“Lovers who are young indeed, and wish to know the sort of life
That in this world you’re like to lead, ere you can say you’ve caught a wife,
Listen to the lay of one who’s had with Cupid much to do,
And love-sick once, is love-sick still, but in another point of view.”
– James Planché, The Golden Fleece

As I’ve explained in previous posts [now gone; I may put them back up some day], there are two basic principles governing sex in the natural world: female choice, and male competition. (It’s true that there are such things as female competition and male choice, but their effects seem to be far smaller.)

Female choice means that females have evolved preferences for certain characteristics in males: characteristics that either benefit her offspring genetically (strength, speed, intelligence, resistance to parasites), or materially (builds decent nests, brings food gifts, hangs around and protects/provides for a bit). She can opt for a strong, healthy male who will love her and leave her, but leave her with strong, healthy sons, who will in turn be attractive to the next generation of females (the “sexy son” hypothesis); or she can go for a male who will provide for her and her young and/or share some of the parenting, thus ensuring that more of their (slightly less attractive) offspring survive.

Male competition means that males have evolved traits useful for competing with each other: strength, aggression, cunning, a willingness to take risks. But they have also had to factor in female choice; building good nests and bringing food gifts might bring more rewards (and have fewer costs) than duffing up all your rivals, depending on the species and the environment. Pair-bonding and parenting are also valid choices, but this is highly susceptible to abuse, because of paternity uncertainty, as I mentioned last time.

Evolutionary biologists call these mating strategies. They’re not strategies in the sense that they are plans that have been consciously worked out; animals don’t teach them, or show them to their young. They’re just drives and patterns of behaviour that spontaneously appeared at some point, and were then inherited. The successful strategies, the ones that are still with us today, are the ones that have developed, over millions of years, to produce the largest number of fit, healthy offspring.

So what strategies do we see at work in modern humans? What do men and women want?

The clues point in contradictory directions. We know, for example, that height is definitely a thing for women. There isn’t a culture in the world where women prefer shorter men; taller men are far less likely to be childless than shorter ones. Human beings are around 50% taller than their ancestors from 3 million years ago, and it’s not just down to better nutrition. Since height is a good indicator of strength and of social status, this suggests that there is widespread demand among females for a strong, dominant partner.

Then there’s the enduring appeal of the “bad boy”. Russell Crowe, Russell Brand, Robert Downey Jr, Charlie Sheen, Darren fucking Day, Ashley Cole, Chris Brown: despite their inability to be faithful, or even fleetingly pleasant, none of them is likely to go without a date for long.

On the other hand, nice guys don’t do too badly for themselves. Sure, they’re not lusted after as much as bad boys, but I’m willing to bet that in most of the happy long-term heterosexual relationships you know, you’d describe the man as a reasonably good egg. And when you look at the basic mating system of the vast majority of human civilisations – monogamy – it’s tempting to conclude that on the whole, the female strategy has been to go for commitment, generosity and “niceness”, and the male strategy has been to go along with that.

But … you guessed it. Things aren’t quite so simple.

Because for men, there’s a strategy that’s better than being a bad boy and better than being a nice guy. It’s pretending to be a nice guy and actually being bad: namely, cheating.

If cheating behaviour ever came about, in a population where most of the partners were trusting, it would spread through the population like wildfire. (Until, of course, a behaviour evolved that counteracted cheating, such as mate guarding, mentioned last week.) Even if it’s eradicated completely, as soon as it appears again, it will spread like a plague.
One thing’s for certain: we’ve all got a lot of cheating men in our family tree.

Similarly, from the woman’s perspective, the choice needn’t be just between the stud who leaves you up the duff and doesn’t give you a penny and the besotted, committed wimp who devotes himself to your children. From an evolutionary point of view, the best thing to do is shag the stud and dupe the wimp into bringing up his child. Best of both worlds!

This is exactly what happens with a lot of “monogamous” species, notably birds, such as the blue fairy wren. And as we’ve seen from results of DNA fingerprinting studies, it seems it’s more common than we’d like to think in humans.

Most biologists don’t actually class humans as monogamous. They describe us as mildly polygynous, or selectively promiscuous. Helen Fisher’s theory is that we’re serial monogamists; after studying the brain chemistry of attraction, she has concluded that humans are designed to stay together for only about four years – just long enough that the child has a good chance of surviving with one parent.

The more attentive among you will have noticed that we have drifted somewhat off the point I was originally driving at: the differences between men and women. But it’s been a detour with a purpose: to illuminate some of the contrasting challenges that face males and females in the mating arena.

I hope you’ll agree, for example, that our little thought experiment goes some way towards explaining the following phenomena:

• Why it is overwhelmingly men, not women, who initiate courtship
  Why so many women can’t stop dating bastards
• Why coyness is virtually unheard of in men
• Why there’s no such thing as a subtly wealthy man, only a conspicuously wealthy one
• The otherwise incomprehensible popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey
• Why, now that women’s earnings are almost on a par with men’s, some women are writing about the “new scarcity” of decent marriage options
• Why men, on average, have a higher sex drive (I’m not going to get into an argument about this. It’s been proven over and over again. Let’s just say that if the female sex drive were as great as the male, we’d still be living in caves)
• Why looks matter more to men than to women (health and fertility are all they need to worry about; women have a more extensive list of requirements)
• Why women tend to prefer older men (status, ability to provide) and men to prefer younger women (fertility)
• Why twice as many men as women remain childless
• Why men take more risks
• Why women are more worried about emotional infidelity (risk of losing resources) and men are more concerned about sexual infidelity (risk of wasting resources)
• Why women’s tastes change according to the time of the month: they prefer more masculine (alpha/sexy son) faces when ovulating, and kinder, gentler faces for the remainder.

Let’s look at it from another angle. We’ve already seen how, anatomically speaking, men and women are virtually identical – except when it comes to the sex parts.

In the realm of sensation and perception, comparisons are harder, because there’s no good way of measuring them, but based on subjective reports, we seem to be cut from more or less the same cloth. There is, however, one obvious difference: the way we experience orgasm. There are huge disparities in frequency, duration and intensity (the theories as to why will have to wait for another day). So in terms of how we feel and interpret the world, men and women are highly similar … except when it comes to the sex part.

Doesn’t it make perfect sense, then, that when it comes to our behaviour, to our drives, our motives, our goals, men and women should be more or less indistinguishable … except for the sex part?

For my final exhibit, I call not on biology, or mathematics, or economics, but on some simple observations.

If men and women are so similar, why don’t we understand each other? Why are there so many thousands of books telling women how to trap a man into marriage, and telling men how to trick women into bed? Why do we find romantic comedies funny? Why are there so many man-hating women, and so many women-hating men? Why are we all – even feminists – so ready to make sweeping generalisations about the opposite sex (“All men are rapists”)? Why is gender such an integral part of our identity (anthropological studies indicate that it is among the most important of our ways of defining ourselves, above national identity, ethnic identity, religious identity and occupational identity)? Why do men tend to prefer more feminine women and women to prefer more masculine men, ie types as unlike themselves as possible?

We’re not brought up segregated from our opposite-sex siblings. We’re not taught different syllabuses. We’re not exposed to different TV shows or newspapers (true, many choose to consume gender-specific material – lads’ mags, chick flicks. But that’s their choice, not something they’re railroaded into). And yet, when it comes to matters of the heart (and groin), we still don’t have the faintest clue how the opposite sex operates.

Of course we’re different. There’s a yawning chasm between us. Which is why it feels so magical when, by whatever means, and for however short a time, we manage to bridge it. And the differences are not learned, they’re hardwired. They’re clearly and firmly rooted in our evolutionary past.

The problem I think most feminists have with evolutionary psychology is not with the information per se, but with how it might be used. They’re concerned, perhaps unsurprisingly, about the agenda of those carrying out and quoting the research.

But for most of us, it’s not about returning to a world where men can pinch women’s bottoms with impunity. It’s not about dragging women out of boardrooms and throwing them back in the kitchen. It’s not about banning women from map-reading and men from verbal communication.

My concerns, at least, are far pettier. I started my first blog because I wanted to figure out where I went so spectacularly wrong. I wanted to know why women I thought attainable spurned me, and women I thought unattainable spooned me. I wanted to know how a woman could choose a misogynist ratbag over a pretty decent guy, how a woman could change her mind completely overnight, and how the hell pouring a pint of beer over a woman’s head could transform someone from scum of the earth into cock of the walk. I wanted to know what, if anything, I could do to maximise my chances of being held again. That’s all.

Some people might have expected me to weigh in on the debate about Elliot Rodger’s killing spree in Santa Barbara, California, on May 23. After all, this is one subject I might seem vaguely qualified to talk about.

I too was serially rejected as a teenager, and was terrified that I would never lose my virginity, to the point where I tried to kill myself three times (although in my case, the desperation stemmed more from the fear that I would never experience love than the fear that I would never get my end away). I too have spent a lot of time reading about and engaging with the Men’s Rights Movement – albeit as an observer rather than a member. Until about a month ago I was following and followed by PUAHate, one of the forums Rodger visited, on Twitter. And since starting the blog, I’ve had quite a few messages from young men with similar experiences: 21-year-old virgins asking for advice, sexually frustrated young men wanting to know if it was all right to pay for sex.

But I’m not going to talk about Elliot Rodger. And nor should anyone else. Not yet.

I’m not going to start pointing fingers when there are still six families grieving. I’m not going to call for stricter gun control laws (although I do like living in a country where those laws are already strict). I’m not going to call for reforms to the United States’ mental healthcare system. I’m not going to propose the banning of all violent films or computer games. I’m not going to pin the blame on society’s culture of misogyny. (I’m no advocate of woman-hating. But if institutionalised misogyny was really the sole cause of this incident, why weren’t there more mass shootings like this when society was even more misogynistic than it is today?) I’m not going to try to hang it all on Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow, however tempting that might be. And I’m certainly not going to write a horribly misguided “open letter to Elliot Rodger” practically empathising with the guy for being a virgin at 22.

I might just as well demand the sterilisation of all Hollywood executives – that would certainly have prevented this tragedy – or the banning of all BMWs.

You get the impression that some of these people had template articles pushing their own agenda ready to go, and as soon as news of the attack broke, they simply filled in all the blanks with the name “Elliot Rodger” and fired them off.

There’s a simple reason why I’m not doing any of these things; why I’m not hitching this gruesome wagon to my own political train. Because we know practically nothing.

The vast majority of the information we currently have about Elliot Rodger comes from Elliot Rodger himself: his videos and his 141-page “manifesto”. This is a man who couldn’t be trusted to observe the most fundamental tenet of human society: don’t kill people. How the hell can we trust him to tell the truth? Judging by the videos, it seems quite likely that Rodger was a psychopath (although again, we mustn’t presume), and one of the defining characteristics of psychopaths is their tendency to manipulate and deceive.

For starters, I see no compelling reason why we should accept Elliot Rodger’s word that we was a virgin. Sure, he might not have had sex with the women he wanted to have sex with; but does anyone really believe that a 22-year-old man, with his own BMW, his own gun, a high sex drive and a colossal sense of entitlement, had never paid for sex at least once?

Even if the likes of Rodger, and Anders Breivik, and Seung-Hui Cho, are saying what they believe to be the truth, why should we accept their version? How can you trust someone who is out of his mind to know his own mind?

After events such as these, newspaper editors, legislators and the public clamour for facts, opinions, and action. But the responses should come in that order. Opinions and legislation should never be formulated without facts. Hysterical knee-jerk responses turn the debate into a series of petty rows and risk sidelining the critical issues. Look at what happened with MMR: when Andrew Wakefield published his 1998 paper suggesting a link between the vaccine and autism, newspapers disseminated it uncritically and people stopped vaccinating their children in droves. Wakefield’s methodology and results have since been systematically discredited time and time again, but no matter how often or how comprehensively the link is disproven, many people still doggedly refuse to vaccinate their children. As a result, the United States is on the brink of its worst measles outbreak in 20 years.

And if I was to ask you what the motives of the Columbine killers were, how would you reply? Probably something about video games, or bullying, or the “Trenchcoat Mafia”, because those were the memes circulating in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. The truth, in the end, was rather different.

Any or all of the issues raised by the commentators above may have been a factor in this tragedy. It might be something else entirely. We don’t know. We may never know.

But until all the evidence is in, and all expert testimonies have been heard, I’m going to resist the urge to speculate, and to campaign for changes to laws that may have had nothing to do with the deaths.

I’m going to show some fucking respect, and I’m going to show some fucking patience.

“Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.”
WH Auden

“So, Andy,” said Dad with a twinkle. “How do you fancy staying up late tonight?”

I was 11 years old. Bedtime on school nights was 8pm, 10 at the latest at weekends. To be allowed to stay up after Mum went to bed was a treat on a par with a personal visit from Tom Baker.

The reason for this break with protocol, it emerged, was that Dad wanted me to watch a film with him: Barbarella, the 1968 comic-book adaptation starring Jane Fonda as an interstellar explorer with an uncanny knack of losing her clothes. I enjoyed the film more for the robots and monsters than for Jane’s wardrobe malfunctions, although the semi-nudity did coincide with some stirrings which, at the time, I put down to Mum’s shepherd’s pie.

It was years before I worked out what was going on that night. Roger Vadim’s kitsch sci-fi romp was, I realised, the sum total of my parents’ efforts to explain to me the myriad complexities of human reproduction. No awkward birds-and-bees talk, no 1950s government information booklet “accidentally” left by my bedside; just a scantily clad spacewoman being pecked to death by budgerigars.

The state didn’t do much better. We had one sex education lesson, at the end of my second year, which consisted of two indecipherable diagrams, some vague mumblings about Aids, and a five-minute a video of a gruff-looking German woman unrolling a balloon over a stick. It was like teaching Mandarin from a takeaway menu. There was nothing about feelings; no clue as to whether this was roughly average size for a stick; and most importantly, no pointers on how to persuade the German woman to touch your stick in the first place.

The internet and self-help literature were years away. If I’d had any brothers or sisters, I might have gleaned the odd snippet by putting my ear to their bedroom door; as it was, the only scraps of information available were the eye-boggling fisherman’s yarns of the playground and the odd scrunched-up jazz mag abandoned in the woods. And with coordinated teams of torch-wielding teenagers combing for them in overlapping eight-hour shifts, those were hard to come by.

But I wasn’t too worried. Everyone else seemed to get by without an instruction manual. Sex obviously comes naturally to humans, as it does to the animals. I would instinctively know the right thing to do when the time came. Wouldn’t I?

♥ As you read this, a million people are having sex. (The World Health Organisation estimates that 100 million sex acts take place every day, and the average duration of intercourse is 7 minutes, which means that at any one moment, there are about 500,000 couples making whoopee.)

And when we’re not doing it, it’s never far from our minds. The oft-touted statistic that men think about sex every nine seconds is a myth, but various studies put the figure at anything between several times a day and once a minute. It’s reckoned that there are about half a billion pages of porn on the internet, and sexual images are everywhere, in newspapers and magazines, on TV and advertising billboards.

Yet for a species seemingly so obsessed with sex, mankind has been remarkably slow to learn about it. The derisory state of sex education in the 1980s isn’t actually that surprising when you consider that sex and love and relationships, were, until roughly that time, a mystery to everyone. Whether it was because sex was taboo, or because we felt the subject somehow beneath our attention – everyone knows how to have sex, don’t they? – there was practically no research into the field until the alarmingly recent past. John Farley, in his 1982 book Gametes and Spores, wrote: “Sex remains almost as complete an enigma today as it was 300 years ago when Dutch microscopists discovered minute ‘animalcules’ swimming about in human seminal fluid.”

Sure, we’d figured out the nuts and bolts – but even they were a long time coming. Sperm (as opposed to semen) were only discovered in 1677, and it was another 150 years before anyone clapped eyes on a human egg. Until the mid-18th century, most scientists still clung to the ancient Greeks’ theory that male semen contained complete human beings, and women were just a sort of incubator. (Oscar Hertwig finally vindicated women in 1875 when his experiments with sea urchins proved that both sperm and egg contributed genetic material to the embryo.)

Things didn’t move much quicker in the early 20th century. In 1933, Sigmund Freud advised those who wished to learn about women to “turn to poets, or wait until science can give you deeper and more coherent information”. Alfred Kinsey published his reports on human sexual behaviour in 1948 and 1953, and while they revealed a lot about what people did, they offered no explanation of why they did it. In fact, we’d split the atom, invented the laser and landed on the moon before anyone had even begun to address many of the fundamental questions of sex.

Why do we have sex? Why does attraction fade? Why do people cheat? Why are there so many female prostitutes, and so few heterosexual male ones? Why is it always men who propose? Why are so many women attracted to men who treat them badly? Why do you often see beautiful women with ordinary-looking men, but never the opposite? What is beauty anyway? Why is it more acceptable for men to sleep around than women? Why is it easier to meet a partner when you already have one? Why are there so many single mums and so few single dads? What’s so attractive about a sense of humour? And what, exactly, is chemistry?

Many of these questions hadn’t even been asked by the time I was born, and none of those that had had received satisfactory answers. The first breakthroughs to cast light on these issues came in the 1970s – although they were building on a theory that was more than 100 years old.