by Tom Hickman
And they see temptation everywhere:
Each day the penis is prey to sexual sights in the streets, in stores, offices, on advertising billboards and television commercials – there is the leering look of a blond model squeezing cream out of a tube; the nipples imprinted against the silk blouse of a travel-agency receptionist, the bevy of buttocks in tight jeans ascending a department store’s escalator; the perfumes aroma emanating from the cosmetic counter: musk made from the genitals of one animal to arouse another. (Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Gay Talese)
Indeed men (and their complicit addendum) sexually scrutinise almost all women regardless of their attractiveness to them: legs and buttocks ahead of them, breasts, groin and legs coming towards them. It is a largely subliminal activity; men are like an anti-virus program, monitoring, monitoring. Women generally do not behave in this way. A man here or there will catch their attention but not the passing panoply of body parts. Women have a much lesser level of visual stimulation – which is why most are not aroused by male genitals and, Kinsey found, fewer than one in five wants the light on when they make love. Almost all men do at some point in their lives.
Various studies have tried to establish how often the penis-possessor thinks about sex, with wildly different results: once every seven seconds (Kinsey), for example; at least once every twenty-four hours (International Journal of Impotence Research) – the latter study claiming that British men think about sex more frequently than any other nation in Europe. What is certain is that sexual thoughts flicker in the background of a man’s visual cortex all day and almost all night. When they do, the sexual-pursuit area of his hypothalamus, an area nearly three times larger in his brain than in a woman’s, lights up like a slot machine and, neuro-imaging shows, hot spots of blood-flow erupt. Constantly, intermittently, he thinks about sex: idly, innocently or less innocently, fantasising.
I would give all I possess
(Money keys wallet personal effects and articles of dress)
To stick my tool
Up the prettiest girl in Warwick King’s
High School
wrote the poet Philip Larkin in a letter to his friend Kingsley Amis, the kind of fleeting fancy not unfamiliar to most men, albeit not in verse.
The penis-possessor’s brain is his most sexually active organ, only off duty when he is asleep, and not always then, any more than his penis.
Testosterone, the male hormone, manufactured in specialist cells (Leydig cells) that lie between the sperm-producing coils in the testicles, is the root cause. In the womb, testosterone shapes both the male genitals and brain – where it shrinks the communication centre, reducing the hearing cortex to make room for the part that processes sex. At puberty testosterone surges through the male body, increasing ten to thirty-five times,deepening the voice, creating body hair – and making desire overwhelming. The difference in the levels of desire between penis-possessors and non-penis-possessors, says the evolutionary psychologist David Buss, is staggering: ‘like the difference between how far the average man and woman can throw a rock’.
As he wrote in old age (The Summer of a Dormouse), the playwright/novelist John Mortimer at Oxford shared Bustyn, his scout (servant), with the future Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Runcie, who one day asked him why Mortimer always had young women in his room and why he wore purple corduroy trousers; to which Bustyn enigmatically replied: ‘Mr Mortimer, sir, has an irrepressible member.’
Sexually and metaphorically speaking, all men wear purple corduroys. Their desire – and the urge for variety that goes with it – is irrepressible. And, sometimes at least, ‘it leads them astray, causes them to beg favours at night from women whose names they prefer to forget in the morning’ (Talese). And to cheat on someone they love. Indeed desire can sometimes be so all-consuming it makes men irrational and believe ‘there are some fucks for which a person would have their partner and children drown in a freezing sea’ (Kureishi). When men are deprived of women entirely, the scabrous American comedian Lenny Bruce said, they ‘will fuck mud’. After visiting Egypt the historian Herodotus wrote that ‘When the wives of highranking men die, the husbands do not deliver them right away to be embalmed, nor do they immediately hand over very beautiful or famous women but wait till the third or fourth day after death. They do this so that the embalmers may not have sexual intercourse with these women.’
In the (possibly) autobiographic My Secret Life, the Victorian Walter put the male craving for intercourse in terms that no penis-possessor would dispute:
If you can’t afford to pay for cunt, or don’t know a cunt which will take you in for love, your prick is a restless article which will insist on the buttocks pushing it somewhere or somehow, till the stiffness is take out of it.
Most men frustrated for the lack of a woman, the Kama Sutra observes, ‘seize the lion’. Some, however, ‘must satisfy themselves with the vaginas of other species, mares, she-goats, bitches, sheep . . . or with other men’.
Although bestiality has almost always been universally condemned, before the nineteenth century same-sex male intercourse was widely regarded in Western culture as exhibiting nothing more than a lustful urge; indeed it was de rigueur for an Elizabethan fop to have an ‘ingle’, a beardless boyfriend poised on the brink of manhood, and to consort with the odd ‘Ganymede’ or boy-whore (the youth Ganymede was wooed by Jupiter, father of the gods), without being labelled a sodomite. The nineteenth century, however, demonised such sex, labelling it deviant (in the latter half of the twentieth century sex therapists began to prefer the word ‘variant’ as purely descriptive and non-judgemental).
About half the world’s cultures condemn homosexuality, two-thirds of the remainder condone it, and the rest ignore it. Kinsey claimed that human sexuality is a spectrum, and, too, that homosexuality is in the genes, dismissed by many as simplistic determinism. What is true is that more men who consider themselves heterosexual than most people would imagine have had some homosexual contact.
Kinsey divided the ways a man can achieve orgasm (or ‘total outlets’ as he preferred to say) into six categories: nocturnal emission, masturbation, heterosexual petting, heterosexual intercourse, homosexual activity and animal contact. It isn’t likely that more than a few have experience in all categories,unlike one of Kinsey’s subjects, the amazingly active Mr King, who kept records of his sexual activity with girls (two hundred), boys (six hundred), countless adults of both sexes including his grandmother, father and fifteen other relatives, and not a few beasts of the field. At the age of sixty-three he demonstrated that he was able to masturbate to ejaculation in ten seconds.
Men who are heterosexual in orientation, and their penises, display a multiplicity of other kinds of variant behaviour.
Whereas for almost all men erotic thoughts about a woman, never mind fleshly contact, are often enough to galvanise their body’s gang of hormones and neurotransmitters which lead to erection, for some that is not enough. In his novel Justine, the Marquis de Sade wrote about the Comte de X who found it impossible to obtain an erection except by cheating while gambling. The early sexologist Havelock Ellis (bizarrely himself impotent until the age of sixty when he discovered he became aroused watching a woman urinating) was told by a young prostitute about a client who could only reach orgasm when she wrung a pigeon’s neck in front of him. Alfred Kinsey interviewed a Congregationalist minister who got erections when he saw a female amputee on crutches.
According to Kinsey the brains of almost all men are intensely curious sexually in a way that the brains of almost all women are not. Men want to experiment. Both de Sade and Henry Miller tried intercourse with cored apples filled with cream. Shades of the film American Pie – rock wild man Alice Cooper used to masturbate into his sister’s jelly doughnuts. Just as the Ancient Greek Clisyphus ‘violated the statue of a goddess in the Temple of Samos after having placed a piece of meat in a certain part’, Portnoy in Portnoy’s Complaint had sex with a piece of liver (‘I fucked my own family’s dinner!�
��). A few young men have finished up in A&E after attempting relations with a vacuum cleaner.
TWO TO TANGO
SOLITARY MASTURBATION (SHAKESPEARE’S ‘jerks of invention’), is, of course, the bread and butter of outlets, possibly the sole sexual activity of youth but a safety valve for almost all adult males, however healthy their sex life, if only sporadically. (Numerous writers including Pepys, Voltaire, Kierkegaard, Gogol, Rousseau, Flaubert and Walt Whitman have claimed that it made their creative juices flow.) Like so many of the words of sex, masturbation is a nineteenth-century coinage. Before that, certainly from the sixteenth century, ‘frig’ (from the Latin fricare, to rub) was the common term in English. ‘Wank’ (1940s, origin unknown) is the most popular synonym to the British, replacing ‘toss off’ (eighteenth century, from the original meaning of finishing a piece of work quickly); Americans largely adhere to ‘jerk off’.
Freud maintained that masturbation was exclusively male and was infantile. Kinsey pointed out that half of all women masturbate too, if far less frequently, and when they do are more adept, because they have a romantic imagination. Visual creatures that they are, men want concrete images (which is why they are drawn to pornography) or a residue of one on the retina – starved of female company when living under canvas in the Canal Zone during the 1950s, national service squaddies, according to one, ‘would get a fix on one of the handful of WRACS [who were only interested in the officer class], get a good image, and rush off to their tents to wank’ (The Call-Up, Hickman). Fantasy made flesh: as the playwright Arthur Miller relates in his autobiography Timebends, he was once in a bookshop with his wife Marilyn Monroe and watched a man masturbating in his trousers as he watched her.
Being masturbated by a woman, which somewhat dismissively Kinsey categorised only under heterosexual petting, is a considerably heightened experience from going it alone – with the proviso, as Alex Comfort pointed out in The Joy of Sex, that the woman ‘has the divine gift of lechery’, does not treat the penis like a gearstick, and goes about her task ‘subtly, unhurriedly and mercilessly’. No one has suggested that this constitutes ‘having sex’. But what of oral (orogenital or buccal) intercourse, which Kinsey also included in the same category? In 2010 the Kinsey Institute found that almost a third of eighteen-to ninety-six-year-old Americans thought that oral sex did not qualify – the basis of Bill Clinton’s denial of congress with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, having enjoyed her fellatory attentions in the Oval Office. (That Clinton the while smoked a cigar, the most recognisable of modern phallic symbols, added ribaldry to the affair.)
As a source of sexual gratification, oral sex runs vaginal intercourse pretty close for most men. Bill Clinton when American president told an air hostess that it was his ‘most favourite thing’; in fact, if it were a case of either vaginal or oral sex only, one man in five says he would opt for oral sex.
The ancient world extolled fellatio as much as bathing. Indeed, Mesopotamia had the same word for semen and fresh water – both of which fertilised life.
Several ancient cultures, principally India and China, ritualised fellatio (fellare, Latin, to suck, first recorded in English in 1887). The Greeks and Romans had something of a hang-up about it. Theoretically they considered fellatio to be unclean but practised it anyway, paying lip service to their higher principles. A variation was irrumatio, in which the mouth of another was used as a passive orifice as a penalty or a humiliation – an act that was about power, not sexual satisfaction. For almost all Romans, cunnilingus was unthinkable: the male mouth, the springwell of oratory, was not to be debased.
Despite the strictures of the Church, medieval Europe did not give up fellatio. After the plague closed the bathhouses, however, and during the following centuries that came to believe bathing opened the pores and allowed disease to enter, oral sex may have been a less pleasant experience, but this is unlikely to have been much of a deterrent, any more than the criminalisation of it (for centuries it was deemed to be a type of sodomy). As mini-directories of the thirty thousand prostitutes who worked in eighteenth-century Paris show, many claimed oral sex was their speciality – this despite the century's medical profession considering the act a sign of insanity. Curiously, the libidinous James Boswell, ever complaining that the girls he picked up on the streets of eighteenth-century London gave him the clap, never once, from the evidence of his diaries, asked for the safer alternative.
In the 1940s Kinsey found that only four married men in ten had had oral sex. A quarter of a century later, the Playboy Foundation found that almost two-thirds of all men had been beneficiaries, and nine out of ten under the age of twenty-five. Since Linda Lovelace’s performance in the film Deep Throat, fellation has come to be seen as a cultural phenomenon in the West. In recent decades the incidence of it has grown exponentially among the young – no longer something to which a couple, who probably had already had intercourse, graduated, but just another element of foreplay.
Oral sex, of course, is a two-way street (‘to eat another is sacred,’ John Updike wrote in Couples). And while there is at least twice as much fellation as cunnilingus among those who are unmarried, largely because of anatomical accessibility in sometimes awkward surroundings, there is equal give and take among those in stable relationships. If the penis is capable of penis envy, it should be of the penis-possessor’s tongue.
The reasons why a man finds skilful oral sex unspeakably pleasurable is because the lips of a woman’s mouth are infinitely more versatile than the lips of her vagina; and her pliant tongue in the words of Gerstman, Pizzo and Seldes (What Men Want) is ‘the Swiss Army knife of sex’; and the mouth is further accessorised by the teeth, which can be tantalisingly employed to nibble and nip. The Japanese call fellatio ‘mouth music’; indeed a woman who knows her stuff can play a man like a flute.2 Does fellatio put the man or the woman in physical or psychological control? The question concerns several of the ‘ological’ disciplines. A man doesn’t care; he never quite believes he’s so lucky that a woman will take his penis in her mouth. Only a relatively small percentage of men want to ejaculate in a partner’s mouth, but the experience is heightened for those who do: there is no interruption necessitated by moving to the coital site as the moment of inevitability approaches – and they are observers of their own climax.
Most women, whatever the depth of their feeling for their partner, however much they might enjoy giving oral sex – if hardly to the extent of the already introduced Jordana in The Pirate, who wants ‘to swallow [Jacques] alive, to choke herself to death on that giant, beautiful tool’ – can’t bring themselves to permit buccal insemination. Contrary to the delight shown by women in Internet pornography, many have feelings of disgust; the violence of the final orgasmic thrusts can be distressing; and, even penis-possessors admit, the smell and taste of semen are not wholesome.
The smell of what the eighteenth-century physician John Hunter called ‘a mawkish kind of substance’ has been likened to seaweed, musk, pollen, the flowers of the Spanish chestnut tree, a greenhouse in summer – all of which may sound alluring – but most penis-and non-penis-possessors agree that semen smells like nothing so much as household bleach. As to its taste, the Brihat Samhita, the ancient Sanskrit astrological treatise, suggests it can be like honey; most women would suggest fish, perhaps, or worse: overripe Brie, dirty socks, nasal mucus are descriptions given in modern surveys. In Rick Moody’s Purple America, Jane Ingersoll muses that ‘men’s curds’ taste ‘like toothpaste with a soy sauce chaser’.
Different foods affect all bodily secretions and that applies to ejaculate, though to what degree is debatable. Red meat and dairy produce are said to result in the least pleasant flavour, with asparagus, garlic and onion not far behind. Beer and smoking have a deleterious effect. On the other hand most vegetables, peppermint, parsley, cinnamon and citrus fruits are said to make ejaculate more palatable. In America a powdered drink is marketed made of pineapple, banana, strawberry, broccoli and celery ‘at nine ti
mes their normal concentrations, together with three essential spices and a select blend of vitamins and minerals’, supposedly making semen sweet ‘in only twenty-four hours’.
What is indisputable is that, if ingested, the average ejaculate won’t make the recipient fat – it contains only one to seven calories.
Location, location, location
How many positions are there for a man and a woman to have intercourse? The great ancient literatures of India, China, Japan and Arabia were obsessed with calculating the permutations, some attempts running into the hundreds.
Classical Greece pragmatically reasoned there were about a dozen. They didn’t bother to describe them all (one they called ‘the lion on the cheese-grater’ still has scholars unsure). But basic physiology and the elimination of the improbably gymnastic – such as the Kama Sutra’s ‘fixing the nail’, in which the prone woman stretches out one leg while placing the other on top of her head – make this difficult to argue with: man on top or underneath; woman on top or underneath, face to face with her partner or reversed; side by side, face to face or with the woman reversed; one or other kneeling or sitting; the woman on hands and knees, her partner behind her; both standing up or only the man – whether or not using the furniture as props, seemingly a fixation among the Chinese.
There was only one position as far as the medieval Church in Europe was concerned; anything other than the man above was perverse. The Elizabethans later advocated the position principally because they believed that face-to-face sex distinguished human sex from bestiality (they would have been horrified to know that pygmy chimps [bonobos], orang-utans and occasionally gorillas enjoy a bit of ventro-ventral activity). There is no woman-on-top sex in Shakespeare but that does not mean there was no woman-on-top sex in Shakespeare’s England.