Chapter 6 Gender: Boys against the girls.
All animals play the mating game. In the movie EDtv, Woody Harrelson is caught on camera cheating on his girlfriend. When asked why he didn’t turn down the woman’s offer of sex, he says, "I'm the guy, I don't stop. That's the woman's job. We're the gas, they're the brakes." What is the origin of our stereotypes for men and women?
Believe it or not, we can learn a lot about human sex stereotypes by examining an obscure little insect called the bush cricket. Although bush crickets don’t have bars or dating services, they do congregate, check each other out, and–just like humans–ponder whether they should perhaps mate with a new acquaintance.
Ah, but there is one small difference. When the pair does decide to mate and the male cricket ejaculates, he loses about a quarter of his body weight–contributing a massive ejaculate that the female uses for energy. For an average human male, this would be about fifty pounds of semen! If this were the rule in men, rather than the "lovin’ spoonful" it actually is, would human males behave differently? The answer is yes, and the ramifications extend far beyond sexual tactics ...