by Robin Baker
Table of Contents
Sperm Wars
Also by Robin Baker
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1 - The Generation Game
SCENE 1 - Great Uncle Who?
Chapter 2 - Routine Sex
SCENE 2 - Normal Service
SCENE 3 - The Wet Sheet
SCENE 4 - Topping Up
SCENE 5 - Conception
Chapter 3 - Sperm Wars
SCENE 6 - A Chance Affair
SCENE 7 - A Sperm War
Chapter 4 - Counting the Cost
SCENE 8 - Doesn’t He Look Like His Father?
SCENE 9 - Making Mistakes
SCENE 10 - Licking Infidelity
SCENE 11 - Checkmate
Chapter 5 - Secret Anticipation
SCENE 12 - A Double Life
SCENE 13 - Multiply, But Don’t Divide
SCENE 14 - A Wet Dream
Chapter 6 - Successful Failure
SCENE 15 - Home for the Day
SCENE 16 - The Stress of It All
SCENE 17 - How Forgetful
Chapter 7 - Shopping Around for Genes
SCENE 18 - Spoilt for Choice
SCENE 19 - Fair Exchange
SCENE 20 - Tasteful Display
SCENE 21 - An Abandoned Selection?
Chapter 8 - The Climax of Influence
SCENE 22 - Finger on the Button
SCENE 23 - Dark Secret
SCENE 24 - Another Successful Failure
SCENE 25 - Correcting Mistakes
SCENE 26 - Putting It All Together
Chapter 9 - Learning the Gropes
SCENE 27 - Practice Makes Quite Good
SCENE 28 - Rough and Tumble
SCENE 29 - How to Con
Chapter 10 - One Way or Another
SCENE 30 - Best of Both Worlds
SCENE 31 - The Coming of Women
SCENE 32 - The Tenth Tonight
SCENE 33 - The Predator
SCENE 34 - Soldier, Soldier
SCENE 35 - Men Are All the Same
SCENE 36 - Exquisite Confusion
Chapter 11 - Final Score
SCENE 37 - Total Success
Copyright Page
Sperm Wars
Dr Robin Baker was Reader in Zoology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester from 1980-1996. Since leaving academic life in 1996, he has concentrated on his career in writing, lecturing and broadcasting. He has published over one hundred scientific papers and many books. These include Baby Wars and Sex in the Future. His work and ideas on the evolution of human behaviour have been featured in many television and radio programmes around the world. He has five children and has lived in Manchester since 1974.
Also by Robin Baker
Sex in the Future
To
K
E
J
F, Y
A, J, K, P, P, R, S, ‘W’
and
Thomas, Howard, David, Nathanial, Amelia
and the baby who was never named
Preface
Sex and reproduction occupy a major part of people’s time – not so much the doing, more the thinking and talking. Despite all of this attention, most people find their own sexual activities, responses and emotions the most baffling of all aspects of their lives. Consider the following.
Why, in the midst of a perfectly happy and satisfying relationship, do we sometimes get an incredibly strong urge to be unfaithful? Why do men inseminate enough sperm at each intercourse to fertilise the entire population of the United States – twice over? And why, then, do half of them dribble back down the woman’s leg? Why should we feel like sex so often when most of the time we don’t want children? Why, when we least want children, do our bodies apparently let us down and produce them? Why, when we do want children, do our bodies apparently let us down and not produce them? Why is it so difficult to know the best time to have sex in order to conceive – or not to conceive? Why is the penis the shape it is and why do we thrust during intercourse? Why do we get such strong urges to masturbate, and why do some of us have orgasms while asleep at night? Why is the female orgasm so unpredictable and so difficult to induce? Why are some people more interested in sex with members of their own sex?
These are just some of the questions to which most people, if they are honest, have no sensible or at least consistent answer. None the less, riding on the wave of a revolution in sexual understanding which began in the 1970s but which did not really gather momentum until the 1990s, these are questions which this book sets out to answer.
So far, this revolution in the interpretation of sexual behaviour has been the sole prerogative of academics – evolutionary biologists, to be precise. In this book, my aim is to bring the new interpretation for the first time within the reach of a much wider audience.
The potential exists to revolutionise the way we all think about sex. My ambition is to help the revolution on its way. The main message from this revolution is that our sexual behaviour has been programmed and shaped by evolutionary forces which acted on our ancestors – and which still act on us, even today. The main thrust of these forces was directed at our bodies, not our consciousness. Our bodies simply use our brains to manipulate us into behaving in a way dictated by our programming.
The central force that directed this programming was the risk of sperm warfare. Whenever a woman’s body contains sperm from two (or more) different men at the same time, the sperm from those men compete for the ‘prize’ of fertilising her egg. The way in which these sperm compete is akin to warfare. Very few (less than 1 per cent) of the sperm in a human ejaculate are the elite, fertile ‘egg-getters’. 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.
Sperm warfare is a story in itself, but it also has wide-ranging consequences at all levels of human sexual behaviour. 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. Thus, most male behaviour is an attempt either to prevent a woman from exposing his sperm to warfare or, if he fails in this, to give his sperm the best chance of winning that warfare. Most female behaviour is an attempt either to outmanoeuvre her partner and other males, or to influence which male’s sperm have the best chance of succeeding in any war that she promotes.
For each one of us, there was a critical moment, some time in the past, when one of our father’s sperm entered one of our mother’s eggs and we were conceived. That event unleashed a complex set of instructions for development. Those instructions were inherited half from our father and half from our mother and eventually produced the person we are today. 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.
Behind every conception lies a story. But the details of these stories are rarely known. How many of us know, for example, whether our mother climaxed at our conception and, if so, whether she did so before, after or at the same time as our father? Did either our father or mother masturbate in the days or hours preceding our conception? Was either of them bisexual or was either of them being unfaithful to their partner at the time? When we were conceived, did our mother contain sperm from only one man or did she contain sperm from two or even more? Is the man we call our father actually the man who produced the sperm which fertilised the egg from which we developed?
These things will have made a difference to our personal origins, and an understanding of the pre
cise ways in which they did is one of the most interesting outcomes of the new revolution.
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. This is true now and has probably been true for at least the last three or four million years. Such conceptions might seem humdrum, but even routine sex has its surprises, as I hope this book will illustrate. And for those one in five or so people who are not the product of routine sex, there is an even more interesting story behind their conception. Many such stories are told in this book.
In 1995, Dr Mark Bellis and I published a book called Human Sperm Competition: Copulation, Masturbation and Infidelity. 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. We argued that almost every aspect of human sexuality, including much of the familiar and humdrum, owed its characteristics to the occurrence, or at least 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. Of necessity, that book is full of jargon, data, graphs and tables, which inevitably distance it from most people’s experience. 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. The research shows, though, that sexual behaviour, in all its mundane, embarrassing, pleasurable, risky, criminal, amoral and exotic forms, does obey fundamental rules.
In order to illustrate these rules and to bring the behaviour to life, I have written this book as a series of fictional scenes. Every scene involves some form of sexual conflict – between males, females or, most often, between males and females. 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. Each piece of fiction is followed by an interpretation of the behaviour just witnessed, from the viewpoint of an evolutionary biologist.
The fictional scenes show people acting out those sexual strategies that have been the main targets for investigation and interpretation in recent years. While I have drawn evidence about how people behave from a wide range of scientific surveys and experimental studies in which, in total, many thousands of people around the world have taken part, the stories themselves, naturally enough, are contrived. Their aim is, after all, to show people experiencing particular costs and benefits of their sexual behaviour so as to neatly illustrate the subsequent evidence and interpretation. My challenge was to create characters and scenarios that offered a reasonably entertaining and plausible piece of fiction, while at the same time reflecting that evidence.
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. All of the scenes have been inspired by actual events. 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. Every character is an amalgam, and every story a mosaic of several different events. Moreover, every character described could be of any race (and almost any nationality), and every scene could be set in almost any country.
Not every event in every scene is interpreted on the spot, but every element of behaviour mentioned is interpreted in its own right somewhere in the book. For example, I have dedicated two scenes to masturbation, one to male (Scene 12) and one to female (Scene 22). After each of these scenes, I discuss the function of masturbation. Elsewhere, scenes of sexual behaviour often involve characters masturbating or having masturbated, without my interpreting their behaviour then and there. But once the functions of masturbation have been gleaned from their dedicated scenes, the involvement of masturbation in other scenes should be clear.
In writing my interpretations, I have tried not to lapse into the academic style that is my natural bent. I have tried to avoid too much mention of numbers and, where a particular explanation is complex, I have tried to give a brief and entertaining version even if it means sacrificing academic precision. I have also avoided using the words ‘probably’ and ‘possibly’ on many occasions when, strictly speaking, they were needed. Any reader with a scientific background who becomes frustrated by the lack of academic rigour in my text should seek the information and explanation they require in the treatise I wrote with Mark Bellis.
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. There are people, eminent in their fields, who will consider this whole book to be a fiction, interpretations as well as scenes. So be it. The point is that I have opted to tell a story, a story based on a genuine academic interpretation of recent research. Apart from this self-imposed starting point, my primary consideration thereafter is that the story should be consistent and interesting. I have not even begun to present all sides of other people’s views. To have done so would have made the book confusing, over-long, even dull. Other people’s interpretations are discussed and appraised at great length in Human Sperm Competition, in which Mark Bellis and I say precisely why we think the story I present here is the best currently available. Having argued the case there, I feel free here to tell the story as simply and as entertainingly as I can manage.
One of the problems I encountered in writing this book is that much of the behaviour I am attempting to interpret requires a totally explicit picture of what happens. Many of the scenes and details I describe could, in another context, be considered pornographic. I have tried not to be gratuitously explicit and hope that, for every scene or detail a reader might find embarrassing or titillating, the explanations that follow will provide adequate justification.
I have a further problem. A large part of the behaviour I describe and interpret is to many people at best amoral and at worst criminal. In my view it is most important that I do not strike any moral stances. As an evolutionary biologist, my aim is to interpret human behaviour without prejudice or criticism. 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. However, as I explain in Scene 33 in relation to rape, the first step in dealing with antisocial behaviour is to understand it – and that and nothing else is the aim of all my interpretations.
This book could never have been written had it not been for my scientific collaboration with Mark Bellis. I owe him a great debt. For seven years, from 1987 until 1994, we discussed, investigated and argued about every aspect of human sexuality. We did not agree on everything, but to a surprising extent one or other of us eventually became persuaded by the other’s arguments - sufficiently persuaded, that is, to collaborate in writing the academic book that is the scientific foundation for this one. 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. He should not be held responsible, however, for the way any of these ideas are presented. Naturally, he is also totally free of blame for my fictional representations.
I am also grateful to Fourth Estate, particularly Michael Mason and Christopher Potter, for showing what I consider to be great courage in publishing this book – not because of the subject-matter but for their confidence that I could actually deliver a saleable product. 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. I hope the end result has justified their initial confidence.
By far my biggest thanks must go to my partner
, Elizabeth Oram, who has encouraged and helped me at every step of the way. She did so despite considerable physical discomfort – the conception, gestation and delivery of this book coinciding with the conception, gestation and delivery of our second child. The book was conceived over breakfast one Saturday in October, three months to the day after the conception of our child. Without her immediate encouragement, I would never have dared to begin this project.
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. First, she saved me from my urge to be even more graphic in my description of sexual scenes than I have. If the final results are interesting and explicit – but still tasteful – they owe much to her restraint and advice. Secondly, she saved me as much as she possibly could from being outlandishly pompous and didactic in writing the interpretations. 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.
Finally, as the race to deliver the manuscript before Liz delivered our baby gathered momentum, she did everything she could to make sure I didn’t sacrifice quality for speed. In order to free time for me to finish the manuscript she allowed me to shirk many of my paternal and household responsibilities. Not once was I made to feel guilty. Moreover, she read and reread successive drafts of each scene and interpretation whenever I asked, even late at night. Throughout all the pressure, when I could so easily have decided that this or that sloppy paragraph ‘would do’, she never once allowed her editorial standards to drop.
