Em & Lo of Love. And Everything in Between. have an item up that… ought to warm the cockles of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists everywhere but… probably won’t, at all.
The big sexual health news this week was that a guy can increase the quality of his sperm by having sex every day for a week, and thus improve his fertility; he might have fewer sperm on his team when he goes for the gold, but the ones he does have will be stronger players. (In contrast, many fertility experts recommend that guys abstain for a few days before her ovulation to increase sperm count.) Reading about this study brought two questions to mind:
1. We noticed most of the mentions of it, and in particular the AP story on the topic making all the rounds, really emphasized the “sex” part. But as far as we can tell from this Bio-Medicine article (the most detailed one we could find), the 118 Australian participants in the study simply ejaculated daily.
Read the quote and find links to their second question here.
Em & Lo go on to explain exactly why the ambiguity between “sex” and “ejaculation” is particularly important in this context.
Now, we’re all for the term “sex” to encompass the vast array of activities that one can have sexually, be it intercourse or mutual handwork or solo masturbation. But, damn it, we don’t live in that kind of world! (At least not yet.) The collective assumption is that sex means intercourse. So it would be far more accurate, and far more helpful, if the stories on this study made it clear that ejaculation, by whatever means, was the key.
The conflation of “sex” and “ejaculation” strongly favors the cultural biases that lead pop-sociobiologists to treat “males spread their seed” as if it was an axiom instead of an assumption. The Australian article proposes a different but more plausible hypothesis for men’s drive for frequent ejaculation that requires only males refreshing their seed.
Since it’s a lot more plausible you might think sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists would welcome such a different sperm-deterioration hypothesis that might have driven evolution of a desire for frequent ejaculation. And I’m sure serious ones will. I’m going to guess that the ones you’ll hear about — the ones who get book deals and popular press write-ups (see Sungold’s excellent takedown of one of the worst here) probably won’t.
This doesn’t mean, by the way, that there’s anything wrong with humans desiring multiple partners. It just means the odds of finding the alleged genes that code preferentially, decisively, and specifically for multiple-partner seeking in men (but absent or suppressed women) that sociobiologists insist have to be there just got smaller.
