At what point along the road did it stop being alright to just climb on another person and try and hump them? I mean, watch what a cow in a field does for foreplay. It ambles up to another cow with all the enthusiasm of a drunk groping for a piss, mounts that heifer and fucks her; if the lady-cow doesn’t like it she simply walks off.

Somewhere in our evolutionary history we stopped doing things like that. We decided that the basis by which we select our sexual partners should actually involve some common ground besides the ability to fuck, which is a good thing. It’s a wonderful fucking thing in fact; we can talk about our favourite episodes of Friends, Tim Robbin’s performance in The Shawshank Redemption and how Abba were actually a really fucking great band. Plus there’s the benefit of a woman not having to be practically raped before she can refuse her consent, at which point as often as not, the male cow doesn’t give up anyway. (It’s actually common practice to castrate male cattle so as to keep their rapier instincts at bay.)

Still, trace amounts of those simpler times live on in every man. That desire to get down to it with every passing half-attractive woman didn’t evaporate and for a guy to describe how forcefully he’d fuck a complete stranger is normal. These urges just got controlled. Let me explain.

In the ancient world, they used to think that physical wellness was controlled by four ‘humours’ – essentially different fluids in the human body. The theory was that illness came from an imbalance between these fluids and the need to lose some of whichever was in surplus; hence vomiting and bloodletting. “A cough? You’ve got too much fucking blood. Fetch my knife.” It’s a beautifully simple theory really – complete bullshit, yes, but clever nonetheless. And you know what? I think there is something in it.

For the average Joe there is one humour, semen, and that needs to be drained on a regular basis. Once upon a time, long ago, before even our hunter/gatherer days, we probably did this like the aforementioned cow; we wandered up to whichever female we fancied, the blood of a just-slaughtered deer on our hands, and fucked. Those who hadn’t proven their Alpha qualities got rejected in favour of those who had and were thus angry enough to fight and prove themselves or else die in the process.

In the modern day however, we can’t do that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this is a bad thing. Let me repeat: it’s a good fucking thing. But man hasn’t outgrown that primal urge to impregnate every fertile thing it can; we just grew opposable thumbs instead.

Put it like this, in today’s world if a man sees a woman in the street he wants to have sex with, does he just walk up, dick in hand and hope that his manly aroma will be enough to win her over? No, he goes home, masturbates and frees himself up to do other things like build the Eiffel Tower or work on the theory of relativity. Ok, I exaggerate; that extra time is most likely spent drinking crap lager and watching shitty movies, but the principle remains: civilized society was able to develop because of masturbation.

With the need for instant gratification tempered we tried to get laid in subtler, smarter ways instead of ever-bolder displays of manliness. So where an earlier ancestor might’ve killed a boar to win a fuck, Nebuchadnezzar II built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. With this crucial development, a physically weaker, yet more intelligent male could reproduce. I mean, Einstein is no one’s first thought when hearing the words ‘alpha male’, yet was chased by six other women while married to his second wife, Elsa. Masturbation allowed us to play the long game. Plus, obviously, there’s that other great benefit of the occasional tug: not having every guy walking around ready to commit bloody murder at the slightest provocation.

Still, that is not to say that Alpha qualities became unattractive. For many women a pro-footballer is as good as it gets (despite the average one having as much intelligence as a small portion of mash potato). Hell, I’ve got one friend who looks for the attributes of a bear – a motherfucking bear – in her sexual partners. All I’m saying is this: look around you – look at all the amazing things civilization has brought you and remember that you’d have none of it if somewhere, somehow, a barely-evolved ape hadn’t scratched its genitals in the right way.