Free The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris Page A

democratic, less tyrannical. Each male too, would need a strong pairing tendency. Furthermore, the males were now armed with deadly weapons and sexual rivalries would be much more dangerous: again, a good reason for each male being satisfied with one female. On top of that there were the much heavier parental demands being made by the slow-growing infants. Paternal behaviour would have to be developed and the parental duties shared between the mother and the father: another good reason for a strong pair-bond.
    Given this situation as a starting point we can now see how other things grew from it. The naked ape had to develop the capacity for falling in love, for becoming sexually imprinted on a single partner, for evolving a pair-bond. Whichever way you put it, it comes to the same thing. How did he manage to do this? What were the factors that helped him in this trend? As a primate, he will already have had a tendency to form brief mateships lasting a few hours, or perhaps even a few days, but these now had to be intensified and extended. One thing that will have come to his aid is his own prolonged childhood. During the long, growing years he will have had the chance to develop a deep personal relationship with his parents, a relationship much more powerful and lasting than anything a young monkey could experience. The loss of this parental bond with maturation and independence would create a ‘relationship void’—a gap that had to be filled. He would therefore already be primed for the development of a new, equally powerful bond to replace it.
    Even if this was enough to intensify his need for forming a new pair-bond, there would still have to be additional assistance to maintain it. It would have to last long enough for the lengthy process of rearing a family. Having fallen in love, he would have to stay in love. By developing a prolonged and exciting courtship phase he could ensure the former, but something more would be needed after that. The simplest and most direct method of doing this was to make the shared activities of the pair more complicated and more rewarding. In other words, to make sex sexier.
    How was this done? In every possible way, seems to be the answer. If we look back now at the behaviour of the present-day naked ape we can see the pattern taking shape. The increased receptivity of the female cannot be explained only in terms of increasing the birth-rate. It is true that by being prepared to copulate while still at the maternal phase of rearing a baby, the female does increase the birth-rate. With the very long dependency period, it would be a disaster if she did not. But this cannot explain why she is ready to receive the male and become sexually aroused throughout each of her monthly cycles. She only ovulates at one point during the cycle, so that mating at all other times can have no procreative function. The vast bulk of copulation in our species is obviously concerned, not with producing offspring, but with cementing the pair-bond by providing mutual rewards for the sexual partners. The repeated attainment of sexual consummation for a mated pair is clearly, then, not some kind of sophisticated, decadent outgrowth of modern civilisation, but a deep-rooted, biologically based, and evolutionary sound tendency of our species.
    Even when she has stopped going through her monthly cycles—in other words, when she is pregnant—the female remains responsive to the male. This, too, is particularly important because, with a one-male one-female system, it would be dangerous to frustrate the male for too long a period. It might endanger the pair-bond.
    In addition to increasing the amount of time when sexual activities can take place, the activities themselves have been elaborated. The hunting life that gave us naked skins and more sensitive hands has given us much greater scope for sexually stimulating body-to-body contacts. During pre-copulatory behaviour these play a major role. Stroking, rubbing,