Sperm Wars
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Sperm Wars
By
Lucio Buffalmano
/ 11 minutes of reading
The author holds a master's degree from La Sapienza, department of communication and sociological research, and is a member of the American Psychology Association (APA).
He studies psychology, persuasion, social & dating strategies, and anything related to people and power dynamics .
Lucio's approach combines science, first-hand experience & critical analysis.
He believes that you can only teach social strategies if the three go together .
You can learn it all in one fell swoop with Power University .
Sperm Wars (1996) looks at dating and sex from an evolutionary biology perspective and through the slightly controversial perspective of “ sexual conflict “.
About the Author : Robin Baker studied zoology and earned his Ph.D. with a thesis on the evolution of the migratory habit in butterflies.
He later left the academic world to focus on his writing.
Sperm Wars introduces lots of stories that go along with the theory.
Some of the stories are interesting, some even funny and, some have noted, can also function as entertaining soft-porn reading.
I will skip the stories for this summary.
Sperm Wars paints a somewhat bleak picture for those like me who see genders as complementing each other.
Instead, it shows Robin Baker shows how male and females in a relationship can have major incentives in tricking and deceiving one another:
There is a big craze around the Internet on “no-fapping”. Interestingly, Robin Baker says that it’s a lie that men and religion impose on men to defend themselves from single men.
The author makes a big case that masturbation helps in sperm wars because it “cleans” the pipe of older and less lively sperm. Instead, a man who masturbates has more lively sperm which is more suited to engage and win sperm wars.
Note: Probably true
Eric Castle from the Mayo Clinic says that masturbation doesn’t have such a big effect on conception.
Sperm Warms says that women are much more likely to have sex with a man who is not her partner during her fertile days and is much less likely to use contraception ( data for this statement is missing ).
Soon after the cheating however, there is a tendency for her to run back to her long term partner.
Reason why?
So that she can be inseminated by both and thus promote sperm competition.
Let the best ejaculator win.
The author says that penis size matters little in sperm competition.
Instead, testes’ size matters a lot as more sperm gives a major advantage in sperm competition and increases the chances of fertilizing the egg. Especially in non-monogamous species, which is why males of non-monogamous species have larger testes.
The author says women are interested in his buttocks more than the penis and muscle ( Body Language of Love confirms this).
The author says that in poor conditions where many children die people tend to produce lots of offspring.
However, Baker says that a strategy of focusing on fewer children and nurturing them properly and giving them more resources is equally effective.
One single child can also work, but it’s very risky as it can fail spectacularly if the child fails to reproduce.
A balance between investing in resources before having children and actually having children is important.
The author suggests that poor men get cheated more.
Men of higher wealth and status instead obtain partners earlier, reproduce earlier, and are more likely to do the cheating.
Read more on cheating, faithfulness, and infidelity:
Poor people are more likely to have a daughter because daughters are more likely to guarantee reproduction -and you can be sure that the child is hers- and are more likely to marry up.
It’s best to have boys for high-status couples instead because men with lots of resources can have multiple children that they can all cater to.
And indeed, Baker says, that’s what we see: American presidents, for example, have 60% of sons.
It’s not yet clear how women can “decide” which gender, but it seems to be the woman who achieves the gender-bias.
My Note: Small sample size
the theory might be good, but the example is not. I believe that the number of presidents’ offspring is too small to derive any meaningful data.
Different researches have reached different conclusions here, so this might be true, but I’m not 100% sure as of now. If it’s true, it’s by a small-ish factor.
Also read: Fooled by Randomness and How to Lie With Statistics .
The author says that rape and prostitution can both be effective strategies.
Indeed prostitution might have been so successful in our part that, in a way, we are all sons of bitches (that one had made me chuckle :).
There are also many drawbacks though, including the risks of disease.
The author wonders how come rape is not more common since it can actually be successful.
One of the reasons is that it’s risky. It often involves a physical fight and also a high risk of retribution from possible partners, family, or tribe members.
He postulates that most men can become rapists given the conditions because most wars, which provide a safer environment for rapists, show widespread raping.
Once a woman has been raped, it might be good for her to conceive though, and the author says that a woman is more likely to conceive from rape than from routine sex with her partner.
The author also makes the interesting claim that women often stick with abusive men who successfully raped them because they “proved their strength” (VS a man who tried but didn’t succeed).
Prostitution has been so successful that, in a way, we are all sons of bitches
Men mostly look at the beauty, age -related to fertility- and reproductive fitness.
Women look a lot at status.
My Note: Depends
As Aronson explains in The Social Animal women also behave like men and look at beauty mostly when the status is the same or difficult to assess. Otherwise, they go for status.
Crucially, and this is what I credit to Sperm Wars the most, is the notion that men respond to traits such as weakness and dependence which can indicate fidelity .
Also read:
The author says that men are much more similar to themselves than women are to other women.
However, they also pursue four different strategies to reproduction:
The strategies tend to be in equilibrium in society.
Basically, it’s not true that everyone should try to be as “alpha” as possible . Because there is enough sperm warfare specialists that a strategy of monogamy can be equally or more (or less) effective.
It seems best instead to pursue your strategy also based on your biological predisposition.
Although few people pursue a lifetime of pure monogamy, most find success in long term relationships .
Amongst the advantages there is that of not getting caught cheating and much, much lower risk of diseases.
I have done quite some research on this book, but instead of writing a coherent piece and rebuttal, for which I don’t have enough knowledge, I will write here some of the most important point:
The idea I have grown and that I am happy with -and which reduces my cognitive dissonance ( Festinger, 1957 )- is this: there is no doubt, of course, that we have all evolved several tools to further our agendas in the reproductive arena.
And that sometimes these tools pitch women and men against each other.
Jealousy and bigger testes in humans than, say, gorillas, are probably examples of males’ tools against female possible cheating.
However, the war of the sexes is nowhere near as bad as the author makes it out to be and cooperation is more successful than covert cheating -albeit cheating while the other partner suspects nothing can also lead to high rewards in such a system-.
Sperm wars, also, played a role in human evolution and still partially does. But not nearly as badly as the author says. There is also no proof -and so far it seems more likely no than yes- that “killer sperm” and “blocking sperm” even exist.
Learn Nature, Then Choose What to Follow
I think a great takeaway here is that nature can be fucked up, and that a lot of our evolution can be maladaptive as well.
Thus, learn biology, and then reflect on what you really want and what’s really good for you and the people around you.
Because that’s not necessarily what our prime urges might push us into.
I really wonder why the author presents claims that are unproven and highly speculative without warning the readers about their very nature. He could have easily told they were speculation and he would have avoided so much criticism.
Was it a case of looking for sensationalism?
To remain in the biological realm I would call such choice maladaptive.
The author tends to explain almost every behavior in light of “better suited for procreation”, which in my opinion is a very common mistake that does not take into account that, when so thousands and thousands of traits are interplays, a lot of behaviors and mutation are just purely out of chance.
However, out of all the theories in Sperm Wars, the one on homosexuality as a maladaptive offshoot of the adaptive bisexuality made the least sense to me. I won’t go in details but it seemed a rather poor theory to me.
Attention: the author makes it clear that Sperm Wars won’t leverage references because it’s the popularization of his other work, Human Sperm Competition , which is heavily referenced.
However, as a guy interested in both the practical application of science and the science itself, I would have liked an in-between version.
The author says that since rape is common during wars, then men must all have a tendency for rape.
However, there is also a correlation element, such as men who go to war are more likely to be violent themselves maybe?
And of course, a situational element, where an environment full of violence can lower the bar for more violence.
If you have not read many books on evolutionary biology Sperm Wars can be a shocking eye-opener.
In a good way.
There are many good concepts here, and you will learn a lot about psychology and human behavior .
“Sperm Wars” has some eye-opening content but also, unluckily, quite a few unfounded claims that cast some shadows on the whole.
It’s difficult to rate this book for me.
Part of me loved it and it had a lot of new information that led me to a deeper understanding of the arms’ race to reproduction.
But it also has a lot of conjectures, key disproved information and no scientific reference.
When I first read it I almost wished the theory was true because it presents such a beautiful and elegant theory that explains things so well.
But beauty and elegance are not synonymous with truth.
Overall, I would give Sperm Wars four stars for the value it provided me the first time I read it, zero stars for scientific to warn readers that they must do their own research with this book.
And a big strike against it for scientific integrity: some information in “Sperm Wars” are highly misleading. And the author does nothing to warn the readers his conclusions are highly speculative at best and either unproven or with plenty of discordant evidence available.
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Now described as a modern classic of popular science writing, SPERM WARS is a collection of 37 short stories showing people engaged in sexual behaviour ranging from the routine to the exotic. Each story is followed by an explanation of the science behind the actions to show how our everyday behaviour has been shaped by evolution.
…
Published to acclaim and controversy over a decade ago, SPERM WARS turned centuries-old biological assumptions on their head. Translated into 25 languages and now used in the study of subjects as diverse as psychology, physiology, biology, sexual counselling, and evolution the book is still in its categories’ best-seller lists around the world, frequently at #1.
…
New facts of life are revealed: 10 per cent of children are not fathered by their ‘fathers’; less than 1 per cent of a man’s sperm is capable of fertilising anything; the penis is designed to remove sperm from a woman as well as putting sperm in; “smart” cervical mucus encourages some sperm but blocks others; and a woman is more likely to conceive through a casual fling than through sex with her regular partner.
…
The book describes how evolution has programmed men to compete with each other to try to conquer and monopolise women, while women, without necessarily knowing they are doing so, subtly but effectively go their own cryptic way to seek the best genetic input on offer from potential sexual partners.
…
SPERM WARS is a revolutionary thesis about sex that can surprise, entertain and even shock.
…
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Most men are excited by the idea of their women being with other men. Yes, most. They may or may not actually like it. But many an otherwise sensible gentleman finds himself aroused upon seeing his hot wife, girlfriend or significant other flirt with a stranger, or perhaps a friend. He may be jealous, hurt, angry, even enraged. Still, he often can’t help but want to make love to “his” woman as soon as they get home, his erection stronger than usual, and his ejaculation more powerful. It’s as if he is pumped up to win some sort of sexual competition with another male for the prize of this valuable female, his wife.
A more adventurous gentleman might even encourage his lady to have sex with the other man, “cheat” on him with lovers, dress in “slutty” clothing when they go out in the presence of other men, or at least talk about the fantasy of being with another man, perhaps while she is pleasuring herself with a large dildo, which *represents* the other man.
Traditionally, this kind of husband (or boyfriend) is called a cuckold , an old English word that carries connotations of unwilling sexual submission and shame. Many cuckolds, willing or not, are sexual submissives in their relationships, helpless slaves to their women’s desire for other men, or their own fetish for being cuckolded by their “slutty,” often cheating wives, sometimes masturbating as they watch their “hotwives” get it on with “alpha” males, even sexually servicing their wives’ well-endowed partners or being the subject of intense humiliation.
But many other gentlemen who enjoy watching or imagining the women they love having sex with other men in threesomes, at swing parties, in porn or with dildos, don’t feel humiliated at all. They do, however, feel extremely excited, and experience harder erections and stronger ejaculations than usual. Some so-called cuckolds effectively dominate the scene, choosing lovers for their hotwives, sometimes advising the lover as to how to turn on the wife, much like a film director selects a leading man for his leading lady, and then coaches him on how to play the scene.
What do all these very different types of cuckolds – the Submissive, the Dominant, the Sissy, the Swinger, the Director (just to name a few) – have in common? They are all extremely aroused by seeing, hearing or imagining their women having sex with other men.
So, what is going on here? Why are so many men excited by cuckolding? Even if they’re jealous? There are many explanations, but one of the more compelling reasons for this type of male arousal lies in human evolutionary biology. Scientists used to think that there was only one kind of sperm with a single goal: to swim to the egg and inseminate it – ejaculation being like the proverbial gunshot at the start of a marathon, sending all the little tadpoles swimming upstream in a race to the mothership. Sounds plausible, but it’s largely wrong. Looking through giant microscopes, evolutionary biologists Robin Baker and Mark Bellis found that “egg-inseminators” make up only about 1% of a man’s sperm. So… what about the rest? What about the 99%? It turns out that sperm aren’t so much like a bunch of individual runners or swimmers, but more like an army or a football team. The offensive players are the tackles and fullbacks in the Big Game going on inside the female’s reproductive tract. They don’t ever even try to race to the egg because their job is to hunt, tackle and kill sperm.
What sperm are they trying to kill? Not other sperm from the same male, that would be “friendly fire,” and it wouldn’t be very good teamwork. These “killer” sperm are trying to attack and destroy sperm from another male that might be sharing the vagina with them in the Superbowl of Sex. They even use chemical warfare, emitting powerful spermicidal enzymes. But the attack sperm then come up against “defensive” sperm on the other side that block and protect their respective inseminator-quarterback brothers from incoming attacks. And the Big Game is on. Go team go! Or, you could say, the Sperm War is underway…
The Sperm Wars theory explains some men’s passion for football and other war games. More to the point, it illuminates male excitement over female non-monogamy, male competition and the idea of being cuckolded (a cuckold being a man whose wife or girlfriend has sex with other men). This goes back to our prehistoric human ancestors who were probably not monogamous. Like our cousins, the bonobos and common chimps, often several males would mate with one fertile female within a few days of one another, sometimes in the midst of a prehistoric “gangbang.” These different men’s sperm would then duke it out within one woman for the evolutionary goal of fertilizing her egg, and so the male psyche was primed to find male competition arousing.
How do Sperm Wars affect men today? Obviously, we don’t have so many gangbangs as our ancestors probably did. But whenever a man has sex with a woman, he unconsciously considers the odds of her being with another man. If he feels that she is totally faithful to him, he might feel very happy and secure and love her a lot, but his erection won’t be at its strongest, nor will his sperm volume be at its highest. Unconsciously, his brain sends a message to his testicles: Don’t bother to send out the full army (or football team) of several hundred million sperm to an empty field where there’s no opposing team.
But if he suspects his wife or girlfriend is having sex with another man, whether she is or not… if he feels she could be cuckolding him—whether he’s a happy swinger, a curious voyeur, a humiliated cuckold, a knowledgeable polyamorist, a controlling pimp, an angry victim or just a confused spouse—his testicles will spring into action and produce as many hundred million warrior sperm, blockers and inseminators as they can. The result is that the man has a much stronger erection, more copious ejaculate and a more intensely pleasurable orgasm than usual. Studies have shown that a husband’s sperm count rises when his wife is away for a few days, even if he’s ejaculated as much as he normal
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