The flow of endorphins resulting from orgasm, too, may also have a positive mental health payoff, relieving anxiety and depression and increasing vitality. Some research has suggested that women’s mere contact with semen through the vaginal wall can help them experience a kind of post-coital bliss.
A Canadian professor of psychiatry, Philip Ney, documented in 1986 in an obscure journal called Medical Hypotheses a depressed woman whose symptoms subsided after she had sex. Then, in 2002, a study of 293 female students aged 18-35 by a psychologist at the State University of New York, Dr Gordon Gallup, found that those who always had sex without a condom were quantifiably happier according to a standard psychological questionnaire, the Beck Depression Inventory, than those who had protected sex or abstained.
Those who used condoms sometimes, Gallup found, came in second on happiness scores, while the least happy women were those whose partners always or usually used condoms. Women who were not having sex scored between the ‘always’ and the ‘usually’ groups. Such obvious distorting factors as the effects of oral contraception were apparently ruled out by the experimental design, leading to the psychologists’ conclusion that mood-altering hormones in the semen, especially testosterone, oestrogen and prostaglandins, were entering the woman’s body topically through internal tissues and going on to act as an antidepressant. Gallup reported at the time of announcing his findings that a similar test on a group of 700 women had shown the same trend.
Gallup expanded on his findings after reporting them in a Cambridge University journal, Archives of Sexual Behaviour. Among his rather startling associated discoveries were that women whose partners do not use condoms become more depressed when their relationship ends, that agitation and irritability increase with condom use, as do suicide attempts -and that women not exposed to sperm take longer to move into a new sexual relationship, while those whose partners ‘go bare’ become involved more quickly. He has also become convinced that contact with semen becomes a chemical dependency for some women.
Gallup’s findings, it has to be said, are seen as distinctly fringe by the medical profession. Some medics have seen them as too simplistic, others as an open-Sesame to an era of unsafe sex. It is also interesting to observe that Professor Ney in British Columbia, who claimed the original discovery, is closely involved with the religious anti-abortion movement in Canada and the US. This is not to suggest for a moment that he is necessarily carrying a Catholic anti-contraception torch, but it seems worth taking note of all the same.
As for physical disbenefits of orgasm, beyond simple and temporary soreness in the genitals of both sexes due to the mechanics of intercourse, they are few. The only widely documented ill effect of orgasm is the rare condition of ‘orgasmic cephalalgia’, an intense, explosive headache that can begin at the moment of climax in both sexes. The headache can last for several hours, and occurs in masturbation as well as coitus. Its cause is not known, but it is assumed to be related to increased blood flow through blood vessels during sex.
5
The Way We Were
‘Sex is great fun … it is the dance of the genitals; it is an ecstatic swinging in the arms of the beloved. It ought not to be too intense; it must not be degraded by possessiveness or defiled by jealousy’
Anthropologist Verrier Elwin
on sex among the aboriginal Muria people of Northern India.
Sexual intercourse culminating in ejaculation is unlikely to have struck many early prehistoric humans as the cause of pregnancies that only became visible several months later. Even if we conjecture that some thoughtful individuals may have wondered whether the placing of the penis in the vagina was entirely unconnected with the emergence of babies from the very same place, we can be quite confident that the all-important link between sex and babies did not exist to any significant extent in the early human being’s mind – a state of affairs that would not recur, strange as it may seem, until the age of the Pill caused intercourse once more to be perceived by both sexes as a consequence-free, pleasurable, pastime.
The situation is unlikely to have changed much when the first belief systems formed in human societies. George Ryley Scott, in his Phallic Worship: A History of Sex and Sexual Rites, states: ‘Without exception, the worship of sex by all primitive races originated in the pleasure associated with coitus, and not in any clearly conceived notion that intercourse would produce children. The sex act gave pleasure to those engaging in it, and by analogy it would give pleasure to the gods. Man could think of no part of himself for which he had greater regard than his sexual member, and no part of woman for which he had greater reverence than her pudendum.’
As it would again in the still inconceivably distant 1960s, an obscuring of the connection between orgasmic bliss and the burdens of childbirth and parenthood tilted the balance of power in human societies rather in favour of women. Women supplied orgasms to men and could withdraw them more or less at will; and what was more, they could magic up babies, by all appearances of their own will and making. Men did not even monopolise hunting; women shared that too.
Given that the history of civilization has partially been the history of the sublimation of women’s sexual desires, there is an assumption among academics, and not only feminist ones, that aeons ago ‘cave’ women could also take the initiative and be as demanding, predatory and promiscuous as men would later become. At the end of the second millennium AD, sisters began ‘doing it for themselves’, in the sense of taking the sexual initiative – and congratulated themselves on thinking of such a revolutionary notion. But it is always worth remembering that things had been like that once before in the sparse, isolated outposts of human settlement that comprised the prehistoric world. When there was no more than one person per thousand square kilometres, women seemed to be the sole creators of new human life. And to this day, fascinatingly, in preliterate societies around the world, where the sex/babies connection is unknown or misunderstood, women, sole suppliers of the delicious snack for the sensations known as orgasm, retain appreciably more power in their societies than in more knowledgeable cultures.
Yet the more civilised we have become, the less instinctive, perversely, sex seems to have become. The sex act, although inborn in animals and intuitive in more primitive human groups, is far from instinctive in civilised man, and, like hunting, seems to become progressively less instinctive as civilisation grows more complex.
Civilisation entails successive overlays of morality, complex economics, religious constraints and politics, and each veneer of culture seems to make the simple enjoyment of sex a more complicated business. In the first civilised era, the Neolithic age, men – thanks to their observations of the farm animals they were beginning to spend their life tending – appear to have realised at last that as fellow humans they played an equal, if mysterious, part in the production of children. We know that women in the first organised agricultural human settlements were inclined to be in charge of crops, while men looked after the herding. We assume consequently that after many generations, males noticed how their ewes could graze happily for ever without getting pregnant, but how with the introduction of just one ram to the flock, all the females would become pregnant. We surmise accordingly that it dawned on men how creatures with penises like their own possessed some awesome power. But the more thought that went into the subject subsequently, the more confused we seem to have become.
Following the somewhat startling revelation that they were essential to the baby-making process, men seem to have seized every chance to reclaim power and make themselves the dominant gender. Subsequently, they more than compensated for their longstanding inferior status to women by imbuing their penis with the status of a life-giving totem that demanded worship – a sexual consensus that in some ways still pertains in most societies. Men’s idolisation of the penis is also evident in the widespread male homosexuality that would later pervade the classical world. We have no particular evidence of homosexuality among prehistoric peoples. But given th
at it exists in many animals, and was a positive cult in most ancient cultures, notably, as we shall see, the Greeks, it would be perverse to imagine that preliterate humans were not also interested in homosexual activity.
The shock discovery by men that they, too, made babies led directly to the cult of virginity in women, which would be of such core importance to the Abrahamic faiths, and especially underwrite Christianity after the story of Mary’s supposed post partum virginity was written retrospectively into Jesus Christ’s CV by Mark and Luke in their Gospels. The more pagan early religions, nevertheless, seem to have imbued sex, rather than the lack of it, with a special reverence – even without knowing what it was for.
In preliterate, pre-agricultural tribes today, where understanding of the male role in conception is incomplete, female virginity is of little or no account, as we will see later. But in societies where the male’s contribution to fertilisation became known, men swiftly began to develop a keen interest in the concept of a child being ‘theirs’. Evidence of an emerging nuclear family structure with clearly defined property rights has been discovered at Neolithic Çatal Hüyük in Turkey, the world’s earliest known city. Houses in this settlement of some 10,000 people were grouped tightly together. Neighbours were close at hand to be coveted and gossiped about. Sex in such a social place became other people’s business and, accordingly, something for which one had to seek privacy because who was doing it with whom had community significance. The architecture, archaeologists have found, reflected the new, settled, semi-public pattern of people’s sex lives; bedrooms with a clear sexual purpose are seen for the first time. They are adorned with erotic works of art – an engraving of a woman with her legs apart and a penis entering her here; another of a naked woman carried between two leopards there.
Women did not benefit from the Neolithic revolution. It meant the emergence of farming and property possession, but also possession of women and their precious fertility. It was now that the veil was invented and men began to control female sexuality. If a field or an ass could be ‘mine’, it followed that so could a child and its mother. Paternity as a concept dovetailed neatly into the emerging idea of property rights. What, after all, would either woman or child be without the power of the man’s semen? One would be barren, the other non-existent. Sex was now becoming more than mere pleasure, it was business too. The transition from nomadic hunter gatherer to commercial farmer saw women’s role dwindling to one of breeding machine. Men at the same time, significantly, were spending more time sitting around and having great thoughts while the crops grew, the animals grazed and the women and children did the donkey work. Intellectual life, philosophy and religious thought undoubtedly have their roots in this period 8,000 years ago.
Even the method of having sex seems to have changed in this era. From figurine evidence, Dr Timothy Taylor, a Bradford University archaeologist who has studied Çatal Hüyük closely, guesses that standardisation of houses and the new, urban, semi-industrial lifestyle signified the standardisation of sex too. The position now favoured, he believes, was with the woman on all fours – a depersonalised mode copied from the farm animals.
Amid such a social structure, it followed that a premium, both social and financial, would became attached to a woman who could be guaranteed on betrothal to be a virgin; it was not so much fastidiousness about other men having touched her as a more-or-less cast-iron warranty that any child of the marriage would be the husband’s and nobody else’s, and therefore the correct person to inherit the husband’s land and animals when he died. This discovery of paternity was a breakthrough for the development of stable families, civil laws, cities and societies. But what disappeared as part of the newly serious equation was the idea of sex as an enjoyable activity, particularly for women. The whole body of laws and customs across several cultures requiring suppression of sexual desire, strict containment of orgasmic pleasure and repression of woman, can be traced back to the Neolithic discovery that men were needed to make women pregnant.
Property considerations have also shaded notions of love in various later cultures. Among the Bedouin, for instance, romantic love is said to be considered a shameful flaw, because people are supposed to love their family and dynasty rather than a mere spouse. The Bedouin are accordingly horrified by public displays of affection between man and wife.
For pre-Neolithic man, we can surmise from such scraps of evidence as exist that sex was purely for pleasure and that orgasm as an end in itself was, if not a matter of consuming, life-or-death importance, still a very special thing. The physical satisfaction of intercourse and the sublime release of orgasm seem to have been sufficient to induce reverence for sex and the bodily parts involved in the act. This veneration was manifested in phallic cults that were the precursors of religion, but also in the worship of the vagina, which may co-incidentally have functioned as the birth canal, but was also the specific site of a very special and unique form of physical pleasure for both sexes.
One of the earliest pieces of evidence that sex for pleasure may have been a preoccupation for Stone Age people exists in a group of pinkish-red ochre lumps with a cross-hatched pattern scratched on their surface. The ochre was found in Blombos Cave, near Stilbaai on the Cape coast in South Africa, and is believed by some anthropologists to be 70,000-year-old lipstick. The world’s oldest known evidence of symbolism in human culture, if lipstick is what it is, their theory has it that the pigment was used by females to make their mouth look more like vaginas – and by so doing, signal to males whether sex was on offer or not.
Some 50,000 years later, however, comes a far less ambiguous example of evidential bric-à-brac supportive of early human cults of sexuality – a rash of more than 200 clay figurines of female bodies dating from the Ice Age of 30,000 to 20,000 years ago and found in the past hundred years from Russia to France. These so-called Venus figurines are faceless, but have large breasts, a rounded belly and a prominent vagina detailed down to labia and even, on one, a clitoris – an especially fascinating find to keen students of the orgasm.
A clue of sorts to something – it is unclear what – is that there are no equivalent male figures; apart from the sketchy graffiti of cave paintings (a large number of which were of vaginas), the only male depiction found to date from the same post-Neanderthal, pre-Neolithic period was, entertainingly for today’s women, a puppet. So Venus figurines may have been primitive fertility goddesses, or teaching aids for women to instruct girls in the art of becoming a woman, or art for its own sake, created by men in the same tradition as heterosexuals, at least, have today, that the female form is more attractive than the male nude.
The figurines could, additionally, be nothing more than early pornography, three-dimensional centrefolds for men away from their mates to masturbate to; why, after all, should Palaeolithic men on hunting trips have been very different from modern men on business trips masturbating in hotel rooms? So, were the Venus figurines revered goddesses or cheap pin-ups? Guessing their purpose has exercised generations of academics. The fact that statuettes are often found broken in waste dumps, just as porno magazines tend to be found in hotel room rubbish bins, rather suggests the latter. But we are still in the realm of relatively uninformed conjecture.
A far clearer insight into whatever part orgasmic pleasure played in the lives of prehistoric peoples can be gleaned by basing our imaginative reconstruction of ancient sex lives on the habits of primitive peoples that have survived more or less intact from the Stone Age. The theory of the Blombos Cave lipstick, for example, was based by its anthropologist authors on similar body-painting sexual rituals they identified in some surviving traditional societies.
Likely as it is to provide the soundest evidence available to us of sex as it was in the real-life Garden of Eden, the study of ancient, preliterate tribes has not always endeared modern researchers to their contemporary society. Alfred Russel Wallace, the Victorian follower of Darwin studied the peoples of the Amazon, who were universally derided at the
time as ‘savages’. Wallace thoroughly discomfited Victorian society, already traumatised by the assertion of Darwinites that humans were descended from monkeys, by further noting that there was less distance than you might think between Amazon Basin ‘savages’ and us.
The obsession with orgasm and its accoutrements that is evident from a brief trawl around contemporary societies, both Western and Eastern, would not be unfamiliar to any visitor from a preliterate society – and, by extrapolation, would be equally recognisable to a prehistoric time traveller. He might also recognise the confusion, misinformation and mystification that continue to surround sexual issues in so many societies, our own included. If in subsequent chapters a sense of congratulating our own culture for making sexual knowledge so universal becomes evident, it is only partially deserved; the extent of enlightenment over sexual issues in modern societies is all too easy to exaggerate.
A Pacific island tribe, for instance, the Trobrianders, investigated by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski for his 1929 book The Sexual Life of Savages of North-West Melanesia, have no word for father. This follows from their having no concept of paternity – even though they fully understand the sexual reproduction of animals. They laughed at Western missionaries who urged them to introduce Christian marriage as a way of legitimising the notion of fatherhood. To Trobrianders of the time, it seemed (unless, and it is far from impossible, they were pulling Malinowski’s leg) sex existed solely as a source of pleasure.
To this day, many Australian aborigines, too, tend to dissociate sexual intercourse from childbirth. When the facts of life as we know them were explained to a woman of one aboriginal tribe, anthropological folklore has it, she was derisive about such nonsense, responding with scorn, ‘Him nothing.’ As late as the 1960s, the Tully River people of North Queensland believed that a woman became pregnant because she had been sitting over a fire on which she had roasted a particular species of black bream given to her by the prospective father. Another Australian tribe avowed that women conceived by eating human flesh. Not far away in Papua New Guinea, members of the Hua people are still said to contend that a man can become pregnant, but will die in childbirth. (This has recently been deconstructed as a probable description of a malnutrition disease, kwashiorkor, one symptom of which is a grossly distended stomach.) And the Bellonese of the Solomon Islands believed, until the influence of missionaries persuaded them otherwise, that the sole function of sex was pleasure, and that babies were implanted in women by ancestral gods.
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