Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Summary:
Many of us pursue fitness because we want to remain attractive to partners and potential partners, and we stay healthy so we can continue to have sex with those partners. But why do people care so much about sex? This book, written by an evolutionary biologist, explains how all the weird quirks of human sexuality came to be: sex with no intention of procreation, invisible fertility, sex acts pursued in private--all common to us, but very different from most other species. Why Is Sex Fun? asks us to look at ourselves in a brand-new way, and richly rewards us for doing so.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
The least and shortest of Diamond's books, but excellent nonetheless
Customer Rating:
Sex is urgent, demanding, sometimes pleasurable, but fun? No, I would not call sex fun. By calling sex fun I think Professor Diamond skips over the very essence of sex which is we have no choice. That's the way it has come down to us. As one of my students crudely put it, "eat cheese or die."
Diamond knows this of course as do all of us. What he is about in this his second book, coming after The Third Chimpanzee (1992) and before the phenomenally successful and highly recommended Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) is to show the general reader how evolutionary biology and the study of the sexual behavior of other species can focus light on human sexuality. He considers such questions as why our sex life is the way it is and how such behaviors are adaptive. He goes beyond the well-known phenomenon that men seek a lot of one night stands while women look for men with resources and a willingness to commit to a long term relationship. He even goes so far as to speculate on why men don't breast feed, while intimating that evolutionarily speaking it might have been something that would work for the human species.
He looks at the battle of the sexes from a strategic and a biologically adaptive point of view. He uses studies from primatologists, anthropologists and others, as well as his own experiences in New Guinea where he studied birds and came to know well the indigenous people and their habits. He offers insight into why women in most societies end up doing most of the work while men are out "big game" hunting and playing "show off." He shows how the occasional large kill is more about status within the tribe than it is about nutrition. He makes it clear that the key to understanding the division of labor between the sexes depends largely on how much nurturing is required before offspring can take care of themselves. By studying birds, whose reproductive behavior vis-à-vis monogamy is most similar to humans, we can see that parental demands are usually too great for a single parent. Therefore both birds and humans are more or less monogamous. This is in contrast to our biologically closer cousins, the overwhelming majority of mammals, who are raised almost exclusively by the mother while the father is busy looking for the next reproductive try.
Interesting is how the reproductive strategies of chimps, gorillas, orangutans and humans differ. Orangutans live solitary lives and meet briefly to mate while chimpanzees are mostly promiscuous, especially bonobos, who even more than humans, use sex as a means of social bonding. Diamond presents theories on why ovulation in humans is concealed even from the woman herself and why this has proven effective in an evolutionary sense. (Either the male must stay home and guard his mate continuously since he doesn't know when she's fertile, and/or the woman must "trick" the males into thinking that anyone of them who had sex with her might be the father and therefore none of those males is likely to harm her baby.)
What I found most enlightening was the answer to the question (incidentally not asked in this book) why are so many human societies and religions patriarchal? The answer, it dawned on me while reading the chapter entitled "What Are Men Good For?" is that patriarchy is a strategy by males to counter the uncertainty posed by the hidden ovulation of women! It's all part of the battle of the sexes. Woman gained control with hidden ovulation since they would always know who the mother was, but men would be in doubt about who the father was. Enter social and political control of women so that paternity is more nearly certain.
In the chapter "Making More by Making Less" Diamond explains why women experience menopause and men don't and why it is almost absent in other animal species--the pilot whale being a notable exception. It seems that a woman getting on in years can better ensure the success of her genes by using her energies and her hard-earned knowledge to help rear her grandchildren instead of getting pregnant again. This idea is closely aligned with ideas about senescence. We get old and die because our systems run down and/or suffer accidents. They run down because the evolutionary mechanism doesn't "care" about people past the reproductive age (natural selection no longer works on non-reproducing life forms!). But why should our reproductive abilities end while we go on living? Because, due to the rigors of life in the wild, older people are not as capable physically as their children and other young people, and so they get selected against. Diamond even goes so far as to intimate that grandmothers by forgoing having more children benefit the entire tribe with their efforts at foraging and being a repository of knowledge about what happened long ago and how to survive rare catastrophic events. As for men, well, their reproductive abilities run down more slowly, but after a certain age it is all the same.
Evolution, evolution
Customer Rating:
This is a fascinating book, & by-and-large explains the uniqueness of human sexuality with evolutionary logic.
Quite a few chapters are fascinating forays into aspects of human sexuality. But chief among these is the chapter which delves into why is sex fun for humans. In a very cogent manner, Diamond puts forward competing theories around the evolution of concealed female ovulation & extends it to explain why sex tends to be largely recreational in humans. The chapter on "What are men good for" represents "both sides" of the argument, & though there are certain attempts at re-establishing men's role in child rearing (food, protection etc), Diamond finally gives up & concedes that men aren't good for too many things in general.
The chapter on female menopause is an intriguing piece of counter-intuitive reasoning - making more by making less - as he calls this chapter. Now a lot of aspects of human sexuality - because it is evolutionary in nature, as are all other aspects of living beings - can be reasoned about, in the evolutionary backdrop, but who is to say that one theory is better than the other, or choose between two competing theories both of which explain the same set of observations. You can see more instances of such theorizing in the final chapter on Body signals where Diamond very eruditely talks about signals that different species have for attracting mates, discusses all the theories around such signals, establishes one of them loosely, & uses it to explain the relatively longer human-male penis compared to the chimps, & gorillas.
These, though, are minor issues - unless you're in the same field as Diamond. For the general reader, this book still is packed with plenty of information, sets good context before trying to explain anything, is full of comparative data among other animal-species, is funny every now & then, & in general will make a great reading.
The evolution of human sex
Customer Rating:
The evolutionist Richard Dawkins once said that he would have written a book on the evolution of sex if Jared Diamond hadn't had done such a good job of it with `Why is Sex fun?' If you are interested in evolution or the evolution of human sexuality then this scientific entry is an imperative. However if you are looking for a book that just does cheap thrills or agony aunt pseudo-explanations, go elsewhere.
Jared Diamond is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of `Guns, germs and steel' fame. He has a talent for making science interesting and writes extremely eloquently and often quite wittily.
The book is quite short but the material brought forth in it is an awareness raiser. Diamond starts by addressing the issue of human sexuality in relation to other animals and indicates a surprising uniqueness to how we do it and in many cases the inclusion of a recreational aspect that evades most other species and demands explanation. Diamond uses evolutionary pressures to explain why the sexes developed and the roles that the genders play with respect to anatomy and biology. The non-evolution of male lactation has a few surprises in store and then it is time to explain why we have recreational sex which finds its reason in concealed ovulation. There is a focus on why men behave in the role they do if it seems that women end up doing more work. The show-off male seems to have an evolutionary advantage because when he eventually manages to brings home the bacon he tends to bring home a butcher shop. There is a massive surprise in store for why the female menopause has evolved and has to do with old people being used as information storage retrieval devices instead of offspring producers. Diamond finishes up by explaining the evolution of sexual signalling before leaving us with the enigma of penis size that has yet to find a suitable evolutionary explanation.
This is far from a simple book but stick with it and you will learn some extraordinary things about why we are the way we are. I am sure this book will also help people get over certain guilt trips they might be on. I cannot over recommend its value and contribution to our biological lives.
A question without an answer
Customer Rating:
I started reading Diamond with Guns, Germs, and Steel and went on to other of his works. While reading "Why Is Sex Fun" we were staying with our daughter, helping her care for a newborn and his comments on the energy expenditure of caring for an infant were enlightening. His writing was insightful and at the same time entertaining, but unless I skipped a page somewhere he fails to answer two questions presented in the advertising - Why is it fun? and Why humans choose privacy for sex? Compared to Guns... and Collapse, this one is a lightweight and not just in the number of pages.
Dry, but enlightening
Customer Rating:
None of Jared Diamond's books will have you on the edge of your seat, but the author does a fine job at making his points, backing it up with irrefutable science and not hype or conjecture. This book delivers an intriguing view on why we, as well as birds and bees, not only do it, but why we treat sex the way we do while other species don't.
Select button not working? 
