The Score: How The Quest For Sex Has Shaped The Modern Man | 
| Author: Faye Flam
Publisher: Avery
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $12.25
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New (27) Used (5) from $12.25
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 56084
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 1583333126
Dewey Decimal Number: 155.3
EAN: 9781583333129
ASIN: 1583333126
Publication Date: June 12, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: New in new dust jacket; first printing.
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Product Description
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 boot camp for wannabe pickup artistswhere men pay thousands of dollars for three days of classroom seminars on how to get women into bedFaye Flams 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 were 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 womenwhether 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.
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| Customer Reviews:
Interesting and amusing, comparable to a nice fishing expedition tour July 20, 2008
This book is amusing to read, although it is a mixture of exact and inexact science and also includes a flair of soap: The author did a tremendous job reviewing the varieties of sexual reproduction in all kind of different species, but then sometimes confounds these reports with personal opinions, allusions to mythology, or simplistic explanations that refers to "gentics" or "evolution". The reader is taken more to a boat and fishing expedition tour rather than to get scientific based facts or hypotheses. Moreover, some core aspects in sexuality are almost totally neglected (ie womens "slower" but nontheless powerful sex drive or cultural aspects among times and ethnicities, the power and prestige and so on) as well as aspects about sexuality going wrong (eg traumatization and violence). It finally remains unclear how the sexual behviour in fishes, worms or apes (who, according to the author, 'thinks' of nothing else than to pass their genes to the next generation) relates to the modern men in the 21th century (who is seldomly driven by that same thought, when it comes to sex). Where is the link, where is the relation? Is it genetics, evolution, power - or all of them? No clear answer. In summary, at the end of the book, one does not feels to get a good answer to the initial question why the modern man has been shaped by sex, but comes up with some confusion a not so ground breaking conclusion: Most males like having sex with females and are willing to put efforts into it. Females on the other hand, like to have healthy offspring/caregiver and are willing to put some efforts into the seletcion for a good partner. This would have shaped todays's males and females behaviour in everyday's situation. But how far that behaviour goes in daily life, has not been discussed in that book at all. For example, would that behaviour persist after founding a family and could that somehow be repsonsible for all the many divorces in western societies? Has the beauty of arts, culture or science etc. not at least sometimes more incentive than to impress females? And would that be sufficient to explain, for example, why most musicians, artists, noble price winners etc. have been males? Thinks are more complex, obvioulsy, and the burden of going through life threatening pregnancies/deliveries and exhausting baby times could also be a good reason, but coming to this was perhaps not the scope of tis book? Finally, the cover of the book is also not a good reflection for the typical "male/female" behaviour most often depicted in the book: The male is not about to spend most energies by simply following a female (or to chase her on a ladder) but, according to the author, gives it best to conquer females by impressing them and beating male rivals. This is a different scenario, but perhaps the choice of the cover has been driven by another force: to offer a picture (with sexy female legs and shoes) following a very simple rule... sex sells - the pickup artist, called Mr. Future in the book, would surely agree on that!
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