Why is Sex Fun?: the evolution of human sexuality Read Free Page A

also have public sex with other adult male chimpanzees within the same estrus cycle.
    Adult females of most mammal species use various means of conspicuously advertising the brief phase of their reproductive cycle when they are ovulating and can be fertilized. The advertisement may be visual (for instance, the area around the vagina turning bright red), olfactory (releasing a distinctive smell), auditory (making noises), or behavioral (crouching in front of an adult male and displaying the vagina). Females solicit sex only during those fertile days, are sexually unattractive or less attractive to males on other days because they lack the arousing signals, and rebuff the advances of any male that is nevertheless interested on other days. Thus, sex is emphatically not just for fun and is rarely divorced from its function of fertilization. This generalization too admits exceptions: sex is flagrantly separated from reproduction in a few species, including bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees) and dolphins.
    Finally, the existence of menopause as a regular phenomenon is not well established for most wild mammal populations. By menopause is meant a complete cessation of fertility within a time span that is much briefer than the previous fertile career, and that is followed by an infertile life span of significant length. Instead, wild mammals either are still fertile at the time of death or else exhibit gradually diminishing fertility with advancing age.
    Now contrast what I have just said about normal mammalian sexuality with human sexuality. The following human attributes are among those that we take for granted as normal:
    1: Most men and women in most human societies end up in a long-term pair relationship (“marriage”) that other members of the society recognize as a contract involving mutual obligations. The couple has sex repeatedly, and mainly or exclusively with each other.
    2: In addition to being a sexual union, marriage is a partnership for joint rearing of the resulting babies. In particular, human males as well as females commonly provide parental care.
    3: Despite forming a couple (or occasionally a harem), a husband and wife (or wives) do not live (like gibbons) as a solitary couple in an exclusive territory that they defend against other couples, but instead they live embedded in a society of other couples with whom they cooperate economically and share access to communal territory.
    4: Marriage partners usually have sex in private, rather than being indifferent to the presence of other humans.
    5: Human ovulation is concealed rather than advertised. That is, women's brief period of fertility around the time of ovulation is difficult to detect for their potential sex partners as well as for most women themselves. A woman's sexual receptivity extends beyond the time of fertility to encompass most or all of the menstrual cycle. Hence, most human copulations occur at a time unsuitable for conception. That is, human sex is mostly for fun, not for insemination.
    6: All women who live past the age of forty or fifty undergo menopause, a complete shutdown of fertility. Men in general do not undergo menopause: while individual men may develop fertility problems at any age, there is no age-clumping of infertility or universal shutdown.

    Norms imply violation of norms: we call something a “norm” merely because it is more frequent than its opposite (the “violation of the norm”). That's as true for human sexual norms as for other norms. Readers of the last two pages will surely have been thinking of exceptions to the supposed generalizations that I have been describing, but they still stand as generalizations. For example, even in societies that recognize monogamy by law or custom there is much extramarital and premarital sex, and much sex that is not part of a long-term relationship. Humans do engage in one-night stands. On the other hand, most humans also engage in many-year or many-decade stands, whereas tigers and