I recently read the book “Sperm Wars” by Robin Baker. It is an evolutionary-psychology book based on the sexual nature of humans. It dives deep into the subconscious motivations behind our sexual acts and also the reality of infidelity. 

In this article, I’m going to share the notes I took on the book, and you can also check out the videos I did on the book, on my YouTube channel “The Superior Code”.

Interesting parts

Chapter 4 – Counting the costs

• 10-15% of people are not sired by the fathers who raise them.
• It can sometimes be costly to be faithful. Remaining faithful can sometimes hurt your reproductive potential
• Infidelity is leading cause of domestic violence
• Oral sex allows a man to collect information about a woman’s activities and health
• Women are more forgiving in infidelity and males are more likely to get caught as the cost is less risky and they aren’t as committed to hiding it

Chapter 5 – Secret Anticipation

• A man’s body can distinguish between masturbation and inseminating a woman.
• Masturbation tops up ejaculate storage with young killers and egg-getters (sperm has three different roles: killers (of other sperm), egg-getters, and blockers (in the canal of the cervix)

Chapter 6 – Successful failure

• Avoiding conception – production of stress chemicals
• ‘The mail man’ is a societal term that reveals the fact that we understand that leaving your woman home by herself is reproductively risky if a man is visiting the house everyday
• Women less likely to use contraception in affairs, showing that she is trying to get pregnant by the affair partner because she rates him more than her husband
• Women have more men offering genes than commitment – so getting a relationship is more important to her than getting sex

Chapter 7 – Shopping around the genes

• Men are attracted to beauty because they are signs of health, youth and fertility 
• Gives explanation to oral sex (and unintentionally explains why cumming on a girl is sexy) – woman also use oral sex to download information regarding the man’s health and sperm quality
• Women and orgies – same purpose of infidelity – she is promoting sperm warfare to get the best genes
• Penis is shaped to remove genetic material of other men

Chapter 8 – The Climax of Influence

• Break down of orgasm and retention rate. Orgasms heighten chance of conception as the orgasm retains more sperm than if she doesn’t have orgasm
• Body can engineer paternity through orgasms. The guy she orgasms for is the guy that she subconsciously wants to impregnate her. 

Chapter 10 – One way or another 

• Homosexuality hereditary 
• Poses uncomfortable questions about rape – “why is it not more common if genetically successful?”
• 4% of children are conceived via sperm warfare

What I learned/liked:

• Each chapter starts with a scene/scenario based on what happens in real life. So for example, a chapter could start with a specific story of how one woman was cheating on her spouse with her boss, but she subconsciously slept with both men in the same time period. The different scenes make it like a fiction story. This could be interesting for people who don’t like cold facts and want a bit of entertainment. In fact, at times it felt like a erotic novel – but its linked to real life situations that actually happen. Personally, I prefer just to get the straight facts though.
• Male nature is a fight for the finite supply of a woman’s reproductive opportunity and female nature is an assessment of the man’s resourceful value to have him deserve that the reproductive opportunity – this is why women are more selective and men manage multiple
• Men compete in the real world but the sperm parallel this same behaviour as they are the genetic soldiers of the man and they also compete just as violently with other mens ‘soldiers’. The male body prepares the sperm for warfare, and the female body also is aware of this
• While men are engaging in sperm warfare, women are promoting sperm warfare, so that she gets the egg fertilised by the highest quality sperm
• The conscious mind is only obeying the secret commands of our unconscious body’s reproductive strategies – and these strategies can be crafty, which is why we consciously use deception
• The body’s stimulation to sex is all part of a unconscious path to achieving certain reproductive goals
• The book reveals the deceptive nature of females and the willingness of males to take advantage of this deception as they want to steal opportunities to mate with other males partners – Monkeys do this (males may quickly engage in sex with a female while her partner looks away), the dunnock brown bird does this (in the same way that monkeys do this)
• The book also goes through the deception of males to hide their patterns regarding infidelity too, as well as subconsciously scheduling masturbation to get fresh soldiers when they’re going to have sex with their partner
• There are obviously some benefits to infidelity which is why nature motivates it
• Our bodies are machines, and we are the passengers who think we have a say. Really, the body is running on a program to heighten our chances of reproductive success.

Overall, a good and interesting book. The only con I noted was that most men won’t know what to do with this information to improve their dating lives. So it’s almost like just a collection of fun facts for the sake of it. But for the ones who are quite insightful, they will be able to take the information from this book and use it so they understand how to better their personal relationships.

Check out my social media