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by Jonathan Margolis

  Even without any clear notion of how human reproduction works, though, the idea still seems to have taken root in a wide variety of primitive societies many thousands of miles apart that the sperm produced by orgasm is a very special and powerful substance. If the Sambia of New Guinea, studied in the 1970s by the anthropologist Gilbert Herdt, are anything to go by, our ancestors may have been quite obsessed with semen. These transient jungle farmers believe sperm is the most important element in the production of children – and that it is also precious and in very short supply. They believe that a boy is born with an internal organ that will eventually produce both semen and growth, but it must be supplied with semen from older men before it can do so. To make the most of this dwindling resource, they harness an unusual mix of homosexual and heterosexual practice designed to produce brave, strong men who are capable of having babies with women.

  The key act by which the male Sambian’s supply of strong sperm is ensured, is regular male-on-male fellatio. A set of rules determines who the semen donor will be (the fellator’s sister’s husband is desirable; the father is not acceptable). Boys from about the age of ten try to accept semen on a daily basis by performing fellatio on a proper donor. After six to eight years as an acceptor, a boy becomes a donor.

  ‘Among the New Guinea Sambia,’ Herdt observed, ‘an aberrant bachelor is one who does not offer his penis to be sucked by pre-pubescent boys.’ An older teenager, he explained, arranges a meeting with a younger boy at a quiet jungle rendezvous, puts his penis in the mouth of the younger male and is brought to orgasm. The crucial part of this custom is that the younger boys swallow the semen produced. The older, fellated boy demonstrates his superior status by standing during this procedure, while the fellator represents his inferiority by kneeling in front of him. Curiously, however, the fellated professes to derive little sexual pleasure from this otherwise fairly standard homoerotic duet. For the convention is that the younger fellator is the prime beneficiary of the ritual, acquiring as he ingests his peer’s precious emission valuable, high-potency fuel for his future seminal needs. The fellated, furthermore, donates his sperm at a certain risk to himself, for even strong, mature males in Sambian philosophy can find their semen depleted if they are over-generous with it.

  The Sambian sperm rite seems like an institutionalisation of homosexuality, and adolescent and adult males in this society turn out commonly to be stimulated erotically by images of and fantasies involving younger males’ mouths. Not surprisingly, young Sambian fellators do not report receiving sexual pleasure from performing their duty; yet as they approach puberty, some of them begin to find it stimulating and get erections while doing it. (Sadly, there is little they can do about these erections since masturbation is taboo because of the waste of semen; the Sambians consider spillage caused by involuntary orgasms in the form of wet dreams to be the result of bad spirits coming and seducing them while asleep.)

  However, pornographic websites originating both in the West and Asia discuss what they call an oral or mouth orgasm as something women can enjoy with considerable intensity while fellating. Some women on the more literate of these sites describe it as similar to ‘an electric current’ beginning in the mouth and taking over the rest of the body. A dissenting sexological voice on one fairly standard, non-pornographic sex advice site which advocates the mouth orgasm (www.afterglow.com) argues that it is the result of women unconsciously compressing their thighs or rubbing their legs together while fellating, thus stimulating the clitoris and inducing a conventional climax. A similar mechanism could well be operating for young male Sambian fellators.

  Despite such overtly homosexual initiation traditions, almost all Sambian men marry heterosexually – with the slight twist that their early sex life involves exclusively oral sex, the husband now being fellated by his wife, who swallows his semen in the belief that this will enhance her sexual maturity and, in particular, her milk flow when she is lactating after childbirth.

  No wonder, then, given the survival of such rituals amongst a preliterate population, that the renowned Duke University anthropologist Raoul Weston La Barre, who studied mainly Native American and South American peoples, concluded that to our ancestors, sperm, bone marrow and brain matter were one unified life-substance – a conviction that he held went back to the Neanderthals a quarter of a million years ago.

  Yet what we now know to be misconceptions about the finer details of human reproduction continue to mislead even peoples who acknowledge the concept of fatherhood. Elders of the (until recent years) headhunting Sema people in Nagaland, in north-eastern India, maintain that pregnancy is the cumulative effect of having sex many times. The Sambians, again, similarly hold that babies are formed in the womb by regular doses of semen from a male.

  And more than twenty other tribal societies from Paraguay to Tanzania studied by a Pennsylvania State University anthropologist, Stephen Beckerman, believe a child can, and ideally ought to, have more than one father. Until the middle of the last century, Canela women, in Amazonian Brazil, had sex consecutively with up to forty men in festive rituals designed both to ensure conception and to blur paternity.

  Yet any uncomfortable image of a misogynistic ‘gang-bang’ mentality in this culture can safely be dismissed; men were very much under the thumb of women in Canela society. When they wanted to have a child, they would choose their favourite five or so lovers to help their husband with the job of fertilisation. Every bit of semen was believed to contribute to the baby, and mothers-to-be would select for a variety of desirable traits among her contributing lovers, from sexual skills to good looks to a good singing voice. The multi-fathering tradition among the Canela was only finally extirpated by missionaries, who convinced them that it was morally wrong by such propagandistic methods as translating the Bible into the Canelan language – and by traders in such items as pots and pans, who taught them the entirely alien concept of personal property.

  Married women of the Barí tribe in Columbia and Venezuela who are bearing a child still proudly announce a list of ‘fathers’. Elderly Barí women will reportedly chuckle and nudge one other as they recall their lifetime’s roll-call of lovers. Among the Curripaco people in the same area, conception is regarded as a process that requires a great deal of co-operative work by many men. But they still put on what Beckerman’s collaborator, Dr Paul Valentine of the University of East London, South Africa, describes as ‘a smug look’ when they describe this process – an indication that multi-father ‘conception’ represents the ultimate coincidence of work and pleasure.

  Multi-fatherhood is a puzzling belief; but curiously, Charles Darwin himself would not have disagreed with it. It was still not understood as late as the nineteenth century that fertilisation was brought about by a single sperm acting in one instant. Though the question remains as to whether the supposedly unsophisticated people who express such ideas to anthropologists are in fact having a joke at the researchers’ expense, testing the extent of Western credulity, being diplomatic about sensitive or embarrassing matters – or being discreet about the delights of having many orgasms a day, something that, for all they know, ‘refined’ Westerners do not, or cannot, enjoy.

  It can hardly be insignificant that it was not until decades after the bulk of pioneering anthropological work was done in Papua and New Guinea that Herdt felt free to investigate the Sambians’ homosexual practices. Even in academic research in the mid- to late-twentieth century, it was not considered decent in Western society to probe such a matter. The Sheffield University zoologist Tim Birkhead, author of a 2000 book on the central evolutionary topic of sperm competition, makes the same point in his preface – that the scientific study of reproductive matters is mostly recent because, for a long time, it was not considered respectable.

  Another reason for isolated peoples to cherish the idea of multi-fatherhood – beyond the fact that it allows everyone to enjoy a great deal of sex – is that the tradition has sensible and stabilising economic and social benefits
. Barí children with more than one father are more likely to survive into adulthood, with gifts of food from several sources in times of scarcity. Barí males also tend to die young from malaria and tuberculosis. ‘You know that if you die, there’s some other man who has a residual obligation to care for at least one of your children,’ explains Beckerman. ‘So looking the other way or even giving your blessing when your wife takes a lover is the only insurance you can buy.’

  We are still some distance away, too, from being free from our own curious tribal customs. When the Tully River aborigines speak of women becoming pregnant by the action of barbecuing fish, they are not stating anything more outlandish than a Western Catholic would when expressing the belief that Christ was born to a virgin. As one modern anthropologist has commented: ‘If we believe in the Virgin Birth, we are devout; if others do, they are idiots.’

  Educated atheists in the modern world can also find themselves uncertain about whether certain sexual behaviour is taboo or not. According to a Glasgow midwife interviewed by the author some middle-class Western mothers, for example, follow the practice (well known in the South Pacific, as we will see) of altruistically masturbating or fellating very young baby boys in the hope of developing and enhancing their infants’ sexual feelings – or even of sending them to sleep. But they carry out this ancient folk practice somewhat guiltily -aware inter alia that for a father to do the same to an infant girl would be sufficient to guarantee him a lengthy jail sentence.

  Alongside confirmation that we are still a long way from being comfortable with our sexuality, there is parallel evidence, too, of creditable sexual refinement among some primitive peoples, suggesting that any idea we may cherish of a brutal, male-centred ‘caveman’ form of sex among our distant ancestors is misleading. Less developed societies with a tradition of encouraging males to delay their orgasm while affectionately stimulating the female are as well documented as those cultures that have less sexually democratic traditions.

  Some indications of the existence of good prehistoric sex may be gleaned, for instance, from anthropological studies of the !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari and of the Muria, an aboriginal people on the plains of central India. These peoples, although separated by huge distances, are remarkably similar in their sexual beliefs and practices – and therefore can plausibly be relied upon to retain echoes in their sexual culture of humans as they were at the dawn of mankind.

  The exclamation mark in the !Kung name represents a popping sound in their language made by forming a vacuum between the tongue and the top of the mouth and then snapping the tongue down – although it might equally be a commentary on the fact that the male !Kung, unusually, manage to be semi-erect at all times. These priapic Bushmen believe that babies are produced by the combination of menstrual blood and semen, which poses the question of how many little !Kung are ever conceived since when women are menstruating they are highly unlikely to conceive. But the tribe is immensely positive about sex, equating it with food as both a medium of survival and pleasure. !Kung women demand their orgasms; if a man has ‘finished his work’, they say, he must continue until the woman is satisfied, too. They hold that if a girl grows up without regular sex, she will lose her mind and end up eating grass and dying. The !Kung do not perform oral sex, but both men and women masturbate energetically.

  In Murian society, as studied in the mid-twentieth century by the Oxford-educated anthropologist Verrier Elwin, sex is a duty performed by men for women, whether married or not. A devout Christian who went to India as a missionary, Elwin converted to Hinduism, married a Muria woman, Kosi, and lived among the people for much of his life. He became convinced that the tribal traditions were superior to those of the ‘civilised’ societies, as there was no sexual inequality and responsibilities were equally distributed.

  ‘The Muria have a simple, innocent and natural attitude to sex,’ Elwin wrote. ‘[They] believe that sexual congress is a good thing; it does you good; it is healthy and beautiful; when performed by the right people [a male and female who are not taboo to each other], at the right time (outside the menstrual period and avoiding forbidden days), and in the right place … it is the happiest and best thing in life. This belief in sex as something good and normal gives the Muria a light touch. The saying that the penis and vagina are hassi ki nat, in a ‘joking relationship’ with each other, admirably puts the situation. 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.’

  A Muria proverb collected by Elwin was, ‘Woman is earth; man cannot plough her’ – meaning, according to Elwin, that just as a single plough cannot break up the earth, no man can really satisfy a woman. Sexual pleasure, Elwin concluded, is regarded by the Muria as a woman’s right, her compensation for the pains of menstruation and childbearing. And the Muria woman uses her sexuality as a means of dominating and subjugating males. On the other hand, it might be noted by sceptics that, citing tribal tradition, Elwin took another woman, Leela, the daughter of a village head as an occasional alternative to Kosi.

  Four thousand miles away in the Amazon basin, sex is the major leisure pursuit for the jungle-farming Mehinacu people, who were studied in the 1970s by the anthropology professor Thomas Gregor, of Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Sexual maxims collected from Mehinacu tribesmen by Gregor include: ‘Good fish get dull, but sex is always fun’, and, ‘Sex is the pepper that gives life its verve’. Sex for the Mehinacu ends the instant the male ejaculates, which does not sound promising. The Mehinacu are well aware that the clitoris hardens during sex and that it is the seat of pleasure. But they have no expression or word for female orgasm, which suggests that they do not have them. (In the West, at least we have developed a term – i.e. female orgasm – even if it is not of the most elegant.) They also have no concept of romantic love. After hearing a Portuguese song on the radio, Gregor wrote, one of the Mehinacu asked him: ‘What is all this, “I love you, I love you”? I don’t understand it. I don’t like it. Why does the white man make himself a fool?’

  In the Melanesian islands of the south-west Pacific, female orgasm is first achieved by mutual masturbation, with penetrative sex only starting just before a simultaneous climax. Another Pacific people, on Mangaia, southernmost of the Cook Islands, meanwhile, enjoys a profoundly erotic culture. Young boys on the island are instructed at the age of thirteen or fourteen in the erotic arts by older women. A typically ‘good’ girl has had three to four lovers between the ages of thirteen and twenty; and all women are said to orgasm, usually several times, during intercourse.

  Mangaia’s sexual culture was known to nineteenth-century anthropologists, but was obviously an awkward subject for them to explore in their own prevailing anti-sexual culture. At the time, the Mangaians were better known for being rather dour and truculent; they gave Captain Cook a particularly fierce reception when he ‘discovered’ the island in 1777. So it was left to Donald S. Marshall, an American anthropologist, to make the island famous for its relaxed attitude to sex. His landmark essay, ‘Sexual Behavior on Mangaia,’ appeared in Human Sexual Behavior. Variations in the Ethnographic Spectrum, in 1971.

  Young male Mangaians, Marshall noted, learn several techniques of intercourse, plus cunnilingus, kissing and sucking of breasts, and are taught always to bring their partner to orgasm several times before allowing themselves to ejaculate – and only then in time with one of the partner’s climaxes. The boys’ instruction ends with a practical intercourse session with an older woman. Mangaian boys are expected to pay attention to their sex lessons, too; men who prove sexually inattentive are prone to have their partners swiftly leave them for more skilful males, and the women will often go out of their way to ruin the failed lover’s reputation en passant. Mangaian women have several partners before they marry.

  Girls on Mangaia are also coached by older women; but it is believed that while orgasm ‘must be learned�
�� by a woman, this can only ultimately be done with the help of a skilled man. Perfect sex on the island consists of no more than five minutes of foreplay, followed by fifteen to twenty minutes of energetic thrusting, with active female participation and encompassing, for her, two or three orgasms. The female’s final orgasm should coincide precisely with the man’s. The typical eighteen-year-old Mangaian couple make love three times a night, every night, until their thirties, when the weekly average drops to a mere fourteen.

  Western sexual researchers have since become a near-permanent feature of Mangaia, a fair definition of a South Pacific paradise, with 1,000 inhabitants and a handful of discerning tourists. The island’s sexual traditions (now largely Judaeo-Christianised) have been of particular interest because they exist outside any religious construct; they seem to reflect a joy in bodily pleasure for its own sake rather than the indulgence of a religious duty.

  Mangaia’s sex life has been also been cited as an ideal for a more liberated attitude to children’s sexuality in Western societies. Dr Alayne Yates, Professor Director of the University of Hawaii Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, wrote in a 1982 book, Sex Without Shame: Encouraging the Child’s Healthy Sexual Development, that on Mangaia: ‘infants are special people, rocked and indulged by all family members. Bare genitals are playfully or casually stimulated and lingual manipulation of the tiny penis is common … Privacy is unknown, as each hut contains five to sixteen family members of all ages. Adolescent daughters often receive lovers at night and parents “bump together” so that young children may be awakened by the slapping sound of moist genitals. Although adults rarely talk to children about sex, erotic wit and innuendoes are common.