by Tom Hickman
According to ancient sources, interpretations of ancient art and anthropological studies, what is now universally called the missionary position was often adopted in the first great civilisations only when conception was desired, medical conviction being that it ensured ‘the proper flow of semen’. But for pleasure it was not that high on the list for the Sumerians, Indians, Persians, Romans and Greeks, who all favoured woman-on-top sex – the Greek courtesan/prostitute hetaera charged the most for the ‘racehorse’, in which she sat astride a prone client. Whether the Greeks really did have a predilection for heterosexual as well as homosexual anal sex is now disputed, though from the woman’s point of view the act obviously had the advantage of protecting against pregnancy, and prostitutes up and down the social scale certainly offered a price; what is certain is that men had a fondness for standing rear-entry vaginal sex, usually for ‘quickies’ in the street, the woman arching herself against the penetratee (cheapest) or resting her hand on her knees or feet (more expensive). Coincidentally, standing rear-entry vaginal sex was not peculiarly Greek: an anthropological study published sixty years ago identified eight primitive peoples around the world who practised it at the time, ‘confined to brief and sudden encounters in the woods’. Traditionally, coital preference in the vast islanded region of the Pacific, as well as in parts of Africa (notably Ethiopia), had different preferences yet again: the most popular position involved the woman recumbent with the man squatting between her thighs. In a variation, the man sat in the lotus position, the woman, also in the lotus position, facing him while squatting on top of his thighs.
Islanders found the European way both indecent and amusing. Kinsey, misreading the journal of a 1920s anthropologist who’d lived among the Trobrianders, in 1948 wrote that Christian missionaries had instructed the natives that only intercourse with the female supine beneath the male was allowable. In fact, missionaries had done nothing of the sort. What had happened was that the natives had parodied the Europeans, joking that the evangelisers must have forced them to adopt the ridiculous position. Kinsey’s error is neither here nor there – except that it gave the position, previously in the modern world known as ‘male superior’ or ‘matrimonial’, a new demotic designation.
Today, the missionary position is the most common throughout the world, from West to East. Its popularity has been ascribed to a man’s psychological need to feel dominant and a woman’s to feel submissive; to face-to-face (and heart-to-heart) sex seemingly being the most intimate. From a physiological viewpoint it would appear to be the most natural way for male and female bodies to connect. In Purple America, Jane Ingersoll muses that ‘missionary style is boring as oatmeal’. But it need not be, with imagination – and using it does not preclude adopting others for variety. Some people never try another way. Many are more adventurous – ‘Three-quarters of love,’ Casanova wrote, ‘is curiosity.’3
The violent mechanics
Feminists, including the writer and academic Germaine Greer, objected to the word ‘fuck’ on the grounds that its original meaning was ‘to strike’, which therefore made sexual intercourse an act of violence against women. Later, fed up with the habitual use of ‘fuck’ in almost all contexts, Greer suggested the reintroduction of ‘swive’, an alternative with a longer etymological history (and its original meaning was nonviolent, ‘to revolve’).
But sexual intercourse requires physical vigour – or violence, hardly a semantic difference – on the part of a man to reach completion; not for nothing did the Ancient Greeks label intercourse ‘the violent mechanics’. Which is why, from the moment of penetration, a penis-possessor on average thrusts his way to ejaculation in about 4 minutes – the length of time that has been accepted by generations of sexologists.
But a 2005 survey in Britain, America, Spain, Holland and Turkey, reported in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, found the average to be 5.4 minutes. The finding, however, was reliant on self-timing, which might be as reliable as penile self-measurement (couples were provided with stopwatches – the British claimed the longest, 7.6 minutes; the Turks the shortest, 3.4). According to another survey, taken among American sex therapists who drew on their male and female clients’ responses, 7 to 13 minutes was ‘desirable’, 3 to 7 was ‘adequate’ and 1 to 2 was ‘too short’ – but not unknown in the lazy Sunday morning leg-over or the snatched ‘quickie’. Again in a Rick Moody novel, Ice Storm, a man has intercourse with his friend’s wife in the front of his friend’s Cadillac in ‘less time than it takes to defrost a windshield’.
Coitus and copulation, the modern standard terms for sexual intercourse, are hardly in everyday use. But throughout history people have almost always preferred slang expressions, most of them vulgar – and many with a ‘violent’ connotation.
There have been periods when the acceptable standard words were, in fact, the most common. The earliest and least-known now was sard, first recorded by the Anglo-Saxons, with currency up to the seventeenth century, and which co-existed with swive, the most popular colloquialism for almost six hundred years from Chaucer to the late Victorians (‘Do not bathe on a full stomach,’ advised a popular self-help book of 1896, ‘nor swive’). Another word found in both formal and daily contexts was jape (thirteenth century), which faded as the modern meaning of ‘practical joke’ established itself. ‘Occupy’ is curious in that it came into being in the fourteenth century with the respectable modern meaning of being ‘in possession of’, was a vulgarity for three hundred years, and then became respectable once more. Over two hundred slang terms for sexual intercourse are recorded in English, Old, Middle and Modern. Many have come and gone and exist only as dictionary archaisms: for instance, plough (which goes back to the Greeks and Romans); root and the much older rootle; and foin (from Old French for fish spear; in fencing, to thrust).
But many old terms are still with us, including the sixteenth-century shag (Shakespeare favoured the variant shog), grind (but in Elizabethan times ‘to do a grind’), knock (today usually followed by off or up) – and fuck (which Shakespeare never used). Hump was fashionable in the seventeenth century; roger and bang (prostitutes were bang-tails) in the eighteenth; poke, shaft and screw (contraction of screw driver) in the nineteenth. ‘To lie with’, used by the King James Bible and Shakespeare, has disappeared, though the confusion between the verbs lie and lay gives rise to America’s favourite euphemism, laid.
The twentieth century’s contributions to the lexicon include bonk and boff, which like fuck meant, and in other contexts still mean, to hit or strike. Fuck, however, besides being the most frequent expletive – and doing service as virtually any word in a sentence – remains the commonest term for intercourse. Sometimes the variant ‘frig’ (which is also slang for masturbate) is used. The young Norman Mailer was persuaded to change ‘fuck’ to ‘fug’ for the publication of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948. ‘So you’re the darling boy’, exclaimed the actress Tallulah Bankhead on meeting him, ‘who can’t spell fuck.’4
Eighteenth-century Indian harlots scoffed at the way European males ‘scurried’ to ejaculation and mocked them as ‘dunghill cocks’; they were used to somewhat better, at least with educated higher-caste clients. As Hindu, Buddhist and other erotic literatures make clear, a woman’s pleasure should be central to sexual activity and a man should learn to hold back from climax so that she can have as many orgasms as she wishes. Through the sexually orientated spiritual meditation techniques taught for millennia by tantric and taoist masters, a man can copulate without climaxing for a considerable time, even almost indefinitely. And he achieves this by first understanding that orgasm and ejaculation are not the same thing. Ejaculation occurs in the penis, orgasm in the brain – which, of course, triggers ejaculation. Kinsey pointed this out; and that half of five-year-old boys have orgasms which is long before ejaculatory age. Masters and Johnson later discovered that in some men ejaculation doesn’t occur until some seconds after orgasm, which makes it incontrovertible that they are sepa
rate functions, though for the majority they’re simultaneous.
Emperors in ancient China had good reason to learn iron selfcontrol. They were required to keep 121 wives, a precise number thought to have magical properties, and to make love to ten of them every night (their sex secretary kept records), which would have been impossible had they climaxed on every coupling. In more recent times King Ibn-Saud of Saudia Arabia, the first Saudi king, practised the same control – he slept with three different women every night from the age of eleven until his death in 1953. Another was Prince Aly Khan, the international playboy son of the head of the Ismaili Muslims, who in the 1940s and ’50s had more than a thousand affairs in Europe and America and was reputed often to make love to a woman in his car as he was being driven between the flats of two others. Aly allowed himself to climax no more than twice a week for fear of debilitating himself.
In recent decades some European men have claimed to have learnt to become multi-orgasmic, to have several orgasms with the one erection and even to have aspired to true sexual ecstasy – an orgasmic state in which, it’s said, the orgasm flows through not just the genitals but the whole body, even the skin. Tantric sex devotees (notably pop singer Sting and his wife Trudie Styler) are said to be capable of making love for as long as five continuous hours, which most penis-and non-penis-possessors alike might find a tad excessive.
There are times when every penis-possessor wants to prolong his activity. Most usually put a brake on proceedings by stopping thrusting, asking their partner to stay still or by thinking of something else, the more mundane the better; or they take the temperature down a notch or two by withdrawing before starting over. More riskily some drive to the crisis point and then attempt to short-circuit their responses by squeezing the base of their penis, or pressing hard on the acupuncture point of the perineum midway between rectum and scrotum, or tugging their testicles to the bottom of the scrotum – the testicles rise up during the climactic process. All of these actions, known for centuries, may help to some degree. A few go so far as to don multiple condoms or a condom treated with a mild anaesthetic to dull sensation – which might be to defeat the object of the exercise. Walt Disney apparently sometimes packed his scrotum with ice to prolong lovemaking with his wife.
But whether a penis-possessor is a good lover who ensures his partner’s satisfaction, or not; or times his lovemaking so that infrequent happening, the mutual orgasm, can happen, or not; or for his own pleasure or hers or both he has held back – the moment comes when he cannot.
A myriad response has been set off in his body. His diastolic blood pressure, normally as low as 65, rises to around 160, systolic from 120 to around 250. His pulse rate, normally 70 to 80 beats a minute, reaches anything from 150 to 250. His breathing is harsh – a shortage of oxygen. His sense of smell and taste diminish, his hearing becomes impaired, his sense of vision narrows, so much so he may not be able to see objects on either side of him. His scrotum tightens, his testicles, swollen by vaso-congestion – often half their normal size again but in some men as much as double – elevate, in many pulling tight against the penis shaft, in a very, very few even disappearing into the abdominal cavity.
His thrusting becomes shorter, quicker, more furious. The first of his sex accessory organs, the Cowper’s glands, come into play. These pea-sized organs, immediately in front of the prostate,secrete a few droplets of an alkaline mucus to neutralise the urethra of any traces of urine, which is acidic and could damage the sperm that are about to follow this route. The droplets form at the urethral opening and may carry a few sperm, which can cause pregnancy – those who practice withdrawal before ejaculation may not be safe. (Not without irony was the secretion once called the ‘distillate of love’, as, not without irony, coitus interruptus in our time has been termed ‘Vatican roulette’.) Meanwhile, the prostate and the winglike seminal vesicles attached to it are pumping a milky protein-rich fluid into the firing chamber at the root of the urethra, a suspension medium to carry the sperm that the vas deferens ducts are simultaneously delivering from the comma-shaped epididymis on the top of each testicle, where they’ve matured. The sphincter between the prostate and the bladder clamps down, akin to a train track switching points, so that the semen doesn’t discharge into the bladder.
The prostate spasms.5
Spinal nerves quiver.
Contractions ripple along the urethra.
And with the last thrusts, semen propels from the penis in three to eight spurts, ‘the sweetest sensation of a man’s life’ (What Men Want).
The force with which semen exits the penis depends particularly on how powerfully the prostate spasms. Clinical monitoring of men during masturbation has shown that in most the semen merely exudes or spurts an inch or two. In some, however, particularly and unsurprisingly among the young, it can travel two or three feet; Kinsey recorded rare instances of adult males whose ejaculate shot six to eight feet.
Some penis-possessors equate a copious ejaculate with masculinity – just as they might equate a large penis – and consequently have an exaggerated idea about the volume of their own; they may even erroneously believe that the greater the volume the greater a woman’s pleasure. A Cruikshank cartoon depicting Sir William Hamilton, his wife Emma and her lover Horatio Nelson catches both notions neatly. As Sir William tries vainly to light a very small pipe and Nelson puffs vigorously on a pipe that is both phallic and reaches to the ground, Emma remarks: ‘Pho, the old man’s pipe is always out, but yours burns with full vigour.’ To which Britain’s naval hero replies: ‘Yes, I’ll give such a smoke I’ll pour a whole broadside into you.’
The 1970s pop group 10cc named themselves after what they thought was the average amount of ejaculate. In fact it’s 2 to 5cc – less than a spoonful.
Post-coitally, for a moment or for minutes, mildly or intensely, the bodies of the partners spasm. A woman’s orgasm may be a passing ripple or a thunderous tsunami outstripping a man’s, which is fairly constant, whatever the quality or intensity of the sex. At its most extreme, men are more likely to flail their limbs, groan or shout as if ‘suffering the extremes of torture’ (An Analysis of Human Sexual Response, Ruth and Edward Brecher) – they have very likely put in more effort, however brief, and they have greater muscle mass from which tension must be released. But some women go into the same violent convulsion, rolling their eyes, pounding, punching or kicking their partner, oblivious to pain themselves, flinging themselves feet or yards; a very few intensely reactive individuals lose consciousness for seconds or even much longer – small wonder that the French dub orgasm la petite mort (the little death).
So, as the return to normalcy after climax throws the physiological changes into reverse, the neuromuscular tensions abate, pulse and blood pressure subside, blood returns to the circulation and the penis shrinks, simply subsiding or retreating in a series of little hops, like someone crawling backwards, carefully – how was it for him, really? Or her?6 Only he or she can answer this and their answers might be different concerning the same occasion, whether the sex is perfunctory or prolonged, routine or rampant, rough or tender of a combination of some or all of these. Words are probably inadequate to capture the convolutions of sex. What words can say is that sex is likely to be at its best for one or the other or both when lust and love are in sync, the brain anaesthetised, the body saturated with feeling, warm skin in contact, limbs entangled, the universe in a lover’s eyes – a state in which, as Alex Comfort described it, ‘while the penis is emphatically his, it also belongs to both of them’.7
Save for the very young male who may maintain an erection for several minutes after orgasm and a very few penis-possessors, of any age, who may maintain full rigidity for up to half an hour and who, if sexual activity resumes, may achieve another orgasm, or several, without ejaculation, virtually all men enter a refractory period after sex during which they can’t respond to sexual stimuli of any kind. And during it, for a while, their penis is so sensitive that further stimulation of
it is unpleasant and even painful. Nineteenth-century marriage manuals recommended that a man who reached orgasm before his wife should continue coital movements until she had been satisfied, but for virtually all men that is physically impossible. And here is one of the greatest mismatches between the sexes: women not only can carry on orgasming if stimulated to it, they don’t have a clear-cut non-reactive phase: their descent from the heights follows a fairly gentle curve – and they want to cuddle and talk. Men, on the other hand, whose exertions can sometimes be comparable to heavy labour or the effort of an athlete at full stretch, have fallen off the cliff.
‘I think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them,’ the novelist Jay McInerney once observed. Of course men can try to be accommodating, to kiss and caress, to murmur sweet nothings; and sometimes they do, they do. It isn’t that they don’t have feelings. But unless they have a pressing reason for getting up, they have an overwhelming desire to go to sleep. They can’t help it: the hormone prolactin, released during ejaculation, strongly urges them to sleep so that energy-producing glycogen, depleted by intercourse, can be restored to their muscles. And, too, the more pleased a man is with his performance (his body is flooded with the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine), the more likely he is to drift away.
On benefits
The penis erect not only gives sexual gratification but, as numerous studies show, can contribute to the health and well-being of both giver and receiver. Various hormones and other chemicals released before and during orgasm help to lower blood pressure, decrease bad cholesterol, improve circulation, mediate pain, and ward off stress – one study suggests that intercourse can be as much as ten times more effective than Valium. Lovemaking can also help to repair tissue, promote bone growth and burn off calories (an average of 85–150 in 30 minutes of activity), as well as dampen food cravings by increasing an amphetamine that regulates appetite. And having sex can even improve brain power – intense intercourse encourages brain cells to grow new dendrites, the filaments attached to nerve cells that allow neurons to communicate with each other; there is some evidence that older people who are sexually active are less likely to have dementia.