROTAL SKIN IS thinner than the skin anywhere else on the body – indeed it’s translucent against a light shone on it from one side in the dark. A woman contributor to FHM magazine wrote that she liked to crawl under the duvet with a torch to watch ‘how the skin gently shifts and crawls, forming and reforming in mesmerising goose-pimply patterns’.
The cerebellum of the brain is ‘corrugated’, to increase its surface area and allow more cognitive RAM; the skin of the scrotal sac has similar corrugations (which in Fanny Hill Cleland dubiously described as ‘the only wrinkles that are known to please’) but with a different purpose: to assist heat loss and keep sperm at three degrees below body temperature. The corrugations almost double the scrotal sac’s surface – Rabelais poked fun at this when Panurge meets the noble Valentine Viadiere rubbing ‘his ballocks, spread out upon a table after the manner of a Spanish cloak’.
Inside the scrotum, the testicles produce spermatozoa at the astonishing rate of seventy million a day. They are the only human cells designed to travel outside the body and constitute only 1–5 per cent of ejaculate, the rest being the fluids from the prostate and seminal vesicles that give them the energy for their journey. To the touch, the testicles seem to be solid lumps, but these two hard glands are like the inside of golf balls, comprising a mass of tiny tubes where sperm are manufactured, a process that takes between two and three months. If unravelled and laid end to end the tubes inside a testicle would stretch over a quarter of a mile.
Sperm are continuously being shuttled from the testicles to the epididymis where they mature, gain motility and the biochemical properties to fertilise an egg, and are then held in a staging area awaiting orders. If not ejaculated they undergo autolysis: they dissolve and are reabsorbed into the body – so much for Baden Powell in the 1920s telling young males who masturbated that ‘You are throwing away the seed that has been handed down to you as a trust, instead of keeping it and ripening it for bringing a son to you later.’
Lifespan of a sperm: a month in the staging area, two days inside a woman’s body, perhaps two minutes on the sheets.
A healthy sperm consists of a head, a mid-piece, which is its powerhouse, and a tail. Inside the head, which is paddle-shaped, oval in outline but flat, is its package of DNA. The head wears a kind of cap containing enzymes to melt the membrane surrounding the female egg.
On ejaculation the oldest sperm are first out, but the youngest at the back – arriving in the later spurts – beat them to the cervical mucus. If a woman is not ovulating, the juices in her vagina, cervix, uterus and fallopian tubes are acidic, and acid kills sperm. But for the short period when she is ovulating, the normally thick juices clear and become alkaline, giving sperm the green light.
In the last fifty years sperm counts have more than halved (from about 200 million per ejaculate to about ninety million)and are decreasing by 1–2 per cent a year. Scientists have identified numerous possible causes including chemicals that mimic the action of the female hormone oestrogen and are found in plastics and paints, the linings of food cans and disposable nappies, and pesticides. Synthetic oestrogen is a constituent of many drugs, the basis of the contraceptive pill, and finds its way into the water supply. Heat is also implicated; the sperm of men who spend long hours sitting in motor vehicles decrease in number and vigour – a situation considerably worsened for those with heated car seats. The heat from laptops balanced on knees also poses a threat.
But in 2009 evolutionary biologist Oren Hasson of Tel Aviv University entered the debate, saying that stressful lifestyles and pollution can’t explain the levels of plunging male fertility. He suggested that ‘polysperm’ are to blame – men are now producing super-sperm so vigorous that they race past the defences set up by a woman’s body. When a sperm penetrates an egg and their chromosomes fuse, all other sperm are supposed to be sealed out. Hasson suggests that super-sperm can be so powerful that more than one can break in, effectively destroying the egg – some small comfort, perhaps, to men who are failing to become fathers to be told that ‘their boys’ are over-virile.
It’s likely to surprise most men that even for the healthiest not all their sperm are the sleek athletes they think them to be: up to 50 per cent of sperm have morphological defects or poor (or no) motility. Only about a quarter of sperm in an ejaculate swim forcefully enough – an average rate of 1.5 millimetres per minute, a speed comparable to a human swimmer in relative terms – to reach the target. In the 1990s evolutionary biologist Robin Baker caused considerable controversy when he claimed that only 1 per cent of sperm have any chance of being an ‘egg-getter’ – because he believed that sperm consist mostly of two other types, which weren’t designed for fertilisation: killer sperm that are on guard to attack the sperm of another man if necessary, and blocker sperm that knot their tails together to form barriers to any such arrivals. Again according to Baker, non-egg-getting sperm change their roles as they age. Most are killers when young and blockers when old. Killers need to be full of energy and movement; blockers need only enough energy to swim out of the seminal pool and travel a little way into the cervix.
The scientific community has been unable to reproduce Baker’s claims, which now appear discredited.
But Baker has led the field in recognising why men produce so many sperm – enough in one ejaculate theoretically to inseminate all the reproductive women in the world. The answer, with its origins in the evolutionary past, is sperm competition. When females mated with numerous males, sperm needed to compete to fertilise an egg – and the more sperm a male produced, the better his chances.
Plato in his Republic suggested that warriors should have the pick of the maidens because their sperm would improve the quality of the race. The 1946 Nobel Prize-winning American geneticist Hermann Muller held a similar view – but in favour of men of brain rather than muscle.
Muller long advocated establishing sperm banks in which donations from brilliant men would be stored. In the late 1970s, a Californian millionaire, Robert Graham, who believed ‘retrograde humans’ were gradually diluting the gene pool, followed Muller’s advice, establishing his Repository for Germinal Choice.
Graham, famous as the inventor of the shatterproof spectacle lens, sold his company and focused on his vision, convincing three Nobel laureates to become donors. But elderly sperm, however eminent, proved poor for freezing and Graham cast the net wider to rising young scientists at universities, entrepreneurs, even Olympic gold-medal winners. Importantly, donors had to have an IQ of around 180 (there are estimated to be only about twenty people in Britain with this level of intelligence).
Graham was accused of being a eugenicist, but women – who had to be bright (Graham advertised in the Mensa magazine) and well off – came flocking. Donors’ identities were kept secret, but such information as their weight, height, age, the colour of eyes, skin and hair and hereditary characteristics were given, from which women could make their choice, as can women seeking a donor today.9
That sperm, its ‘fecundating’ properties aside, influences female health and psychology is no new hypothesis – it goes back to the Ancient Greeks and Chinese and has been credited down the ages. In Restoration England adolescent girls, who frequently suffered from anaemia, were told they would be cured when marriage entitled them to regular infusions
of it. The English birth-control pioneer Marie Stopes was saying much the same thing, affirming that ‘the stimulating secretions which accompany man’s semen’ were highly beneficial when women absorbed them – which is why she disliked condoms (in fact, a wife in an 1872 divorce case complained that by using condoms her husband endangered her health). In the same period, Walter (My Secret Life) expressed the belief that ‘spermatic lubrication is health-giving to a female’ (making it sound, perhaps, like Lucozade). Tablets containing extract of semen were sold by a pharmacist in Chicago at the beginning of the twentieth century; and during the First World War, Harley Street doctors were prescribing ‘male secretion treatment’ for wives deprived of access to their usual source by the absence of their husbands in the trenches.
If the notion of semen as a kind of universal pick-me-up seems absurd, a study conducted at the State University of New York in 2002 suggests otherwise. Researchers found that women who absorb semen vaginally are less depressed than those whose partners use condoms – and are twice as unlikely to attempt suicide as those who never have sex. The research team considered how often the women in the study had sex, the strength of their relationships, their personalities and whether or not they used oral contraceptives, and decided that all of these were irrelevant. Semen was the only factor in play. A more recent study tentatively concluded that swallowing semen while performing oral sex gives women some protection from breast cancer and pre-eclampsia, the dangerous high-blood-pressure disorder associated with pregnancy.
Not only does semen contain mood-altering hormones that make women happy – it’s holistic.
SOME ARITHMETIC OF SEX
IT MAY BE true that Warren Beatty has had sex with in excess of 12,000 women; that the French writer Georges Simenon had sex with over 10,000 (most of whom he had to pay, mind); that the Italian dictator Mussolini had sex with a different woman every day for fourteen years. The rich and famous have a history of sexual excess. Once, such penis-possessors were called philanderers; today they are likely to be labelled sexual addicts and absolved for their transgressions by a whole new industry that has sprung up to treat them. Is there really such a thing as sexual addiction, analogous to addiction to alcohol or drugs? Or – moral issues aside – is having intercourse with multiple women only doing what comes naturally and would be done by most other penis-possessors given fame and riches (good looks possibly optional)?
Changing sexual mores mean that the average penis-possessor today is likely to have more sexual encounters than the average penis-possessor of earlier generations. A US university study of international promiscuity conducted in 2008 covered one-night stands, ‘short-term matings’ and longer relationships to assess what evolutionary psychologists term ‘sociosexuality’ – a measure of how sexually liberated people are in thought and behaviour. In this study the extrapolated information suggested that in the Western world the Finns were likely to have the most sexual partners over a lifetime – fifty-one; the British were placed eleventh with forty. But the findings were a projection. ‘Running-total’ data collected between 1999 and 2002 for the US National Center for Health Statistics found that up to that time in their lives a third of American penis-possessors had had fifteen partners, with the median being seven. A detailed survey in England in 2002 found that the average penis-possessor in London also claimed fifteen, with those outside London claiming twelve, both figures rising year on year. True or false? According to yet another research project these figures could possibly be halved; penis-possessors lie, even to themselves (as do non-penis-possessors, but in the opposite direction – they underestimate their tally in case they’re stigmatised as promiscuous).
A penis-possessor’s weekly tally of orgasms, however achieved, depends largely on age but is highly individual. Beyond the masturbatory teens when the desire for outlet may be every day or even several times a day, the weekly average over active adulthood – an indeterminate span – is two or three, a constant across cultures and centuries. (As in all things there are exceptions: Kinsey found a man who averaged thirty-three orgasms a week for thirty years.)
In marriage or relationships some penis-possessors, up to about the age of thirty, achieve three or perhaps four couplings a night,10 but the average over active adulthood is twice a week, though the Durex global survey, conducted since 2006, suggests a global figure of 127 bouts of sex a year. Yet a breakdown by individual nationality delivers fluctuating results, with the Hungarians, Bulgarians and Russians leading on 150, and the Swedes (102), Malays (100) and Singaporeans (96) trailing the field. The Japanese appear to be the least satisfied with their sex lives.
How often a penis-possessor has coital orgasm on any one occasion is fairly predictable: once or twice is the historical norm.
But while many never desire more than a single orgasm at any age, two is not enough for others, three is within the norm if hardly on the everyday scale, and anything beyond is exceptional. In his London journal James Boswell noted that in an encounter with ‘Louisa’ in 1763, he was ‘fairly lost in supreme rapture’ five times. In recent decades British tabloid newspapers have thought that Sir Ralph Halpern, the first British executive to earn £1 million, and inventor Sir Clive Sinclair deserving of banner headlines when young mistresses revealed them to be five-times-a-night men, despite both then being in their fifties; more banner headlines followed when an English lap dancer claimed that the Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho had scored (naturally) with her eight times in one evening. Only eight? The French novelist Victor Hugo, sexually hyperactive throughout his long life, said he made love to his wife nine times on their wedding night. Nine? According to anthropologists, ten times a night isn’t out of the ordinary for the polygamous Chaggi of Tanzania. Ten? The sexually voracious actress Mae West, who had good-humoured contempt for the prowess of most men, was unstinting in her praise for a Frenchman named Dinjo who, she said, on one encounter coupled with her twenty-six times – a hard man good to find, indeed.
According to the World Health Organisation, there are an estimated 100 million acts of intercourse every day.
The rest is silence
During his laboratory investigations into human sexuality, the sexologist William Masters placed a finger in men’s rectums during intercourse to assess how violently their prostate spasmed on ejaculation. In men over sixty he could detect nothing. It was, as it were, as if a mute had been clamped over the bridge of a stringed instrument: the strings still played but the resonance was deadened.
The decline in sexual prowess is relentless. From middle age onwards (whenever that may be) the erection that in his twenties sprang up without command now needs to be coaxed to attention, and it isn’t what it was when it gets there; just as old age brings loss of muscle and height, so too it reduces the penis’s dimensions: shoulders fully braced, the 6-inch erection of yesteryear is an inch or more shorter now. And where once a man could maintain erection for an hour during continuous sexual arousal before climax, he now finds it subsiding in less and less time; at sixty, according to Alfred Kinsey, six or seven minutes is all he, and his penis, can manage. There is also a progressive lessening of desire for intercourse; once a week, once a month, once now and again.
There can be compensation in a penis-possessor’s sexual drive becoming less driven: in his fifties, when the urge is upon him, he’s able to hold back in a way that was once beyond him; if he has learnt anything from life, he can give more consideration to his partner and gain satisfaction from this and from his greater control. In life generally, he can be less driven too – since the age of about thirty, testosterone, the rocket fuel of his sex drive but also of his aggression, has been falling by a percentage point a year. ‘Twenty years ago, ten years ago, his dick would have been driving the car,’ wrote Howard Jacobson about middle-aged Frank in his novel No More Mister Nice Guy. ‘The great consolation of being fifty, for all your other organs, is that they finally get to sit behind the wheel.’
But the wheel of time turns, inexo
rably. True rigidity becomes a distant memory; the refractory period of sexual indifference after climax increases; the days of coming are going. Sexually speaking, men drop by the wayside. By sixty-five half of all men are, to use a sporting metaphor, out of the game; as are virtually all ten years later, without resort to chemical kick-starting.
South Sea islanders talk of a man’s release from sexuality being like a boat that enters the tranquillity of the lagoon from the turbulence of the open sea. Some men might relate to this, regret even tinged with humour. (When he was seventy-eight, Winston Churchill, about to speak at a public meeting and passed a note by an aide telling him that his flies were unbuttoned, scrawled back: ‘Dead birds do not fall out of nests.’) Yet most are unlikely to admit to themselves that the lunchbox of youth has finally become the cocoa mug of old age. They, and their penis, like out-of-work actors, are only ‘resting’.
Even in his dotage the possessor is likely still to consider himself a sexual being. ‘The old man,’ wrote the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, ‘in the privacy of his thoughts, though he may protest the opposite, never stops believing that, through some singular exception of the universal rule, he can in some unknown and inexplicable way still make an impression on women.’ In extreme cases this is nothing less than penile dementia. But however old he is, a man looks, oh he never stops looking: a pert breast, a pneumatic buttock, a face that makes him think: ‘There was a time . . .’, or even, ‘Even now, if . . .’; and if, and if . . .
