Sperm Wars

by Robin Baker

  As it turned out, his fear was justified. The girl wasn’t lying and, moreover, was determined to have the baby. When he refused to pay her blackmail demand, her father sued him for maintenance. He denied both paternity and ever having had sex with her, but was legally forced into a test of paternity. The publicity surrounding the case encouraged the two boys, now aged fourteen, to decide there was money to be made from selling their story. They accused the teacher and his lover of forcing them to take part in homosexual orgies against their will.

  The teacher had judged his partner correctly. She stood by him during the early stages of the paternity case but left him when the homosexual scandal broke, taking their two daughters back to her own country. He never saw them again. Within a week of her departure, the paternity test confirmed him as the father of the schoolgirl’s child. Following his arrest he was tried and found guilty of having sexual intercourse with minors, both male and female. He spent only a short time in jail, but it was long enough for him to contract HIV from homosexual activity with other inmates. Unemployed and penniless, he died of AIDS just before his thirty-seventh birthday.

  Most readers of this book will be exclusively heterosexual. After a period of sexual exploration and mate selection during late adolescence, they will reproduce within the context of one or two successive long-term relationships. The men will have sex over their lifetime with about a dozen women – and the women with about eight men. On average, they will produce two children and eventually four grandchildren.

  A minority, though, will pursue their reproductive success in a quite different way. A few will be bisexual, spending phases of their life directing most if not all of their sexual attention towards people of the same sex as themselves. Others will be very promiscuous, having hundreds if not thousands of sexual partners in their lifetime. Yet others, at the other end of the spectrum, will only ever have sex with one person. And there will be some men who will direct part of their sexual activity towards forcing women they have never met before to have sex with them. Some of these will band together in gangs before finding a woman to rape.

  The conventional majority often find it difficult to understand the minority who show these alternative strategies. Their unusual behaviour is often interpreted as an aberration. The sometimes unpalatable truth of the matter is, however, that such minorities are pursuing reproductive success just as vigorously and strategically as the conventional majority. And we should not assume that just because these alternatives strategies are uncommon they are necessarily unsuccessful.

  Each of the seven scenes in this chapter focuses on an area of human sexuality in which people pursue an uncommon but often successful reproductive strategy. In this first scene, we explore the way that male homosexual behaviour can be a successful reproductive alternative to exclusive heterosexuality.

  Any discussion of homosexuality is bedevilled by the ambiguity of the words that are used. In the following pages, I shall use the following conventions. A heterosexual is a man who only ever has sex with women. An exclusive homosexual is a man who throughout his entire life only ever has sex with other men. A bisexual is a man who has sex with both men and women. Homosexual behaviour, on the other hand, is the behaviour shown towards other men – whether the man concerned is an exclusive homosexual or a bisexual.

  At first sight, homosexual behaviour might seem a strange way to pursue reproductive success. It would seem particularly strange if, like most people, we made the mistake of assuming that just because a man is sexually attracted to other men, he is inevitably less likely to reproduce. The evidence, in fact, indicates the contrary. Far from being a pathway to a lower level of reproductive success, homosexual inclination is very much a successful reproductive alternative to heterosexuality.

  Men who are attracted to other men do still reproduce – and on the whole they reproduce very successfully. On average, every person who reads this book will have had within the past five generations – in other words, since about 1875 – a male ancestor who practised homosexuality. This does not mean that we have all inherited a predisposition for homosexual behaviour. Some will have done, as we shall see, but only a minority. Nevertheless, it does mean that none of us would be the person we are today if one of our ancestors had not shown homosexual behaviour – and reproduced.

  Before we start to discuss just how homosexual behaviour can aid a man in his pursuit of reproductive success, we must consider four basic facts about male homosexuality that are not generally known and that provide a most important perspective.

  First, homosexual behaviour is not peculiar to humans. Adolescent birds and mammals often show such behaviour. Male monkeys show the same range of homosexual behaviour as men, from mutual caressing and masturbation to anal intercourse. There are reports, for example, of a male monkey masturbating to ejaculation while being penetrated anally by another male.

  Secondly, as far as humans are concerned, homosexual behaviour is shown by only a minority of men – at least in the largest and most industrial societies. In Europe and the United States, for example, only about 6 per cent of men experience any homosexual contact during their lifetime, most often during adolescence. For two-thirds of those men, that contact is intimate and genital, often involving anal intercourse.

  Thirdly, in all birds and mammals, including men, the vast majority of males who show homosexual behaviour are bisexual. For example, male monkeys who have anal intercourse with other males do not reduce their rate of intercourse with females. The same is generally true for men. The vast majority (80 per cent) of those who have sex with men also have sex with women. Many, like the man in Scene 30, may have phases that are exclusively or almost exclusively homosexual, but for fewer than 1 per cent of men does this ‘phase’ last an entire lifetime.

  Finally, there is now convincing evidence that homosexual behaviour is inherited. Genetic inheritance is more often via the mother than the father: for example, men with homosexual inclinations are much more likely to have uncles and cousins with similar inclinations on their mother’s side than on their father’s. In the scene we have just witnessed, the man’s uncle was more likely to have been his mother’s brother than his father’s; his cousin was more likely to have been the son of one his mother’s brothers or sisters than his father’s.

  A genetic basis to homosexual behaviour does not mean that the circumstances encountered by boys during their childhood do not also influence their behaviour. Boys genetically inclined towards homosexual behaviour may not show that inclination in some childhood situations but may do so in others. The man in the scene, who almost certainly carried the genes for homosexual behaviour, might never have developed his homosexual tendencies had it not been for his early relationship with his uncle. The converse could also be true, though it should be less common – boys without the genetic inclination may nevertheless be seduced or forced into homosexual behaviour during childhood. Modern evidence suggests that, more often than not, exclusive homosexuals and bisexuals are born and not made.

  This discovery provides an important clue for biologists in their attempt to understand the evolution of homosexual behaviour. No gene can persist in a population at the 6 per cent level unless on average it imparts some reproductive advantage to the individual concerned. Of course, a lifetime of exclusive homosexuality can have no reproductive benefit – but bisexuality can. It seems most likely that exclusive homosexuality is a genetic by-product of the reproductively advantageous characteristic of bisexuality. If so, homosexual behaviour joins the ranks of a number of other human characteristics that are advantageous when a person has inherited a few of the relevant genes, but disadvantageous if they have inherited more.

  The classic example of such a characteristic is sickle-cell anaemia. In the tropics, a single level of the sickle-cell gene is advantageous, endowing its possessor with increased resistance to malaria compared to people without the gene. A double level of the sickle-cell gene, however, condemns the possessor to an early death a
nd/or a lifetime of pain and suffering.

  Of course, this comparison between the genetics of homosexual behaviour and the genetics of sickle-cell anaemia should not be misinterpreted: there is no implication here that the former, too, is a disease. Rather, the anaemia is the best-studied example of a genetic principle that could also be applied to the inheritance of homosexual behaviour. We can think of bisexuals as having a small number of the genes for homosexual behaviour, and exclusive homosexuals as having a larger number – bisexuals have a reproductive advantage relative to heterosexuals; exclusive homosexuals never reproduce, and have a reproductive disadvantage compared with both heterosexuals and bisexuals.

  So, how big is the advantage of bisexuality compared with a lifetime of only ever having sex with women?

  As far as children within long-term partnerships are concerned, bisexual men have fewer children over their lifetime, but probably have them earlier in life. The man in Scene 30 had two children with his long-term partner, probably about average for the society in which he lived. But he had them before he was twenty-three, several years earlier than the average heterosexual. Such early reproduction may not seem very advantageous, but it can be. Biologists measure reproductive success not simply in terms of number of children or grandchildren, but in terms of reproductive rate. A person can have a higher reproductive rate than another either by producing more children over a lifetime or by producing the same number of children but earlier. Although throughout most of this book it has been adequate to discuss simply the pursuit of reproductive success, it is crucial here to remember that when we talk of reproductive success, we really mean reproductive rate.

  It is difficult enough to compare the reproductive success of different categories of men, such as bisexuals and heterosexuals, even if we limit our comparison to long-term partnerships. The risk of including children raised within those partnerships but fathered by other men will always render such comparisons fragile. And our attempt becomes impossible when we try to compare their further success via short-term relationships with a number of women. Even the women who produce the children may not always know who the fathers are – so the men certainly won’t. Yet it is precisely this avenue to reproductive success that seems to be the most important to bisexuals. The expectation is that such reproduction allows bisexuals to achieve a greater reproductive success than heterosexuals, but the evidence is impossible to obtain.

  Multiple partners, both male and female, are a feature of male bisexuality. Nearly a quarter of men who show homosexual behaviour have more than ten male partners in a lifetime. For some the figure can be in the hundreds. More importantly, though, the more male partners a bisexual man has during his lifetime, the more female partners he is also likely to have. Since, on average, a bisexual man will inseminate more females over his lifetime than will a heterosexual man, a bisexual man is more likely to have children with different mothers.

  The important question, of course, is whether the average bisexual’s success at attracting and seducing many different women owes anything to his experiences with many different men. There are probably three main ways why it might.

  The first is that early learning with other boys gives the bisexual a precocious sexual competence. Over 80 per cent of men who are ever going to show homosexual behaviour have done so by the time they are fifteen, and 98 per cent by the time they are twenty. Male homosexuality is an activity that occurs most often during adolescence or even childhood, whether with contemporaries or with older men. To appreciate the difference in competence between boys with homosexual experience and their heterosexual contemporaries, compare, for example, the man in Scene 30 with the man in Scene 27. The latter could scarcely manage intercourse, even at nineteen, let alone cope with the subtleties of the female orgasm. In contrast, even at thirteen the bisexual in Scene 30 could seduce girls into intercourse. By nineteen, women were queuing for his favours, and even in his mid-twenties his sexual aura made him attractive to girls from the age of fifteen upwards. The result was that, before his thirtieth birthday, he had fathered four children with three different women – more than most men in his society manage from a lifetime of heterosexuality.

  The second way in which homosexual activity can aid heterosexual success is by allowing practice with different personalities. Experience with multiple male partners of different character types gives the bisexual an edge when interacting with multiple female partners of different character types (Scene 36). For example, the man in Scene 30 was aware of the similarity between his final male lover and one of the women with whom he had produced a child. Experience with one gave him experience at handling a relationship with the other. In this case, he experienced the woman before the man. When the reverse is true, experience gained with a man of a particular character type can help the bisexual to get the most out of a relationship with a woman of a similar character type. The experience may help at all stages and levels of that relationship – seduction, stimulation, social interaction and even deception.

  The final way in which homosexual activity can aid heterosexual success is via infidelity from within a long-term heterosexual relationship. Practice at being unfaithful to his female partner with a man gives the bisexual experience at walking the tightrope of infidelity with a woman. Although bisexual men decrease their homosexual activity markedly as they leave adolescence and begin relationships with women, their homosexual inclination rarely disappears completely. A man with a long-term female partner is as secretive about his homosexual infidelity as he is about his heterosexual infidelity.

  There is some advantage in practising infidelity with a man. The long-term female partner of a bisexual is less successful at detecting his homosexual infidelities than his heterosexual infidelities (often because she does not know he is bisexual). A woman who does not know her partner’s true sexuality is likely to assume that he is heterosexual – because the majority of men are. Consequently, she will usually feel less threatened by his relationships with other men than by his relationships with women – the average man’s relationships with other men will be less likely to be sexual than his relationships with women. Even on those occasions when her partner’s relationships with men are sexual, a woman has less to lose, at least initially, than if he is unfaithful with a woman. Although some of the costs of infidelity (Scenes 9 and 11), such as risk of infection, still apply, most do not. For example, he will never need to reduce his support for her in order to help maintain his lover’s child. He is probably also less likely to desert her to live with his lover if the latter is a man.

  So homosexual behaviour during adolescence and beyond can give a man considerable reproductive advantages over his heterosexual contemporaries. In which case, why is bisexuality not more common?

  The answer is relatively straightforward. There are costs to bisexuality which can negate the benefits. The most important cost of homosexual behaviour is a greater risk of disease. Even before the advent of AIDS, homosexual behaviour brought with it an increased risk of early death from sexually transmitted diseases, such as syphilis. In effect, bisexuals are programmed by their genes to pursue a lifestyle that trades the benefit of an earlier and perhaps greater production of children (with more women) against the risk of an early death.

  Another cost is genetic – and here there is another parallel with sickle-cell anaemia. Although people with a small number of the genes may gain an immediate apparent advantage, as we have seen, that advantage may not be as great as it seems. This is because, compared with people without the genes at all, those with a small number will produce descendants with a higher proportion of individuals with a larger number. In other words, although bisexuals produce more children and grandchildren at a faster rate than heterosexuals, among those descendants there will be a few exclusive homosexuals who in turn fail to reproduce at all.

  Yet another cost arises because a proportion of the heterosexual majority display homophobia – a prejudice against people who show homosexual behavi
our. Such prejudice is occasionally so extreme and violent that any man suspected of homosexual behaviour faces an increased risk of injury or even death. We encountered a similar if less extreme prejudice in Scenes 12 and 13 in relation to masturbation. With masturbation, of course, such prejudice is all bluff and hypocrisy – the intimidators being as likely to masturbate as the intimidated. Inevitably, some homophobes are also hypocrites, displaying public homophobia while secretly behaving bisexually. On the whole, though, most homophobes are part of the heterosexual majority.

  Whenever we encounter such common prejudice, it is usually because the target is in some way a threat to the people showing the prejudice. It is quite possible that homophobes, like bisexuals, are themselves born not made – an inevitable evolutionary result of the very success of bisexuality that we have just discussed. The reproductive advantages enjoyed by bisexuals mean that they should – for that reason alone – be regarded as a threat by the surrounding heterosexuals. Unfortunately, the bisexual’s role in the spread of disease adds to this threat. So, just as we discussed for masturbation (Scene 13), one defence for the surrounding individuals is to try to reduce the bisexuals’ reproductive advantages through threat and intimidation.

  The final picture, therefore, is that compared with their heterosexual contemporaries, bisexuals experience both advantages and disadvantages in their pursuit of reproductive success. In which case, the important question becomes whether the total costs are greater than the total benefits, or vice versa. Are bisexuals more successful reproductively than heterosexuals – or are they less successful? The answer is that it depends on how common bisexuals are in the population. When they are rare, they are more successful than heterosexuals. When they are common, they are less successful. The reasons are as follows.