by Robin Baker
Suddenly he was at work, being told by his boss that if he wished he could leave his clothes off, but his erection had to go. An anonymous, faceless woman came into the room with a hat in her hand.
‘Cover it with this,’ she said and reached forward to do it for him. But she dropped the hat and grabbed his penis instead, squeezing so hard it hurt.
‘We can’t waste that, can we?’ she said, and in an instant was naked.
The room filled with fog. All he could see was the woman’s body from her waist to her knees. Her black pubic hair filled his tunnel vision and as she lay down, pulling him on to her, she became just a vagina. But he couldn’t get into her. Wherever he pushed his penis, there was a barrier. Where was her entrance . . . where was it? Panic set in. He was going to ejaculate before he was in. And he did.
The woman disappeared instantly. So did his panic. But he didn’t fully wake until he felt the semen trickling over his belly, down his side, and on to the bottom sheet. He groaned inwardly and wiped the ejaculate off his body with the top sheet.
That was his first wet dream for a year. He turned over, away from the rapidly cooling wet patch. Briefly, he was an adolescent again, worrying how he could hide the patch from his mother in the morning. At times during his early teenage years, he had even worried about going to bed at all in case he ejaculated. It was bad enough at home, but if ever he stayed at a friend’s house he could scarcely sleep all night for fear of leaving his mark. Eventually, he had discovered that if he masturbated before going to sleep when away from home, wet dreams rarely happened.
Since then, these nocturnal surprises had virtually disappeared from his life. Now, in his early thirties, they were a rare event. The last time, a year ago, was when he had flu and a slight fever. Then his partner had reacted badly on discovering the mark on the sheet, claiming it was a slight on her sexual attractiveness – and how could he be feeling like sex if he was ill, anyway? He wondered if she would react the same way this time. But, unlike during adolescence, the thought of being discovered did not keep him awake. Within a minute, he had drifted back into sleep.
For one in five men, their very first ejaculation occurs spontaneously. Most often, this first occurrence is a wet dream, but for a few unfortunate boys it occurs in public. This is usually due to subliminal stimulation (watching a film, climbing a tree), or extreme stress (reading in front of a class at school). After the first few occasions, however, almost all spontaneous ejaculations occur in private, at night, while asleep – as wet dreams. At some time in their lives, over 80 per cent of men experience these nocturnal events. So, how do they help a man in his pursuit of reproductive success?
Wet dreams can occur at any time of life, but are most common in the teens and early twenties, and are most likely after periods of abstinence from intercourse and masturbation. But only during the teens do they occur often enough to be a direct substitute for other outlets. The adolescent’s body aims to ejaculate at least three times a week, and if he omits to do so via masturbation (or intercourse, if he is lucky), wet dreams act as insurance.
During adolescence, wet dreams probably tailor the ejaculate just as precisely as masturbation. Later, they occur much too rarely to be part of the three-a-week system. From his mid-twenties onwards, even if a man fails to ejaculate via intercourse or masturbation for days or even weeks, wet dreams may not occur. He will still get virtually nightly erections during REM sleep (the deepest kind) and dreams, but his body seems to inhibit ejaculation.
After adolescence, nocturnal ejaculations are probably most likely to occur when the sperm waiting to exit have been damaged in some way. A high temperature, for example, during flu or other infections, can kill or damage these waiting sperm. The body still generates an urge to masturbate under such circumstances, but if the man gets no opportunity for secrecy during the day, the body forces a wet dream to rid his sperm columns of these moribund tenants at night.
Humans are by no means the only species to ejaculate spontaneously. Rats, cats and probably most mammals will from time to time ejaculate in their sleep, especially around puberty. In men, it is sleeping with a partner that most often seems to mark the change from the function of wet dreams as a back-up in his three-a-week system, to their being rare events.
As we have already discussed (Scene 13), the timing and frequency with which a man sheds sperm can give a clear indication to an observer both of his current sexual activity and of his expectations. Secrecy is important to the success of male strategy, and it is probably this need for secrecy that has caused men’s bodies to avoid wet dreams as sexual outlets once they have a partner. They are not as easy to hide from a partner as masturbation, because the evidence remains on the sheet. Since a man has much more control over when and where he ejaculates during masturbation, wet dreams are a suitable back-up for masturbation only in young men without a partner.
6
Successful Failure
SCENE 15
Home for the Day
The soldier stopped pedalling and allowed his bicycle to free-wheel down the steep hill. He welcomed the brief moment of relaxation. It was over two hours since he had cycled out of his barracks in the heat of the June evening. Now, as the sun dipped towards the horizon behind him, he still needed another half-hour to get home. His bike had no lights, but he might just arrive before it would matter. As he gathered speed and the fields and hedgerows raced past him, he could scarcely believe his luck, both bad and good. The bad luck was that, for some wartime reason, the whole barracks was being moved much further away from his home. The good luck was that he had been given an unexpected twenty-four-hour leave. He had his bike, he had the strength and energy, and he certainly had the motivation. A three-hour ride? Nothing to it.
His partner didn’t know he was coming home. For a moment she was stunned when, just as it was getting dark, the back door opened. Her two daughters, aged eleven and seven, were upstairs, asleep. Otherwise, she was alone in the house. When she identified the intruder, she was both pleased and unnerved. Pleased, because she missed his company during the long weeks between visits home. Pleased, because she had been feeling sexually frustrated for days. Unnerved, because if he had arrived an hour earlier he would have found another man in the house.
So far, her genuine claims of fidelity during his long absences had always been accepted – eventually. Her position in such pleadings was particularly vulnerable because her elder daughter was not his, and he knew it. She was the product of a springtime indiscretion. As a twenty-two-year-old farm girl, she had allowed herself to be coerced into sex with the man for whom she worked. Never would the woman forget that day, twelve years ago, that nearly ruined her life. Even now, the man’s eyes still stared at her in her dreams and from her daughter’s face.
On finding she was pregnant, she had lost her job, her mother’s love, and her freedom. She was banished, first to live with her grandmother for a few months during the most obvious phase of her pregnancy, and then to a confinement in the house of a tyrannical, moralistic midwife. There was no doubt that she owed this soldier who had just walked through the door a lifetime’s gratitude for offering to take on and support her and her baby daughter. And he had done this despite the opposition of his own parents and despite the prejudice of the villagers in whose community they lived and worked. Four years after they had met, she had given him his own daughter, the consequence of New Year celebrations - but he desperately wanted a son. Maybe if war hadn’t broken out, they would have had another child. But it did, and they hadn’t.
He enjoyed the camaraderie of army life, but constantly worried about what his partner was doing back at home. Knowing this, she shuddered at what might have happened had he arrived home and found another man in the house. In fact, her relationship with this other man had so far been totally platonic. But she knew his intentions were far from innocent and tonight, for the first time, she had found herself being tempted. Who knows what would have happened if the girls had gone to
bed at their proper time, instead of staying up as unwitting chaperons?
After a welcoming hug and kiss, she told her partner to wash away his cyclist’s sweat while she prepared what food she could from a temporarily thin larder. He waited until they were in bed and becoming aroused before breaking the news to her that he’d had no chance to buy or borrow any condoms. She protested that the last thing she wanted at the moment was a baby. He said it would be all right because he would withdraw before he came. Maybe it didn’t matter anyway, she said, because her period was due any day.
He didn’t withdraw, either then, first thing in the morning, or again in the early afternoon. An hour later he was gone, cycling the three-hour journey back to his barracks and imminent relocation. Even as he cycled, one of his sperm was entering his partner’s egg, and by the time he saw her again she was experiencing pregnancy sickness. A few months later, during the hottest week in March for twenty years, his son was born.
Fifty years later, the woman would have seven grandchildren, the soldier six – one from his daughter, and five from the son conceived when he was home for that day in June.
Each of the three scenes in this chapter deals with a situation in which a different woman appears in some way to fail. Yet in failing, each actually benefits – as if her failure were strategic. In Scene 15 we encounter a woman who is apparently convinced that the last thing she wants is to conceive. However, not only does she fail to avoid conception, but her body goes to some lengths to make sure that she does. Fifty years later it is clear that her body had engineered a very successful failure – a real bonus in her pursuit of reproductive success.
The conscious reason that this woman allowed unprotected sex, even though she didn’t want to conceive, was because she thought conception was unlikely. Her spur-of-the-moment reasoning was that it was so long since her last period that her next must be due any day. But as we noted in Scene 2, and as she soon discovered, the human menstrual cycle is nowhere near as predictable as many people think.
Just about the only reliable element in the cycle is that once a woman has ovulated she will menstruate fourteen days later (but see below). Everything else is highly variable, as her body contrives to make itself unpredictable to men. Particularly crucial to her strategy is the tremendous variation in the number of days from the end of menstruation to ovulation. This variation (which we shall soon discuss further), however, is only one element in her unpredictability. Another less well-known feature is that even apparently normal cycles are by no means always fertile: a woman experiencing such cycles may not in fact be ovulating at all. Scattered among her fertile cycles, every healthy, fertile woman routinely also has infertile ones.
There are at least three different types of infertile menstrual cycle – and most women experience them all. In the first type, a woman neither menstruates nor produces an egg. In the second, she menstruates normally, but still does not produce an egg. In the third, she both menstruates and ovulates, but curtails (from fourteen days to about ten) the normally consistent interval from ovulation to menstruation. This curtailment prevents a fertilised egg from implanting.
In the short term, phases of infertility are an important method by which a woman’s body subconsciously seeks to do two things: on the one hand, to confuse men; and on the other, to organise the number and spacing of children over a lifetime. Only if such infertile phases persist for long periods, such as several years, might they indicate a problem. Even then, they may still be part of a woman’s natural subconscious ability to plan her family.
The proportion of cycles that are fertile varies in a fairly predictable way throughout a woman’s life. Obviously, she does not ovulate during childhood, though she may ovulate before having her first period. And even once she has begun to have periods, few cycles are fertile. By the age of twenty, a normal, healthy woman produces an egg in fewer than half of her cycles. Even at her peak, when around thirty years old, still only about 80 per cent of cycles are fertile. After thirty, the proportion begins to decline, slowly at first, then rapidly after she reaches forty. By fifty, women more or less cease to ovulate, though there are unconfirmed reports of women giving birth up to the age of seventy.
What seems to happen in each cycle is that in the days after the beginning of a period, a woman’s body goes through a series of hormonal changes. These changes prepare her body to produce an egg but, about one or two days before ovulation can occur, her body goes on hold. Whether she eventually produces an egg or not depends on the events of the following few days, or even weeks. This holding period is an opportunity to collect sperm, perhaps just from her partner, perhaps not – perhaps just from one man, perhaps from two or more. In part, whether or not she ovulates will depend on how her body feels about the man or men from whom she has collected sperm. Most of all, however, it will depend on how it feels about trying to produce a baby in the current circumstances.
The woman in Scene 15 thought her next period must soon be due because it was so long since her last one. She was wrong. Her body was on hold. In the absence of her partner for the foreseeable future, it had momentarily considered collecting sperm from another man. But when it collected sperm from her partner, it responded by producing an egg. Consciously, the woman thought it was a bad time to conceive, but her body knew better. Given that it was eight years since she had last conceived and that her ability to have and raise a third child would soon begin to decline, now was precisely the time to conceive – especially as it was June.
Many mammals, such as squirrels, sheep and bears, breed only at a particular time of year. This way, their bodies can time giving birth and raising young to coincide with the best weather and the greatest availability of food. In contrast, most of the larger monkeys and apes, living in more uniform tropical environments, will breed at any time of year. Nevertheless, conceptions and births are not evenly spread throughout the seasons: more still occur in some months than in others. Humans are just the same.
At the latitude of Britain and Canada, more babies are born in early spring (February and March) than at any other time of year. There is a second, smaller peak in early autumn (September). At the latitude of Central America, more babies are born at the coolest time of year (December/January). In the southern hemisphere, the birth seasons are the same as in the northern. But the months, of course, are half a year different.
Just as these seasonal birth peaks reflect peaks of conception nine months earlier, so do these peaks of conception reflect peaks of ovulation. Suppose Scene 15 was set in Britain. There, women are more likely to produce an egg in May/June and December than in any other month of the year. If the scene had been enacted in October rather than June, the outcome might have been very different. In October, even if the woman’s body had been on hold, she might not have responded to intercourse by ovulating. But it was June. Moreover, she was thirty-four years old, it was eight years since she last conceived, and her body rarely had the chance to collect sperm. Despite what her brain might have thought, her body decided on that summer day that it was actually a very good moment to conceive – and it was right.
Fifty years later, her son had not only survived, he had given her five grandchildren. The average number for women living at her time and in her society is likely to have been four. Without her son, she would have had only two grandchildren, half the average. Because she had had her son, she achieved seven grandchildren in all, nearly twice the average, giving her every chance that her descendants would be present in the generations to come.
The man, of course, did not fare quite as well as the woman from their partnership. But he still fared quite well, and for him the son was even more important – without him, he would have had only one grandchild. Then there would have been a very real danger that accident or infertility would rob him of all descendants within a generation or two (Scene 1). Because he had had his son, he too achieved an above-average number of grandchildren. So from the point of view of his reproductive success it had been
a good decision to take on this woman, despite the cost of raising her daughter from another man. It had also been a good decision to take on a three-hour cycle ride in the heat of that June day.
SCENE 16
The Stress of It All
As the woman fingered the piece of paper in her hand, tears began to roll down her cheeks. Ironically, only yesterday she had thought that things couldn’t get any worse.
Seven years ago, when she and her partner had first started living together, the future had looked bright. But, somehow, it had all gone wrong. Maybe they shouldn’t have overstretched themselves financially with their first house. Maybe they shouldn’t have spent so much on holidays and entertainment in the first few years together. Maybe they should have seen the danger signs earlier and drawn in their horns when they began to slip into debt. But her partner had insisted they could manage. Promotion and solvency were always just around the corner. But now, seeing this final demand, she realised things were never going to get better. As she sobbed, it seemed to her as if life had been one long chapter of stress and unhappiness.
It had begun ten years ago. In her late teens she had become involved with a brilliant young man. But their relationship was fraught. He had been continually critical of her body and general appearance and had refused on principle to use, or allow her to use, any forms of contraception other than rhythm and withdrawal. Haunted by the fear of pregnancy and obsessed by the fear of becoming fat, she had lapsed into anorexia. After a year of despair, she finished with him, counselled herself out of her eating problems, and eventually qualified with distinction for the career she had always wanted. Two years later, she met her current partner and they began living together almost immediately.
