Bering references eight dfifferent studies in bulding his arugment, which is that we may have good old Darwinian natural selection to thank for our wildest sexual fantasies and the highly evolved cognitive mental representation capacities in our brains that make them possible.

This conjuring ability to create fantasy scenes in our heads that literally bring us to orgasm when conveniently paired with our dexterous appendages is an evolutionary magic trick that I suspect is uniquely human.

Bering notes that “masturbation to completion is an exceedingly rare phenomenon in other species,” dropping that old Alfred Kinsey stat that 92 percent of all Americans masturbate to orgasm, and cites a “classic” (meaning pre-Internet porn) study on male masturbation by British evolutionary biologists Robin Baker and Mark Bellis, which found that male university students masturbated to ejaculation every 72 hours, on average (like I said, this was conducted pre-Internet porn), even when they were also having actual in-pair copulation.

 
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Baker and Bellis’s quite logical argument for this seemingly counterintuitive state of affairs (after all, shouldn’t men try to stock up as much sperm as possible in their testes rather than spill their seeds so wastefully in a rather infertile swath of toilet paper or a dirty sock?) is that because there is a “shelf-life” for sperm cells – they remain viable for only 5-7 days after production – and because adult human males manufacture a whopping 3 million sperm per day, masturbation is an evolved strategy for shedding old sperm while making room for new, fitter sperm. It’s quality over quantity.

Bering digresses for a moment to review the scientific literature on non-human primate masturbation before getting back to his intriguing thesis and its even more intriguing conclusions:

The answer for this cross-species difference, I’m convinced, lies in our uniquely evolved mental representational abilities—we alone have the power to conjure up at will erotic, orgasm-inducing scenes in our theater-like heads … internal, salacious fantasies completely disconnected from our immediate external realities.

It’s the final section of Bering’s column that is most interesting and most thought-provoking, and I’ll encourage my readers to click through and read for themselves rather than stealing all of his thunder. Here’s a teaser:

And so I’m left wondering… in a world where sexual fantasy in the form of mental representation has become obsolete, where hallucinatory images of dancing genitalia, lusty lesbians and sadomasochistic strangers have been replaced by a veritable online smorgasbord of real people doing things our grandparents couldn’t have dreamt up even in their wettest of dreams, where randy teenagers no longer close their eyes and lose themselves to the oblivion and bliss but instead crack open their thousand-dollar laptops and conjure up a real live porn actress, what, in a general sense, are the consequences of liquidating our erotic mental representational skills for our species’ sexuality?