Why Is Sex Fun?

by Jared Diamond

  That’s the case with most of our familiar North American and European birds: males and females are monogamous, and they share in caring for the young. It’s also approximately true for humans, as we know so well. Human single-parenthood is difficult enough, even in these days of supermarket shopping and babysitters for hire. In ancient hunter-gatherer days, a child orphaned by either its mother’s or its father’s death faced reduced chances of survival. The father as well as the mother desirous of passing on genes finds it a matter of self-interest to care for the child. Hence most men have provided food, protection, and housing for their spouse and kids. The result is our human social system of nominally monogamous married couples, or occasionally of harems of women committed to one affluent man. Essentially the same considerations apply to gorillas, gibbons, and the other minority mammals practicing male parental care.

  Yet that familiar arrangement of coparenthood does not end the battle of the sexes. It does not necessarily dissolve the tension between the mother’s and father’s interests, arising from their unequal investments before birth. Even among those mammal and bird species that provide paternal care, males try to see how little care they can get away with and still have the offspring survive owing mainly to the mother’s efforts. Males also try to impregnate other males’ mates, leaving the unfortunate cuckolded male to care unknowingly for the cuckolder’s offspring. Males become justifiably paranoid about their mates’ behavior.

  An intensively studied and fairly typical example of those built-in tensions of coparenthood is the European bird species known as the Pied Flycatcher. Most flycatcher males are nominally monogamous, but many try to be polygynous, and quite a few succeed. Again, it is instructive to devote a few pages of this book on human sexuality to another example involving birds, because (as we’ll see) the behavior of some birds is strikingly like that of humans but does not arouse the same moral indignation in us.

  Here is how polygyny works for Pied Flycatchers. In the spring a male finds a good nest hole, stakes out his territory around it, woos a female, and copulates with her. When this female (termed his primary female) lays her first egg, the male feels confident that he has fertilized her, that she’ll be busy incubating his eggs, and that she won’t be interested in other males and is temporarily sterile anyway. Hence the male finds another nest hole nearby, courts another female (termed his secondary female), and copulates with her.

  When that secondary female begins laying, the male feels confident that he has fertilized her as well. Around that same time, the eggs of his primary female are starting to hatch. The male returns to her, devotes most of his energy to feeding her chicks and devotes less or no energy to feeding the chicks of his secondary female. Numbers tell the cruel story: the male averages fourteen deliveries of food per hour to the primary female’s nest but only seven deliveries of food per hour to the secondary female’s nest. If enough nest holes are available, most mated males try to acquire a secondary female, and up to 39 percent succeed.

  Obviously, this system produces both winners and losers. Since the numbers of male and female flycatchers are roughly equal, and since each female has one mate, for every bigamous male there must be one unfortunate male with no mate. The big winners are the polygynous males, who sire on the average 8.1 flycatcher chicks each year (adding up the contributions of both mates), compared to only 5.5 chicks sired by monogamous males. Polygynous males tend to be older and bigger than unmated males, and they succeed in staking out the best territories and best nest holes in the best habitats. As a result, their chicks end up 10 percent heavier than the chicks of other males, and those big chicks have a better chance of surviving than do smaller chicks.

  The biggest losers are the unfortunate unmated males, who fail to acquire any mates and sire no offspring at all (at least in theory—more on that later). The other losers are the secondary females, who have to work much harder than primary females to feed their young. The former end up making twenty food deliveries per hour to the nest, compared with only thirteen for the latter. Since the secondary females thus exhaust themselves, they may die earlier. Despite her herculean efforts, one hardworking secondary female can’t bring as much food to the nest as a relaxed primary female and a male working together. Hence some chicks starve, and the secondary females end up with fewer surviving chicks than do primary females (on the average, 3.4 versus 5.4 chicks). In addition, the surviving chicks of secondary females are smaller than the chicks of primary females, and hence are less likely to survive the rigors of winter and migration.

  Given these cruel statistics, why should any female accept the fate of being the “other woman”? Biologists used to speculate that secondary females choose their fate, reasoning that the neglected second spouse of a good male is better off than the sole spouse of a lousy male with a poor territory. (Rich married men have been known to make similar pitches to prospective mistresses.) It turns out, though, that the secondary females do not accept their fate knowingly but are tricked into it.

  The key to this deception is the care that polygynous males take to set up their second household a couple of hundred yards from their first household, with many other males’ territories intervening. It’s striking that polygynous males don’t court a second spouse at any of dozens of potential nest holes near the first nest, even though they would thereby reduce their commuting time between nests, have more time available to feed their young, and reduce their risk of being cuckolded while en route. The conclusion seems inescapable that polygynous males accept the disadvantage of a remote second household in order to deceive the prospective secondary mate and conceal from her the existence of the first household. Life’s exigencies make a female Pied Flycatcher especially vulnerable to being deceived. If she discovers after egg-laying that her mate is polygynous, it’s too late for her to do anything about it. She’s better off staying with those eggs than deserting them, seeking a new mate from the males now available (most of them are would-be bigamists anyway), and hoping the new mate will prove to be any better than the former one.

  The remaining strategy of male Pied Flycatchers has been dressed up by male biologists in the morally neutral-sounding term “mixed reproductive strategy” (abbreviated MRS). What this means is that mated male Pied Flycatchers don’t just have a mate: they also sneak around trying to inseminate the mates of other males. If they find a female whose mate is temporarily absent, they try to copulate with her and often succeed. Either they approach her singing loudly or they sneak up to her quietly; the latter method succeeds more often.

  The scale of this activity staggers our human imagination. In act 1 of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, the Don’s servant, Leporello, boasts to Donna Elvira that Don Giovanni has seduced 1,003 women in Spain alone. That sounds impressive until you realize how long-lived we humans are. If Don Giovanni’s conquests took place over thirty years, he seduced only one Spanish woman every eleven days. In contrast, if a male Pied Flycatcher temporarily leaves his mate (for instance, to find food), then on the average another male enters his territory in ten minutes and copulates with his mate in thirty-four minutes. Twenty-nine percent of all observed copulations prove to be EPCs (extra-pair copulations), and an estimated 24 percent of all nestlings are “illegitimate.” The intruder-seducer usually proves to be the boy next door (a male from an adjoining territory).

  The big loser is the cuckolded male, for whom EPCs and MRSs are an evolutionary disaster. He squanders a whole breeding season out of his short life by feeding chicks that do not pass on his genes. Although the male perpetrator of an EPC might seem to be the big winner, a little reflection makes it clear that working out the male’s balance sheet is tricky. While you are off philandering, other males have the chance to philander with your mate. EPC attempts rarely succeed if a female is within ten yards of her mate, but the chances of success rise steeply if her mate is more distant than ten yards. That makes MRSs especially risky for polygynous males, who spend much time in their other territory or commutin
g between their two territories. The polygynous males try to pull off EPCs themselves and on the average make one attempt every twenty-five minutes, but once every eleven minutes some other male is sneaking into their own territory to try for an EPC. In half of all EPC attempts, the cuckolded male flycatcher is off in pursuit of another female flycatcher at the very moment when his own mate is under siege.

  These statistics would seem to make MRSs a strategy of dubious value to male Pied Flycatchers, but they are clever enough to minimize their risks. Until they have fertilized their own mate, they stay within two or three yards of her and guard her diligently. Only when she has been inseminated do they go off philandering.

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  Now that we have surveyed the varying outcomes of the battle of the sexes in animals, let’s see how humans fit into this broader picture. While human sexuality is unique in other respects, it is quite ordinary when it comes to the battle of the sexes. Human sexuality resembles that of many other animal species whose offspring are internally fertilized and require biparental care. It thereby differs from that of most species whose young are externally fertilized and given only uniparental care or even no care at all.

  In humans, as in all other mammalian and bird species except brush turkeys, an egg that has just been fertilized is incapable of independent survival. In fact, the length of time until the offspring can forage and care for itself is at least as long for humans as for any other animal species, and far longer than for the vast majority of animal species. Hence parental care is indispensable. The only question is, which parent will provide that care or will both parents provide it?

  For animals, we saw that the answer to that question depends on the relative size of the mother’s and father’s obligate investment in the embryo, their other opportunities foreclosed by their choice to provide parental care, and their confidence in their paternity or maternity. Looking at the first of those factors, the human mother has a greater obligate investment than the human father. Already at the time of fertilization a human egg is much larger than a human sperm, though that discrepancy disappears or is reversed if the egg is compared to an entire ejaculate of sperm. After fertilization the human mother is committed to up to nine months of time and energy expenditure, followed by a period of lactation that lasted about four years under the conditions of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that characterized all human societies until the rise of agriculture about ten thousand years ago. As I recall well myself from watching how fast the food disappeared from our refrigerator when my wife was nursing our sons, human lactation is energetically very expensive. The daily energy budget of a nursing mother exceeds that of most men with even a moderately active lifestyle and is topped among women only by marathon runners in training. Hence there is no way that a just-fertilized woman can rise from the conjugal bed, look her spouse or lover in the eye, and tell him, “You’ll have to take care of this embryo if you want it to survive, because I won’t!” Her consort would recognize this for an empty bluff.

  The second factor affecting the relative interest of men and women in child care is their difference in other opportunities thereby foreclosed. Because of the woman’s time commitment to pregnancy and (under hunter-gatherer conditions) lactation, there is nothing she can do during that time that would permit her to produce another offspring. The traditional nursing pattern was to nurse many times each hour, and the resulting release of hormones tended to cause lactational amenorrhea (cessation of menstrual cycles) for up to several years. Hence hunter-gatherer mothers had children at intervals of several years. In modern society a woman can conceive again within a few months of delivery, either by forgoing breast-feeding in favor of bottle-feeding or by nursing the infant only every few hours (as modern women tend to do for convenience). Under those conditions the woman soon resumes menstrual cycles. Nevertheless, even modern women who eschew breast-feeding and contraception rarely give birth at intervals of less than a year, and few women give birth to more than a dozen children over the course of their lives. The record lifetime number of offspring for a woman is a mere sixty-nine (a nineteenth-century Moscow woman who specialized in triplets), which sounds stupendous until compared with the numbers achieved by some men to be mentioned below.

  Hence multiple husbands do not help a woman to produce more babies, and very few human societies regularly practice polyandry. In the only such society that has received much study, the Tre-ba of Tibet, women with two husbands have on the average no more children than women with one husband. The reasons for Tre-ba polyandry are instead related to the Tre-ba system of land tenure: Tre-ba brothers often marry the same woman in order to avoid subdividing a small landholding.

  Thus, a woman who “chooses” to care for her offspring is not thereby foreclosing other spectacular reproductive opportunities. In contrast, a polyandrous female phalarope produces on the average only 1.3 fledged chicks with one mate, but 2.2 chicks if she can corner two mates, and 3.7 chicks if she can corner three. A woman also differs in that respect from a man, whose theoretical ability to impregnate all the women of the world we have already discussed. Unlike the genetic unprofitability of polyandry for Tre-ba women, polygyny paid off well for nineteenth-century Mormon men, whose average lifetime output of children increased from a mere seven children for Mormon men with one wife to sixteen or twenty children for men with two or three wives, respectively, and to twenty-five children for Mormon church leaders, who averaged five wives.

  Even these benefits of polygyny are modest compared to the hundreds of children sired by modern princes able to commandeer the resources of a centralized society for rearing their offspring without directly providing child care themselves. A nineteenth-century visitor to the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad, an Indian prince with an especially large harem, happened to be present during an eight-day period when four of the Nizam’s wives gave birth, with nine more births anticipated for the following week. The record for lifetime number of offspring sired is credited to Morocco’s Emperor Ismail the Bloodthirsty, father of seven hundred sons and an uncounted but presumably comparable number of daughters. These numbers make it clear that a man who fertilizes one woman and then devotes himself to child care may by that choice foreclose enormous alternative opportunities.

  The remaining factor tending to make child care genetically less rewarding for men than for women is the justified paranoia about paternity that men share with the males of all other internally fertilized species. A man who opts for child care runs the risk that, unbeknownst to him, his efforts are transmitting the genes of a rival. This biological fact is the underlying cause for a host of repulsive practices by which men of various societies have sought to increase their confidence in paternity by restricting their wife’s opportunity for sex with other men. Among such practices are high bride prices only for brides delivered as proven virgin goods; traditional adultery laws that define adultery by the marital status only of the participating woman (that of the participating man being irrelevant); chaperoning or virtual imprisonment of women; female “circumcision” (clitoridectomy) to reduce a woman’s interest in initiating sex, whether marital or extramarital; and infibulation (suturing a woman’s labia majora nearly shut so as to make intercourse impossible while the husband is away).

  All three factors—sex differences in obligate parental investment, alternative opportunities foreclosed by child care, and confidence in parenthood—contribute to making men much more prone than women to desert a spouse and child. However, a man is not like a male hummingbird, male tiger, or the male of many other animal species, who can safely fly or walk away immediately after copulation, secure in the knowledge that his deserted female sex partner will be able to handle all the ensuing work of promoting the survival of his genes. Human infants virtually need biparental care, especially in traditional societies. While we shall see in chapter 5 that activities represented as male parental care may actually have more complex functions than meet the eye, many or most men in traditional societies do
undoubtedly provide services to their children and spouse. Those services include: acquiring and delivering food; offering protection, not only against predators but also against other men who are sexually interested in a mother and regard her offspring (their potential stepchildren) as a competing genetic nuisance; owning land and making its produce available; building a house, clearing a garden, and performing other useful labor; and educating children, especially sons, so as to increase the children’s chances of survival.

  Sex differences in the genetic value of parental care to the parent provide a biological basis for the all-too-familiar differing attitudes of men and women toward extramarital sex. Because a human child virtually required paternal care in traditional human societies, extramarital sex is most profitable for a man if it is with a married woman whose husband will unknowingly rear the resulting child. Casual sex between a man and a married woman tends to increase the man’s output of children, but not the woman’s. That decisive difference is reflected in men’s and women’s differing motivations. Attitude surveys in a wide variety of human societies around the world have shown that men tend to be more interested than women in sexual variety, including casual sex and brief relationships. That attitude is readily understandable because it tends to maximize transmission of the genes of a man but not of a woman. In contrast, the motivation of a woman participating in extramarital sex is more often self-reported as marital dissatisfaction. Such a woman tends to be searching for a new lasting relationship: either a new marriage or a lengthy extramarital relationship with a man better able than her husband to provide resources or good genes.