Trying to explain this apparently paradoxical phenomenon, Sudanese psychiatrists quoted by Lightfoot-Klein theorise that the crippling effects of circumcision can be counteracted by an unusually strong bonding between marriage partners. ‘In the opinion of most,’ Lightfoot-Klein concludes, ‘the sexual response of Sudanese women is largely nothing more than a kind of stereotypic response. They think that since orgasm entails both cerebral as well as muscular responses, and involves also respiratory and vascular reactions, the physiological phenomena are present but damaged or lessened in circumcised women. In compensation, they suggest that the cerebral component may be heightened.’
Whether the psychiatrists – all male, as Lightfoot-Klein wisely points out – are suffering from a spot of wishful thinking can only be speculated upon. But what is most striking about the findings from the clitoridectomised wives in Sudan is how these women, whose sex life is probably the same as their hundred times great-grandmothers in the Nile Valley in the time of the Pharaohs, are echoed curiously in part by American women interviewed in the 1970s by Shere Hite.
Hite, it may be remembered, discovered that the great majority of women were more interested in affection, intimacy and love in bed than in orgasm, and did not even rate orgasm as the most important bodily sensation of their sex life; the bulk of her questionnaire respondents cited the moment of penetration as the most satisfying in the whole gamut of sexual behaviours.
Can it be that in some way Sudanese Islamic women following ancient and, to us, repellent traditions, have nonetheless helped us to pinpoint a universal truth about orgasmic pleasure – a truth that, in spite of the appalling suffering of victims of FGM, could nevertheless be of some comfort to Western women who, thanks to the prevailing beliefs of our time and culture, regard themselves as chronically anorgasmic?
There are, obviously, many factors to consider before coming to the most tentative conclusion that FGM has anything positive to teach us about female orgasm. The doubts crowd in the more one considers Lightfoot-Klein or Assaad’s research findings. It seems most odd that these, to us, abused women manage to have vaginal orgasms which, research such as that done in 1999 by QueenDom.com tells us, 26 per cent of liberated, educated, uncircumcised, Western women with access to Cosmo, vibrators and willing partners still seek in vain. One can only wonder if the circumcised women contrived their answers because they felt insecure and embarrassed about admitting they were non-orgasmic, were unwilling to admit to strangers that their marriages were not blissful, or were simply being polite to the nosey foreigners. And even if their accounts of non-clitoral orgasms are true, the question is begged as to whether their cultural tradition is worth bleeding to death and contracting septicaemia for -not to mention the accompanying package of economic and cultural suppression.
The strange case of circumcised women apparently having orgasms is paralleled, it might be noted (if only out of academic interest rather than practical), by the odder still, yet only passingly documented, phenomenon of male eunuchs having both erections and a form of ejaculation. In those Middle Eastern cultures where eunuchs – castrated servants – existed and in Ancient Greece, too, it was known that removing the testicles and penis did not remove sexual desire. Nor did castrates who retained their penis lose the ability to have an erection. That rare thing, a eunuch’s wife, once revealed that her husband could ejaculate, albeit after a long bout of intense stimulation. The probability is that the ejaculate in such a case is fluid from the prostate gland.
It should also be noted that the more acceptable and sensually literate ‘Eastern’ take on sexuality and the sacrosanct Nature of both male and female orgasm (but especially female) is far more manifest and homogenous across ages and religions than isolated centres of Female Genital Mutilation. It was around 1500, over a thousand years after the Kamasutra appeared in India (of which much more later), that the Tunisian poet Sheikh Umar ibn Muhammad Nefzawi wrote The Perfumed Garden. But its tone and philosophy were to all intents identical to the earlier Indian work, and it may provide a flavour of the truer sensual Nature of Eastern and Islamic cultures.
Long ago there lived a woman named Moarbeda, a noted philosopher who was once reputed to be the wisest person of her time. It is recorded that one day some questions were put to her, and these were some of her replies:
‘In what part of woman’s body does her mind reside?’
‘Between her thighs.’
‘And in what place does she experience her greatest pleasure?’
‘The same.’
‘And what is a woman’s religion?’
‘Her vulva.’
‘And with what part of herself does she love and hate?’ ‘The same … We give our vulva to the man we love and refuse it to the man we hate.’
It is The Perfumed Garden that advises men, ‘Do not unite with a woman until you have excited her with playful caresses and then the pleasure will be mutual’, and famously recommends that choosing the right moment for penetration will awaken ‘the sucking power of her vagina’ – which in turn leads to great orgasmic pleasure for both. Choosing the perfect timing for penetration may be less of an undertaking than average for male readers of The Perfumed Garden, however. Nefzawi tells of a man named Abou el Keiloukh who ‘remained erect for thirty days without a break’ – by eating onions. (The Kamasutra had advocated another method of attaining Olympian levels of priapic virtuosity. It recommended that eating ‘many eggs fried in butter, then immersed in honey, will make the member hard for the whole night’.)
As befits orgasmically sated societies, there was an equal acceptance at this time of homosexuality (male, at least) across North Africa, Turkey, Persia, all the Near East, India, and as far from the Middle East proper as Indonesia. Bypassing the sterner strictures of the Judaeo-Christian god’s followers, gayness in the Eastern world flourished from ancient times to the present day. The Persian proverb ‘A boy for pleasure; a woman for children’ is still guiltlessly followed by many in Arab lands. Sodomy in Persia stood for ‘higher’ virtues, anal intercourse a way of reaching spiritual highs and teaching young men. It was equally respected in Egypt, by Moors, Arabs, Berbers, and in Afghanistan, where Pathans sang a gay love song, ‘Wounded Heart’: (‘There’s a boy across the river with a postern like a peach, but alas! I cannot swim!’) Nomadic tribes in mid-Asia, too – Cossacks, Huns, Tartars, Mongols, Turkomans – were keen sodomisers.
When Islam held sway in Spain, Arabic poetry reflected its homosexual predilection. Muhammad ibn Malik, in twelfth-century Andalusia, wrote a poem called ‘Facing Mecca’:
Friday
in the mosque
my gaze fell upon a slim young man
beautiful
as the rising moon.
When he bent forward in prayer
my only thought was
oh, to have him
stretched out
flat before me,
butt-up,
face-down.
What legacy have such unexpectedly liberal and sensual ancient Middle Eastern sexual mores bequeathed to the present day? An eloquent answer is given by the British writer Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in an essay called ‘Why East Beats West When it Comes to Sex’ which appears in a 2001 book edited by Stephen Bayley and unambiguously entitled Sex.
She quotes from a letter she received from a British millionaire after an article of hers appeared on the ambiguous sexual message given by the hijab, the Muslim women’s traditional head covering: ‘I am writing this to you with some trepidation,’ the letter read, ‘but I can’t stop looking at the pictures which accompanied your article. I find them a real turn on. I am sick of bodies on display everywhere. Women who cover themselves have real power over our fantasies. I know I cannot ever have one of these women, and I am jealous of men who can. It must be like opening up a beautifully wrapped birthday present.’
Many Muslim women, Alibhai-Brown explained, are wise and knowing sexually. ‘In East Africa where I grew up, Zanzibari Muslim women
were thought of as sophisticated, addictive lovers who could weave invisible bonds around a man and keep him intoxicated mostly by never giving him the whole of themselves. But you never saw them. They were always completely covered up in black robes, yet their eyes were animated in ways which cannot be described.’ Alibhai-Brown confirmed in the essay that in Islamic texts, Allah gives a woman the right to physical gratification which she can demand of her husband.
‘If one could step back from the ubiquity of sex in public spaces, and allow it to retreat into those small inner places where unfolding and disclosures become possible once more, we may yet discover the difference between a fuck and an experience,’ Alibhai-Brown contends. She describes the modern anti-sex trends in Islamic countries and the Indian subcontinent as having ‘marched in, like unwelcome storming soldiers, through history to deny; destroy or punish physical love and lust. The forces of suppression won ground in the twentieth-century; particularly in Islamic countries which responded to political powerlessness by killing all joy and earthly pleasures in their populations or by forcing them to live in a way that masks these. Hindu fundamentalism is displaying the same tendencies.’
Ironically, she concludes, ‘the thrusting, commercialised sexuality which is sweeping across the globe is also destroying that genuine and deep sensuality which was once so carefully nurtured among these groups. Late-night sex shows on TV may work a treat for the beer-filled bloke who tumbles back at midnight and would like but can’t have a shag (and many Asian men would be among them), but coarse, pretend sex cannot appeal to those with more refined tastes and traditions. So here we are, part and yet not part of the modern sexual revolution; more knowledgeable and at ease with physical love than many westerners (we have not until recently had to suffer any anguish about imperfect bodies), yet unable or unprepared to join in the scrum which passes for satisfying sex today.’
8
Sex and the City State
‘She demands eight obols to give him a peck on his prick’
Hipponax of Ephesus (6th century BC)
The Ancient Greeks were the first culture we know to have applied method to the pursuit of pleasure. It is in Greek that we see the first sexual use of the word orgasmus, meaning, ‘to swell as with moisture, to be excited or eager’. The pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, an overlooked, yet defining, feature of civilisation, is seen in the Greeks’ championing of theatre, art, comedy, sport – and sex. ‘Let there be lewd touching first and games before the work,’ says an anonymous saying from the fifth century BC. One of the many roles of the Greek deity Mercury/Hermes was as the god of masturbation. Burgo Partridge, in a book entitled A History of Orgies, commented: ‘The culture of the Greeks is entirely a song in praise of pleasure, and the Nature of that pleasure was an intense and ingenuous sensuality. At all intellectual levels the people recognised the essential part played by voluptuous materialism in human affairs.’
The Christian idea of ‘sin’, along with all the misery and self-flagellation that went with that, was a concept which had yet to be formulated. For the moment, guilt-free enjoyment of all the body and mind had to offer was the bonus prize for living in the most giddily advanced civilisation there had ever been. Yet it is easy, at the same time as noting the hedonism of the Greeks it, to exaggerate it. More fundamental was the emphasis in Greek life on balance, of guarding against the pursuit of one thing destroying the enjoyment of another. Marriage, for instance, afforded opportunities for sensual delight, but it equally concerned procreation, the preservation of bloodlines and the proper education of children. The Greeks recognised that unbounded sexual indulgence would lead to the sexual satisfaction of nobody, and that it might destroy the other things worth having.
On the other hand still, while it was understood that hedonism is not always compatible with momentary gratification, the concept of balance did not rule out the odd sexual excess either. It was appreciated that man is part human, part animal, and that the interests of the two can conflict. So the craving for sexual pleasure was an accepted addiction; orgies were seen as a kind of societal safety valve, and one Aristophanes comedy, Lysistrata, has the women of Athens organising a sex boycott to try to stop their husbands fighting wars.
The appetite for orgasm was not seen as exclusively male. Greek men were terrified by what they perceived as women’s insatiability and sexual energy. Euripides’ The Bacchae played on this Greek male fear that women would willingly tear men limb from limb in their lust for pleasure. Young virgins, especially around puberty, were seen as particularly wild. The abundant medical writings of the time ascribed women’s drive for sexual activity to an inbred psychological urge rather than the desire for pleasure that tempted men. But whatever caused it was immaterial, so long as a civilised Greek city state kept this dangerous hunger for sex in check. This it did by promoting the necessity of marriage, preferably at puberty, after which pregnancy would completely cure any remaining sexual rampancy. As a double indemnity, women were cloistered at home, often surrounded by guard dogs.
Marriage, love and sex were not particularly inter-connected, though. The object of marriage was to produce a son and heir, but a Greek husband rarely looked to his wife for companionship or for sexual delight. Around 600 BC, an Athenian judge, Solon, established some sexual laws pertaining to marriage: an heiress was given the legal right to demand her husband fulfil his conjugal duties at least three times a month; a cuckolded husband was given leave to kill his adulterous rival. But in practice men and women had little to do with one another after marriage. The refined sexual pleasure appropriate to a gentleman was openly available via a number of extra-marital avenues. Prostitution was entirely accepted – the same Solon instituted fixed-price, state-run brothels outside the walls of cities, with prostitutes in gauzy garments openly advertising their attractions. Most were slaves or women taken as trophies of war. Additionally, the general expectation was for men to be bisexual, or ‘ambidextrous’, which opened up an even greater number of erotic opportunities for men.
These erotic opportunities included paedophilia. Parents routinely colluded in the sexual initiation of even young children by older men, and would express outrage if their children were not seduced. The Birds by Aristophanes, includes this denunciation by one character of another: ‘Well, this is a fine state of affairs, you villain. You meet my son from the gymnasium, fresh from the bath, and you don’t kiss him, you don’t say a word to him, you don’t hug him, you don’t even feel his testicles. And you’re supposed to be a friend of ours!’
The Greeks simply had no concept of sex as a sin or a forbidden fruit. They considered sexual relations to be a natural, everyday phenomenon. They had no sense of shame in connection with sex, and attached little stigma to any of its aspects save a little snigger at masturbation, which they did with gusto anyway. Unlike in Egypt, ‘respectable’ Greek women showed little by way of bare flesh, but the men were practically full-time nudists. The Greeks even fought their battles nearly naked. Male Greek culture was sexually charged at all levels. The Greeks referred to various situations in which godliness seized a man, a state they knew as theolepsy. Hearing music, dancing and alcohol could cause this sense of divinity, and they also found it present at orgasm, when the bounds of personality particularly seemed to melt away and one’s reality merge with the infinite.
Greek pottery provides us with something close to a pornographic record of the libidinous sex life of these ancient sybarites. A huge amount of it is overtly sexual; naked satyrs and nymphs romp away under olive trees; young lovers, heterosexual, homosexual, whatever, bathe together, dance and make love. We can only assume the whole jolly scene was drawn more or less from life, as artists saw it.
If anything, the Greeks were more suspicious of the one form of sexual desire that would be endorsed by the Christians – that occasioned by love. It was love, after all, that made a man copulate too often and lose strength through the over-draining of his semen; sexual pleasure was necessary to human well
-being, and not copulating enough could cause a semen build-up and damage health. But sex had to be mastered, which expressly meant limited.
The incessant physical longing of love was regarded as a disturbance of the body’s natural balance, a disease which deprived the mind of its control of the body. What we revere as the serotonin rush of post-orgasmic bliss, for the Greeks was a transitory dullness of intellectual power. Those who admired the intellectuality of the Greeks would still be echoing this belief thousands of years later. A nineteenth-century philosopher, Hartmann, wrote: ‘Love causes more pain than pleasure. Pleasure is only illusory. Reason would command us to avoid love. If it were not for the fatal sexual impulse, therefore it would be best to be castrated.’
The tradition arose, then, that only the conscious intellectual or physical diversion of the mind would do the trick, a spot of hard work, whether it was fishing, poetry or just thinking. And like twentieth-century anti-pornography campaigners who became obsessed with pornography, anti-sex Greek philosophers thought a great deal – about sex.
In the fourth-century BC, Plato related in The Republic that someone once asked Sophocles in his old age, ‘How do you feel now about sex? Are you still able to have a woman?’ He replied, ‘Hush, man; most gladly indeed am I rid of it all, as though I had escaped from a mad and savage master.’ Socrates opined that satisfaction of the sexual instinct worked against moral perfection. Epicurus saw love as ‘an impetuous appetite for sexual pleasure, accompanied by frenzy and torment’. He denounced carnal intercourse as the worst enemy of the serenity of the wise man: ‘Sexual intercourse never did anybody any good and one can think oneself lucky if it doesn’t do one harm. A wise man will neither marry nor have children. Nor will he yield to the passion of love.’
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