Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation Read Online Free PDF

adult lives. Perhaps in the wild, male flies never mate often enough—or live long enough—for this to be a problem. Perhaps. But then again, perhaps not. It is surely no accident that in your species, as in many others, females prefer to mate with fresh-faced virgins.

    Dear Dr. Tatiana,
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    My lioness is a nymphomaniac. Every time she comes into heat, she wants to make love at least once every half an hour for four or five days and nights. I’m worn out—but I don’t want her to know. You couldn’t suggest any performance-enhancing drugs, could you?
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    Sex Machines Aren’t Us in the Serengeti

    There is a drug, but it hasn’t been approved for lions yet, I’m afraid. And anyway, you should be ashamed of yourself. A great big lion like you should be able to keep it up without fussing. I’ve heard of lions copulating 157 times in fifty-five hours with two different females. Honestly.
    But let’s look at the reason for your lady friend’s prodigious lust. The problem is, she’s got a genuine, clinical sex mania. Such manias are of two main types. In type I, the female needs lots of
stimulation to get pregnant. In type II, a male copulates like mad not to stimulate the female but to ensure all the offspring in a brood are his own. Your lover is a classic type I. The affliction is not limited to lions: female rats, golden hamsters, and cactus mice, for example, all require vigorous stimulation before they can conceive. But lionesses are especially demanding: by some estimates, less than 1 percent of all copulations produce lion cubs. No wonder lions spend so much time snoozing.
    What does all the stimulation do? Some species—such as rabbits, ferrets, and domestic cats—do not release eggs without proper stimulation. Others—rats, for instance—release eggs spontaneously, but a female that hasn’t been stimulated enough won’t stay pregnant even if her eggs have been fertilized. And lions? The usual assumption is that lions are like domestic cats and won’t ovulate without stimulation. But getting such information from dangerous wild animals is, well, dangerous, so we don’t know for sure.
    Whatever the mechanism, though, the underlying puzzle is the same. Massive stimulation is wildly extravagant. In nature, wild extravagance quickly vanishes if it is not beneficial. If some lionesses needed less stimulation to become pregnant—and there were no disadvantage to having less—the levels would fall. But they haven’t. So the question stands: Why do lionesses need so much encouragement to become pregnant?
    Possibly it has something to do with the structure of lion society. Lionesses live together in family groups, known as prides. A band of males lives with a pride, fighting off challenges from other bands of males. If the resident band is defeated, new males take over and kill any cubs they can find—the loss of cubs stops the females from producing milk and brings them back into heat. Frequent changes of males are therefore bad from the females’ point of view. So perhaps the extraordinary virility demanded of
lions is a test in which the females make sure their lions are strong and will be able to defend the pride for at least a couple of years. In keeping with this idea, there is some evidence that lionesses have lower fertility at the start of a band’s tenure, as if they are testing the new men out. However, this is at best a partial explanation for the extravagance. Even when lionesses know their lions, they still copulate several hundred times whenever they come into heat.
    Could female promiscuity be the reason for such extravagance? This can account for type I sex mania in some species. Among golden hamsters, for example, the more energetically a female is stimulated by one partner, the less likely she is to respond to another. Among rats, vigorous stimulation will not necessarily put a female off other