O Penis Perfeito
by
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Dot smiled. At last, Adrian was showing some sexual awareness of her in front of her friends. She breathed in and pressed her chest against his. “Do you think I'm showing too much of my tits?” she whispered. “No,” Adrian answered, lying. Dot gave him a sharp look but her mouth then opened wide in a big smile. She pushed him away and swam backstroke to one end of the pool. Claire heard every word of the exchange. She turned to Will in the water. “It’s like the Garden of Eden, isn’t it?” “Maybe the swimming pool in the Garden of Eden,” Will agreed. “Do you think this is like the Garden of Eden, Adrian?” Claire asked him. Before he had a chance to answer, Claire duck dived past him, making sure her buttocks broke the surface as she did so. She emerged a little closer to Dot and turned to see if the men were watching. They were. “It’s certainly a heavenly respite from the heat,” Adrian said, “but I wouldn’t have thought a scientist like you would use such a metaphor.” Claire found a submerged rock and rested herself on it. “The Garden of Eden story is the most misunderstood myth in human folklore,” she said. She looked down at her own breasts, uplifted by the water. “I like to think it’s an allegorical representation of the most important step in the evolution of life on this planet.” Dot joined Claire on the submerged rock. “How so?” Adrian asked. It was his turn to stare, uninhibited, at this twin apparition of loveliness, semi naked in the swimming pool of Eden. He continued to tread water. Will was also transfixed. But once again, he made little disturbance to draw attention to himself. “It’s about the emergence of consciousness,” Claire said. She paused and looked sideways at Dot. There was no escaping the direct comparison that the men would make right now but there was something magical about the water. It cooled the rivalry. She put an arm around her best friend’s back. “The Eden story is about temptation and the acquisition of knowledge,” she continued. “The serpent is a well known phallic symbol. Woman comes to know the serpent and is tempted by it. This leads to wisdom or self awareness - then the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked.” She paused again, looking around at the walls of the ravine and then back at the men. “The biblical story about the gaining of knowledge is a vastly simplified explanation of the evolution of consciousness. It came about when females selected mates based on penis size and intelligence. They did this by mating with only those individuals who had great penises and who displayed the most self awareness.” Claire looked at the men for a response. Will merely nodded and continued to stare at Dot. Adrian looked thoughtful. “Interesting theory,” he said at last, “but whoever wrote Genesis couldn’t have known about sexual selection, or even evolution, surely?” “No,” Claire agreed, “but they are such fundamental processes, we are all aware of them, at least subconsciously. Therefore they will, in any story that seeks to explain
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About the Book
Claire and Dorotea are best friends and beautiful women. Their affable rivalry turns serious in a game that has been played out over two hundred thousand years. It’s a competition that has shaped the very course of human culture, and created a penis of a size disproportionate to its function. Claire is well educated and highly intelligent. She knows what she wants and how to get it. She lectures in anthropology. Studying for her PhD, her thesis is The Role of the Clitoris in the Evolution of Love. She quotes Shakespeare and feminist interpretations of Darwinian theory. Dorotea is an independent, professional photographer. Although she studied the same things with Claire in high school, she’s now an artist, not a scientist and she has two things that Claire wants. One is a photo album, the existence of which she only accidentally reveals to Claire. It is locked and hidden in a darkroom. No one else has ever seen it. Inside are photos like no other. The second is something Dorotea will take to the other side of the planet to avoid losing. But when she gets there, the same forces that drive Claire will nearly kill her and make her lose what she’s found … until someone special intervenes.
About the Author
Mark Cox is intensely interested in how Charles Darwin’s lesser known theory of sexual selection explains the shape and behaviour of contemporary humans. He spends his spare time surveying the literature on evolutionary psychology. He describes his passion as the instruction of ordinary people in the discoveries of anthropology and psychology. We’d all be a lot happier he says, if we only understood what really motivates us. A great admirer of Richard Dawkins, Sarah Hrdy, Richard Leakey and Susan Greenfield, he believes we’d all get on a lot better if the insights of great scientists were made common knowledge.
His early influences on writing were the giants of science fiction: H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams. Later on he filled his head with Hesse, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn.
He dreamed of writing human drama himself that could both entertain and educate. He describes O Penis Perfeito as a synthesis of erotic fiction and informal dialogue on human evolution. He compares his novel with Playboy magazine and its regular feature, the Playboy Forum. If just a few readers take an interest in the serious stuff, he maintains, a useful purpose will have been served.
Mark is currently devoting his spare time to a book on the link between the politics of work, stress and disease. He lives in Australia with the three youngest of his four children. He surfs (don’t they all surf down under?), is a keen cyclist, vegetarian, photographer and humanist (not necessarily in that order!). He has tertiary qualifications in psychology and nursing.