Sperm Wars

by Robin Baker

  Over the following weekend, she had routine sex with her partner only once, on Saturday, and again he obliged her with an orgasm during foreplay. Early Sunday morning, just before she woke, she had a nocturnal, her fifth orgasm that week. However, it was the last exciting thing to happen that day. The remainder was spent travelling, on the long drive to and from her parents, who had volunteered to look after her two daughters while she was away. By the time she and her partner had returned home and she had packed, it was late. He still wanted to have sex. ‘One for the road,’ as he put it. But she was tired and managed to put him off. On Monday, she left for the airport and her long-awaited three-day conference trip abroad. Her companions were to be her boss and two other colleagues, one of whom was her new lover.

  Actually, ‘lover’ was an exaggeration, or at least premature. They had known each other for nearly a year, ever since she had joined the company. It was her first job since the birth of her younger daughter. Slowly, they had grown close. Neither had ever found it easy to make friends with their own sex, but in each other they had found the nearest they were likely to get to a ‘best friend’. In their early thirties, both had young children and both were now in long-standing but increasingly stale relationships. He was even convinced that his partner was having an affair. Within a few months of meeting, they had freely acknowledged their physical attraction to each other. He had tried somewhat halfheartedly to do something about it, but each time he suggested a plan, she had found some excuse. It hadn’t been difficult.

  They had also acknowledged that they could never live together. They were both opinionated and competitive, with strong likes and dislikes. Their relationship worked only as long as they talked about their separate problems, their separate aims, and their separate wishes. Whenever they talked about principles, attitudes or just life in general, they would argue. She could not imagine a home without at least three cats; he hated cats. She was pale and prone to sunburn; he was swarthy and worshipped the sun, often spending hours naked in his secluded garden. She was aggressively vegetarian; he could not imagine life without meat. She was obsessively tidy; he still had the air of an adolescent, putting his feet on tables and dropping his crushed beer cans on the floor. She was provocative and mischievous, a tease; he was gullible, but strong-willed, ambitious and obstinate. They each found the other’s traits to be irritating but attractive, each seeing in the other characteristics which moderated their own polarity.

  Their relationship had changed six weeks ago. On that day, in a field in searing sun, she had given him oral sex and promised that one day she would have his baby. True, she had done so in part as a ploy to avoid having sex with him there and then, but she had meant it. She just hadn’t expected the opportunity to arise quite so soon. Then, as early as two weeks after her promise, they had been asked by their boss to accompany him on a business trip abroad. Her future lover had then made her promise that if they had the chance, they would have sex while they were away.

  Even so, she still didn’t give in easily. He visited her hotel room almost as soon as they arrived early on the Monday afternoon, but she sidestepped his advances, pointing out that this was their only chance to see the city during the day. Together, they mingled with summer tourists in the streets and on the canals and enjoyed each other’s company, watching the world parade past as they sat and sipped at pavement bars. By late afternoon, they felt extremely close as they arrived back at the hotel. But still she resisted sex, saying she only just had time to get ready before they met up with their boss for the evening.

  The meal and the socialising were a strain because they had to maintain a façade of distance. They had both agreed that nobody must suspect they were so close. It was midnight when they arrived back at the hotel. She pointed out that the next day would be very busy. She tried to persuade him that they needed a good night’s sleep and that maybe they should wait until tomorrow night. But this time, he would not be deterred.

  She had seen him naked before, but it was the first time he had seen or really touched any of the more exciting parts of her body. By the time they were both naked, because still she teased and delayed, he was on the verge of ejaculation. With scarcely any foreplay, he tried to enter her. She objected strongly to his urgency, but he was now so desperate that he virtually forced himself inside her. He ejaculated immediately, with scarcely a thrust.

  Once he had withdrawn, she chastised him. He apologised and said that next time he would be more considerate. She said there wouldn’t be a next time if he behaved like that. But she didn’t throw him out of her bed and within fifteen minutes he had stroked, kissed, licked and massaged her into a climax. Within the hour, his penis was back inside her for the second time that night, and after a long and sensuous intercourse they climaxed more or less together.

  Half-way through the night, as a sperm war was being fought inside her body, she told him to go back to his room. When he protested, she said she was worried about them being discovered together in the morning. Over the next two days, they maintained a professional distance, both during the day and while socialising in the evenings. But on both nights they spent a few hours in bed together before she made him return to his room. By the time they left to fly home they had had intercourse six times, and on three of those occasions she had climaxed while he was inside her. Her body was full of her lover’s sperm, from cervix to oviduct – and she was only forty-eight hours from ovulation.

  She arrived home late that Thursday night, feeling very tired, very guilty and a little nervous. She bathed, avoided her partner’s advances by pleading tiredness and nausea, and slept. Sometime during the night, she had a nocturnal.

  At work, on Friday, she tried to avoid her lover as much as possible. He sought her out at every opportunity and tested her ingenuity to its limit. Eventually, when he tried to snatch a kiss, she rounded on him. Their trip had been fantastic, she told him, but now they were back things had to return to normal. She didn’t want to hurt her partner and she didn’t want to risk discovery. They had had a good time and it seemed they had got away with it. She wanted it to stay that way. If he wanted to remain close to her, he had to forget sex. A friend she needed, a lover she didn’t. She felt guilty at the look of hurt on his face as she spoke, but her tirade worked. After that, he made no further sexual advances.

  That evening, the last she and her partner were to have on their own before collecting their daughters, she bathed, masturbated, and then appeared naked in their lounge urging her partner to give her another baby. They had intercourse on the floor, just the once, and she pretended to climax with him. That pleased him because these days she rarely climaxed with him inside her. They then sat and relaxed in the warmth of the summer’s evening, a cat on each lap. As she gave him the public version of her business trip, sperm warfare resumed inside her body and continued all night. But this war was very one-sided.

  As they drove to her parents’ the next day, a sperm entered the egg which had just arrived in one of her oviducts. She had conceived, and with her help her lover’s sperm had won both battles, and the war. She had kept her promise to him.

  This, of course, is the third time we have met this woman and her lover. We watched them in a hay-field on a sunny afternoon as she gave him oral sex and promised one day to have his baby (Scene 20). We also followed them that same evening as they returned home to their respective partners and had oral sex (Scene 10). Now, we have just watched the woman’s body manipulate sperm warfare in a way that made sure she kept her promise. Her third child would inherit her lover’s looks, drive and ability in combination with her own cunning and intelligence. Her body had decided that as the genetic father of her third child, her lover was the best compromise around (Scene 18). In Scenes 22 to 25 we have unravelled, step by step, the function of the female orgasm. We have seen the effects of having a masturbatory or nocturnal orgasm in the days before intercourse, and of not having one; of climaxing, and of not climaxing, while a seminal pool is at the top
of the vagina. In this most recent scene we witnessed a woman’s body putting all of these orgasms together and biasing sperm warfare in her own best interests. As a result, she conceived a child who was fathered by her lover, not her partner. This move will have enhanced her reproductive success – as long as her body was correct in judging that a child by her lover would be more successful reproductively than a further child by her partner.

  Having reached its decision over the best father for its next child, her body set about engineering paternity. It did so by generating and orchestrating a sequence of urges to climax and not to climax. Her body dictated the sequence and timing of these urges according to who was the next most likely inseminator. We can now discuss the details of this and other such sequences. Of all of the weapons used by a woman in her pursuit of reproductive success, her orgasm sequence may well be the most important, particularly when she promotes sperm warfare.

  This is the second scene in which a woman has increased her masturbation rate in the context of infidelity. In Scene 6, the woman masturbated more often than usual in the week before infidelity with her ex-boyfriend. At first glance, such events seem simply to reflect an increase in sexual excitement – the anticipation of sex with someone other than a partner. Closer inspection, however, shows that this is too simple an explanation. The women in the two scenes masturbated or had nocturnals only at times when, although infidelity was on the horizon, the person most likely to inseminate them next was their partner. On no occasion in these two scenes did they have these orgasms when their very next intercourse was likely to be with their lover. In this, women differ from men (Scene 13).

  Of course, women do have nocturnal and masturbatory orgasms just before having sex with a lover, but these are often ‘mistakes’. In Scene 26, the woman had a nocturnal on the Saturday night, yet as it turned out her next insemination was by her lover on Monday night. At the time she had her nocturnal, though the next most likely intercourse was the ‘one for the road’ suggested by her partner on Sunday night. As it happened, this insemination never materialised. Her nocturnal was a ‘mistake’, but one she could later correct, as we shall see.

  So what is this link between infidelity and the frequency of nocturnal and masturbatory orgasms if it is not simply sexual excitement? And why, if they are a response to the anticipation of infidelity, are these orgasms more likely to occur just before sex with the partner rather than just before sex with the lover?

  It is because whenever a woman anticipates sperm warfare, she more often than not has some preference over who should win. Usually, that preference is for the lover, not the partner – otherwise, she would not risk all the potential costs of infidelity (Scenes 8 to 11). In this scene, just as in Scene 6, we have watched a woman who, in anticipation of sperm warfare, subconsciously prepared the battlefield to favour her lover’s army.

  In the current scene, the woman’s body had decided that the lover would be a better genetic father to her child than her current partner, but a worse long-term partner. Her body’s ploy, therefore, was to collect sperm for fertilisation from the lover, but not to do anything else that might cause her to lose her current partner. This meant she would have to have sex with her partner both before and after her infidelity. Otherwise, his suspicions would be aroused. Consequently, she could not avoid sperm warfare. In any case, her body would not want to miss out on the benefits of promoting such warfare (Scenes 17 and 21). Her best option, therefore, was to make life as easy as possible for her lover’s army while still giving it a contest to win. As events turned out, her body engineered the situation perfectly.

  The woman’s body initiated its strategy a week before the anticipated infidelity. Its aim was to allow routine sex with her partner to continue undisturbed, while ensuring that his army would be as small as possible when the troops were eventually called to battle. Her body’s technique was first to make her feel like masturbating a day or so before each anticipated routine intercourse, and this strengthened her cervical filter. Then, during each routine sexual episode, it made her feel like an orgasm during foreplay. This orgasm strengthened her filter still further.

  In the event, the woman and her partner had two episodes of routine sex during the critical week before her infidelity. On neither occasion did she feel like an orgasm during intercourse itself. So the result of her body’s preparations was that on neither occasion did she retain many of her partner’s sperm. Her nocturnal on the Saturday night was a continuation of her body’s strategy. There was a strong possibility that her partner would want sex on the Sunday night, just before she left on her trip. The nocturnal prepared a strong filter, ensuring that even if he had insisted, she would still have managed to keep down the number of his sperm in her tract – especially if she also had yet another foreplay orgasm during the episode. As it was, she managed to avoid insemination by her partner on the Sunday night altogether.

  When the woman was eventually inseminated by her lover on the Monday night, she contained only a small army of her partner’s sperm, just as her body had planned. However, she still had a reasonably powerful cervical filter, not least because of the unnecessary nocturnal on the Saturday night. She tried to delay the first intercourse with her lover for another day to give her partner’s army time to decrease in size still further, but her lover would not be delayed any longer.

  Because of the strength of her filter, when she did have sex with her lover for the first time, her body felt like an orgasm during intercourse. That way, she could correct the ‘mistake’ of her earlier nocturnal preparation and bypass her filter. Her lover, though, was pursuing a strategy of his own. Having been thwarted in his attempts to have sex with her on so many previous occasions, his absolute priority was to ejaculate inside her. When at last she allowed penetration, he ejaculated as quickly as he possibly could, before she changed her mind yet again and made him withdraw.

  His urgency prevented her body from bypassing her strong filter during intercourse, and at first few of his sperm managed to escape from the seminal pool into the cervix. But, with his cooperation, she climaxed from his caresses fifteen minutes later. With the seminal pool still in position, his huge army now bypassed her filter and flooded her cervix and womb. The lover had got the best of both worlds – rapid insemination before she changed her mind, and a high level of sperm retention. And she had satisfied her body’s urge to collect as many sperm from this man as possible. As long as his army was reasonably competent, he should now easily defeat the remnants of her partner’s small and ageing army.

  An hour later, when the woman’s lover offered to top her up with a small army of young sperm – his second inseminate – she accepted and they cooperated to produce an intercourse orgasm. This bypassed the filter in her cervix – although that filter was now substantial, containing blockers from both men – with the result that a high proportion of the lover’s young small army reached her cervix and womb. The combination of his first relatively huge army and his second small, young army had an easy victory while she later slept.

  Over the next two days, he kept her topped up with young sperm – and on half of the occasions she bypassed her filter with an intercourse orgasm. On her return home, she contained a large and powerful army from her lover. Her body’s aim was now to engineer a strengthening of her filter before allowing her partner to inseminate her. She succeeded. First, she avoided sex with him any sooner than she had to without arousing his suspicions. Secondly, she had a nocturnal. Thirdly, unable to rely on his cooperation over a foreplay orgasm after such an absence, she took the safer option the next evening and masturbated – then immediately solicited sex.

  This was to be the insemination that deceived her partner into thinking he could be the father of any child conceived that month. She felt no urge to climax during intercourse, only an urge to pretend that she did. As a result, few of her partner’s sperm made it through her cervix into the battlefield. And those that did would be out-competed by the numerical superiority
of her lover’s killers and egg-getters. There was never any doubt that this particular war would be won by the woman’s lover.

  Her strategy worked very successfully, but of course none of it was achieved at a conscious level. Her body achieved its aims by subconsciously orchestrating the sequence of moods, motivations and responses that would best serve her reproductive interests. Consciously, she will simply have relished her sexual pleasures, her excitements and her fears as she cleverly negotiated the slalom of infidelity and deception.

  The behaviour and responses of this woman during her infidelity were fairly typical. In Britain, the average frequency of nocturnal and masturbatory orgasms for women during phases of fidelity is just under one per week (Scenes 22 and 23). During phases of infidelity, the rate increases to about every other day. These orgasms occur most often when women anticipate that their next intercourse will be with their partner. When they anticipate it will be with their lover, they occur less often.

  Women also change their likelihood of having an intercourse orgasm during infidelity. On average, they are more likely to climax during or after intercourse with a lover (33 per cent of occasions) than they are during or after routine intercourse with their partner (22 per cent of occasions). Thus a lover’s army receives assistance in entering the battlefield more often than does a partner’s.

  These differences mean that on the whole not only does a partner encounter a stronger filter than a lover, he is also less likely to receive help in bypassing that filter. On average, the advantage enjoyed by a lover in sperm warfare is relatively large. When a woman is not being unfaithful, she helps her partner to place a large sperm army inside her on 55 per cent of occasions. When she is being unfaithful, she helps him on only 38 per cent of occasions, but helps her lover on 65 per cent of occasions – nearly twice as often.