Why every man’s ideal woman is 22 (no matter how old HE is!)

X AND WHY by Tom Whipple (Short Books £9.99)

NEAr the end of his life, the distinguished poet John Betjeman was interviewed by the BBC. Looking back on it all, they asked, did he have any regrets? Betjeman considered the question for a moment. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I haven’t had enough sex.’

Typical male, you might say. And, according to one of the many surveys in this hugely entertaining and informative book, you’d be right.

Asked to review their lives, ‘ men, whether heterosexual or homosexual, consistently lament the times they didn’t have sex but could have done so, while women, lesbians included, consistently lament the times they did’.

Modern debate about the issue of gender has reached the point where any claim that men and women are different, in any way or to any degree, has the loonier fringes on Twitter yelling furiously about sexism or preconceptions or whatever the latest thought- crime is this week.

Tom Whipple, a science writer for The Times, has provided a timely and wellresearched reminder that biology still influences our behaviour.

Did you know, for instance, that priests are more likely to break their vow of celibacy than nuns? or that throughout a woman’s life, the age of her ideal partner is the same as her — while throughout a man’s life, the age of his ideal partner is 22?

When men are asked after speed-dating events how much the women liked them, it probably won’t surprise you that they tend to overestimate their own appeal.

Much of this, of course, is down to testosterone. Increased levels of the substance make you more likely to have an affair, get into a fight and become Foreign Secretary (I may have misread some of that).

A man’s testosterone falls when he suffers a failure — so much so that it happened to male republican voters in the U.S. when Barack obama won the 2008 presidential election.

In the Twenties, a Chicago surgeon made a living from men’s desire for testosterone: he took the testicles of executed men and transplanted them into paying clients, with ‘apparent success’.

Yet Whipple is careful (as always in the book) to point out the subtleties. It’s not that testosterone makes you aggressive as such — rather it causes you to seek status. In one experiment it made some teenage boys act antisocially, but led others to join the debating society.

Nevertheless, this book frequently reminded me of Kingsley Amis’s comment about the male libido: it’s like living your life chained to an idiot. In 2015 the Ashley Madison website — aimed at people seeking affairs — was hacked. The truth emerged that of its 35 million users, 30 million were male.

Not only that, many of the 5 million women weren’t women at all, just computer programs designed to keep the men interested and paying.

Contrast this with women’s biological make-up, which seems tailor-made to keep them acting sensibly.

It has even been shown that when a woman is ovulating, she makes fewer and shorter telephone calls to her father. It’s thought this is her unconscious ‘antiincest’ drive kicking in (sex with a relative

being a genetically bad idea). But again, the book searches behind the headlines, highlighting twists in the ‘sex-mad men/cautious women’ narrative. One of the biggest corrections is to the old statistic about men having more sexual partners than women.

This, Whipple points out, is mathematically impossible. With heterosexual encounters, ‘by definition, one of each [gender] is always involved in the act’. Average out all that activity, and the figure for men and women must be the same.

It turns out that women wired up to lie detectors report the same number of sexual partners as men do. Without the lie detectors they’re underreporting. Whipple doesn’t spell this out, but my bet is that the converse also applies: men are over-reporting.

This is why I always discount those ‘shocking’ surveys about how much sex teenagers are having. If you ask a 17-year-old boy whether he’s had sex, he’s going to say yes.

An individual example of female promiscuity is given by 94-year- old Mary of Norfolk, as she recalls her experiences during World War II.

‘I was an absolute trollop when I was a Land Girl . . . I’d possibly meet them at the pub, then have sex at the

side of the road . . . I look back now and think, “Oh, that was fun.” ’

One question men do answer truthfully is whether or not they’re gay. Researchers tested people’s stated preferences against the reactions of their genitals (measured by blood flow) as they watched erotic videos.

Men who said they were straight became aroused by videos of naked women but not by those showing naked men. Men who said they were gay had the opposite reactions.

However women — even those who claimed they were straight — became aroused at the sight of both sexes naked.

Most women, runs the conclusion, are ‘to at least some degree’ bisexual. When the doctor who discovered this mentions it to straight males, ‘I can see this glister in their eyes’.The book examines gender and relationships all over the world. In Pakistan, for instance, the transgender people known as Hijras are used in debt collection.

It’s made clear to the person who owes money that if they don’t pay up, a group of Hijras will dance and sing on their doorstep. The embarrassment this would cause in front of their neighbours ensures that almost everyone reaches for the cheque book.

Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, a doctor noticed a factor that caused a fourfold increase in his male patients’ risk of a heart attack. That factor was ‘having more than one wife’.

The next time a social meejah warrior rails about the sexes being identical, point them towards this book. Yes, says Whipple, some men are effeminate and some women want to join the Army and kill people. But just because the genders ‘ overlap with each other does not mean they are the same’.

even when sexual behaviour changes, the old tendencies show through.

Viagra has increased the amount of sex being enjoyed by older people, so much so that one retirement community in Florida developed a problem with drunken late-night copulation in public places.

By definition, residents of both genders were involved, but do you think the ‘unofficial leader’ of the gang was a man or a woman? Correct. He was a ‘ perma-tanned retired biology teacher, who called his manhood Mr Midnight’.