Book Excerpt: 'Sex: A Natural History'

ByABC News via logo
August 26, 2002, 6:01 PM

Aug. 27 -- Why do we find certain people and not others attractive? How do we select our mates, and why do we sometimes cheat on them? What about the battle of the sexes are men really from Mars and women from Venus? In Sex: A Natural History, award winning science reporter Joann Rodgers explores the biology and psychology of what drives our sexual behavior. Read the introduction to Sex: A Natural History below.

'It is an old maxim of mine,' said Holmes, 'that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.' Answered Watson, 'Perhaps, you may have convinced me as to the motive, but you are yet to explain how it is done.' Arthur Conan Doyle

People love sex. We have it every chance we get, in every position and season. We will take incredible risks, exhaust ourselves, even self-destruct to get it, do it, keep it. Once we experience its power and its pleasure even when we only can imagine it we seek it with the intensity of an addict after a fix. If nature were into efficient engineering of reproductive systems, interest in sex would end with a woman's last ovulation. Any self-respecting MIT graduate cum Harvard MBA would insist on a just-in-time inventory system: When you're out of eggs, you're out of sex. Instead, we, like every other living thing, are throbbing collections of protoplasm whose energies are ever in screaming search of sex. We want sex not just for reproducing, not just on purpose, but for pleasure and even just for the pleasure of its pursuit.

Consequently, if sex were a novel, it would be an Everyman story. The heroes and heroines would be every one of our genes, cells, tissues, hormones, organs, and most of all the chemistry of the brain and mind. The plot would track the quest to bring them together in harmony against all odds to merge a heavily guarded set of gametes while simultaneously bringing pleasure to participants. At the end, we would respect the characters if not altogether like them. A friend and colleague, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Jon Franklin, once said that truly heroic stories are full of "aha!" moments that show how ordinary characters resolve to imagine, then successfully execute creative, resourceful, lasting, and most of all practical solutions to fundamental, serious, life and death complications. He could have been summarizing the story of sex. There is no magical deus ex machina, no metaphysical or divine act that makes sex work. Just diligent, tenacious, randomly acquired, hard-earned tangles of internal constructions and functions, hardwired yet flexible enough in each one of us to meet unique circumstances.

Paradoxically, for most of us, how these elemental facts of life happen is as poorly understood as they are compelling. This is partly, at least, because Rube Goldberg couldn't reengineer a more clumsy, less "efficient" process. Sex in humans and other animals is an almost ludicrously complicated, infinitely resourceful, and varied network of anatomical, chemical, social, biological, and emotional signals and schemes for regenerating and perpetuating chromosomes, genes, and DNA.

But our lack of understanding is also because we seem squeamishly reluctant to think too hard about sex. Sex, according to Johns Hopkins University psychologist and sexologist John Money, is a thoroughly unloved human behavior. "Isn't it supremely ironic," he once told me, "that the very thing responsible for every parent and every child is a philosophical orphan? People thirst for a sexonomy, a factual set of fundamental principles that lets us talk and think about sex as a reflexive, built-in thing we do, no different than coughing, thinking, sneezing, or singing. Sex is here because we are members of the human species, not because of any act of yours or mine. And most people can't bring themselves to talk about it."

We prefer "doin' what comes naturally" to considering what "naturally" means. While excavating the secrets of life is notoriously difficult, those whose livelihood it is to try have become adept at peeking under the planet's blankets to find out just what "naturally" does mean. Sometimes hilariously so. En route to finding ways to get rid of a citrus crop pest called Diaprepes abbreviatus, an inch-long black beetle, University of Florida zoologist H. Jane Brockmann and Ally Harari of Ben-Gurion University in Israel spent long hours sorting out the mating rites of this bug and concluded simply that "everybody mounted everybody." Males mount females, males mount males and even mating couples. Females mount females and lure alpha males in the process. It turns out that the beetles have a hard time sorting out who is who. But nature doesn't play dice with anything so important as survival of a species, leading Brockmann, with classic understatement, to note that "when you see something like that, it demands an explanation."

Well, yes, but to those on the lookout for the natural signals of sex, these beetles' mating habits may also explain something about why Hugh Hefner made a splendid living exploiting the flirtatious dance of animal attraction between wealthy men and big-breasted young blondes. Or between men and women in general. The signals are different only in kind, not in category. As the beetle experts learned, the females who tried to mate with other females tended to wind up with the largest males, the insect equivalent of the men with wealth, which helped the girls in terms of their survival, because bigger, in the insect world, is indeed often better. The larger the male, the more likely he is to bring nuptial gifts, such as more food and a set of genes that helped him get them. It also turns out that while it's hard even for the beetles to sort it out, females are a bit bigger than males. So the males first follow their noses to the females, tracking a particular scent the girls give off; but because the boys still can't always tell who wears pink from who wears blue, they frequently mount another guy or, mistaking size for sex, head for a beetle couple already mating. Without any better navigational cue the males depend on sight, moving toward "big" beetles, which are more likely female but may well be a mating pair. And, if such a male is big enough, he can always push a smaller male off the back of the female of the pair he mistook for a big girl and have his way. In a male sexist world, that would be the end of it. But to the keen observers of these beetles, such visual signals suggest a far more important theme in the nature of sex: that it takes two to tango, and to choose to dance in the first place. It seems the females are also doing the choosing. How? By mounting each other. The bigger female, who mounts another female, attracts the biggest guys who, myopic as they are, think the female-female pair is one giant lady bug. Result: The biggest male gets the shrewdest female. To test all this further, the scientists spent more hours and days observing the reaction of male beetles to sets of large and small female-mounted pairs. The larger beetles went straight for the larger females. By attracting the biggest males, the most "fit" females got good genes (i.e., those from bigger, presumably more potent and wealthy males) and nuptial gifts such as food that male bugs tend to pass on during copulation. If all this doesn't remind us of the behavior of some two-legged animals, we haven't been paying attention. And if this isn't the nature of sex, and natural, nothing is.

Just why we so willingly endorse the mystique of sex but avoid confronting its mystery may rest in part in the difficulty of doing what the beetle watchers do-that is, spend a lot of time as objective voyeurs but also in our universal vulnerability to its force. We adore telling stories about sex, but we don't want sex to tell us too much about ourselves.

Sex scares us. And why shouldn't it? "Making love," says psychologist David Buss, author of The Evolution of Desire, "is one of the most important, complex and perilous cooperative exchanges that any of us engage in during our lives. Loaded with promise and fraught with dangerous pitfalls, love affairs tax our ability at deal-making to the fullest, requiring the complete repertoire of psychological specializations that evolved for cooperation." University of Texas zoologist David Crews, who has studied sex behavior for decades, is more blunt. "Sexuality," he declares, "is all in your head and that's the most dangerous place it can be. It has so many components, but we only have one thought at a time. So usually we act on it and set down a course. We get confused, forgetting all the other aspects. We get into a lot of predicaments."

Why bother to parse any of this? Beyond idle curiosity, or concern about sexually transmitted disease, why probe? After all, no one needs an instruction manual; the mechanics aren't that hard to figure out, or even master. If the goal is to get, beget, or be gotten, even the sexually challenged get help from a vast inventory of how-to and advice books, medical texts, illustrated guides, devices, and therapists.

One reason to look further is that information at the clinical level is to a genuine knowledge of sex what a list of grapes is to a master wine maker as remote from creation of a great or even a good vintage as a 1945 Chateau Mouton Rothschild is from fermented grape juice.

Another is that because sex is essential to collective survival, societies are obsessed with it, creating rules that irrationally inhibit and too often cruelly torment people. Debates over political "solutions" to sexual "problems" are well-served by information about the biology and psychology of sex. As archaeologist Timothy Taylor noted in his book The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture, sixteenth-century Spaniards were so outraged at the homosexuality and transvestism they encountered among the indigenous people they conquered that they destroyed almost all of the sculpture, pottery, monuments, and jewelry that depicted such practices, distorting greatly our view of sexual behavior and morality. "We cannot assume," Taylor adds, "that our modern way of thinking about sex either biologically or socioculturally is necessarily any more objective than any other way of thinking about sex. Even within the rather narrow Western tradition . . . from Plato to Shere Hite, it is clear that no one has ever had a monopoly on the truth about our bodies."