The History of Sex: Seville -- Has Anybody Seen My Daddy? -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 3)

Of course, this isn't the first time in history that the leader of a newish movement says one thing (like 'give up your riches and follow me') and his followers do another (viz. the pre-Reformation Popes).

The problem is, once you start teaching people to bend the rules, there's no telling where they'll stop.

The Game has fathered at least one TV series, countless DIY Don Juans and—perhaps most surprisingly—even a Spanish imitator.

Like the original, which was published as a Bible lookalike in America, its Latin copycat also has a black jacket and purports to be nothing less than 'the Bible of Success with Women.'

In addition, the cover of Sex Code: El Manual Práctico de los Maestros de la Seducción sports a female silhouette in the crosshairs.

As with American MPUAs, the author of Sex Code tries to justify his actions by regurgitating sub-Darwinian gobbledygook from celebrity philosophists like Richard Dawkins, with plenty of supporting parables from pop-culture sources like The Matrix.

In the beginning, you see, evolution hardwired us to crave certain traits in mates ('The Promiscuous Woman Does a Disservice to Her Genes' declares one heading), but scientific advances like the Pill have made our bodies outdated replicating machines, transforming 'the battle of the sexes' into nothing but 'a game.'

Though it may defy logic, brethren, we can have our cake and eat it. Evolution is all-powerful, but we're so clever we can also outwit it:

With this knowledge, ye shall be as gods! 

IT'S ALL ABOUT ME

Whereas The Game is constructed as a typical underdog-to-topdog story—Strauss is just a little guy pursuing the American wet dream—Sex Code begins with the author explaining why he's 'consecrated his life to the study of seduction' (I was going to serve the poor but instead I consecrated myself to poonanny).

The scene-setter is straight out of a B movie: Mario Luna wakes up with a whiskey bottle in one hand and a woman in the other.

While he's smoking, the girl stirs, so he rolls her over and pulls down her panties.

And as our hero ties off yet another used condom, the girl tells him: 'That'll be €120.'

'I'd paid to fuck—again,' he muses.

Then he adds, in case the reader has mistaken him for a missionary:

'There wasn't anything altruistic about my behavior. Blowing my salary on whores didn't have anything to do with charity. I knew perfectly well what had driven me to waste my savings on prostitutes: my low self-esteem.'

Has anybody seen my daddy?

Did You Remember the Pill?

From the archive: 2010

Like most men, I should be enormously grateful for the Pill, which marks its 50th anniversary this year. 

However, I can't help but think the benefits have been largely one-sided.

For one thing, I doubt the male doctors who invented the Pill really had women's liberation in mind when they came up with a way to have condom-free coitus.

If they had, we'd surely have a male equivalent by now.

SEAMAN AND SUICIDE

An excellent article on the dark side of the discovery notes that the Pill was initially tested on poor women in Puerto Rico because they had less legal protection.

And it turns out that a woman named Seaman -- yes, really -- wrote a book highlighting the risks of the contraceptive in 1969: The Doctors' Case Against the Pill.

One thing the article doesn't mention is the tragic personal life of 'the Father of the Pill,' Carl Djerassi, who fathered his only daughter during an affair the year before he invented the contraceptive.

At the age of 25, his daughter decided to be sterilized, and she committed suicide three years later.

You can read a revealing interview with him here.