by Robin Baker
Her final effort was superhuman! When I failed to complete the manuscript by the expected delivery date of our baby, she hung on and refused to give birth for a further ten days. Thanks to the time she freed for me, I managed to deliver the manuscript to Fourth Estate just before our first daughter, Amelia, was born.
Introduction to the 2006 Edition
The first twenty-six years of my working life were spent as a university scientist, giving lectures, carrying out research, and writing a series of academic books on a variety of subjects. As for most academics in my position, a successful publication was one that sold—not really to people—but to a reasonable proportion of university libraries in the English-speaking world. There they would sit, gathering dust, waiting for somebody to need to consult this or that piece of information or viewpoint. Such books aren’t usually read as such. They are picked at—often nitpicked at—by other academics, from professors to students, as often as not looking for flaws rather than facts. Then, ten years ago now and a trifle disgruntled at having so much effort reach so few people, I turned my hand to writing popular science. The hope was that the words might actually be read outside of ivory towers—and maybe even by people who spoke languages other than English. To my great pleasure, both hopes were realized and never again could I contemplate reverting to writing for academia.
Sperm Wars had a subject matter—sex, fertility, and reproduction—of interest to all and was meant to both entertain and inform; to help people think about their own and others’ actions; to give a new perspective on the sexual behavior and urges that everybody experiences at some time in their lives. Not only those urges that all societies consider normal and acceptable but also those that many don’t. What I never really contemplated while writing was that some people might find the book reassuring. Ironically, this seems to have been one of its most common roles.
I had expected mail: from incensed academics accusing me of prostituting my scientific research; from zealots condemning me for seeming to condone via objective explanation behaviors that are or are considered to be antisocial, illegal, or even sinful; and from male and female chauvinists angry because I appear to justify what they see as the heinous actions of the opponent sex. None of this really happened. Academics preferred to vent their spleen in the introductions to their own books rather than confront me directly—and zealots and chauvinists by and large either appreciated what I was saying or saw no cause to react. Instead, my mailbox was, and still is, filled with letters from men and particularly women from all over the world thanking me for explaining why they had at some time or other behaved in what, until reading my book, they’d considered to be inexplicable ways. Most of these letters concerned infidelity or promiscuity; others were about masturbation or nocturnal climaxing. The response wasn’t what I’d anticipated, but much appreciated nonetheless.
The letters came from all over the world because, thanks to the efforts of my energetic and accomplished agent, Laura Susijn, foreign publication rights to Sperm Wars were eventually sold to twenty-one different publishers, from Canada and Russia in the North to Australia in the South, from the United States in the West to mainland China and Japan in the East. Altogether, it has so far been published in a gratifying twenty different languages.
Such worldwide translation and publication has allowed a fascinating insight into the reaction of different nationalities to the open, nonjudgmental discussion of human sexual behavior found in the book’s pages. In the UK it quickly made the Sunday Times bestseller list, peaked at number 7, and stayed for a few weeks. There was a similarly enthusiastic response to the German, Polish, and first Chinese translations. In contrast, the Danish and Swedish translations seemed to arouse much less excitement. Maybe frank and liberal-minded discussion of sex was nothing new in Scandinavia by 1996! The response in the United States, however, was quite different from anywhere else and took me completely by surprise.
The weeks after Sperm Wars was published in America I performed what seemed an endless state-to-state round of radio interviews. Those in California and New York followed the pattern to which I’d become accustomed in Europe—lively, open, inquisitive, and only occasionally bawdy badinage about infidelity and other intimate details of people’s sex lives. Lulled into a state of false confidence, I moved on to other states—which I prefer not to name.
The first and most bizarre shock came from a radio station that enthusiastically offered a fifteen-minute conversation about Sperm Wars with its celebrity host—with the proviso that neither I nor he used the word “sperm,” which was considered offensive. After that, although never quite so strange, station after station placed this or that limitation on what I could say. Describing the book’s content and message was more often than not well near impossible. Worst of all (for me) was the station that, I assumed to be well aware of the nature of the book, offered an hour-long interview. Five minutes in, the host gave an on-air plea of “help” to the technicians around him. Two minutes later he pronounced that he just couldn’t handle the conversation and cut me off, replacing my interview with fifty minutes of canned music. The reason? It wasn’t because I’d sworn or been coarse, or that I’d talked about genitals or orgasms. It wasn’t even because I’d used the word “sperm.” It was because I had listed, soberly and earnestly, the reasons why a woman sometimes finds herself having sex with more than one man in the space of a few days, the behavior that generates the sperm wars that were the basis of my book.
Sperm Wars sold well enough in the United States first time round. However, whether due to the prudishness, embarrassment, and reluctance to openly discuss sexual matters that I encountered on my radio tour in 1996 or not, it reached far fewer people than in parts of Europe and Asia. Certainly not as many as I and its original publishers had expected. So why relaunch it in America now, nearly ten years after its initial publication?
It isn’t because human reproduction is beginning to change. Until the end of the twentieth century, our basic sexual behavior had stayed more or less the same for thousands, maybe over a million, years. However, as I described in another book, Sex in the Future, the greater availability and reliability of reproductive technology will one day influence much of the behavior detailed in Sperm Wars. DNA paternity testing, in particular, is beginning to reduce the chances of a man being tricked into unknowingly raising another man’s child and hence impacting on the costs and benefits of infidelity. For the moment, though, this impact is still minimal. Nor is this relaunch of Sperm Wars really because the book has been accredited “classic” status as has been the case elsewhere in the world—in Britain, France, Poland, Czech Republic, and China to name a few—where relaunches have already taken place or are in process. It isn’t even because for a time in the States the original became a collector’s item. Not long after the first version had disappeared from the nation’s bookstores, second-hand copies were being offered for sale on one of America’s biggest Inter-net bookshops for ninety dollars a copy, having originally retailed at around twenty dollars. Instead, the main reason is the feeling that the average American in 2006 is more ready, able, and maybe even eager, to tackle the sorts of questions and explanations with which this book deals than he or she was in 1996. Ready—and less easily embarrassed.
Over the last few years there has been both a runaway success of national chain stores specializing in sex and a never-ending spate of news, articles, and features about Americans’ obsession with “sex toys.” The toys, themselves, aren’t really new. In principle they are still no more than aids to solitary male or female masturbation or to couples for making their sex life more varied. What is new, though, is the fact that these toys are selling by the zillions to a broad segment of the population—not just to the inhabitants of New York and San Francisco! The current batch of American under-thirties has even been branded “Generation Porn.” Sex is everywhere, from Web to television, and it would be encouraging to think that it reflects or at least precedes the development of the healt
hy, informed, and nonjudgmental attitude that Sperm Wars is intended to promote.
There is, of course, still a way to go. Even the most optimistic American liberal would admit that the United States is still less relaxed over sexual matters than parts of Europe and Asia. So, too, would the less fortunate of its public figures. Many politicians, from ex-presidents down, might wish that their electorate were more similar to those in parts of Europe where having a lover, the more attractive and famous the better, is an almost mandatory part of a successful image. They might wish that “doing what comes naturally”—the subject matter of Sperm Wars—was better understood by the average American.
I wait with interest to see if the Sperm Wars message engages the current generation in the United States even more than it did the previous. In the meantime I thank John Oakes and Avalon Publishing Group both for their faith in my book and their faith in its potential American audience. I also thank them for helping me meet a personal yardstick, one that emanated from the professor who supervised my doctoral studies many years ago. A wise and deliciously eccentric man, Howard Hinton had a smattering of Mexican genes and a rich store of memorable maxims. Which of these he’d conceived himself and which he was simply passing on I was never quite sure, but two in particular have become relevant to my Sperm Wars experience.
His first maxim was that academic opponents never change their mind, so the only victory one can ever hope for is to outlive them. The second was that if anything one writes isn’t still being talked about ten years later then it wasn’t worth writing in the first place. Whether I shall outlive those few academics incensed by Sperm Wars is for the future to reveal—but the relaunch of the book in the United States ten years after it was first published is now a matter of record. Whether this edition has even more meaning to the American book-reading public the second time around remains to be seen, but I at least have the pleasure of knowing that my now-deceased mentor would have given it his irreverent blessing.
Robin Baker
August 2005
1
The Generation Game
SCENE 1
Great Uncle Who?
The faces in the creased brown photograph stared impassively at the woman, their gazes spanning the hundred years between them. She loved this photograph and often asked to see it when she visited her grandmother. The faces belonged to three young children, all long dead, frozen in time by some ancient camera at a moment early in their lives. They were standing in a line, tallest and oldest on the left, shortest and youngest on the right. The two boys at either end were aged about ten and two, the pretty girl in the middle about five.
Whenever the young woman looked at these faces, she sensed a continuity with the past that she never experienced at any other time. The photograph showed her great-grandmother with her two brothers. But, with very little stretching of the imagination, it could be her looking out from the photograph, not her great-grandmother. The resemblance between them as children was uncanny. Her grandmother called it ‘the family face’, so many of their clan having the same bone structure and eyes.
The woman looked at the photograph a little longer, then asked her grandmother to tell her the story of their family ‘just one more time’. Before speaking, the old woman fumbled to the front of the album and took out a large sheet of paper. This family tree was her pride and joy and she loved showing it and the photographs to her many grandchildren.
The young woman concentrated hard as her grandmother spoke, determined this time to remember what was said. She knew that one of the boys in the photograph had not lived long enough to have children. Her great-grandmother, however, had not only survived but had also escaped the poverty of her family background. She had been a pretty child who had grown into a beautiful young woman, chased by all the young men in the village. One day, while working as a servant in a large household, she had fallen pregnant to the owner’s son. The baby was her grandmother, the teller of the story.
Instead of being disowned and sent away, her great-grandmother was welcomed into the family. Everything happened so quickly that, despite gossip, nobody ever knew for sure that the baby had been conceived illegitimately. The young couple then lived together in relative comfort for the rest of their lives and produced four more children. All were boys and, unusual for their generation, all had survived.
The grandmother then pointed to the oldest boy in the photograph, her uncle. He had not been as lucky as his sister. Failing to escape the poverty into which he had been born, he had worked hard all his life. Like his sister, he also had five children. Three had died as babies, and one of the survivors, a boy, had been killed in the war when only eighteen years old. The other survivor, a girl, was infertile and died alone, in her fifties, a few years after her partner. The youngest boy, the one with the bright eyes and smile, had died of measles about two years after the photograph was taken.
The young woman pored over the family tree with her grandmother. The tree had the shape of a pyramid: three names at the top, the three young children in the photograph, and about fifty at the bottom, the woman’s own generation. Then suddenly she noticed something that had never occurred to her before: every single one of the fifty people in her generation traced back to her great-grandmother, the pretty girl in the picture. Not one, of course, traced back to either of those two boys.
The young woman bent forward to look at the family tree more closely. She was looking for others who, like the two boys, had no living descendants and whose lines on the tree therefore ended in mid-air. The most conspicuous was one of her grandmother’s brothers, the great-uncle whose name she could never remember but who was reputed to have had a very strangely shaped nose. She spotted two more lines ending in mid-air before her stance became too uncomfortable. Unable to bend forward any longer, she straightened up and turned away from the paper and photographs. As she did so, the baby in her womb kicked. She winced, then smiled and held her stomach. At least her line wasn’t going to end in mid-air.
Our personal characteristics depend on our genes – chemical instructions as to how we should develop and function. These instructions are packaged in sperm and eggs and passed down our family tree, finally reaching us via our genetic parents. And we inherit more than our ‘family face’ via these genes: we also inherit many aspects of our physiology, psychology and behaviour, including much of our sexual behaviour.
This book’s task is to work out why we behave sexually as we do. Our approach is simple. We shall ask why it is that people with some sexual strategies (patterns of sexual behaviour) are more successful reproductively than people with others. Our measure of success will be the number of descendants people achieve – because this is what shapes future generations.
Families and populations become dominated by the descendants of their most successful ancestors. They also become dominated by those people’s characteristics. In the scene we just saw, the younger woman’s generation was dominated by her great-grandmother’s face, not by great-uncle who’s nose. For all she knew, her generation was also dominated by a ‘family sexuality’, passed on to so many people by the dynasty founders, her great-grandparents. Nobody will have inherited directly the sexuality of great-uncle who. Whatever his sexual strategy might have been, it was unsuccessful and he left no descendants to inherit that strategy.
It is irrelevant to our generation whether people in the past wanted many children and grandchildren or whether it just happened. The only factor to shape our characteristics is who in the past had children (and how many) and who did not. The great-grandmother and great-grandfather in Scene 1 were probably most dismayed when their sexual fun produced a child. But if it hadn’t, the younger woman and her fifty or so family contemporaries would not have lived. In effect, each generation plays a game in which its members compete to pass their genes on to the next generation. Each generation has its winners, like the pretty girl in the picture, and each has its losers, like her two brothers and great-uncle. We are the descendants
of the winners, the people whose sexual strategy paid off.
The generation game has not ended. It will continue for as long as some people in a generation have more children than others. In our own generation, the game is as active and cruel as ever. It will still be the genes of those among us who produce most descendants that will characterise future generations, not the genes of those who produce few or none.
Whether we know it or not, whether we want to or not, and whether we care or not, we are all programmed to try to win our generation’s game of reproduction – we are all programmed to pursue reproductive success. Our successful ancestors have saddled us inescapably with genetic instructions which tell us not only that we must compete, but also how to. Inevitably, some of us will have had more successful ancestors than others, so that even in our generation there will be some people who have inherited instructions for potentially better strategies. When our generation comes to work out its final score, some people will have done better than others. We are about to start investigating why it is that some people are more successful than others in life’s generation game.
2
Routine Sex
SCENE 2
Normal Service
It is late on a Saturday night and a man and woman in their late twenties are getting ready for bed. As they drift around their rooms, attending to the minutiae of life, they are naked. For them, this is usual and of no sexual importance. They are no longer excited by simply being naked in each other’s presence. In fact, they now scarcely notice each other’s bodies. As it is Saturday night, they know they will have sex before they go to sleep. Yet, as they vacantly pursue their separate routines, there is no hint of foreplay, even when on occasion their paths cause their bodies to brush past each other.
