Synopses & Reviews
A smart, witty, and fresh look at the male side of the male-female relationship from a science writer and sex columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer,
Beginning with a aboot campa for wannabe pickup artistsawhere men pay thousands of dollars for three days of classroom seminars on how to get women into bedaFaye Flamas quest for a deeper understanding of men takes her back through the evolutionary history of the human male.
Sweeping from the birth of the first male and female organisms to the sexual foibles of twenty-first-century humans, Flam shows how a small difference in the size of the first sperm and eggs set off a war between the sexes that weare still fighting today. Since this primordial split, a consistent pattern of behavior has emerged: males use a stunning variety of strategies to make themselves attractive to females, and females put them through the wringer.
By placing the human male in the context of the natural world, Flam highlights some intriguing resemblances among males of all species, but also the unique challenges that men face when courting womenawhether for a lifelong partnership or a one-night stand. Flam ultimately reveals that millions of years of evolution have left the love lives of humans suspended somewhere between monogamy and promiscuity, and that it is this eons-old tension between males and females that has created the modern man.
Synopsis
"The Score" is a smart, witty, and fresh look at the male side of the male-female relationship from a science writer and sex columnist at "The Philadelphia Inquirer."
Synopsis
A smart, witty, and fresh look at the male side of the male-female relationship from a science writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer.In The Score, Faye Flam examines how the desire to "score" has profoundly shaped males over millions of years. Sweeping from the origin of the sexes to the sexual foibles of twenty-first-century humans, Flam, a science writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer, shows how a small difference in the size of the first sperm and eggs resulted in an evolutionary tradeoff that has affected both males and females. Because males of most species invest less in reproduction than females, they have to invest more up front to get sex-whether by jumping through hoops to prove that they'll be a good father, fighting to near death with rivals, or paying a couple thousand dollars for a class on how to pick up chicks à la the pickup artists in Neil Strauss's The Game.
Within this tug-of-war context, Flam explores a wide range of male behaviors and courtship strategies and ultimately reveals that males have been shaped by competing for the preferences of the female sex. But after all this sex-propelled evolution, we're still stuck in a troublesome suspension between monogamy and promiscuity-and it's this tension that explains the contradictions of the modern man.
About the Author
Faye Flam has been covering science for The Philadelphia Inquirer since 1995. In June 2005, she started writing “Carnal Knowledge”, a weekly column about the science of sex. She has also written for New Scientist, Science, and The Economist, and her search for a good science story has taken her everywhere from the South Pole to Greenland to NASA’s zero-g plane. A graduate of California Institute of Technology, Flam was recently a Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan. She lives in Philadelphia.