Sex at Dawn

Phil is at a prime age for the so-called midlife crisis that seems to hit many men around this stage of their lives. Explanations are easy to come by, ranging from economics (he finally has enough money and status to be attractive to the sort of sexy young women who had ignored him previously) to existential dread (he’s coming to terms with his own mortality by lashing out symbolically against his own impending aging and death) to the wife’s life cycle (she’s nearing menopause, so he’s biologically driven toward the fertility of younger women). Each of these may have some measure of truth, but none answers the most pressing question: Why do men have such overwhelming hunger for variety in their sexual partners—not just at midlife, but always?

If the ghost of Calvin Coolidge weren’t haunting him, a man would simply buy a DVD or two of his favorite porn actress and watch it over and over the rest of his life. Knowing how the movie ends is hardly going to ruin the experience for him. No, what makes heterosexual men seek a constant stream of different women doing the same old things is the Coolidge effect. If you’ve never been to a porn gateway website, you’ll be astounded by the variety and specificity of the offerings there: everything from “unshaved Japanese lesbians” to “tattooed redheads” to “overweight older gals.” It’s a simple, unavoidable truth almost everyone knows to be true but few dare to discuss: variety and change are the necessary spice of the sex life of the human male.

But an intellectual understanding of this aspect of most men’s inner reality doesn’t make accepting it any easier for many women. Writer and film director Nora Ephron has explored these issues in many of her films, including Heartburn, which was based on her own failed marriage. In a 2009 interview she explained how raising two sons had informed her view of men: “Boys are so sweet,” she said. “But the problem with men is not whether they’re nice or not. It’s that it’s hard for them at a certain point in their lives to stay true. It just is. It’s almost not their fault.” But then she added, “It feels like it’s their fault if you are involved with any of them.” ¹

The Perils of Monotomy (Monogamy + Monotony)

The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful.

CARL JUNG, in a letter to Freud dated January 30, 1910

Remember what Phil said about how sex with his wife had grown overly familiar, how he’d come to feel he and Helen were “siblings, almost”? Interesting word choice. The strongest explanation for the prevalence and intensity of the Coolidge effect among social mammals is that the male drive for sexual variety is evolution’s way of avoiding incest. Our species evolved on a sparsely populated planet—never more than a few million and probably fewer than 100,000 of us on Earth for most of our evolutionary past. To avoid the genetic stagnation that would have dragged our ancestors into extinction long ago, males evolved a strong appetite for sexual novelty and a robust aversion to the overly familiar. While this carrot-and-stick mechanism worked well to promote genetic diversity in the prehistoric environment, it’s causing lots of problems now. When a couple have been living together for years, when they’ve become family, this ancient anti-incest mechanism can effectively block eroticism for many men, leading to confusion and hurt feelings all around.²²

Earlier, we discussed how men’s testosterone levels recede over the years, but it’s not just the passing of time that brings these levels down: monogamy itself seems to drain away a man’s testosterone. Married men consistently show lower levels of the hormone than single men of the same age; fathers of young children, even less. Men who are particularly responsive to infants show declines of 30 percent or more right after their child is born. Married men having affairs,

however, were found to have higher testosterone levels than

23

those who weren’t. Additionally, most of the men having affairs have told researchers they were actually quite happy in their marriages, while only one-third of women having affairs felt that way.²⁴

Of course, sharp-thinking readers will point out that these correlations don’t imply causation: maybe men with higher levels of testosterone simply seek more affairs. Probably so, but there is good reason to believe that even casual contact with novel, attractive women can have a tonic effect on men’s hormonal health. In fact, researcher James Roney and his colleagues found that even a brief chat with an attractive woman raised men’s testosterone levels by an average of 14 percent. When these same men spent a few minutes talking with other men, their testosterone level fell by 2 percent.²⁵