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Demystifying sex
Saturday, 10 June 2006
Sex is a topic we all think about. It's one of the most fascinating, cruel, strange and wonderful parts of life. Like most people, I spent a lot of time being confused about sex during my teen years and early twenties. To overcome this, I read up on the research that's been done into this subject. Here's a summary of what I found.
The information I present here comes from a number of different sources, but one in particular stands out. The book "Sperm Wars" by Robin Baker is highly recommended for anyone who wants to read further.
I'll talk exclusively about heterosexual sex, as the other kind is something I've got no experience of, so I'm not really qualified to comment.
We all know what the primary function of sex is - to reproduce. Of all the marks we make on this planet - writing books, building businesses, making friends and so on - none will endure as long as successfully passing our DNA to future generations. Or at least, that's what our bodies hope.
Because sex is really a bodily function - like eating and sleeping. As long as we're surviving and reasonably healthy, our body's number one priority will be to reproduce. It will demand sexual satisfaction, at least some of the time, just as it demands food and sleep.
We do have a certain amount of conscious control over all these needs - we can stay awake even when our bodies feel tired, for example - but the control's not total. If our body feels its needs aren't being satisfied, it will take action to rectify this. The same way it will eventually force us to sleep, no matter how hard we try to stop it, our body will also make us do things we may not want to in its pursuit of sex.
Of course, these sexual demands get mixed up in the emotional whirlpool of love and the desire for companionship. In this piece, I'll concentrate purely on the biological side though.
When a man and a woman make love, and the woman becomes pregnant, the genetic make-up of the two people mix to form a new person. Half of the resulting offspring's characteristics come from one parent, and half from the other. You learnt all of this in science class.
Of course, in today's world we have contraception added into this mix, but we're really tricking our body with these methods. As far as our bodies are concerned, every time we have sex we could be reproducing, and so they manipulate our feelings with this in mind.
Things becomes interesting when you start to look at the strategies our bodies use to maximize their chances of passing genes on to the next generation. The male strategy differs markedly from that of the female.
In one sexual encounter, a man can fertilize a woman with hundreds of millions of sperm, each of which can produce a new person. A woman, meanwhile, generally only produces one egg a month. Obviously, the man has a lot more genetic material to pass around.
On top of that, a man can go around making as many women as he's able to pregnant, but a woman must wait nine months for a baby to be born. She obviously has a much larger investment and risk factor in the outcome of any sexual encounter than he does.
This explains why women are usually a lot more cautious about sex. If I gave you a few hundred million dollars every day, you probably wouldn't be too careful with your money. If I gave you one or two dollars a month, you would be.
When she looks for a sexual partner, a woman's body is looking for two things. Firstly, she wants a man with good genes, whose offspring are also likely to be reproductively successful. But also, she wants a man who'll stick around to help her bring up the resulting children. Human children require a lot of care over a number of years. Having a man help with their upbringing greatly increases their chance of survival and becoming healthy enough to reproduce. Remember, that our body still thinks we're wild hunters and gatherers, so it doesn't know about professional working mothers and the like.
A woman doesn't necessarily have to get both of these things from the same man. Some men may be better providers and some may have better genes. This introduces an interesting wild card into the game. A woman may improve her chances of creating desirable offspring by tricking her long-term partner into bringing up another man's children.
And a man's body can also benefit if he's the one who gets to pass on his genes to someone else's partner. He gets a healthy, cared-for offspring without expending any of his own resources on raising that child to maturity.
Robin Baker's research found this occurs much more often than many people suspect. Around one in ten people don't have the biological father they believe they do. Other research from the University of Arizona has found that far fewer men than women pass on their genes to subsequent generations.
But this is a risky strategy for a woman to take. After all, if her long-term partner discovers her infidelity, he may leave her or even kill her children. Because of this, a woman's body appears to have specifically been designed to confuse men. It causes her to behave in ways that men find baffling to throw them off becoming suspicious. Women walk a high tightrope in the game of reproduction, and they need all the tools they can to get them to the other side.
Even without the infidelity factor, making herself desirable but confusing and hard-to-get has other benefits for a woman. She can use it as a test for the man's sexual strength. If he's able to overcome the obstacles she throws in his way, any future male offspring that result will also likely have these skills.
To make matters even more confusing, women vary their sexual strategies widely - from woman to woman, and also depending upon where they are in their menstrual cycle. Every woman really is different, and even the same one can change depending on the time of the month.
Taking into account factors like this, you start to get a clearer picture of what's going on. Our bodies are playing a kind of sexual poker game beneath our conscious selves. Each person and each sex brings different characteristics to the game, and must vary their strategy depending on what those characteristics are. And letting other people find out what's going on can be a major disadvantage.
This is why sex can so often be confusing and cruel. But it's also why we desire it so much. It's our chance at immortality, and our bodies want that prize - even if our minds aren't always interested.
I've only really scratched the surface of modern research into human sexuality here, but I hope I've made you interested enough to read up further on this fascinating topic. I also hope things are just that little bit clearer than they were before you started reading this article.
I plan to write further on this subject in later articles, so stick around.
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