Fisher tells how the high sex drive of the human female has led University of California Professor of Anthropology Sarah Blaffer Hrdy to a novel hypothesis about prehistoric female adultery. Hrdy maintains that female apes such as the bonobo have (without quite realising, one imagines) a lot of non-reproductive sex with successive partners, and that this has to do with the females pursuing a brilliantly Darwinian end – to confuse paternity so that every male in the community will act generously towards her and paternally towards her children, thus helping ensure their wellbeing and success.
In humans, Hrdy argues, the same must have happened, the females pursuing sex with a string of males to keep friends. When the first stirrings of civilisation came, with the move four million years ago from tree-dwelling to a bipedal life on the African grasslands, pair bonding evolved, and young females turned from open promiscuity to secret copulation. But there was bound to have been a substantial pleasure reward involved here as well as a genetic one. And, it may be extrapolated from Hrdy, it is only because female unfaithfulness implies not all men give good orgasms that it is such a strong taboo in primitive cultures.
Helen Fisher adds that it is probable that the veil evolved in Muslim societies and the chaperone in places like Andalusia in direct response to this seductive, sexually acquisitive, orgasm-seeking trait in women. The Talmudic requirement for a man to satisfy his wife sexually, which we will discuss in the next chapter, was also very likely occasioned by the ancient experience of women having a strong sex drive. The expressly matriarchal society adopted by the Ancient Jews may have been a product of or a precursor for this acceptance of powerful female sexuality. The female clitoridectomy too may have been designed by jealous men in the African societies where it exists to curb the high female libido. It similarly stands as an interesting commentary on what must have been a sophisticated early understanding of how female sexual feeling works; to believe the clitoris needs removing to stabilise women’s rampant sexual desire requires a pre-existing folk knowledge of female orgasm.
Current research, counter-intuitive though it may seem to many, is that the accepted, age-old economic contract between the sexes of female fidelity and guaranteed paternity in exchange for meat for the family does not quite hold up – that ‘slutty’ female behaviour is good for the species because it improves the gene pool by giving women a variety of men with whom to mate.
Even evolutionary psychologists, who have generally been rigorous in upholding the validity of the ‘fidelity for food’ bargain, have moved towards accepting that a bit of female promiscuity can give a woman a measure of back-up insurance if the father of her children is killed. The idea that women in such a situation sleep around for the sheer orgasmic pleasure of it has yet to gain universal currency, however.
The institutionally promiscuous concept of woman, prompted by evolutionary logic discreetly to seek out sexual adventure, seems to be supported by research by the Pennsylvania anthropologist Stephen Beckerman, in communities such as the sexy Canela people in the Amazon, and also by Kristen Hawkes, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah, who has spent years studying the licentious Aché, a Paraguayan people, and the North Tanzanian Hadza tribe, who also enjoy a richly varied love life.
The till-death-do-us-part, missionary-position couple of Desmond Morris’s model is just a tiny part of human history, in Beckerman’s and Hawkes’ view. ‘The patterns of human sexuality are so much more variable,’ Hawkes told Sally Lehrman, of the online magazine AlterNet.org, in 2002. The average Hadza hunter, he found, can only bring in a big game carcass once a month, and he is obliged to share his kill with everyone in the community, his wife and children receiving no special bonus. Strong emotional bonds with extra mates help a Hadza woman remain safer in dangerous times. But, again, the idea of these promiscuous women seeking extramarital sex for pleasure alone is not even on the agenda.
‘Pair bonding,’ Helen Fisher declares in Anatomy of Love after some scholarly humming and hahing, ‘is the trademark of the human animal.’ Even in polygamous ‘families’ and free-sex communes, she says, men and women have favourite spouses and tend to form de facto couples. And in arranged marriages, couples will frequently form romantic bonds retroactively
Fisher cites data that only 16 per cent of the 853 cultures on record require monogamy, whereas 84 per cent of all societies permit polygyny, the practice of men having more than one wife. Polygyny (as opposed to polygamy, which can cut both ways) would not seem to be particularly conducive to female promiscuity. Yet, Fisher notes, in societies where polygyny is allowed, only 5-10 per cent of men actually have more than one wife at the same time. One wife is, in reality, the global norm, as is, for that matter, one husband.
Fisher’s conclusion is that it is unclear which sex is more interested in the pleasure of sexual variety, but that overall we can be said to follow a mixed reproductive strategy -monogamy and adultery. Kristen Hawkes believes, however, that the promiscuous traditions of our female prehistoric ancestors have come through the selective process to remain quite rampant in modern society. High infidelity, remarriage and divorce rates for Hawkes may have less to do with modernity than with our collective sexual past. ‘It makes the variation we’re seeing in modern society so much more understandable,’ she says.
‘If the anthropologists are right, monogamy may well be counter-evolutionary or an adaptation to modern life. Or perhaps the nuclear family has always been more of an ideal than a reality,’ Lehrman concluded in her AlterNet article.
7
Orgasm BC
‘Let his left hand be under my head and his right hand embrace me,’
from the ‘Song of Solomon’
Very early civilisations may have been the Petri dish in which the culture that became large-scale organised religion began to grow. But while the leading brand faiths, with the responsible goal of long-term species survival on their mind rather than the frippery of momentary pleasure, placed a premium on reproductive sex, their predecessors seem to have been less fussy over whether their orgasms were attained by heterosexual or homosexual intercourse, just so long as they were attained.
Institutionalised male-on-male anal sex is thought to have been quite common in preliterate civilisations across the world; typically, in societies as diverse as the Chuckchee of Siberia, the Aleuts and Konyages of Alaska, the Creek and Omaha of the US, and the Bangala of the Congo, the practice was legitimised by a form of religious marriage between a man and a transvestite. Anal sex was as revered as vaginal, and was associated with the worship of androgynous, hybrid male and female gods. Even when formal temples began to appear in Middle Eastern cultures there are said to have been priests who used anal intercourse as a way of being a go-between between cult adherents and their gods.
It was in the more advanced parts of the world some 5,500 years ago, namely the Middle Eastern lands, that pagan cults grew into complex, codified religions, especially among the desert wanderers who were the intellectual avant-garde of their day. As they developed, these embryonic new religions had a habit of incorporating a heavy and egregious sexual content -no surprise again when orgasms were still the most rapturous physical and psychological experience most people enjoyed, other than those privileged to see burning bushes, receive tablets of God’s word on mountain tops and so on. The desert religions that turned into market leaders and survived to the present day, namely Judaism and Christianity plus their modernist rival Islam, have all retained a disproportionate preoccupation with sex and with the tortured relationship for thinking people of all eras between the essential act of creating life and the hedonistic luxury of orgasm.
While the great religions were still under construction, the pre-eminent culture existed in Ancient Egypt. There, acts of human-like sex were credited with having originated everything, even the universe. The Egyptian creation story was told in different versions in different cities, which was hardly unreasonable since the whole thing was patently a myth and flexible in interpr
etation. But the common thread throughout these stories is (surprisingly in view of later civilisations’ taboos on the matter) masturbation.
One of the Pharaohs’ most onerous ceremonial duties in Egypt was to bring fertility to the Nile by masturbating annually into its waters. The tradition supposedly went back to a primary event in the various versions of the creation myth of the time, although if you think about it, the creation myth must have been invented as a post-rationalisation of the Nile masturbating ceremony. The supreme being, Atum, myth had it, arose out of the primeval darkness. He masturbated to form Shu, god of air, and Tefênet, goddess of moisture, while he himself became the sun god, Ra, the Supreme Lord of Egypt. Tefênet’s vagina created the morning dew and their incestuous love created the Earth. Or as the Pyramid Texts, Utterance 527, graphically put it: ‘Atum is he who once came into being, who masturbated in On. He took his phallus in his grasp that he might create orgasm by means of it, and so were born the twins Shu and Tefênet.’
The Pharaohs’ river ceremony was not so much the sanctification of an act of selfish pleasure as a new recognition of the primacy of fertility. In a landscape where the River Nile so visibly and tangibly made barren land fertile and life possible, it was inevitable that fertility would be as important as it was, overriding entirely any thought of pleasure in sex, especially for women. Magic was also widely employed to aid fertility, the lack of which was a person’s greatest worry
What is particularly interesting in the Egyptian creation myth is that Atum’s construction of the world was clearly a function of his own physical gratification, rather than a stated desire for parenthood; his offspring were, if Utterance 527 is to be believed, an accidental side-effect of his pleasuring himself.
But while following the example of their sexy gods’ potent sexuality was a religious duty for Pharaohs, civil servants and ordinary citizens too are now believed to have aspired to lives as sensual as their king’s. Material from excavated middle- and working-class houses (much of it hidden away during the Victorian Egyptology boom) shows that regular Ancient Egyptians covered their walls in explicit, exotic paintings and spent lavishly on their appearance, clothes, make-up, jewellery and perfume – and even dildos, a large collection of which is neatly filed away in wooden drawers deep in the British Museum.
A combination of the weather, the self-confidence of their culture and the green fertility of the Nile delta helped make Egypt an exceptionally sensual society. Under the unrelenting sun, women wore little more than a transparent linen shift, female slaves not even that – just a few beads. The men wore a pleated miniskirt, with an easily discarded woollen cloak for evenings. How could sex not be on everyone’s mind in such an erotic setting?
It would be wrong, nevertheless, to represent Ancient Egypt as some free-love sexual Utopia; it was in no sense a liberal society. Girls were regularly deflowered in arranged marriages at the age of six. Men opted for anal intercourse or vaginal penetration from behind to avoid having to lay eyes on their wife. But a belief pertained that sex was a part of the human condition and, as such, inherently guilt-free. Cleopatra is said to have fellated a thousand men, including a hundred Roman noblemen in one night; the Greeks referred to her as Merichane – ‘gaper’, ‘the ten-thousand-mouthed woman’ and Cheilon - the ‘thick-lipped’.
Love poetry was rife in everyday Ancient Egypt. Divorce, affairs, sexual indiscretion, adultery and womanising were not particularly discouraged or sanctioned against. The master of a household was permitted to have children by the servants. Virginity was not venerated even as an ideal. Contraception was practised, notwithstanding the cultural importance of fertility; the Kuhun papyrus, discovered in 1860, cites a variety of contraceptive methods, including the use of a tampon of crocodile dung smeared with honey and salt. Homosexuality was acceptable; the gods Set and Horus are described in sodomist congress, and the British Museum also holds a painting of two male court hairdressers having sex. Even bestiality was not taboo; the local sun god, Mendes, was often represented as a goat, and it was said by Herodotus that the city’s worshippers of both sexes practised carnal intercourse with goats.
Paradoxically, anal sex is thought to have been relatively routine among the Ancient Hebrews, who began the taboo against it as part of their drive to establish a more ethical spirituality than the Egyptians who had enslaved them. The Biblical myth of Sodom plainly illustrates the desire by the earliest Jews to distance themselves from the practice of orgasm-without-responsibility. It is interesting, too, that as part of the de-sexing of humanity in the interests of a higher, more intellectual calling, the Eden creation story was made superficially so un-sexual; the first full-frontal, nude drama appears at first reading to deal with a host of issues, but sex barely seems to figure among them. (It does, in fact, but only to the most sophisticated of readers, and then again, only in the original, not in translation.)
The original writers of the holy texts were actually a good deal more in favour of sexual pleasure than their later translators, even if it is a little fanciful to suggest, as has been done, that the rocking rhythm of the Hasidic student studying the Torah is itself a form of spiritual copulation. Yet the Bible in large part treats sexuality as a gift of God and a central part of being human, and often describes sex without mentioning if the participants are married. There is plenty of what could be described as erotic writing, such as the account in the Book of Ruth of Ruth seducing Boaz on the threshing-room floor. The ‘Song of Solomon’, to those with half an ear for it, is one long erotic poem. The ancient text is laden with words like ‘pomegranate’, ‘vineyard’ and ‘garden’ that are said by scholars such as David M. Carr, Professor of Old Testament at Union Theological Seminary, a non-denominational graduate school of theology in New York, to be deliberately and overtly sexual images. Raisin cakes are claimed to represent aphrodisiacs. One line, ‘I will go my way to the mountain of myrrh and to the hill of frankincense’, is alleged to describe a man wanting to bury his face in his wife’s bosom. Other phrases are less ambiguous: ‘Your two breasts are like twin fawns’, ‘Your lips, my bride, drip honey’. And the Song certainly advises a man as clearly as possible to stimulate manually his lover’s clitoris: ‘Let his left hand be under my head and his right hand embrace me’.
Naturally, the tendentious anti-pleasure post-rationalisers have been working on de-sexing such material for nigh on 3,000 years. The ‘Song of Solomon’ is often dismissed as an aberration out of keeping with the rest of the Old Testament.
Many Jews explain it away as an allegory for God’s love for Israel, while some Christians excuse it as a representation of Christ’s relationship to his followers.
Generally speaking, when Bible translators have happened upon sexual references, they have been assiduous in seeking out neutralising euphemisms like men with a mission to protect unborn generations of virginal Sunday School teachers. Thus is ‘penis’ changed in every instance to ‘thigh’. ‘Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh,’ Abraham asks his servant in Genesis, ‘and I will make thee swear by the Lord, the God of heaven, and the God of earth.’ (This is a reference to the custom of ‘testifying’, by which anyone taking a vow places their hand on their testicles.
What the early Jews officially thought of ‘testifying’ in, you might say, a more proactive sense, i.e. masturbation, has been obscured by the curious business regarding Onan, the son of Judah, who, a simple reading of Genesis suggests, was put to death for the practice. This interpretation led to ‘Onanism’ being proscribed for thousands of years, although in reality the proscription was not taken very seriously.
There was a sense that in desert communities in which the men needed to produce as many sons as possible, and had as many wives as they liked, both masturbation and withdrawal before ejaculation were a waste of the most precious human resource. But masturbation bothered very few moralists before the eighteenth-century, and at least one writer, the anonymous author of a tract entitled Hippolytus Redivivus in 1644, claimed i
t was a sound remedy against the dangerous allurements of women. Why masturbation later became so very taboo, with the fear of it growing quite hysterical in such prudish times as the Victorian era in England, is something of a mystery. But what we can now say with a degree of certainty is that the Onan described in Genesis, who prompted Dorothy Parker to name her canary after him because he kept spilling his seed, was no masturbator. Rather, he was a responsible proponent of coitus interruptus.
What transpires from reading the sparse Biblical passage concerned is that Onan was required by the Levirate law of Judaism to sleep with his dead brother Er’s wife Tamar, to attempt to preserve the family line by providing her with a male heir. Onan, nevertheless, did not want to get Tamar pregnant. As the passage in Genesis states: ‘Onan, however, knew that the descendants would not be counted as his, so whenever he had relations with his brother’s wife, he wasted his seed on the ground to avoid contributing offspring for his brother.’ Whether withdrawing his penis from her vagina (‘flower’) at the critical moment made him history’s first recorded gentleman or a prototypical cad is a matter of interpretation. But for practising a basic contraceptive method and thereby failing to provide his dead brother with a son in accordance with Jewish law, he certainly managed to anger God who, we are told, killed him.
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