I had forgotten just how good this book actually is. I’ve read most of the popular stuff Diamond has written and enjoyed all of them. My favourite is Guns, Germs and Steel, but this one is also very good.

Although this one has a particularly fine title I have to say that it does make me want to ask another equally important question – why are there so few really good television documentaries that come out of the USA. I mean, there was Cosmos, which was mind-blowing, but there have been few that reach the heights of some of the stuff that comes out of the BBC. Connections, Life of Earth, The Ascent of Man, Civilisation, The Body in Question, The Light Fantastic, The Root of All Evil, and these just to name a few life altering documentaries from the BBC (and also just for the sheer joy of listing them).

It is not as if good pop science books don’t come out of the USA. In fact, the best pop science books and pop psychology books all come from the US. This is a discrepancy I find completely puzzling.

The book asks, and mostly answers, a series of intriguing questions about human sexuality. The questions themselves are so interesting that if I was designing the cover I would just list them there. Not just the first question – and if you ever wanted to sell a book, I’d have thought it would be hard to come up with a better title. But the book is bursting with similarly fascinating questions.

Why do we have sex even when there is no chance of pregnancy? This needs answering because most of the other mammals in the world would look at us as incredibly strange for engaging in such odd behaviour.

Why don’t men breastfeed? We have most of the equipment and men have been known to produce milk – even without scientific intervention. So, why not?

I’m only going to answer one of his questions – he asks, what are men good for? And his answer? Not a lot. Men come out of this book looking rather pathetic. We don’t do nearly as much helping out as women do, we don’t do hardly anything at all except some occasional hunting and ‘alpha’ posing. It is quite unattractive – and that does seem to conform to my understanding of what most men seem to be like.

There are lots of other questions in the book, why menopause? Why are women pretty? Why do women have large breasts? And the most surprising ‘answer’ in the book is to the question, why do men have such large penises?

The best thing about this book is that it shows that many of these questions have not been completely settled. The questions are clearly important, they are all very easy to ask, but the answers many not be nearly so easy to come by. Diamond presents some of the alternatives here and this makes for a fantastic insight into the scientific method, particularly as it applies to the evolution of various traits and behaviours.

This is either a short book or a long essay, take you’re pick, either way, it is a quick read and very interesting.

Δεν θα σταματήσω ποτέ να εκθειάζω τον Jared Diamond, καθώς αποτελεί πρότυπο ερευνητή. Στο παρόν βιβλίο ξεκαθαρίζει τα πράγματα σχετικά με τα δύο φύλα προσφέροντας ζουμερές πληροφορίες και νέες ανακαλύψεις. Απολαυστικό και διαφωτιστικό από την αρχή ως το τέλος.

Jared Diamond does not posses Carl Sagan's gift of enriching all he writes with a grand sense of poetic wonder; he also lacks the verve and wit of a science writer like Phil Plait. Diamond's books, however, are absolutely essential for those seeking to understand our universe and ourselves because he invariably chooses such fascinating topics. From the development of civilizations in his masterpiece GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL, to their potential decline in COLLAPSE, Diamond leaves one with a deeper understanding of humanity's essential questions. In this case "Why Is Sex Fun?"

Diamond first points out, then speculates the answers to the more rare and suspicious aspects of human sexuality: our tendency towards monogamy; recreational sex in general; concealed ovulation; menopause; men's attraction to big boobs, big butts...and big penises; and the use-ful/less-ness of men in general.

Oh, and male lactation.

THERE IS AN ENTIRE CHAPTER ON MALE LACTATION!!!

Jared Diamond won a Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote the sentence, "Lactation is not an infrequent result of nipple self-stimulation in teenage boys." I don't know which is the greater honor.

"Why Is Sex Fun" lacks the scope and depth of Diamond's other works, and leaves multiple questions untouched (most notably the evolution of homosexuality); however, it is a brief(>150 pages) and fascinating exploration on the how's and why's of fornication.

It seems that Jared Diamond got better and better with every book he wrote. With practice he got exceptionally good at making comparisons between species, cultures, etc. He also developed a better focus on the subject with every book.

However this book was written before any of that. While it is easy to read, it contains little info and has strange examples. It also alludes too often to the author's sex life in a "Look at me I'm a successfully married man with a sex life...horay!" way. Diamond tries to explain various reasons for various sexual habits & cycles, goes on rants about the analogous examples in the animal world and attempts to draw occasionally weak parallels to humans. Jared also seems side with certain "virginal nerd men" I know in that most men are scumbags and women deserve better. I disagree because women have the option to pick whoever they deserve and I will not accept blanket insults against my sex.

I still somewhat recommend this book because of the random bits of information in it. For example: polygamous Mormon men (especially priests) are the peak of male evolution in that that on average the have the most children(25). Plus it's an amusing book to read in public places.

The most frustrating aspect of this book is that Diamond forgets to answer the most important question of all - the one on the cover. What the hell? Now upon finishing the book every reader has to go out, experiment and answer the question for themselves.

I always enjoy Jared Diamond's books and this was no exception. It can't be compared to Guns and Germs and Steel because it lacks the depth and breathtaking perspective of that book. Nevertheless, it is an intriguing exploration of the evolution of human sexuality and makes a strong case that we are the animal with the weirdest sex life.

Diamond explores questions I had never previously considered, such as why men don't lactate. That question is of itself interesting but I also found myself reflecting on the fact that it is so easy to accept what is, without wondering why.

I suspect the first part of the title was the contribution of the publisher in order to get sales. Nevertheless, an easy and intriguing read.

I have read a number of Jared Diamond’s books and am a great fan. After reading this book I felt like the title was chosen by someone in his publisher���s marketing department. Mr. Diamond was probably chagrined by it. He’s a scientist, and he spends a lot of time discussing animal behavior and speculating about how the distinctive features of human sexuality evolved. There’s not much talk about why it’s so fun.

The basic points he discusses are: 1. Males and females have different investments in reproduction and that determines their behavior—males take a few seconds to discharge semen while females have 9 months of pregnancy and years of lactation; 2. Males could breast-feed but that didn’t evolve because of that low investment, 3. Female humans conceal their ovulation for two reasons, originally to hide who the father was (new dominant males kill the offspring that aren’t theirs) then later to keep the man around to help raise children, 4. What are men good for? He struggles to find a good reason (see below), 5. Why does human menopause exist? Many other female animals are fertile in old age, and 6. Evolution of sexual body signals—breasts and big hips in women, and in men, penis size. A seventh point that he discussed in the first chapter, that humans have sex in private unlike almost all other animals, didn’t get an explanation.

I thought male sexual body signals were facial hair and low voice—not penis size. Mr. Diamond suggests that the penis has evolved as a sexual signal, like the peacock’s tail, a body part that is longer than necessary to advertise genetic strength and health. “The length of the erect penis is only about 1¼ inches in gorillas and 1½ inches in orangutans but 5 inches in humans, even though males of the two apes have much bigger bodies than men.” Why? Could it be all the positions humans have sex in? “[T]he 1½ inch penis of the male orangutan permits it to perform in a variety of positions that rival ours, and to outperform us by executing all those positions while hanging from a tree. As for the possible utility of a large penis in sustaining prolonged intercourse, orangutans top us in that regard too (mean duration fifteen minutes, versus a mere four minutes for the average American man.)” Ouch.

Then he describes what the penis would look like if men designed it, using the phallocarp of New Guinea men as an example—a penis sheath up to two feet long, four inches in diameter, brightly colored, and erect (google it!). They say they feel naked without it, even though, other than the sheath, they are completely naked.

The discussion of the importance of men was surprising. I always assumed that the male role in hunter-gatherer societies was obvious: the men hunted. A female anthropologist, Kristen Hawkes of the University of Utah, decided to test this assumption. She had people test the caloric yields of the men’s hunting catches and the women’s foraging yield in tribes in Paraguay and Tanzania.

In the Northern Ache people of Paraguay, the men hunted large animals such as peccaries and deer, and collected honey. The women pounded starch from palm trees and gathered fruits and insect larvae (in addition to caring for children). On average the man brought home nothing 25% of the time, whereas the women produced a consistent amount every day. The man’s average calorie return was 9, 634, where a woman’s was 10, 356.
You may argue that the men’s protein was more valuable than the women’s starch, but in other places women gather high-protein staples: the Kalahari San women gather mongongo nuts, and in New Guinea the women fish, and catch rats, grubs, and spiders.

Mr. Diamond asked, why don’t the men turn their energy to securing high-protein food that is easier to obtain and thus a more predictable source of nutrition? Turns out that women want to mate with men who are successful hunters, even if it doesn’t really mean that much for the overall nutrition of the group. Women today still want to be with the most powerful and successful man; it’s clearly a deeply-wired aspiration.

The other section that was of particular interest to me, an aging woman, was the one on menopause. The current thinking in anthropology is that older women are a very important component of society, and that cessation of fertility helps increase the longevity of women. The theory goes like this: because of humans’ long childhood, and the risk of death in childbirth, a woman risking her life at 45 to have one more child wouldn’t make sense, because it would mean her existing children would lose their mother and have a lower chance of survival. Much better to stop having children and put your energy into helping your children be successful in having children. In other words, non-fertile grandmothers are a very successful survival strategy for the human race.

In addition, old women are a storehouse of knowledge for the whole tribe; old people are the “tribe’s library.” I love what Mr. Diamond says about being “postreproductive”: “No human, except a hermit, is ever truly postreproductive in the sense of being unable to benefit the survival and reproduction of other people bearing one’s genes.” Today this is less true than for pre-literate peoples, and with books and the internet we don’t think of any one person being the repository of knowledge. “We find it impossible to conceive of the overwhelming importance of elderly people in preliterate societies as repositories of information and experience.”

In conclusion, Mr. Diamond says, “That importance to society of the memories of old women is what I see as a major driving force behind the evolution of human female menopause.”

Thought-provoking across the board and convincing in some places, Diamond makes a evolutionary biology argument that posits part of human distinctiveness arises from our unusual reproductive characteristics: concealed ovulation, recreational sex, and female menopause. Diamond's meditations on how menopause may have been selected for and why men don't breastfeed their children were compelling and carefully argued. When he ventured into the territory of human social arrangements; however, Diamond hamstrung himself with his own disciplinary bias. As a sociologist, I find it extremely hard to believe that complex human social behaviors - like adornment and marital relationships - are driven by an evolutionary logic. As Diamond points out in his chapter on male breastfeeding, humans have often made "counter-evolutionary" choices. If our instincts drive us to behave in certain ways - why some ways but not others? I highly recommend the book, despite these problems.

جميل جدا كعادة جاريد دياموند

A lighter read from Jared Diamond, but not as the title might suggest. The author of Collapse and The Third Chimpanzee now provides us with a look into human sexuality from an evolutionary perspective. He makes reference to research that allow us to investigate the origins of our sexual behaviour and our cultural attitudes towards forming partnership. This is an interesting way, one could say obvious, to complete the study of the spectrum of our sexuality.

I'll admit I came into this expecting sociology with a little bit of biology, but instead, I got the reverse. There are a lot of comparisons drawn between humans and other species, as an evolutionary explanation for our sexual evolution is attempted. I think not including any observations on how lgbtqia people may fit into the picture is an oversight, but overall this was an informative book.

3.5 stars

I must admit that I would never have picked this book up if I hadn't come to know of Jared Diamond's brilliant writing in his other book: Guns, Germs and Steel. Although human sexuality is an endlessly fascinating topic, books attempting to scrutinize it are all too often filled with nothing more than bumbling rhetorical questions and weird, irrelevant anecdotes. So knowing how amazing Guns, Germs and Steel was, I was fairly confident Jared Diamond would not disappoint in Why Is Sex Fun?

My final thoughts: Why Is Sex Fun? is a worthwhile read that is well-structured and answers questions methodically. Among many other things, this book informs me about many new things on human sexuality (of course) and even poses questions I admittedly never thought of asking before. But unlike in GGS, the explanations put forward in Why is Sex Fun? still overwhelmingly feel like theories. The reason why I loved GGS so much is that the explanation Diamond provided us with were so well-rounded and consistent I could easily accept it as 'truth' (albeit not perfectly complete, but then, what theory actually is). So although the theories in WISF are plausible, they fail to consider so many aspects and fail to explain so many observations that it doesn't really convince the readers.

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For a quick recap, here are the questions the book addressed:

1. Why don't men lactate?
2. What is the purpose of recreational sex?
3. Why did we evolve concealed ovulation?
4. What are the roles of men?
5. Why did we evolve the female menopause?
6. Body signals. (why do men have large penises?)

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And here are a few questions and observations that I thought need addressing:

1. It is said that "recreational sex is the glue holding a human couple together while they rear their helpless baby together". Well, I'm sure many of you (like myself) would have raised their eyebrows at this. Is sex really the only reason a male would stay with his mate? And if he is so inclined to leave, would sex really be so important that he decides to stay after all? If deserting his mate is evolutionarily better for the male, then why didn't males evolve behavior that causes them to leave their mates despite the promise of sex?

Besides, it's still evolutionary more advantageous for the male to cheat on his mate, and there's no physical inhibition stopping him from doing so. He could still be monogamous and profit from regular sex with his mate AND occasionally cheat on her but not so much that he would be jeopardizing his child's life by neglect.

2. Why do female mammals tend to be smaller in size than males? As pointed out in the book, most of the time it is the females that have to care for the young. So wouldn't it be more logical if females were bigger than males? They would be better prepared to chase away predators and protect their young, and they would also be more prepared to chase away competing mothers for the best food sources. I get it that males have to be big in order to compete with each other for females, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they have to be bigger than females. So why are females smaller?

3. What exactly are the advantages of monogamy? The book often used monogamy as part of an explanation, but it never addressed the reasons why some animal species including humans are monogamous in the first place. From my point of view, monogamy isn't even strictly necessary in traditional hunter-gatherer societies. The child could be taken care of by the whole tribe, as opposed to just the father (as the book points out why monogamy is necessary).

4. Now, I'm almost certain that this particular question had been in most of your minds while reading through the book: What is the the advantage of the female orgasm? And additionally, the book didn't really answer its title question: Why exactly is sex fun?

The only answers the book provided were a) Recreational sex is important to conserve monogamy b) recreational sex is a by-product of concealed ovulation which is also important to ensure monogamy

Well, okay. But the book didn't go any deeper than that and ask the question why sex is fun in the first place, or why sex has to feel good.

5. In the book it was mentioned that there are two types of males, the "show off" and the "provider". It was also mentioned that females are better of married to the "provider" but that it's better for the male to be the "show off" because he attracts more females. So, why are females attracted to the "show off" instead of being genetically programmed to be more attracted to the "provider"?

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Well, that's that.

Why sex is fun?
যৌনতা কেন আনন্দদায়ক?

নিঃসন্দেহে একটি কৌতূহল উদ্দীপক শিরোনাম। পত্রপত্রিকা, লেখালেখিতে 'যৌনতা'র ব্যবহার নিছক যৌন নিপীড়ন, যৌন কর্মী, ধর্ষণ এসবেই সীমাবদ্ধ। খুব বেশি হলে নিষিদ্ধ রগরগে বইয়ে, আপত্তিকর প্রচ্ছদে আর শিরোনামে পাড়ার নিষিদ্ধ বইঘরে বা নিষিদ্ধ সাইটে স্থান পেয়েছে এক সুরসুরি সমেত পরিচয়ে। তাই দেশীয় 'ভদ্র' বইপাড়ায় এরকম একটি নাম ঘুরঘুর করছে, এর বিষয়বস্তু কি?

আপনি কি জানতেন প্রাণী জগতে একমাত্র মানুষই বংশবৃদ্ধি ছাড়াও আনন্দ পেতেও মিলিত হয়? অন্যান্য প্রাণীকুলের মিলনে আনন্দ নেই তা নয়, বরং কিছু ক্ষেত্রে মনে হয় মানুষের চাইতে বেশিই আছে। তবে সেসব শুধুই জিন ধরে রাখার একটি প্রসেস মাত্র। স্রেফ আনন্দের খাতিরে মিলিত হয় একমাত্র মানুষই। অর্থাৎ বিবর্তনে পূর্বপুরুষ বা অন্যান্য প্রাণী থেকে মানুষ শুধু একটি বৃহৎ মস্তিষ্ক, দুই পায়ে হাঁটা, বিচিত্র ভাষায় কথা বলতে পারা ছাড়াও যৌনতার প্যারামটারেও সিগনিফিকেন্টলি ব্যতিক্রম! সুতরাং নামকরণ যথার্থ।

একটি ননফিকশন পড়বো বলেই বইটি হাতে নিয়েছিলাম। যেরকমটা ভেবেছিলাম বইটির টপিক হবে তার থেকে একদম ভিন্ন বুঝতেই পারছেন ইতোমধ্যে। এটি মূলতঃ একটি গবেষণামূলক গ্রন্থ। অবশ্যই সহজ করে, মডার্ন জেনারেশন এর জন্যই লেখা। একাডেমিক ভাষায় বক্তব্যগুলোও বোঝা যায় সহজেই। মানুষ কেন উদ্ভট যৌনতায়, লিঙ্গের দ্বন্দ, কেনো বিবর্তনে শুধু নারীতেই স্তন্যদান আর সন্তান পালন ধারণ বর্তালো- পুরুষে কেন নয়, বংশগতিতে পুরুষের অবদানটা আসলে কতটুকু, মানুষ কেনো বুঝতে পারেনা তার উর্বরতার সময় কখন, নারী্র কেন পুরুষের আগেই সন্তান উৎপাদন প্রকৃয়া বন্ধ হয়, নারী পুরুষে আকর্ষণের প্যারামিটার গুলো আসলে কি ইত্যাদি বিষয়গুলো বিভিন্ন প্রাণীর সাথে তুলনা ও সামাঞ্জস্যতা বর্ণণা করেই আলোচনা হয়েছে বইটিতে।

পড়তে মজা লেগেছে। চিন্তা করে কিছু ফান ফ্যাক্টও পেয়েছি। যেমন, খুব হাই এরোটিক ব্যাপার-স্যাপার এ অক্টোপাসকে চিত্রায়িত করতে দেখা যায় হরহামেশাই। সম্ভবত এর বহু বাহু/অঙ্গের জন্য। কিন্তু মজার বিষয় অক্টোপাস প্রাণী হিসেবে জীবনে শুধুমাত্র একবারই প্রজননে অংশ নেয়! আবার জেনেছি পুরুষ ম্যানটিস কে সঙ্গমরত অবস্থায় খেয়ে ফেলে নারীটি! তাও আবার পুরুষটির কনসেন্ট এই!! এমন নানাবিধ অজানা বিষয় যুক্তিতর্কে উঠে এসেছে। ভালো লেগেছে। তবে একই কথা বারবার ঘুরে আসায় কিছুটা বিরক্তও হয়েছি বৈকি। অনুবাদটা ভালো লেগেছে। বৈজ্ঞানিক টার্ম বাংলায় পড়ার হ্যাপা তো জানেন-ই!

সব মিলিয়ে বিজ্ঞানভিত্তিক বইয়ে আগ্রহ থাকলে ভালো লাগবে আশা করছি।