It is easy to forget that for all of the artifice we create surrounding human sexuality, sex and who we end up having it with is largely beyond our ken. Sex exists for plenty of reasons, none of which are intuitive or even all that helpful when looking for an agreeable someone to chat up. Before I tell you how to turn some quirks of human sexuality to your advantage, it needs to be pointed out that we do not have sex simply because we like it. The underlying rationale is something more along the lines of: we like sex because it is necessary for procreation, and procreation is the force behind our evolution, our emotions, and our enjoyment of sex. Sexuality has been such a strong driving force in our evolution, in fact, that it is never far from our minds – just consider freshmen boys.
Whether one is good or bad at fashioning random sexual rendezvous, however, we always feel aware of our sexualities. To quickly prove this point, look around yourself – without even being conscious of it, you should have noted the sex (or apparent lack there-of) and relative attractiveness of anyone near you. Knowing that you do or do not want to sleep with those near you is not an indication of poor morals, but rather the culmination of thousands of years of the often times violent, always sexual evolution of the human species. But why does sex exist at all?
In what may come as a surprise, the reasons sexual reproduction exists are still being researched and debated in the scientific community. It was long thought that asexual species had a distinct advantage over sexual ones because they could reproduce faster and, in what should be an even stronger indication of their fitness, rarely find themselves wondering how their hair looks. The value of sexual reproduction can be found in genetic variability: sexual reproduction recombines genes from two sources, and this is thought to be important for two reasons. The first is that sex may serve to remove dangerous genetic mutations from the species, indicating that mating evolved to get around static, lethal mutations in asexual species. The second is referred to as the Red Queen hypothesis, a nod to Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass.” It says that species must constantly evolve, even if only in “little” ways, just to survive. In this idea, sex provides a way to keep the species ahead of infiltration by disease and parasites, which evolve on a shorter time scale than animals. In the words of Matt Ridley, author of many books on the origins of sex, “parasites invent new keys; hosts change the locks.”
These theories may seem supremely uninteresting, but they are necessary to make any sense of human sexuality. In an effort to provide you with tips to better your chances in the world of competitive mating, I here furnish two ingenious studies that astonishingly involve neither illicit brownies nor Miller Light. In light of the relationship between sex and genetic diversity for the sake of parasite avoidance, a Swiss zoologist studied the way men smell. Men wore t-shirts for a few days, and the shirts were then given to women to infer the general level of attractiveness of the men from how they smelled. Each individual woman repeatedly and consistently preferred the odor of specific men; men that had immune system genes different from the women that found their smell pleasant. This shows that there are factors operating on our supposedly free choice of mates below our very noses.
Perhaps more surprising than the effect of a man’s immune system on his odor, a study done at the University of Jyv„skyl„ in Finland did a similarly-themed study that showed men preferred the smell of ovulating women. This should come as somewhat of a surprise for many reasons, not the least of which being that human females have no visible indicators of ovulation, unlike, for example, the reddening posterior of some species of baboon. So what is the upshot of these studies and this discussion? We can now use science to our sexual advantage!
There are many beginner’s tips for successful sexual behavior, my personal favorite (due to the name, of course) being the “copulatory glance,” otherwise known as staring into someone’s eyes. To this time-honored and battle-tested tactic, let us now add the following: if you are a woman that feels particularly unlucky at love, figure out when you are ovulating (the halfway point between your menstrual flows), and make sure to stand near attractive men during those days. If nothing else, this might make women feel a little better for having to undergo the delights of foregoing pregnancy. As for men, you can employ a slightly gross trick used by men in Greece: store a handkerchief in your armpit for a bit, then offer it to the object of your desires. Pheremones may only play a small role in human mate selection, but most of us need all the help we can possibly get.
Anyone need to blow their noses?
Joshua is a senior in Arts & Sciences and a Forum editor. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].