August 2010

It’s the age-old question, isn’t it? You had girlfriends asking you this after they found your tapes / DVDs / magazines / bookmarks. And it always seems to baffle them. They think we’re sick, or that we’re real pervert, or that they don’t satisfy us in bed so we need other women.

I’ve heard some people trying to explain this phenomenon, but they always sounded apologetic or plain dumb. So I want to run my explanation by you.

Humans are animals. On the scale of our evolution, we have been living in a “modern” world for a very short time, so a lot of our behaviours have “animal” origins. Especially things relating to sex.

Sex is something we animals do in order to insure our genes will survive us—and if possible a better version of those genes. We have specific strategies to insure that. In courtship, females look for the best specimen so their offspring will be strong and healthy—and have more chances to survive. Since their eggs are few—and since the “investment” of having a child is very costly to them, both in gestation time and in nurturing time—they try to get THE ONE. They also need a male who’ll stick around and help care for and protect the child. That is why women look for one guy and stick with him.

Males, we are quite different. We don’t have just a few eggs, we have billions, and we can recharge in a relatively short time. And after the fact, we can always run away and never be bothered with child care (I’m not saying that’s what we should do; I’m saying that is always an option). So our strategy to insure the survival of our genes is to disseminate, the logic being that if we inseminate many females, at least one of them is bound to give a new life to our genome.

This goes so far that certain species of primates will have “hardening” sperm that will block a rival’s sperm’s access to the egg. And men will produce more sperm if they suspect their mate has been “fooling around”.

Now that’s the way we would act if left to our primeval, animalistic selves.  But we are civilized now. And in our world, the way to go is to meet a girl, fall madly in love and stick with her (at least that’s the way the theory goes). Now, we males end up with one female while our instinct urges us to disseminate.

So instead of “fooling around”, a lot of us males have “pretend” partners. Hence the thousand of girls we watch on the Net. By touching ourselves while watching Jenna Jameson, we are satisfying a biological imperative to disseminate.

That doesn’t mean we’re not madly in love—quite the opposite! It means we found a way to stay with the same person and be fateful to her while still giving in to our biological imperatives—in a symbolic, cathartic kind of way.

No harm done. No affair. No broken heart. No lies. Just a few soiled Kleenexes.