Hard drive

Human males have yet to evolve flesh-eating sperm like some animals, but their biological imperative for sex has made them into the creatures they are today.

By Tracy Clark-Flory

Read more: Sex, Men, Evolution, Science, Biology, Nature, Monogamy, Life, Tracy Clark-Flory

June 13, 2008 | The animal kingdom is crawling with kink: threesomes, sadomasochism, spontaneous sex changes, and coital decapitation, for starters. There are also male ducks with corkscrew-shaped penises and sea creatures that shoot acidic semen leaving their partner pregnant and covered in burns. Nature even has its own date rape drug: the Great Barrier Reef's yellow slug delivers a sedative to its desired mate with a quick penile stab.

It's all in the name of successfully passing along genes -- much like these creatures' human counterparts. The male of our species has yet to evolve flesh-eating sperm, but their biological imperative to sow their seeds has led to similarly mind-boggling behavior, like paying $2,150 for seduction seminars. Faye Flam, a science reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, charts this carnal quest in "The Score: How the Quest for Sex Has Shaped the Modern Man," and details the trade-off experienced by most males: They invest less than females in reproduction, but pay for it (among humans, sometimes literally) by working harder to have sex in the first place. After all, some male mammals need only ejaculate, while the female is responsible for gestation and nursing.

In addition to engaging in pop-culture discussions (like Christopher Hitchens' assertion that women aren't funny) and scientific meditations, Flam also infiltrates a pickup artist's boot camp, tours the world's only penis museum (Iceland's Institute of Phallology), and grills experts on the sex lives of our Stone Age ancestors. There's very little that escapes her survey of men's sexual selves, including pornography, monogamy, parenting and homosexuality.

Salon spoke with Flam by phone from her desk in the Philadelphia Inquirer's newsroom.

In your book, you mention the idea that everybody -- including animals -- wants to be the male when it comes to sex. Why is that?

It has to do with a couple of common male traits that run through the whole biological world. One of them is that the sperm are smaller than the egg and for most male animals that translates into not having to invest as much energy or work into the babies. Everybody wants to do less work. It's a universal laziness.

You really only have a chance to see that sexual choice play out in these crazy sea worms that can be either male or female. Before they have sex, they fight it out, and the winner always plays the male role. Most other animals don't get the chance to fight for the right to be the male during reproduction.

There are a few animals that turn the tables and the female sticks the male with all the work. More often than not, though, the females not only have to either incubate the babies or create the eggs, but they also end up stuck with more of the work. The males can pass on their genes without investing quite as much.

What about the question of pleasure. Does that play into the male sexual advantage?

It's hard to say what is going on in animals' heads when they're having sex. Who knows whether it's any more pleasurable for these sea worms -- if they feel any pleasure -- to be the male during sex, and that's why they fight over the position or whether it's just an instinct.

One of the funny things about sex is that we have an urge to do it, we want it, but it doesn't always turn out that well. You can chase and chase after someone, but it doesn't necessarily mean the sex will be particularly pleasurable. That may be something that's going on with a lot of men. But they chase it anyway.

Your book mentions the idea that sexual anticipation, rather than realization, might give us greater pleasure.

They're doing a lot of research in an area called neuro-economics where they're looking at what really gives people pleasure and why we spend our money the way we do. Apparently, an animal's brain really reacts and the pleasure centers turn on during the period when he's anticipating a reward, not when he actually gets it. That's a growing area of research right now and it applies well to sex.

Pickup artist Mystery's "Venusian Arts" -- which you point out should technically be called "Venereal Arts" -- loom large in your book. Does it have a biological basis?

The pickup artists illustrate a couple of things really well. First, they illustrate the idea that because males invest less in offspring, their success in evolutionary terms is more tenuous. Males are more likely to get completely frozen out of reproduction. So they are likely to end up evolving to chase after sex in a way that females might not. The pickup artists illustrate the way that men are likely to invest a lot of their money and time in going after plain old sex.

Second, there were some things they did that psychologists believe might really work -- and they would probably work for females, too, in some cases. Their concept of playing hard to get was tested in a lab. There was a speed-dating setup in which people pretty successfully guessed how picky their opposite-sex counterparts were. The participants they liked the most were the ones they thought were the pickiest. So, projecting that you're picky could actually be helpful.

The pickup artists also attempt to play on people's tendencies to copy each other. They would show up somewhere with a lot of female friends, so that women would look at them and think, "Wow, he must be popular. Those women must see something in him." That's also something that works on some animals. A researcher actually surrounded male birds with fake female birds, and the real females went for the males surrounded by decoys. The females were attuned to thinking they had to have what everybody else wanted.

You mention some people's desire to return to the "simple" days of hunting and gathering, when men and women had strict sex roles. How accurate is this popular perception of those times?

I had a long interview with an archaeologist, James Adovasio, who co-wrote a book on the topic called "The Invisible Sex." He exploded all of these myths. From what we know from archaeological records, and modern people that hunt and gather, women were pretty independent. They could get fish, small animals and plants on their own. They really weren't dependent on men -- at least to eat, anyway. The idea that somehow in the old days the men's hunting was so terribly important is a myth. Our picture of prehistoric man was built up during the late 1800s, so it was a reflection of what men thought life should be more than what it really was.

That opens the way for a lot of interesting evolutionary forces. If women aren't dependent on men then they can afford to be picky, they can decide to only mate with the men who are skilled singers, attractive or good fathers. It puts men under an evolutionary pressure of a different kind.

Next page: Alan Alda, testosterone and artificial insemination