Customer Reviews

How Sex Works: Why We Look, Smell, Taste, Feel, and Act the Way We Do

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Most books on sex focus on either the titillating or the medical - on relationships or the nasty little details of STI's. Moalem's book not only discusses both, but also manages to connect the medical and the psychological. I don't think anyone has quite done this since Desmond Morris wrote The Naked Ape. I found myself picking this book up frequently - no matter where I started reading, there was something compelling. Especially the chapter on homosexuality - who knew that this might be triggered by the same gene that causes women to like men - in other words, the gene that promotes heterosexuality in females? And the wide range of sexual behaviours in animals - that male big horn sheep culture is predominantly gay?? A lot of this is not fundamental knowledge, but it sure makes for interesting, fun reading.

Sex fascinates us; it makes or breaks marriages, ruins political careers, and is the backbone of the internet entertainment industry. And yet it is something hidden, as if we were ashamed at its fascination. In my work, I always ask people who come to see me what they do for fun. Of thousands of replies to this question over the years, I have had exactly one person list sex. Surely there are a lot more people than that who find sex something to do for fun. And besides being fun, sex is interesting. It is one of those universal activities that you can never learn everything about or participate in all its variants. There are many enthusiastic guides about how to have sex (the best of them is _The Guide to Getting It On!_), but if you are more interested in why we have sex and why people do the sexual things they do (including yourself), you are bound to gain insight from _How Sex Works: Why We Look, Smell, Taste, Feel, and Act the Way We Do_ (Harper) by Dr. Sharon Moalem. The author is a neurogeneticist, evolutionary biologist, and physiologist, but he is used to writing for a popular audience, and this book gives lots of facts, from trivial to essential, about a topic that is always interesting. If you had a good sex ed. class (bet you didn't), many of the subjects in Moalem's book may be familiar, but there is new research in many aspects of sex and new ways of understanding its evolutionary importance, and Moalem has incorporated much of it in a readable and amusing fashion.

Sex is pretty costly, and that isn't just because of the price of dinner and a movie. It takes energy, and putting two half-cells together to make a new starter cell for a new individual is enormously complicated and can go wrong in countless ways. On the plus side, it jumbles the genes every generation, which not only makes it hard for parasites and viruses to ride along, but also allows variation in every new individual, enabling evolution to make its changes. Jumbling the genes may be something we are programmed to do. Moalem reviews studies that show how olfactory and visual cues may help us have the best chance of sending good DNA to our progeny. There are also studies to show how sex works internally. The more attracted a woman was to her partner, for instance, the easier and more intense were her orgasms; good orgasms produce more of the hormone oxytocin, which is thought to increase bonding. It's a nice positive feedback system, and indicates how essential good sex is to a good relationship. It would be a sorry sex book that didn't have pages on penis size. Guys, it's time to relax: although only 55% of you are happy with the size of your penis, 85% of women were quite satisfied with their partner's penis size (and though Moalem doesn't say so, some of the remaining 15% must have had dissatisfaction with too big, not too small). But size does matter: condoms have to fit, especially non-latex condoms, which don't have the stretch of the typical rubber. Moalem describes working for an agency in Thailand where western visitors to brothels reported that condoms were breaking. The problem was that local Thai condoms were smaller than those fit for men from the West.

There are controversies even in science about the dimly-lit biology of coitus. Moalem agrees (despite some studies to the contrary) that there is a physiological G spot. The ancient Greeks and plenty of other observers have been telling us there is such a thing as female ejaculation, and Moalem cites modern experts who say it isn't just a myth, though perhaps not every woman can do it and no woman should feel she is missing something without it. Focusing in one chapter on homosexuality, he points out that it seems to be programmed into the behavior of literally hundreds of species, part of a bonding mechanism between social animals. There is research that in at least some cases in humans, there is a gene that directs women to like men, and thus have more children; the same gene in men can cause them to like men. It's not all that simple; there are studies to show that a baby's fetal environment might play a role, and then of course there's all that post-birth nurture stuff. Moalem is interested in how technology is helping us overcome medical problems of sexuality, but also mentions "teledildonics" which is sexual remote interaction through the internet. There is little moralizing here. Connected to his review of male circumcision (which might have originated as a health practice but certainly took on a life as its own, including wrongly being thought to reduce masturbation), Moalem is strongly condemnatory of female circumcision. That's not the typical tone of his book, though, which in many chapters is a jaunty review of the most modern research on an old, old topic. Improved understanding can't hurt; one in five American high school girls, for instance, has no idea how HIV is transmitted. Moalem says that sex is one of evolution's greatest gifts; but so, too, is our intelligence to understand things scientifically. His book is an invitation to apply that intelligence in order to understand sex better, and what is strongly linked, to enjoy it more.

HOW SEX WORKS: WHY WE LOOK, SMELL, TASTE, FEEL, AND ACT THE WAY WE DO comes packed with a satisfying blend of anecdotes and insights into myths and scientific revolutions alike and provides a fine historical survey of medical research into sex. From how male virility is fueled by competition to why being in love encourages fidelity, chapters survey the excitement, idea and reality of sex in a lively manner perfect for both health and general-interest libraries.

A surprising elucidation of the latest findings on sex and evolution.

Get a handle on the evolutionary view behind some of the behaviors we see in the opposite gender. Moalem unfolds some interesting insights into why women (and men) will behave the way they do. The book doesn't necessarily advocate acting on our baser instinct but can come in handy in understanding the "why" behind certain behaviors.

I truly enjoyed reading this book. It was nice to be able to pick up a book on the subject of sex and actually learn something new. It made me think of sex in a new perspective. Information was referenced with numerous research studies and examples. I also appreciated the author's writing style, and found the chapter titles brilliant. Very engaging!

How can this be? Well, the book barely lives up to its title, and certainly does not warrant the sub-title. Moalem must be a voracious reader; the book often devolves into a series of reports on recent literature in the broad field of sexual physiology, behavior, and side-effects. There are copious endnotes, but they are hard to cross-reference with the text.

It would be good to know the credentials of an author who is selectively picking through current research, as considerable judgment is required to decide what to include and what to omit. The book is quite silent on this, but a bit of digging shows that he is not without controversy in the blogosphere. It appears that he was educated at the University of Guelph (Ontario) and the University of Toronto (Ph.D. in the late 1990s); whether he practices medicine as sometimes implied remains ambiguous. Whatever else he may do, self-promotion seems to be a core competency.

The book could do with a good editor. You guessed it. There is considerable repetition of the same thought within pages. Not to mention incomplete sentences. Colloquiality and accessibility are not the same thing. I find the lack of a coherent overall structure off-putting in a book that purports to educate. And the same idea appears repeatedly in close proximity. ;-}

Now, I think I learned a few things from the book (hence 3 stars), but I will not trust too much without going to the primary references to see whether he interprets things the way I do. You might want to try a library copy before making an investment.

I like the data from this book. The opinion of the author made it annoying, but not so much that I couldn't take the book for what it was and learn a lot of information. I loved the information learned here. It will help me understand Sex from a broader perspective.

Having read and throughly enjoyed this author's only other book, Survival of the Sickest, I assumed How Sex Works would be just as fascinating. However, I'm finding it disappointingly boring. It's filled with study after study where, instead of focusing on the why's as to what was found, just reports statistics. Furthermore, a great deal of the information in this book is (so far) not new to me, and I'm just your average person [and biology lover], not some...connoisseur on the subject.

However, there is a plus in that the book reads like a conversation, and an easy to understand one, at that. We'll see how the rest of the book goes. I put this as 3 stars because I'm only half way through, but holding out hope that the second half will be much better. I suggest picking up this author's other book instead!

This book has a great title. It has tons of great information, which I love. However, the book worries me because it is full of personal opinions and I spotted a few pieces of information that are wrong or misstated in order to favor the author's point of view. Also, the author uses Ms. Hellen Fisher as a reference and Ms. Fisher is a highly opinionated author that tends to twist scientific data to her ideas. So, be careful and cross-reference anything that you might find that you do not know. It is sad to see such a possible great book be tainted with wrong information and using personal opinions as facts. Anyway buy it read it and reseach it!

An entertaining enough book. Not so hard to do when you write about sex. All you have to do is keep it simple, which this author does; and short -- this book was a quick read. Not entirely satisfying though. There wasn't a lot I didn't know about from paying attention to the occasional news article and high school sex ed.

One thing that kind of annoyed me is that the author addresses the old trope about penis size and ethnicity. Personally, I don't believe it, and from all the studies I've read, a correlation has not been definitively established. Yet Moalem appears to believe it's true.

Worse, he singles out Indian men as being of below average size, and Israeli men as above average. (I'm not Indian, by the way).

He accounts for the difference in penis sizes by claiming that it has to do with surface area: in colder climates, the penis is smaller so that it doesn't have as much surface area from which to lose heat. In warmer climates, he says the penis is larger to keep the genitals cool.

But if this is true, shouldn't sub-tropical India be above average? And why are Israelis above average? Many Israelis are from Central Europe, a colder climate than India.

But when I looked at the author's bio information, I thought, "oh yeah, that makes sense." The author is Israeli.