Ways to Understand Male Sexuality

There are five ways to find out. One is to study modern people directly and describe what they do as the human mating system The answer is usually monogamous marriage. A second way is to look at human history and divine from our past what sexual arrangements are typical of our species. But history teaches a dismal lesson: A common arrangement from our past was that rich and powerful men enslaved concubines in large harems. A third way is to look at people living in simple societies with Stone Age technologies and conjecture that they live much as our ancestors lived ten millennia ago. They tend to fall between the extremes: less polygamous than early civilizations, less monogamous than modern society. The fourth technique is to look at our closest relatives, the apes, and compare our behavior and anatomy with theirs. The answer that emerges is that men's testicles are not large enough for a system of promiscuity like the chimpanzee's, men's bodies are not big enough for a system of harem polygamy like the gorilla's (there is an iron link between harem polygamy in a species and a large size differential between male and female), and men are not as antisocial and adjusted to fidelity as the monogamous gibbon. We are somewhere in between. The fifth method is to compare humans with other animals that share our highly social habits: with colonial birds, monkeys, and dolphins. As we shall see, the lesson they teach is that we are designed for a system of monogamy plagued by adultery.

Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (2003-05-01)

• evolution
• reproduction
• sex
• sexuality