Bed wars. Robin Baker - Bed Wars

When I created these stories, I provided them with less detailed explanations than we get from research and experimentation. Although some stories were taken from news reports in newspapers and magazines, most of them are based on events that I myself witnessed, as well as stories borrowed from the lives of my friends and family. All these stories are based on real facts. However, let my friends not waste time trying to recognize themselves in some individual stories. Every character is a mixture certain traits character, each story is a mosaic of several different events. Moreover, each character described could be of any race (and be of almost any nationality), and each story could take place in almost any country in the world.

Not every event in every scene will be examined separately, but every element of behavior mentioned in the book has a right to exist. For example, I dedicated two scenes to masturbation, one for a man (Scene 12) and one for a woman (Scene 22). After each of these scenes, I will discuss the function of masturbation. In other individual scenes depicting sexual behavior, characters often masturbate themselves or with the help of other people, but in this case I do not make an explanation. Since the functions of masturbation are made clear in dedicated scenes, it should be clear why other scenes also feature masturbation.

In my interpretation, I tried to move away from the academic style to which I am most committed. I have tried to avoid mentioning numbers too often, and where I found it difficult to provide a detailed explanation of a situation, I have strived to give a concise and readable history, although I have had to sacrifice scientific accuracy to do so. Also, in most cases, I tried to avoid using the words “probably” and “possibly” where, in truth, they should have been used. Any scholarly reader may be confused by the lack of academic rigor in the book, and so I am obliged to advise him to consult the treatise that I wrote with Mark Bellis for information and clarification.

Not all of my comrades scientific work will agree with my interpretations, or even with some of the details of my descriptions, of what happens between a man and a woman, between sperm and the female womb, between sperm and an egg, or between sperm themselves. There will be people, professionals in their fields, who will consider this book to be fiction. So be it. So I decided to present everything in the form of a story. A story based on actual academic interpretation of recent research. Even outside of these self-indulgent plans, I was initially focused on the fact that the stories should be meaningful and interesting. I did not intend to voice all opinions on this matter. If I had done this, the book would have been confusing, too long, and boring. Other scientists' interpretations are discussed and evaluated in Human Sperm Competition, where Mark Bellis and I make a clear case for why we believe the concept I present in these pages is the best one currently available. In that book we argued about this phenomenon, now I have every right to tell this story in the most simple and exciting way.

One of the problems I encountered in writing this book is that most of the behaviors I tried to explain require extremely detailed descriptions of what is happening. Many of the scenes and details I described would be considered pornographic in another context. I have tried as much as possible not to describe unnecessary details, and I hope that if the reader is confused or aroused by any scene or moment, then the subsequent explanations will be an adequate justification for this.

I also encountered deeper problems during my work. Most of the behavioral habits that I have described and analyzed are due to the fact that the people exhibiting them, in best case scenario behaved immorally, at worst, committed crimes. In my opinion, the most important thing about this is that I do not view these situations from a moral point of view. I am an evolutionary biologist and my goal is to provide explanations for human behavior without prejudice or judgment. The danger with this is that many will interpret my lack of criticism of certain forms of human behavior as meaning that I tolerate or encourage such behavior. However, as I explained in Scene 33 regarding rape, the first step in dealing with antisocial behavior is to try to understand its causes. Only this - and nothing else - is the goal of my interpretations.

Bed wars. Infidelity, sexual conflict and relationship evolution Robin Baker

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Title: Bed Wars. Infidelity, sexual conflict and relationship evolution

About the book “Bed Wars. Infidelity, Sexual Conflict, and Relationship Evolution by Robin Baker

Drunk teenagers have sex at someone's party. Colleagues who have worked together for years suddenly lose their minds during a business trip. A woman seduces her husband's best friend. The boss gets involved with the secretary and becomes everyone's laughing stock. After all this, they ask the question “Why?”, because they didn’t want anything like this. Renowned British biologist Robin Baker offers a truly revolutionary approach to explaining our sexual behavior. An extremely frank, provocative book, it destroys pious myths and reveals shocking reality.

On our website about books lifeinbooks.net you can download for free without registration or read online book“Bed wars. Infidelity, sexual conflict and the evolution of relationships" by Robin Baker in epub, fb2, txt, rtf, pdf formats for iPad, iPhone, Android and Kindle. The book will give you a lot of pleasant moments and real pleasure from reading. Buy full version you can from our partner. Also, here you will find latest news from the literary world, learn the biography of your favorite authors. For beginning writers there is a separate section with useful tips and recommendations, interesting articles, thanks to which you yourself can try your hand at literary crafts.

Friends, we at ANF recently published the book “Bed Wars,” known as Sperm Wars in the English-speaking world. I have never received such excellent sex education before! I couldn’t resist and decided to publish for you an excerpt from the book, dedicated to the real battle of the sperm of different men in a woman’s body. The Battle of Borodino was not even close!



Sperm Wars

Game of chance

On Wednesday evening, the woman left for her weekly meeting with eight girlfriends. She has been going to these meetings for a year now. The company consisted of about twelve girls, but not everyone was able to come every week. Usually at these parties they drank and chatted a lot, had dinner and sometimes went to a club. From time to time, some men tried to make acquaintance with one of them and take them away from the group. It was considered normal if one of the girlfriends met and even left with a man. Although most of them had a home and a regular partner, they enjoyed female solidarity.

Today it was her turn. She met this man completely by accident. The man she had been in a relationship with that last summer after school—the same man who had been her regular sexual partner for several months during her first semester of college. They immediately recognized each other and spent literally the entire evening talking, retelling to each other the events that had happened since their last meeting, when they communicated with each other rather sarcastically. She learned that he now works on the other side of the country, but came to their city for a week on business, staying at a hotel nearby. Now in his late thirties, he still hadn't gotten along with anyone, but he did have a girlfriend or two.

He still glowed with masculinity, promiscuity and insecurity. Although she was honored to have him as her boyfriend, she finally broke up with him when she discovered that he had been cheating on her frequently and in various ways. At that time in her life, she was defenseless and needed someone to rely on. However, now that he had appeared in front of her literally out of nowhere, almost all of her feelings for him had returned. But still, at the end of the evening, she returned to the company of her girlfriends.



The next day he showed up at her work at lunchtime and invited her to walk to the nearest lunch bar. Over lunch they agreed to meet that evening. It was Thursday, and her partner would not be at home: he would be spending the evening with friends. She decided that there was no need, as well as point, to inform him about this. Until she decides to turn their relationship in a different direction, the evening will be completely innocent, and therefore it is hardly worth mentioning this meeting at all. But still, she took her ex-boyfriend to a restaurant, which was located some distance from the city and in which it was unlikely that one would bump into acquaintances.

All evening it was clear that he hoped that after dinner they would move to bed in his room. He was very helpful and playful, finding excuses to touch her from time to time. But the thought of cheating on her partner had never crossed her mind before. She still found her ex-boyfriend attractive and his touch arousing, but she also found that his sexual expectations irritated her, almost offended her. As a result, she showed coldness towards him all evening. Eventually he understood the meaning of her message and retreated. On the way back to her house, they simply exchanged pleasantries.

For a few seconds after she got out of the car, they spoke as if they would never meet again. She was surprised to suddenly feel a rush of warmth, nostalgia, and maybe even guilt, and quickly kissed him on the cheek. She was even more surprised when she kissed him again, this time on the lips. And when something arose in her soul in that momentary moment of passion, she quickly got out of the car, wished him good luck in life and entered the house.

When her partner returned home an hour later, she was already lying in bed pretending to be asleep. He fell into a drunken sleep, and a normal night began to the accompaniment of snoring, and her thoughts and dreams revolved around this exciting evening. At some unspecified moment she suddenly full degree I realized that I came in my sleep.

The next day, sitting at work, she could not believe that it was so easy. She spent yesterday evening, albeit in almost the most innocent way, but with another man, and not a single person in the world knew about it. Man, this evening, their conversation and their kiss, memories of the beginning of their sex life, when she was still a teenager - from these thoughts, constantly spinning in her head, she was in almost constant excitement. In fact, her panties were wet all day, and one time she went to the toilet to masturbate.

She did not have sex with her partner that Friday night, but she did have sex with him on both Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday night she managed to insist that he bring her to orgasm before entering her. It was generally rare for her to cum during intercourse. She never sought this during sex itself, and in those cases when she really wanted to achieve orgasm, she asked the man to give her pleasure during foreplay. On Saturday morning she masturbated in the bathroom, then appeared naked in the living room and seduced her partner: they had sex on the floor. Every time she had an orgasm this weekend - even during foreplay - her fantasies had nothing to do with her partner (in lately she didn't think about him at all!), she imagined real or fictional scenes from the past with her ex-boyfriend.

She had been secretly enjoying this explosion of sexual activity and excitement all weekend. However, she did not plan to do anything more reprehensible than simply daydreaming about illicit sex. When she arrived at work on Monday, her mood began to change. Her ex-boyfriend was due to leave on Thursday and she might never see him again. A plan was brewing in her mind, and her excitement slowly turned into nervousness. Maybe she should see him again. This will be easy to do: instead of going to meet her friends on Wednesday evening, she can spend this time with him. All you had to do was pick up the phone, call him on his mobile and make an appointment. Easily.

And this thought both excited and frightened her at the same time, so much so that all Monday she could do nothing but think about it. On Tuesday, she found the courage to make just one call, but no one answered her. After that, she didn't have the strength to continue, and she didn't try to call him back throughout the day. On Wednesday morning her mood changed again - instead of guilt and fear, there was a calm confidence. Why shouldn't she see him anymore? He is her old friend, and this may be her last chance. After all, their previous evening together had been quite harmless, and there was no reason to feel guilty or nervous. But maybe it's not worth telling anyone about it anyway.

The third time she called, he finally answered. He was pleasantly surprised to hear her voice, but was in a hurry somewhere and, not having time to discuss the details of the meeting, simply asked her to call him at the hotel in the evening. She spent the rest of the day in great excitement. She told her friends at work that she needed to visit her sister, so she won't go to the party today. She told her partner, leaving him at seven o'clock in the evening, that she wanted to go to the club and would return late. He didn't like it, but he wasn't too outraged.

She was nervous when she arrived at the hotel, and the first few minutes of their conversation were very awkward. However, even before they finished their first glass, sitting in the hotel bar, they felt as if they were students again. It was as if these last six years spent apart never happened. Tonight, unlike last Thursday evening, she behaved completely differently and was in a completely different mood. Having finished the next glass, she sat down so that their knees were touching, and during the conversation she touched either his arm or his leg with her palm. When he suggested having dinner at the hotel restaurant “to avoid going out into the cold,” she happily agreed. After dinner, he said that he needed to go up to his room to bring photographs that he wanted to show her. She went with him to the room because she always wanted to know “what the rooms in this hotel look like.”

He never showed her any photographs. Literally a moment after they closed the door behind them, they were already kissing and taking off each other's clothes. Before she had time to catch her breath, they were already naked, lying on the floor, and he was inside her and cumming. She was taken aback by such haste, but made no attempt to stop him. He did not suggest that she use condoms or interrupt the act, and it never occurred to her to ask him about it. Her cunt was wet all day with anticipation, and when she walked into his room, she was just leaking. So penetration was quick and easy, and ejaculation was rapid.

When everything was done, he began to apologize, saying that he was so impetuous because he never stopped loving her and wanted her madly. He swore that if they got off the floor and went to bed, he would try to please her. So he did. For half an hour he caressed her body and played with her; he understood her feminine essence in a way that her partner had never understood. After she finished, they dozed for a while, hugging each other. Then they started all over again. He penetrated her just as quickly, but this time everything was done without haste. His movements were long and slow. She, unusually for her, came during these thrusts, just a few seconds before he ejaculated.

After that they hugged, but this calm was short-lived. For the first time that evening, she felt a growing sense of guilt and panic. It was already late. And fear quickly took over all her thoughts. She had to go home. He asked her to stay the night, call her partner and come up with some excuse not to return home. But she didn't want to hear anything about it. She just needed to go home. In the end, she got out of his arms under the pretext that she needed to go to the toilet. She then refused to go back to bed and began to get dressed. The conversation became tense and strained. She even felt a twinge of irritation towards him; their farewell was awkward. She got into a taxi and went home, her "backwash" seeping into her panties, just like her old ones. good times. But she didn't notice it. Her mind was busy thinking about what she should do when she got home.

Very quietly, so as not to wake up her partner, she undressed, washed herself thoroughly, and then went to bed. Then she began to wake him up and excite him. When he got aroused, even before he had time to fully wake up, she sat astride him, inserted his penis into her and after some time made him cum. A vague thought flashed through his mind that she was very wet, but he did not think about it, but concentrated on getting pleasure from intercourse without any effort on his part.

The next day, her ex-lover went home. They never met again. A day after this, she ovulated and became pregnant. For the next three weeks, she and her partner had sex literally every other day. By the time she discovered she was pregnant, that night of infidelity had become a hazy memory. She felt both fear and guilt, but it all went away, and now she could almost believe that this had never happened. She consistently convinced herself that the baby was definitely her partner's child. After all, she had sex with him about sixteen times that month, which didn't compare to the one night she spent with her ex-boyfriend.

Nine months later she gave birth to a girl. Two years after that, they had a boy, and three years later, another girl. The eldest daughter grew up and became more and more like her mother. She was also noticeably more attractive, more energetic, and more popular among her peers than the two younger children. However, the difference between them, at first glance, was no greater than the difference between brothers and sisters.

All these years, that woman’s partner had no idea that at the moment of conceiving her first child, there was another man’s sperm in her body, and not just his own. And, of course, even she herself never knew exactly what happened inside her body in those few critical days. Neither of them ever learned that the tiny sperm that penetrated her egg and produced her first daughter did not in fact belong to her partner, but to her lover.

Both scenes (6 and 7) in this small chapter reveal the essence and process of the war between sperm. In fact, only one of these scenes contains people - the one we just watched. Scene 7 isn't really a scene at all. As a description of the war between sperm in action, this plot in the book is the only one that requires interpretation.

We have just witnessed a textbook scene of infidelity. The nuances of the characters' behavior played a role in who ultimately got the fatherhood of our heroine's first daughter. We should note this precarious and irregular masculinity of the woman's ex-boyfriend and that his child later developed more positive character traits than those inherited by her partner's children. We also need to pay attention to the number and duration of her orgasms - both those that were given to her by men and those that were caused by her own stimulation. We will discuss the significance of these details later. And now we will take a closer look at the very fact of infidelity and the factors that influenced the fact that it was the sperm of the ex-boyfriend, and not the partner, that fertilized her. Overall, the result of all this was a major factor in determining the reproductive success of all three characters in this scene.

We have already mentioned that a woman is somewhat more willing to have routine sex with her partner during the post-ovulation phase of her cycle when she is unable to become pregnant (Scene 2). But this will not be the same if she cheats. This woman would be more willing to have penetrative sex with another man than with her partner during the fertile phase. Moreover, in such cases, she is less inclined to use contraceptives or insist that the man use them.

If we want to identify similar cases infidelity and determine their statistics, we will see that women experience changes in mood and behavior, which provoke infidelity. We will even understand why this could happen, not only in the scene we just witnessed, but also in the very first scene in which our couple appeared. We watched them for the entire first month, and in the end the woman did not become pregnant. She was cold towards her partner during her fertile periods, and we interpret this to mean that her failure to conceive was a benefit to her body rather than a failure for the couple in question. At that time, the only man available to her was her partner, and her body decided - since consciousness had nothing to do with it - that the right time for him to father her first child had not yet arrived. For this reason, her body generated a feeling of coldness towards him during her fertile period.

This month, a chance meeting with an ex-boyfriend meant that a woman had an alternative potential father for her first child - and in fact, it was the alternative that her body chose. She had two opportunities to commit treason: the first on Thursday, the second on the following Wednesday. She chose to use only one of them. On Thursday evening, heated by a meeting with her ex-boyfriend, the woman was at the phase of her cycle in which she was not yet capable of conceiving. Her body hardly found anything attractive about sex with this man. She used her coldness to keep him at arm's length that evening, even though he openly expressed his hopes for sex. However, on Wednesday her mood took a completely different turn. On Tuesday, she entered her new phase and became fertile, and the idea of ​​seeing her ex-boyfriend seemed very attractive to her. However, the motivation for her to take decisive action was insufficient - and so on until Wednesday. No one knew, including herself, that on this particular day the chances that fertilization would lead to conception were higher than ever.

When Wednesday evening arrived, her mood changed from the previous Thursday evening, and her body language changed accordingly. Most of the proposals came from the man, but despite the fact that the week before she had made it clear that she was not interested in sex with him, this time she happily agreed to everything. Once in the bedroom, she made every effort to get his sperm. She agreed to have penetrative sex and for him to cum; foreplay was minimal, and the woman completely forgot about contraception. Later, her mind will tell her that such behavior was provoked by excessive excitement from everything that happened. In reality, two days before ovulation, her body was craving the sperm of this particular man. We find out the reason why her body wanted to be re-impregnated later (Scene 25), but once she had his sperm, she became uninterested in being around him. Now the most important thing was to return to my partner.

In her subconscious, there apparently were two reasons why her body provoked such a sudden change in mood towards her partner. She will partly talk about this later, but she will come up with explanations of what is happening that are slightly different from the actual ones. The hidden strategy her body was following was that no matter who fathered the child, the best man The person who will help her raise this child will be her partner. Thus, according to this strategy, her infidelity should never be revealed. There was a fear that the betrayal would be revealed, and a feeling of panic, but she needed to be in her right mind to think through the best time plan and come up with a suitable story. It looks like it worked great.

Research shows that such one-time infidelities are very rarely discovered, and even long-term extramarital affairs have a chance of being discovered only in 50% of cases out of a hundred. In this case, as we see, the woman did a very good job of covering her tracks.

And now comes the next stage in her body's strategy, when the conscious mind finally takes the initiative. She reaches home and makes every effort to have sex with her partner. Consciously, she will view this as something that will help her hide the betrayal. If she forces her partner to impregnate her, then any self-explanatory marks on the sheet or the smell of sperm will not arouse his suspicions. What her mind doesn't realize is that, having received her ex-boyfriend's sperm, her body is now quite willing to accept her partner's sperm. Her body decided that her ex-boyfriend would be a better genetic father than her partner. The only thing her body doesn't know is how to compare their sperm. A woman wants her ex-boyfriend's sperm to fertilize her egg only if his sperm is more competitive and fertile. There are only the only way To check this, contrast the sperm of one man with the sperm of another. In other words, her body wants to start a sperm war between two men, and this is probably her only chance to do it.

When a woman's body contains sperm from two or more men, they begin to compete with each other for the reward of fertilizing the egg. But what actually happens is not just a game of chance, not just a competition of speed. This is a real war - a war of two (or more) armies. This war between sperm, or the threat of such a war, has influenced and shaped the sexuality of every man and woman alive today, as well as the sexuality of almost every animal that has ever existed.

Sperm warfare is more common and more significant than most people realize. Recent research in Britain found that 4% of people were conceived as a result of sperm wars. In other words, every twenty-fifth child born owes its existence to the fact that the sperm of its genetic father defeated the sperm of one or more other men while inside the reproductive tract of its mother. If you don't think that's a lot, know that since 1900, each of us has had an ancestor who was conceived through a sperm war. Thus, each of us is who we are because one of our recent ancestors produced sperm that were competitive enough to win this war.

Most often, since a woman produces only one egg at a time, there is only one winner in a sperm war, as shown in Scene 6. However, periodically, a woman can produce two eggs at the same time and give birth to fraternal twins. Under such circumstances, another outcome of the war is possible - a draw. We have several remarkable examples (this is more obvious when the competitors in the sperm war are of different races) of fraternal twins having different fathers.

Let's return to the moment of conception, which we witnessed earlier. Three sperm reached the egg zone at the same time. They all belonged to a lover. If we move down the fallopian tube to the collection of sperm that waits quietly in the rest area, we find that nine out of ten also belong to her lover. The woman's partner lost this sperm war big time, even though he made all the necessary preparations—we're talking about routine sex again.

Thus, we interpret a man's interest in routine sex simply as an attempt to ensure a constant flow of fertile sperm through a woman's fallopian tubes. Routine sex, however, not only “tops up” the partner with fertile sperm: it is also preparation for sperm warfare. Moreover, the level of this preparation depends on how great the risk of such a war is. When deciding how much sperm to ejaculate during routine sex, a man's body weighs the odds of how likely his partner's body is to contain another man's sperm. His body determines this very simply by noting how much time he spent with the woman and how many sperm he needs to send into her body since their last copulation. If they haven't had sex in a week, then he calculates how much time he spent with her in these last eight days.

Although this strategy may seem crude, it still works. The less time a man spends with his partner, the higher the chances that she is cheating on him. If he spends more than 80% of his time with her, then realistically the chances of her being unfaithful are zero. But if he only spends 10% of his time with her, then the likelihood that she is cheating on him will be higher than 10%. In other words, while it's important to a man's body, the less time has passed since he last had sex with his partner, the greater the chance that the next time he impregnates her, she will have another man's sperm in her body. To increase his chances of winning the sperm war that may follow all of this, he must inject more sperm. Which is what he does.

The difference in the number of sperm released depends on the relevant circumstances, and this difference is very large. In the infidelity scene, we just watched a woman return home on a Wednesday night and have sex with her partner. While deciding how much sperm to produce, his half-asleep body determined that only three days had passed since they last had sex (Sunday). The average refueling in this time period is approximately 300 million sperm. It further determined that since then they have spent 50% of the time together, so the chances that the woman managed to cheat on him during this time are quite low. So an average refill of 300 million sperm is exactly the amount of sperm the body has to load into the urethra and then expel. If the two spent more time in each other's company during those three days, the risk of the woman being unfaithful would be zero, in which case the man would produce approximately 100 million sperm. On the other hand, if one of them went away and was absent from early Monday morning until late Wednesday evening, then the risk that she cheated on him would be disproportionately higher, and then he would produce about 500 million sperm.

For the woman's lover the situation was completely different. This was the first time he had impregnated this woman in the past six years. Moreover, even in the past eight days, he had only spent a few hours with her. His body reasoned, naturally, correctly, that the chances of her body containing sperm belonging to another man were very high, and responded by loading and expelling 600 million sperm. Half an hour later he added about 100 million more. Since “treason on Wednesday” is playing important role, the sperm war began from the moment the lover sent an army of sperm into the woman's body, and this army was twice the number of sperm of her partner.

So the lover had a double advantage over her partner from the very beginning. By the time the war reached a critical point, and the prize of the opportunity to fertilize an egg was already visible on the horizon, the lover had a nine-fold advantage. (We remember that in the resting area of ​​the fallopian tubes, nine out of ten sperm waiting to be sent to the fertile area were the lover's sperm.)

What happened during the sperm war that led to such a preponderance in favor of the lover? The first step to understanding this will be to familiarize and evaluate the soldiers themselves - the sperm.

The most common ejected human sperm is, of course, the majestic, round athletic cell that most people know about: with a head, a body and a long, thin tail. Its head has the shape of a spatula, oval along the outer perimeter, but flattened, and it looks like there is a cap on top. This cap is filled with a very important liquid. Inside the head, tightly compressed, are DNA cells, genes that a fertile sperm will deliver to the center of the egg. The head protrudes like a lollipop from the short, dense middle, which represents the sperm's center of power, the place where stored energy is mobilized to activate the tail with which the sperm swims. Such round characters can easily travel inside a woman's body, propelled forward by graceful, slow movements of the tail.

Although this image will be quite familiar to most people, sperm of this type make up only about half of normal sperm. The sperm army is a much more motley collection of characters than people might imagine. For example, some sperm have a large head, while others have a small head. The latter are so small that there is no room inside them to store DNA cells. Some sperm have round heads, some are cigar-shaped, some are dumbbell-shaped, and some have heads so outlandish that they can hardly be described. Some sperm really resemble hordes of monsters, they have two, three or, very rarely, four heads.

Spermatozoa differ not only in the shape of their heads. Some have short tails, others have tails that curl like springs, and there are also those with two, three or even four tails. Some sperm, like hunchbacks, are arched in the middle in the shape of a rectangle. Others, like tourists with backpacks, carry bags of stuff on their backs. cellular material. On average, only 60% of the soldiers in this army are the well-rounded athletes we know, while the rest are a bunch of mutants. However, they all play an important role in the war between sperm.

During the “Wednesday Betrayal” there was a massive offensive by the lover’s army, which helped lead to an advantage in his favor during this war, changing the score from 2:1 to 9:1. To understand how this happened, we need to get inside a woman's body with a microscope and follow in detail all the stages of this campaign. We'll start with the moment a woman and her lover walked into a hotel room, undressed and had sex on the floor.



Sperm War

When the woman and her lover fell to the floor and only a few moments had passed since their intercourse, there were already sperm in her body. Her partner ejected a total of 600 million sperm during their last routine sex session during the previous weekend. Most of them flowed out along with the “reverse flows”, but still some part remained inside it. However, their ability to influence the outcome of a sperm war depends on where exactly they are located.

A few infertile sperm are still inside her vagina, carried out from the cervix along with the mucus that oozes all day in anticipation of the next betrayal. Each drop of mucus carries with it several of her partner's sperm. Since these sperm will not be participating in the upcoming battle in her cervix, they are partially replaced by the last handfuls of sperm from the cervical cavities. They appear and enter the mucous canals in a futile attempt to quantitatively replace those lost in her vagina. However, the number of lost sperm turned out to be greater than the number of those that arrived to replace them, and all day long the strength of her partner's sperm slowly dwindled.

Those spermatozoa that were located in the mucous secretions of the cervix were not the type of round spermatozoa to which we referred. Instead, sluggish blockers settled there: sperm, whose task is to prevent subsequent rivals from penetrating into the cavities of the mucous membrane of the cervix and into the uterus itself. Sperm with curled tails, with a curved middle, with large backpacks, with a large head, or with two, three, four heads can very effectively block any of these extremely narrow channels in the mucosa where they are located. Two sperm can do the same thing when pressed against each other. The lover moves inside her, but relatively few of her mucous passages remain blocked by these rapidly diminishing partner's sperm.

These sperm blockers are not the only defense the partner has inside her body. Some of his sperm are floating around her uterus, although they too are dwindling in number. These sperm are familiar to us. They are flexible and athletic, but they are not here to fertilize an egg. These are killer sperm, they rush around in search of another man's sperm, which must be found and destroyed. Every time the killer comes across another sperm, he tests chemical composition on the surface of his head. If this chemical composition is the same as his own, the killer classifies him as an ally and continues his search. So until now, all such meetings were only with allies and there was no need for the deadly service of assassins. Now many began to move more slowly, and a large number of them simply died of old age. The weakest ones stayed in her womb for only three days. The more active ones are newly arrived sperm from reservoirs hidden in the mucous cavities.

A woman's womb is not the only territory occupied by killers. Some were also dispersed along the length of her fallopian tubes. There was even one that floats in abdominal cavity near the left ovary. These killer sperm in the fallopian tubes accompany the last handful of fertile sperm belonging to her partner to reach the egg. Killer sperm and those that reach the egg are very similar. They are round and massive in shape, but while the heads of killer average size, among miners they are somewhat larger. If a woman now ovulates, her partner will still have good chance make her a child. But ovulation will happen in a couple of days, and the war is about to begin.

After the first few strokes, the lover places his seed in her vagina. The cervical tube descends into this puddle and remains there, then the vanguard of his army begins to seep into the channels of her mucous secretions. In this army there are about 500 million killer sperm, about a million getters and about 100 million blockers. For some, the path to the mucous canals is blocked by blockers from her partner’s sperm. So some of these blockers are still retained, even though almost all the mucosal channels are clear. The invaders are making their way inside in waves. Several hundred miners, supported by killers, move along the cervix directly into the uterus - in general there are several million of them - and intend to occupy the mucous cavities. They pour in, settle in and wait. further development events. The remains of killer cells move through the cervix into the uterus more slowly, the slowest ones remain far behind. These latter spread through the channels of the mucous membrane, then calm down, and many immediately curl their tails, as if in anticipation of a long wait.

Some of the lover's sperm from the vanguard of the getters do not reach the fallopian tubes. As we have seen, there were relatively few killer sperm left in the woman's uterus belonging to the partner, but those that remained did their best to hold back the flow of the lover's sperm. As soon as the killer of one of these men meets the sperm of a rival, he raises the alarm, because war has begun. After about an hour, killers of both species begin to swim twice as fast as usual, looking for the maximum number of sperm from their opponent. Their goal is to poison enemy miners, and for this they use a deadly cocktail of liquid in the caps that each of them carries on his head. They do this by bumping their heads against each other. At first, as we have seen, they test with the top of their head each sperm that they meet on their way, comparing it chemical surface with your own and checking it for similarities and differences. If the killer discovers the sperm of the enemy army, he attempts to strike with the deadly end of his glans on the vulnerable side of his opponent's glans, each blow accompanied by the injection of a small amount of caustic poison. After delivering several blows, he moves on, leaving the enemy sperm to die.

A single killer sperm carries enough poison to kill quite a lot of sperm from the enemy army, but gradually its cap loses its poisonous properties, and it has no energy reserves left to produce new poisons. In a last desperate attempt to kill another opponent, he tries to stick his head into him and inject the last drops of his deadly fluids. As the war progresses, the number of pairs of dead and dying sperm gradually increases: they join their heads in a deadly embrace.

In this initial fight, one or two of the partner's killers do their job, and some of the lover's killers, as well as his sperm killers, die head-on in this fight, their heads left covered in venom. However, any initial success of the partner's sperm is short-lived. In turn, the partner's sperm are surrounded by hordes of the lover's invaders who accompany the getters. Like a kamikaze, frantically inflicting mutilation, sperm killers on both sides are trying to destroy each other's troops. However, the partner's sperm is outnumbered by approximately 1000:1, and soon the partner's last sperm is defeated.

Now the front line moves to the fallopian tubes, where the killing continues. Incurring small losses, the lover's sperm systematically destroy the last of the partner's remaining earners and killers. At the moment when the woman has sex with her lover again an hour later, the first battle has already passed, and not a single living sperm of her partner remains inside her body. In fact, the role of second fertilization in this particular sperm war is more complex than it appears at first glance, but any explanation given here will only confuse us.

Thus, in our war, one of the sides had such a strong advantage that it easily dealt with the soldiers of the other. But main battle everything is still to come. It will begin when the woman returns home, sits on top of her partner, inserts his penis into her vagina and makes him ejaculate. By doing this, she will start a real war. However, although her partner will now send new reinforcements of 300 million sperm into the arena of war, her lover's army will still have the upper hand.

Once the partner's newly introduced sperm tries to escape from the seminal pool, it will run into problems. The woman's mucous passages are almost completely blocked - not only by her lover's sperm, but also by white blood cells belonging to the woman herself. The lover's vast quantity of sperm and a corresponding army of white blood cells will do their job almost flawlessly, and the partner's sperm will encounter even more obstacles when trying to leave the seminal puddle than the lover's sperm did when trying to get out of it just a couple of hours ago. The partner's sperm lines swell in the blocked ducts, creating plugs all the way out of the seminal pool. As a result, only a very small number of the partner's army will be able to get out of the puddle before the woman expels the "backwash".

Even those sperm that have escaped the pool and found free channels are still at risk. A small vanguard of miners and killers, who got straight into the uterus, drives the hordes of the lover’s killers through the gauntlet. Of course, one or two sperm will make it through this system without being poisoned, but when they try to leave the uterus they will again encounter problems. The passage into each fallopian tube is very narrow, only one sperm can penetrate through it to reach the descending egg. Moreover, both entrances to the tubes are blocked by the lover's sperm and are guarded by his killers, while many of the partner's sperm are killed when they try to break through. Even those few who managed to escape and arrive safely at the fallopian tube rest area are still under threat of death from the lover's killers who patrol virtually the entire area.

And below, in the woman’s reproductive tract, in the cervix, many of her partner’s sperm are trying to get into the mucous cavities. But the entrance to them is patrolled by killers, and from the inside these cavities are also filled with the sperm of a lover. It was only by chance that some of the partner's sperm got stuck in the channels leading into the empty cavity; most of them got stuck in the mucus, where they became prey to the combined forces of the lover’s sperm and the woman’s own white blood cells.

In general, the meeting on Wednesday served the lover well in this war, and in the next couple of days nothing happened that would restore the balance. On Thursday and Friday, everything happens as usual for the woman, the number of sperm blockers of both armies slowly decreases. Some are carried into the vagina along with mucus. Others are destroyed by a rearguard action of white blood cells. Even when some of the blockers in the cervix are replaced by sperm emerging from the mucous cavities, there are not enough new recruits to replace the losses, and the blockers die off. The killer spermatozoa located in her uterus, after initial losses during the battles, gradually increase in number, receiving new reinforcements from the mucous cavities on Thursday. Then the killers also begin to decrease in number. A constant influx of sperm-producers from both men (but mostly from the lover) is established, these cells leave their refuges and are sent to the resting areas located in the fallopian tubes. Along the way, they have to break through the enemy's killers located in the womb, and most of the partners' getters fail in this task, because almost all of the killers belong to the lover. On Friday evening, when there are only a few hours left before ovulation, the partner's earners in the fallopian tubes become a hundred times less than the lover's earners.

When a woman has sex with her partner on a Friday night, she is only an hour away from ovulation. Now it will be much easier for her partner's sperm to get through the cervical mucosa, because the number of blockers has seriously decreased. Although most of his sperm are directed into the now half-empty sockets, the vanguard of getters and killers goes straight into the fallopian tubes. Many of them are killed or detained by the lover’s killers patrolling the territory, but a sufficient number of the partner’s sperm breaks through, the advantage is still on the lover’s side, but the ratio changes from 100:1 to 10:1. And it is at this moment that the woman produces an egg, which is released from one ovary, and a chemical signal travels along the entire fallopian tube adjacent to it. This signal activates hundreds of sperm in the resting area; they advance in waves, trying to break into the fallopian tube, into the zone of conception. Now it becomes a race - or rather a steeplechase, because there are still killers in the pipe, and mostly they are the lover's killers. The partner’s sperm, and specifically those few sperm that have just arrived straight after ejaculation, turn out to be faster than the lover’s sperm; if their powers were equal in all other respects, then the partner could win the prize of conception.

But their other chances are not equal. One by one, the partner's earners stumble upon the lover's killers. When the egg reaches the fertilization zone in the fallopian tube and when the first sperm arrives there, the inequality in favor of the lover is reduced to 5:1, but that is enough. The first three sperm to arrive belong to the lover, and one of them takes the prize. An hour later, when the partner’s fresh sperm have defeated the lover’s sperm in our woman’s tract on all fronts, the advantage in favor of the partner becomes very significant. But it's too late. The lover did this, and the woman's daughter, who will be born nine months later, is conceived by the wrong man whom she will call daddy. But no one will ever know about this.

During the long female infertile phases, the composition of the cervical mucus is such that it is difficult to penetrate through it. The narrow channels in the mucus structure are small in number, and although sperm can penetrate the mucus itself, few sperm are able to overcome this mucus plug and pass through it. Even those spermatozoa that will be able to pass through the mucus, they will do it very slowly. During this phase, the flow of mucus moves slowly, but it is fast enough to perform its disease-fighting function. In contrast, during the fertile phase, the composition of the mucus changes: it becomes more liquid and viscous, and the channels themselves expand and therefore become more accessible to both sperm and bacteria.

The only big problem with sperm penetration during a woman's fertile phases is that not all the channels within the mucus remain unclogged after all that we have already mentioned. To get rid of congestion and to cope with the increased risk of infection, the woman increases the intensity of the mucus flow. Thus, it throws out cells, bacteria and other remnants of its metabolic products. She notices that she has more discharge during these periods and sees a clear, clean discharge on her underwear.

Although the nature of such changes in the composition of female mucus is understandable, it can cause some problems. Such changes can threaten a woman's attempts to hide her fertile phase from both herself and her partner (Scene 2). Her body overcomes this danger by producing mucus in the b O larger quantities than required simply to prevent sperm from entering the cervix. These symptoms, associated with increased mucus production, may appear more than a week before ovulation and last two or three days after it. Therefore, although the timing of cervical mucous discharge gives us some clues as to when exactly a woman enters her fertile phase, it is still unpredictable and cannot be relied upon to understand a woman's sexual strategy.

Thus, the mucous secretions of the cervix are a kind of full-fledged filter. Regardless of the phase of your menstrual cycle a woman is able to increase the effectiveness of the function of these mucous secretions by blocking the channels. The more channels it blocks, the more powerful the filter becomes.

So what does she use to block the mucus ducts? Firstly, blood and all the tissues that come out during menstruation. Secondly - white blood cells (Scene 4). And thirdly - sperm (Scene 7). This blockage may last for several days, but eventually all these masses disappear as cervical secretions inexorably wash them into the vaginal cavity. Later we will see that this ability of a woman to increase or decrease the power of her own internal filters is the most powerful weapon in attempts to fool men (Scenes 22−26).

Even when the mucus is already in the vagina, it has not yet fully completed its function. It flows down the walls of the vagina, covering them with a thin film. Some of the mucus comes out, and the woman feels wetness on her labia. But most of this mucous film remains on the vaginal walls, preparing them for the next sexual intercourse, even if it does not happen for the next few days. When a woman becomes aroused as a result of foreplay, her vaginal walls begin to “sweat.” Sweat itself is not slippery. But when it is mixed with the film from old mucous secretions of the cervix, a very good lubricant is obtained. And then the vagina is ready for penetration and sexual intercourse.

We now have all the information we need to look at what happens, from the first penetration of the vagina by the penis to the flow of backflow. But we also have to change our ideas about what a vagina looks like and remember how we spent medical examination. What I am about to describe was first filmed using a fiber optic endoscope attached to the underside of the penis just before intercourse. Thus, through the penis we could observe what was happening inside. So, in addition to my description, imagine that you dared to take part in such an experiment. You have sex in the missionary position, and your erect penis (if you are a man) or your partner's penis (if you are a woman) is equipped with a camera - it is located right on the head. You see what is happening inside you on a large television screen that is located on the wall directly in front of you.

The penis penetrates deeper into the vagina for the first time, and the walls of the vagina part, and when the penis is completely inserted into it, you see that something like the end of a cylinder appears at some distance in front. Also at some distance is the cervix. Right now, with that central dimple-like hole, it looks like a pink sea anemone with its tentacles cut off. But during sexual intercourse everything will change.

If you look at the screen at the moment when the movements begin, you will see that every time the penis moves back, the walls of the vagina close behind it. Every time the penis moves forward, the vaginal walls move apart. Anytime the penis is fully inside the vagina, you can see the far wall of the vagina and the protruding cervix. The movements continue, and when the penis is completely in the vagina, the picture changes. The far end of the vagina becomes more spacious, slowly filling with air and becoming slippery with mucus secreted. What's even more impressive is that the cervix begins to elongate and overhang this space more and more. Gradually it resembles less and less a sea anemone and more like a pink, very wide elephant trunk. As a result, you see that in front of the penis fully inserted into the vagina there is the front wall of the trunk of the cervix. Her hole faces down so it's virtually invisible. The closer to the climax of sexual intercourse, the lower the cervix hangs, and its opening may even come into contact with the vaginal wall. When ejaculation occurs, jets of semen hit the anterior wall of the cervix and flow back into the vagina, thus forming a kind of puddle on the surface of this cavity. The cervix hangs down, plunging its end into this puddle of semen, and most of all resembles an elephant’s trunk lowered into a lake.

After a minute or two, when ejaculation is complete, the penis begins to shrink. Accordingly, the vaginal walls close behind him, push him out, but do not release the puddle of semen. The penis shrinks, and we can no longer observe what is happening inside the woman with the help of a camera - our television screen fades. However, now this is not of decisive importance, although it is now that the most important events begin to occur. These events occur at the chemical level, and all this can only be seen under a microscope.

The first thing that happens - and we could see this on our television screen moments before the penis began to shrink in the vagina - the puddle of semen begins to coagulate, becoming less liquid and more jelly-like. The sperm then begins to flow towards the cervix, which can only be penetrated through the surface that forms between the mucous secretions of the cervix and the semen. Imagine that the cervix is ​​really an elephant's trunk, lowered into a puddle of semen. This trunk is clogged with mucus. However, this mucus does not dissolve or even mix when the two substances come into contact. Instead, something more complex happens.

The surface between the mucous secretions and the proboscis of the cervix is ​​not flat. The “shoots” of the seed penetrate into the most spacious channels in the mucus and increase in volume. They penetrate to the very beginning of the cervix, stretching in the mucus like the fingers of rubber gloves. Sperm move furiously along these fingers and from there penetrate into narrower mucus channels, leaving behind the seminal fluid itself. We'll look more closely at the sperm path later, but for now we're interested in the "reverse flow."

Lowered into a pool of seminal fluid, the proboscis of the cervix, a few minutes after intercourse, begins to shrink and rise to the surface of the vagina, again turning from an elephant's trunk into a sea anemone. It breaks away from the pool of semen and thus cuts off the sperm's escape route. Once the cervix has shrunk in size, the sperm that remain in the pool are virtually doomed to be released and die prematurely. About fifteen minutes after ejaculation, the puddle begins to thin out and becomes more watery again. Soon, slight unconscious muscle vibrations begin to push this mixture of semen, mucus, sperm and other cells out of the vagina. Eventually this mixture ends up in a cavity located just before the vaginal exit. On average, this happens half an hour after ejaculation, but it can happen after ten minutes or a couple of hours. Before this, a woman can get up, take a walk, even go to the toilet, but there will be no “reverse flow”. However, once the “backflow” has collected at the exit of the vagina, any sudden movement, even coughing or sneezing, will trigger the release of unnecessary material. Even if the woman is sleeping, after two hours the “backflow” will become so liquid that it will begin to seep out, causing the sheets to get wet.

On average, the "backflow" contains about half of the ejaculated sperm - sometimes more, sometimes less. Exactly how much depends partly on the power of the female filter. Quite often (in about one case in ten) a woman's filter is so powerful that she expels almost all of the man's semen; more rare are the cases when her filter is so weak that almost all the liquid remains inside her body. The most important thing is that the proportion of sperm that remain in a woman's body is not random. In more general terms, she is controlled by her body - and not just by the cervical filter. Every time she has sex, her body decides how much sperm to keep inside and how much to throw out. How and why, we will find out later. We will soon find out why this female ability so important in the life of the couple in question. But not now.

Refueling

Over the next two weeks, our couple becomes quite active sexually. The woman's coldness disappeared when her fertile week arrived. Both partners have gone through the anticipation phase and are enjoying their sexual activity more than they did the entire previous year. After that incident on Saturday evening, they had sex twice a day - in the morning, when they had just woken up, and then in the afternoon, around three o'clock. Half an hour later they even tried to repeat the experiment. He got a massive erection, but despite ten minutes of intermittent sexual exercise and his partner's encouragement, he finally admitted that he wouldn't come. Then they missed several days.

On Wednesday evening, the woman, as always, met with her friends, on Thursday evening the man went to meet “with the guys.” On both of these evenings, when the reveler eventually climbed into bed, his partner was already asleep, or at least pretending to be. However, they had sex on Friday night and continued their games on Saturday and Sunday. The next week passed in a similar manner until the woman got her period on Saturday morning. Then they abstained until the next Saturday, by which time they menstrual bleeding stopped.

Only a few couples have routine sex at exactly equal intervals. We observed this couple for four weeks, they had penetrative sex ten times, and the woman was impregnated nine times. But the time intervals between one intercourse and another vary from thirty minutes (albeit without ejaculation) or seven hours (with ejaculation) to seven days.

In this book, men get the roughest jobs. Our story is the story of how men's bodies struggle to do the most difficult work, and female body deceives and manages to outsmart them at almost every turn. But this seemingly uninspiring scene gives us the opportunity to watch a man do something impressive. A man may not look particularly sophisticated when he ejaculates, but something remarkable is still happening before our eyes. Every time he has routine sex, he produces no more sperm than is required to refuel his partner. How does such a restriction help him in his quest to achieve reproductive success? To understand what a man is trying to do, we need to follow further the sperm we are in last time seen floating through the channels of female mucus from the cervix.

A small part of these sperm, the vanguard, swims straight down the cervix into the uterus itself. Except when a woman is pregnant, her uterus is, roughly speaking, a pear-shaped sac, also similar in size to a pear. Like the vagina, the walls of the uterus are pressed tightly together, leaving little free space inside. Once inside the uterus, the sperm are pressed against the walls, and the uterus itself pushes them to its apex, the widest part of the pear: in fact, the sperm swim on the crest of a wave created by muscle spasms passing along the walls of the uterus. At the top of the uterus on each side (like horns, if we were to imagine the pear-shaped uterus as the face of a bull) there is an opening leading into a narrow tube, the fallopian tube. Despite the fact that there are two such tubes, only one of them will contain an egg during a single menstrual cycle. Once the sperm have left the uterus, they swim a short distance down the fallopian tube to the “resting area.” Here they stop their swimming, calm down and wait for events to develop.

And in the cervical mucus, the next batch of sperm moves along now more diagonal channels and seeps into tiny depressions on the walls of the cervix. These sperm, too, as soon as they find themselves in the cavities, stop moving, calm down and conserve energy. Over the next four to five days, they will sequentially awaken and re-enter the cervical canals. Then they too will make a journey through the mucus, swimming through the uterus towards the resting area in the fallopian tubes.

The last batch of sperm will simply remain in the cervical mucus. They will settle there, cluttering the mucous canals. Eventually they will die - or be killed. Their mortal opponents are hordes of marauders made up of white blood cells that are expelled female body into the uterus minutes after fertilization. Making their way through the mucous secretions of the cervix, these killer cells absorb and digest live and dead sperm. At their peak, the white blood cells are quantitatively comparable to sperm, but twenty-four hours after fertilization, these hordes are gone, leaving white cells in much smaller numbers to complete the cleansing operation. Although white blood cells may be numerous, they do not pursue sperm lodged in the mucous cavity.

On average, each ejection of sperm contains about 300 million sperm. The woman will throw out 150 million of them in her “reverse flow.” Several hundred sperm will travel straight to the fallopian tubes, and about a million will first go to rest in the mucous cavities, forming reservoirs, and they should make their journey to the fallopian tubes over the next five days. In general, about 20 thousand sperm from each ejaculation will eventually pass through the fallopian tubes. The remainder, those that are not expelled with the "backwash", will eventually be cleared out by white blood cells or carried out by the slow flow of cervical mucous secretions (Scene 3) back into the vagina.

It may seem that releasing 3 million sperm is a waste of resources, since only about a million remain in the reservoirs. But not everything is as it seems. Whenever a woman needs to refuel, the important thing is that the size of the reservoirs depends on how many sperm the man ejaculates. If he only gives out 200 million, the tanks will fill half as much as if the man had thrown out 400 million.

Robin Baker

Bed wars. Infidelity, sexual conflict and relationship evolution

© Publication in Russian, translation, design. Alpina Non-Fiction LLC, 2013

© Electronic edition. Alpina Publisher LLC, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of the electronic copy of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including posting on the Internet or corporate networks, for private or public use without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Preface

Sex and reproduction occupy the bulk of human time - not so much the process itself, but thoughts and conversations about it. Despite so much attention given to this issue, most people still find their sexual actions, reactions and emotions to be the most difficult to understand aspects of their lives. Let's try to answer the following questions.

Why is it that when we are in the stage of an established and happy relationship that satisfies us in everything, we sometimes experience an incredibly strong temptation to cheat on our partner? Why do men produce enough sperm each time they have sex to impregnate the entire population of the United States—twice? And at the same time, half of them do not reach the goal, flowing back? Why is it that when we least want to have children, our bodies clearly fail us and produce offspring? Why is it so difficult to figure out the best time to have sex to get pregnant—or not get pregnant? Why does the penis have this particular shape, and why do we thrust during sexual intercourse? Why do we have such a strong need to masturbate, and why do some of us have orgasms while we sleep at night? Why is the female orgasm so unpredictable and why is it so difficult to achieve? Why are some people so interested in sex with members of their own sex?

These are just a few questions that most people, if they are honest, will not be able to answer intelligibly or at least consistently. Still on the wave sexual revolution, which began in the 1970s and gained full momentum only in the 1990s, and the questions that we will try to answer in this book arose.

Until now, this revolution in the interpretation of sexual behavior has been the preserve of scientists—evolutionary biologists, to be precise. In this book, my goal is to bring new information to a wider audience for the first time.

We could potentially revolutionize the way we think about sex. My goal is to see this revolution happen. Its core message is that our sexual behavior was programmed and shaped by the forces of evolution that guided our ancestors—and still guide us, even today. The main impulse of these forces is directed towards our bodies, and not towards consciousness. Our bodies simply use our brains to make us behave as our genetic programming dictates.

The central force that drives this program is the threat of war between sperm. If a woman’s body simultaneously contains sperm belonging to two (or more) different men, they will compete for the “prize” - fertilization of her egg. The way these sperm compete is reminiscent of real war. Only a few (less than 1%) of the sperm ejaculated male body, are the fertile elite, capable of reaching the egg. All other sperm are sterile kamikazes whose function has nothing to do with fertilization; they serve only to prevent another man's sperm from reaching the egg.

The sperm war itself is a very interesting story, but it also has global consequences at all levels of human sexual behavior. Partially - consciously, but more importantly, unconsciously, our sexual relationships, emotions, reactions and behavior revolve around the war of sperm, accordingly, human sexual behavior can be interpreted from this unexpected point of view. Thus, by and large, a man's behavior is an attempt to ensure that a woman does not endanger his sperm, or, if he fails, an attempt to provide his sperm with the maximum chance of winning this sperm war. By the same parameters, a woman’s behavior is an attempt either to outwit her partner and other men, or to influence the sperm of a particular man to have the maximum chance of winning this war that the woman provokes.

Each of us has had that critical moment in our past when one of our father's sperm penetrated one of our mother's eggs, resulting in our conception. This event marked the beginning of the development of a complex set of processes. These processes are inherited half from our father and half from our mother, and, in the end, they lead to the fact that the person we are at the moment is born. If our father had not had sex with our mother, we would never have existed in this world.

Behind every pregnancy lies a story. But the details of these stories are rarely made public. How many of us know, for example, whether our mother experienced an orgasm at conception and, if so, when exactly this happened - after the process was completed or at the same time as our father? And did our father and mother masturbate in the days or even hours before we were conceived? Are either of them bisexual or have they ever been unfaithful to each other? And was there in the mother’s body at the moment of our conception the sperm of only one man or two or more men? Is the man we consider our father really the same man whose sperm fertilized the very egg from which we developed?

These factors are important to our origins, and understanding exactly how this came about is one of the most interesting results of my revolutionary approach.

Most people, of course, were conceived through routine sex between a man and a woman who lived together and were in some kind of long-term relationship with each other. This has been the case for at least the last three or four million years. These pregnancies may seem trivial to us, but even in routine sex, certain surprises happen, and I hope that the book you are holding in your hands illustrates this. About every fifth person who was not born as a result of routine sex has his own, more interesting story conception. Many of these stories are described in this book.

In 1995, Dr. Mark Bellis and I published a book entitled Human Sperm Competition: Coitus, Masturbation, and Infidelity. In that book, published by Chapman and Hall, we presented the results of biological research, much of it our own, concerning the consequences of how human sexuality is transformed when threatened by war between sperm. We have proven that almost every aspect of human sexuality owes its characteristics to the emergence, or at least the threat, of war between sperm. If you would like to see scientific basis ideas and statements presented in this book, I advise you to read “Competition between Human Sperm”. Naturally, this book is full of technical terms, data, graphs and tables, which inevitably makes it difficult to read for most people. But it nevertheless provides interpretations and explanations of all the types of sexual behavior with which most people are intimately familiar—behavior that often seems irrational and inexplicable. Our research also shows that sexual behavior, in all its simple, complex, pleasurable, risky, criminal, immoral and exotic manifestations, follows a few basic rules.

To demonstrate how these rules work and to show this behavior visually, I have included a series of fictional episodes in this book. Every episode involves some kind of sexual conflict - between men, women, or, more often, between men and women. Most of these stories also feature the theme of sperm warfare, which, as I will argue throughout the book, is a fundamental element underlying our sexual behavior in general. Each story is followed by an interpretation of the sexual behavior we just observed from the point of view of an evolutionary biologist.

These fictional stories show how people behave according to the sexual strategies that have been our main subjects of research in recent years. I have described obvious phenomena of human behavior based on wide range scientific research and experiments in which many people around the world participated, but these stories themselves, while very convincing, are still fictitious. Their purpose is to show exactly how people suffer certain losses and gain certain benefits as a result of their sexual behavior, and also to clearly and consistently demonstrate the facts and their interpretations. Creating characters and scenarios that could be authentically acted out and reflect real-life situations was a challenging job for me.