Sperm competition

Another insight from Sex at Dawn:

"Why do so many heterosexual men get off on pornography featuring groups of guys having sex with just one woman?  Researchers have confirmed what porn producers already know: men tend to get turned on by images depicting an environment in which sperm competition is clearly at play.  Images and videos showing one woman with multiple males are far more popular on the internet and in commercial pornography than those depicting one male with multiple females.  Why would the males in a species that's been wearing the shackles of monogamy for 1.9 million years be sexually excited by scenes of groups of men ejaculating with one or two women?" (Page 229)

The traditional theory of male competition is that men compete, not their sperm.  The winner of the personal struggle gets to impregnate the most females.  This is of course the gorilla model, where the male is twice the size of the female, and is polygynous (has a harem).  But suppose men cooperate, and instead their sperm competes?

They point also to:

1. Men climax much quicker than women
2. Women can have multiple orgasms; men need a bit of a break before they're ready to fuck again
3. The shape of the coronal ridge and the glans is unique to man; this shape is effective in pulling back previously deposited sperm, with extended repeated thrusting
4. Man has the longest and fattest cock of all the great apes
5. A human ejaculation consists of 3 to 9 spurts; the early spurts contain protective chemicals; the later ones a spermicidal substance--logical only if multiple male partners are the biological norm
6. Daily ejaculation dramatically reduces DNA damage to men's sperm cells, thereby increasing male fertility
7. Rapid-reaction DNA controlling development of testicular tissue, this DNA being absent in monogamous or polygynous primates
8. Human (and bonobo) sexual activity goes far beyond what's needed for conception,  with more than 1000 copulations per birth
9. Female Copulatory Vocalisation. i.e., the noise women make during orgasm makes no sense if we are monogamous, never mind the danger such a racket would make in a jungle full of large predators
10. Why do women have orgasms at all?
11. Human hypersexuality.
12. Testicular volume and libido far beyond what's needed for monogmaous or polygynous mating
13. There is evidence that the woman's body chooses which man's sperm to accept by releasing chemicals
14. The precarious location of the testicles in a vulnerable external scrotum, associated with promiscuous mating  

Such an interesting book.  The squeals of outrage which greeted its publication rather suggest it's essentially right.

[See also Sex at Dawn]

Sex at dawn

I'm rereading this, well, seminal book.

This snippet:

Our DNA differs from that of chimps and bonobos by roughly 1.6%, making us closer to them than a dog is to a fox, a white-handed gibbon to a white-cheeked crested gibbon, an Indian elephant to an African elephant or, for any bird-watchers who may be tuning in, a red-eyed vireo to a white-eyed vireo

Yet, when it comes to monogamy, we are routinely compared to gibbons, who conveniently happen to be monogamous.  But they are rather dim compared to us, chimps and bonobos,  and are also much less close relatives, diverging from our evolutionary line over 20 million years ago, compared with 5 million for bonobos and chimps.  Chimps and bonobos are, meanwhile, emphatically not monogamous.

An altogether fascinating book.

See also:

    Our Cheatin' Hearts
    Drives
    Normal Plus
    Friends
    Big Day Coming

Drives

We humans have lots of drives and needs: shelter, food, warmth, among others.  But for the most part, in Western countries, these needs are satisfied, and we are left with our unsatisfied needs/drives: love, companionship, and sex.   Oddly enough, though Western capitalism feeds and clothes and warms us, providing (again, for the most part) for our physical needs, it's not very good at filling our emotional needs.

 We are lonely and alone.  We are, most of us, atomistic nothings in giant cities, so big we can never know them fully, so populous we can never get to know everybody.  24% of households have just one person in them.   No wonder so many people have pets!

Suicide in Oz killed 2,272 people in 2011.  And that's those acknowledged as suicide.  Many "single vehicle" accidents, especially in the bush, are disguised suicides.  Interestingly, only 1,277 ppl died in motor vehicle accidents in 2011, only half the official toll from suicide. Drug-related deaths totalled 1388.  Some of these are surely slow-burning suicides.  Note, as an aside, how many resources are deployed to combat road deaths and how few to stop the more numerous suicides and drug deaths.

Ironically, the biggest killer by far is the different forms of heart disease: 26,613 in 2011.  Another 32, 525 die from strokes, prostate cancer, dementia etc, all of which are primarily environment-related.  The excessive prosperity of our system leads to overeating and especially overeating easily prepared and readily available food ("junk food").   Two thirds of Ozzies are obese, double the ratio of 20 years ago.

Just to put it all into perspective, only a little over 200 people a years are murdered.

Our civilisation, then, overfeeds us.  And it's killing us.

How much eating is "comfort food"?

A huge amount of mine is, I know.  We hunger for love and affection; for sexual love, not random encounters; for meaning.  And meaning comes from loving and being loved.

Yet, in a way, the need for sex and the need for love are sometimes opposed.  A man may dearly love his current partner, yet lust after others.  If he satisfies that lust he may destroy the relationship with the person he really loves.  But the need for sex, for "hotness" is very powerful.  We humans like sex, we want more of it, at some deep level within us it fulfills our needs.  But we also deeply want to be loved and to love.

Our culture struggles with these often irreconcilable needs.  We deplore it when famous or wealthy or powerful men break their marriage vows.  Yet so many keep on doing it.  Why?



What we need is less food, less consumption, and more friendship, love and sex.

[ Some previous thoughts on all this:

Our Cheatin' Hearts
Normal Plus
Friends
Friends and Enemas ]



Sources:

All deaths
Road deaths
Drug deaths
Obesity in Australia
Sex at Dawn

Friends

I've been reading--and rereading--Sex at Dawn, which is a remarkable and thought-provoking book.  The authors suggest--prove! in my opinion--that humans are not naturally pair-bonded, but instead relate sexually and emotionally to several partners.  Within a hunter-gatherer group, the men would have sex with many of the women, and the women with many of the men.  The men might also have sex (make love) with each other, even though it produces no offspring, because the individuals in the group survive only if the group survives, and bonding the group together--including same-gender bonding--becomes imperative.  So gayness makes clear evolutionary sense.  The oxytocin released during the act of sex ties the community closer together.

But these communities seem never to have exceeded 150 people (The Dunbar number)

Now we try to run vast societies with millions of members, and we stretch the emotional bonds appropriate for 150 people beyond their capacity, and we wonder why our lives are "nasty and brutish".  We wonder that crime exists, and selfish, greedy elites, and hate-filled Christianist communities.

I have no idea what the solution is (we're here, now, with cities of millions of inhabitants) but it seems to me that love is a key ingredient.  Love thy neighbour as thyself, He said.  Yet, I fear that our societies will become only more atomised, more lonely and more selfish and that the ruling ideologies and theologies promote the vile nonsense that selfishness is rational, that greed is good, and that loyalty is for spaniels.

Meanwhile, we aid and assist this process of progressive anomie and irrelevance every time we say "he's just a friend".  Celebrate love, mes amis.  Don't believe or accept the Abrahamic piffle that love--physical and sexual--is wrong.

We are programmed to love one another.

Big day coming

They're supposed to make you happy.  But my upcoming big day isn't.  I'm conscious of my health, of all that's going wrong with me.....

And Sex at Dawn is depressing the hell out of me.  All that talk about declining testosterone.

First world problems!  I have enough food, a roof over my head, money to buy books, and it's spring!  Trees in blossom and bud, daffodils richly yellow everywhere.

Sometimes, though, these nostrums fail to convince.

Ah well.  Onwards and upwards.  En avant mes braves!

Normal plus

If you follow this blog and read my scribbles you will know that I believe that sex is (potentially) part of friendship as well as part of love.  In the current episodes of Majorca Flats, I'm exploring how a deep friendship can become an amitié amoureuse ( friends with benefits, in the far less felicitous English phrase.)

I've shown this Venn diagram before, or rather one like it, but I've amended the earlier version slightly.  I've been reading Sex at Dawn, which makes a compelling case for multiple marriage, for the notion that sex is about bonding a tribe together, about transforming conflict into friendship using sex.  Of course, it's not quite that simple.  It never is.  All the same ....

It's long been obvious to me that sex between husband and wife is not about procreation, whatever the religious troglodytes say.  It's about love, about bonding a couple together long enough that their children have a good start in life.  And, you will know from my constant mutterings about it, that gayness (which otherwise is bizarrely dysfunctional from an evolutionary point of view) is really about bonding men together.  Being gay, if you have children, is not dysfunctional in evolutionary terms.  And in a group which practises multiple marriage, gay men would almost certainly sometimes have sex with women, even if only as part of a threesome. In fact, gayness would help bind the tribe even closer.  Not only would there be links between men and women, but there would also be links between men and men.

What if our survival depended not on our competitiveness but on our co-operation, on our ability to work together?   What if the whole Hobbesian "nasty, brutish and short" view of primitive "hunter-gatherer" societies is plain wrong?  What if the dog-eat-dog perspective of human society is in fact based on the false premise that a brutal Darwinian personal (as opposed to group) competition was essential for our survival, whereas in fact, what was essential was our co-operation?

Love between men -- in addition to love between men and women -- may be central to the survival of our species, because it will transform politics from a zero-sum game to a win-win one.  Bisexuality is normal plus, not minus, as Mary Renault said over 50 years ago.  

I'll keep you posted as I think this thing through.