Sperm Wars
Page 21
The main differences between coupling positions concern not their influence on sperm retention but their influence on a couple’s vigilance and vulnerability during intercourse. As one of the men in Scene 21 discovered, it is much easier to defend some positions than others. Moreover, the rear-entry position allows at least the man to be more vigilant (Scene 34).
As far as sperm warfare is concerned, much more important than the position a man adopts for intercourse is the size of the sperm army he introduces into the woman. All of the men should have introduced as many sperm as possible, as it should have been clear that warfare was imminent. Failure to inject large numbers would have guaranteed a very poor performance.
However, the men did have a problem of strategy because there were two women to inseminate. Whereas they should have put a larger army into their first woman because a chance to inseminate their second woman could not be guaranteed, they should have avoided putting all of their sperm into the first because an opportunity to inseminate the second did seem likely. Precisely how many sperm they deployed will have depended in part on how long it was since they last had sex with each woman. Suppose it was forty-eight hours. In such a circumstance, we should expect the average man to inject about 450 million sperm into the first woman and about 350 million into the second. Not all men, however, are average.
If any of them had been a sperm war specialist, such as we met in Scene 19, he would have had an immediate advantage. His large testes and huge sperm armies could have won the day. But there could have been another anatomical feature separating the men – penis size, as well as testis size, could have made a difference.
Most people see the human penis as functional rather than aesthetic. What most people don’t realise is that there is more to its function than simply delivering sperm to the top of the vagina. The human penis is a very effective suction piston. Its shape is no accident, nor is the backward and forward thrusting that accompanies penetration. The penis has evolved its size and shape to remove any material that is already present in the woman’s vagina. In humans, it is particularly effective at removing any seminal pool or any as yet unejected flowback that may still be present. As the penis pushes forward, with any foreskin now pulled back off the glans on to the shaft, the smooth, blunt tip of the glans pushes through any semen or mucus in the vagina. As it then begins to pull back, two things happen: any material behind the vertical flanges at the back of the glans gets dragged back down the vagina; and any material ahead of the penis gets sucked further down the vagina, ready to be pushed through at the next forward thrust. Rapid backward and forward thrusting during intercourse thus sucks out any seminal material from a recent insemination. It may even help to remove some mucus and blocker sperm out of the cervix. The longer and more rapid the thrusting, the more the vagina is sucked clean of any previous insemination. The larger the penis, the more effective the removal.
As each man in Scene 21 tried to claim the prizes in front of him, success or failure depended in part on how he adjusted his behaviour according to his position in the queue for each woman’s body.
The stranger, the first to inseminate the younger girl, was in pole position – the man with maximum opportunity to deploy his army and make life difficult for all who followed him. Even if he had a chance to inseminate the other woman later, his situation would be less favourable. More than any of the other men, he had most to gain from injecting more of his sperm now (say six hundred million), and saving fewer (say two hundred million) for later. Because he was in pole position, he also needed to ejaculate quickly. Any delay might have given another male the chance to physically oust him and deposit his own sperm inside the girl first. It was because of this urgency that he ejaculated before the girl climaxed.
Having succeeded in being first to inseminate the girl, what the stranger should then have done, but didn’t, was try to delay the next man as long as possible. That way, he would have given his army maximum time to leave the seminal pool and deploy itself. (The man who was first to inseminate the older woman succeeded in doing just that, despite triggering aggression.) The girl the stranger had inseminated, having failed to climax while he was inside her, had other plans. She moved immediately from the stranger to the next man.
This man needed to get his penis inside the girl as quickly as possible after the stranger had finished – the sooner he could do this, the sooner he could pursue his own best strategy. He would, of course, have been helped in his urgency by having watched the girl’s previous intercourse. Like most men, he would have found the sight of a copulating couple sexually arousing (Scene 9). While he was waiting his turn his penis would have been erect and ready for action. Once inside her, in fact, he had a choice of strategy. He could have ejaculated really quickly, reducing as much as possible the stranger’s head start, but the disadvantage of this option was that he would have shot his sperm straight into the stranger’s seminal pool. So instead, he tried thrusting long and vigorously to remove that seminal pool first – and paid the price. Because of his delay, he was displaced and relegated from the possibility of being second to not inseminating her at all – at least, not in the first round.
Just as it is better to be first to inseminate a woman than second, so it is better to be second than third. Rather than wait his turn, therefore, the third man successfully engineered events to inseminate the girl second, not third. At the risk of aggression from the man he displaced, he moved in at just the right moment.
The fourth man then had no real alternative. Having been thwarted in his attempt to be the second to inseminate the other woman, he had to settle with being the third to inseminate the girl. Her vagina already contained a seminal pool from two different men. His only option was to try to remove as much of that pool as possible by long, vigorous thrusting. In this he succeeded, for the girl eventually felt her vagina becoming dry. So when he ejaculated, his pool had the girl’s vagina to itself. But the cost of removing the pool was that he lost time, and sperm from the first two men had precious extra seconds to swim into her cervix and prepare an ambush for the fourth man’s army.
It was because the best strategy for all the men was to try to inseminate each woman as soon as possible that the first round of sexual activity was frenetic and mildly aggressive. The second round, though, was quite different. As the afternoon wore on, both pace and tactics changed. Why?
It is important to realise that winning the first sperm battle inside the girl did not necessarily guarantee claiming the prize of fertilisation. It would do so only if she ovulated some time within the following two days, during which her tract would be monopolised by those first few armies. If she ovulated not two but four or five days after the orgy, the situation could be very different. So having done the best they could to win the first skirmishes, there was some value to the men in a longer-term back-up strategy.
By four or five days after the orgy, most of the sperm from the first skirmishes would be dead or dying. As time passed and ovulation still hadn’t happened, the chances of fertilisation being achieved by a sperm introduced into the girl relatively late in the orgy improved considerably – especially as these later sperm would also have been very young. They would be the last to lose their fertility inside the girl, which meant that if ovulation was delayed they would have a good chance of claiming the egg. Of course, such late sperm would have to run the gauntlet of the earlier blockers and killers, but nevertheless they might just succeed.
The fact that each man divided more or less all of his initial store of sperm between the two women during his first two inseminations would not prevent him from pursuing a back-up strategy. A man adds new, young killers and egg-getters to the back of his sperm queue at the rate of about twelve million per hour. In the five hours or so from first insemination to last on that abandoned afternoon, each man will have mobilised a further sixty million young sperm. The longer each waited to make his final insemination of each woman, the more young sperm he would have available.
Consciously, of course, none of the men knew anything of what their bodies were trying to do. As far as they were concerned, they simply felt different levels of excitement as one by one their opportunities came to enter and inseminate one or other woman. When their bodies judged rapid insemination to be best, they experienced intense excitement and virtually spontaneous ejaculation as soon as they were inside. When their bodies wanted to remove as many traces of the previous ejaculates as possible, they experienced only just enough excitement for erection. They had to work very hard at thrusting before their bodies finally gave them the tingle of loading and the climax of ejaculation. During spells when it was best to wait a while, they temporarily lost interest and their erections dwindled. Finally, when their bodies judged there was nothing to be gained from introducing further sperm into either woman, they lost interest totally.
In this complex interplay of reactions and interactions, the man with the best chance of victory would be the one whose body best timed his own inseminations, most interfered with other men’s inseminations, and best judged when and when not to couple and to thrust. It would be this man that the women’s bodies were seeking to father their child. The women’s role, in trying to further their own reproductive success, was to give each man maximum opportunity to prove himself – and maximum chance to make mistakes. In the first round of activity, the women benefited most by allowing the men their urgency and their thrusting. In the second round, they benefited most by allowing the men to play musical chairs with their vaginas.
In the second round, giving each man maximum opportunity to couple for long periods and to choose his moment, right or wrong, to ejaculate for the last time was a shrewd method of selection. By allowing such lengthy coupling without any other overt sexual activity, each woman was testing each man’s ability to guard her vagina from other men, maintain an erection, and judge the best moment to ejaculate – all qualities she would like in sons and grandsons.
During this long, slow, relaxed second phase, the women’s bodies will have experienced satisfaction simply at the feel of an erect penis inside them. Not until each body decided it had given the men maximum opportunity to show their prowess at sperm warfare would it have lost interest in simply coupling. During the short, frenetic first phase, though, and once or twice during the second, their bodies will have looked for a different satisfaction. Instead of the quiet, gentle feel of a penis in their vaginas, they will have looked for the right moment to begin a headlong rush into orgasm.
We do not know whether the older woman in the scene climaxed or not. The girl climaxed twice; once immediately she was entered by the second man and once right at the end, while she was impaled on the stranger. These two climaxes actually meant that, despite everything, she was still not giving all the men an equal chance at winning the sperm war inside her. She was still showing favouritism – and the person she favoured was the stranger. How she implemented this favouritism won’t be clear until Scene 25. For the moment, the question of interest is why she preferred the stranger.
Xenophilia, a preference for strangers, is a powerful factor in a woman’s choice of mate, particularly as a target for infidelity. In this, women are typical primates. A female red monkey, for instance, was observed allowing nearly every new male she met to inseminate her, while avoiding those she knew. Similarly, female macaques are known to go out of their way to allow male newcomers to their troop to have sex with them. They do this even though such newcomers occupy a very low rank and are often victimised by the resident males.
Of course, a female primate does not allow every male stranger to inseminate her. The males still have to satisfy her other criteria for mate choice. The point is that, if two males satisfy her criteria equally, she is more likely to prefer the stranger. It is generally thought that what the female is doing here is taking precautions for the future. If the new male eventually achieves a powerful position in the troop’s hierarchy, he is more likely to behave favourably towards her and her offspring if there is some chance he is the father.
We cannot tell whether the girl in Scene 21 preferred the stranger simply because he was a stranger, or because he satisfied her criteria better than the men she already knew. Whatever the reason, she did favour his sperm. First, she solicited sex from him both before and after any of the others. Secondly, she climaxed with him, and only him, during the second phase of sexual activity. It might seem contradictory, therefore, that she climaxed not with him, but with the man following him, during the first frenetic phase. But this is not in fact a contradiction – as will become clear in Scene 25.
8
The Climax of Influence
SCENE 22
Finger on the Button
The woman said goodnight and closed the door to her young daughter’s bedroom. Going into her own room, she undressed, put on her dressing-gown and went downstairs to pour herself a coffee. Her partner was out, the house was quiet, and she had at least two wonderful, peaceful hours entirely to herself. She switched on the television, picked up a magazine, and began idly flicking through the pages. Bliss.
Fifteen minutes passed, the television just a quiet noise in the background. For all the attention she gave it, the magazine, too, might as well have been in the background. The occasional image or headline caught her eye as she mechanically turned the pages, but essentially she was lost in her own thoughts – like butterflies, dancing around in her head, chasing each other in and out of her mind.
She wasn’t sure which came first, the thought that she could, or the tingle between her legs that told her she should. But suddenly the idea was there. It would be nice, but could she be bothered? A few more minutes went by. She put down the magazine and stared at the fire. Maybe she would. Even having decided, she waited until she had drunk the last of her now cool coffee. On her way upstairs she took the phone off the hook. Quietly, she walked past her daughter’s bedroom to her own, and bolted the door.
For a moment, she toyed with the idea of doing something different this time. Maybe she would look at the pictures she had secreted away, but she couldn’t quite remember where they were. Maybe she would put something in her vagina, but she couldn’t think of anything quickly to hand. Two or three years ago, she had used the handle of her partner’s table tennis bat, but then had spent days imagining splinters and germs. One day, she would buy herself a vibrator, if she could only think of somewhere to hide it.
In the end she decided not to bother with anything and simply to follow her usual routine. Lying down on the bed, she untied the belt of her dressing-gown so that it fell open. Her left hand went across to her right nipple. Her right hand went first to her mouth to collect saliva on her fingers, then down between her legs to her clitoris. She began to masturbate.
At first, she had difficulty focusing on her sensations. Other, random, non-sexual thoughts kept intruding. She tried several fantasies. Old favourites like being undressed, licked and caressed by another woman or being worked on by two men got her started, but didn’t take her very far. Then, after about five minutes of stimulation, a fantasy scene with a friend and her partner
finally started her sensations buzzing. Lubricant was spreading over her genitals and her fingers. Her breathing grew heavier and her heart began to race. The images had now gone and her focus was entirely on the sensation between her legs, under her moving fingers. As she massaged her clitoris more and more vigorously, first this way, then that, first with this rhythm, then with that, she felt the flush spreading over her chest, throat and face. Her body tensed, poised on the brink. Just one more touch of her moist, swollen clitoris, and she was there. In silent climax, her thighs and genitals spasmed, quickly at first, then at increasingly long intervals. Finally, she relaxed. It was done.
Not bad, she thought. Maybe 7 out of 10.
After lying on the bed in post-climactic torpor for a few minutes, she stood up and re-belted her dressing-gown. Downstairs, she put the phone back on the hook, poured herself a glass of milk and returned to the warmth of the sitting-room and the drone of the television. Warming herself in front of the fire, she tried to remember the last time she had masturbated. It didn’t happen that often, perhaps only three or four times a month. Maybe the last time was about ten days ago. When she did masturbate, the orgasm was usually fairly good. Certainly better than any her partner gave her. Occasionally, he could give her a 5 out of 10 with his hands, but with his penis it was usually about 2 out of 10. Actually, it was usually 0 out of 10 because she rarely climaxed during intercourse.
Masturbation had first added sexual colour to her life in her late teens. At first, her orgasms were pathetic, the merest tingles. She scarcely knew when she had climaxed – 1 out of 10 at the most. By the time she was twenty, however, she was often hitting 7.
Her partner didn’t know she masturbated. In fact, the only person who did know was the woman who, with her partner, had just starred in her fantasy. They had been friends for years, having met long before they had each met their respective partners. In one drunken conversation when they were twenty they had talked about masturbation. She had felt quite daring when she admitted that yes, she did ‘sometimes’, but was then totally deflated when her friend announced that recently she had been masturbating virtually every night. If she didn’t, she claimed, it was difficult to sleep. This had seemed particularly surprising because at the time her friend had been suffering from a prolonged bout of cystitis. The disease had invaded her left kidney and was proving difficult to shift.