Faye Flam

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Score

Beginning with a “boot camp” for wannabe pickup artists - where men pay vast sums for three days of classroom seminars on how to get women into bed - Faye Flam's 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 we're still fighting today. Since this primordial split, a consistent pattern of behaviour 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 women - whether 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.