Phillyist Reviews... The Score

If you're picking up a copy of Inquirer columnist Faye Flam's first book, The Score (subtitled "How the Quest for Sex Has Shaped the Modern Man") looking for a titillating chronicle of men's sex lives, look elsewhere. Likewise, if you're looking for groundbreaking scientific research explaining why, for instance, guys like porn, you've picked up the wrong book. Flam is a journalist, pure and simple, so she's neither trying to arouse nor to astound. What she is doing—what she does quite well—is reporting, educating, and informing.

I was always fascinated by biology. But because I very nearly threw up on fetal pig dissection day, and because I spent a good portion of my sophomore year of high school collecting insects (note: no arachnids allowed) instead of, I don't know, learning about Gregor Mendel, I never made it a point to take more biology classes, even in college. And in many ways, I feel like it's people like me—people who have the interest but not necessarily the academic background—who would most enjoy reading Flam's book, which breaks down, very clearly, quintessential issues of maleness: sex drive, fidelity, sexual preference, chromosomal differences, even penis size. Flam refers to sexuality not just in terms of human males, but also in terms of animals: fish and frogs that change genders depending on environmental conditions, rams that hump each other when there aren't any ewes around, peacocks' tails being a mating blessing but a survival curse, penguin monogamy... They all, at least in some ways, relate to us. Flam does a great job of connecting all the dots for us in a way that we can understand without making us feel like idiots. And even better, she makes us laugh once or twice.

Flam frames her book with a workshop she attended on The Mystery Method, with which VH1 junkies are no doubt familiar. Generally only open to men, the workshop, led by a disciple of Mystery (born Erik Von Markovik) who goes by the name of "Future," is basically aimed at helping men get women into bed. Lessons from the workshop periodically pop up in the book as an entree into a real, scientific topic: peacocking, for instance. It's both funny and frightening that there might actually be a science behind the seduction game, and it helps to put the many studies Flam cites into an accessible context.

This is the kind of book that makes for an enjoyable read, but, by the time you've turned the final page, has also made you that much smarter—or at least that much more likely to perform well at Quizzo. I've always been a fan of Flam's column and I hope that this is the first of many books to come.

If you'd like to hear more from Flam before picking up a copy of her book, she will be speaking tonight at The Wistar Institute on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. It promises to be a good time.

The Wistar Institute 2008 Authors Series Presents:
Faye Flam on "The Science of Male Sexuality"
The Wistar Institute (3601 Spruce Street)
TONIGHT, September 16, 7PM (with dessert reception to follow)
Free, but registration required