by Terry Gould
Indeed, given the age-old image we have in our minds of sexually immoral humans behaving “like animals”—implying that the worse one is at controlling a pleasurable urge the more animal one is and the less human—it is understandable that we don’t blink when we read of a swinger described as an iguana or a hippo. The truth is—cloven-hoofed gods of the Greeks notwithstanding—we are unwittingly being unfair to animals, most of which have sex less in any given year than an average human. In fact, almost all species of mammals and birds that live in social groups are rigidly bound by their own codes of sexual behavior, and if we look closely at that behavior we notice something telling about morality: it serves the interests of the beasts who enforce it. Morals are without exception dictated by the dominant figures in a group, who ruthlessly attempt to constrain the sexual expression of others. Animal morality may not be based on a righteous code handed down from a holy gazelle or a lion god, but it is enforced by the kings and queens of the herd, flock, or pride who act like gods—and it is tied strictly to reproduction for the most part.
There are, however, two animals that do not adhere to this reproduction-oriented morality. They engage year-round in sex acts that in the vast majority of cases do not result in off-spring. One species is our closest relative, the bonobo chimpanzee. Whether females are in estrus or not, male and female bonobos enjoy sex several times a day with an ever-changing array of partners in their close-knit group, reproducing only once every five years. The other species is modern humans. About three-quarters of men and women in the United States have sex anywhere from a few times a month to four or more times a week. They do so in sessions lasting from fifteen minutes to over an hour, with about one-third of women and more than half of men having five or more partners after the age of eighteen—and whose total copulations produce an average of only two offspring per female per lifetime. This seems consistent with what the archaeologist Timothy Taylor discovered in his comparison of the sexual behavior of prehistoric peoples to bonobos. “Sexual pleasure has been taken yet further by humans—and so has sex as an aspect of power,” he wrote in The Prehistory of Sex. “Effective plant-based contraception was available to our prehistoric ancestors, freeing sex from any necessary reproductive shackles.” For Taylor there seemed to be a clear “evolutionary development of sensual and sexual pleasure.”
Given the thousands of species of animals that have sexual intercourse only during the widely spaced intervals when they are likely to reproduce, and the mere two species that have intercourse week in and week out without reproducing—one human, the other humanlike—an argument can be made that sex done purely for pleasure with a variety of partners is actually more human than it is animal, while sex done strictly for reproduction is actually less human than it is animal. After studying “the varied, almost imaginative, eroticism” of the group-sex-loving bonobo for a decade, the zoologist Frans De Waal concluded: “The possibility that these aspects have characterized our lineage from very early on has serious implications, given how often moralizing relies on claims about the naturalness or unnaturalness of behavior: what is natural is generally equated with what is good and acceptable. The truth is that if bonobo behavior provides any hints, very few human sexual practices can be dismissed as ‘unnatural.”’
In terms of a moral assessment of the behavior of lifestylers this natural versus unnatural debate does indeed have “serious implications.” For the morality that we employ to judge them is founded upon ancient rules dictated by the supposedly divinely inspired chiefs of a sparsely populated tribe, once surrounded by enemies and desperate to procreate in a manner that assured paternity. According to the moralis prescribed by the rulers of that Hebrew tribe, masturbation, birth control, homosexuality, abortion, group-sex fertility rites, prostitution, spouse exchange, sex during menstruation, and all other forms of nonprocreative sex-pleasure the human body is capable of were banned as “immoral,” and they still retain that taint. How did the leaders of the Hebrews convince their followers not to have a nonreproductive orgasm when and where and how they felt like it—when all around them other tribes were doing so in a manner “natural” to humans? The ancient rulers and priests, in league with their well-rewarded scribes, convinced their people that their sexuality was not their own but was controlled by God and His agents on earth. The mechanisms of sexual control were fear, as in “fear of God,” and guilt, as in guilt for the “original sin” of sex—the ultimate taboo humans were condemned to break again and again, keeping them perpetually fearful and guilty and in need of priests, rulers, and literary proselytizers who all claimed to be closer to God than they were.
At the turn of the second millennium A.D. the wealthy and powerful officials of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths, their allies in the state, and their moral mirrors in the mainstream media have two things in common besides their roughly consistent brands of sexual morality. One is “the sexual hypocrisy” evidenced by the exponents of morality, which is “of particular interest” to evolutionary biologists such as Robin Baker “because… the most successful exponents are those who try, through force or criticism, to prevent other people from behaving in a particular way while secretly behaving in precisely that way themselves…. Rule-makers and enforcers are in fact the people who most indulge in behavior they seek to prevent in others.” The other pattern of conduct they share is that they regularly help us to assuage our sexual guilt by asking for our money. Religious leaders pressure us for donations; their allies in the state, who swear themselves into office holding not their testicles but a holy book, solicit campaign contributions and levy taxes; and most moral advocates in the media harvest ample rewards in wages and royalties paid out by a chastised public.
Instead of continuing to accept on faith what the agents of God and their scribes tell us is immoral, or even what our own good sense tells us is moral, we can reappraise all our ancient proscriptions by posing a single question at every juncture in our analysis of the history of sexual morality. It is a question employed by evolutionary theorists who like to sharpen the discussion surrounding moral rules pronounced by politicians, preachers and reporters.
“Cut bono?” is the question. “Who benefits” from the preaching of these moral rules?
Moral preaching began in earnest in the West in 2000 B.C., when God appeared to the wandering Abraham and commanded him to take his wife, Sarah, and his nephew, Lot, to Canaan. “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you,” God told the seventy-five-year-old patriarch. “I will give this land to your offspring.” The land was already occupied, of course, but since the Canaanites resembled today’s pleasure-loving swingers and homosexuals, they “were very wicked sinners against the Lord,” and were therefore less worthy of the territory than the new arrivals from Babylon. Thus, the man who laid the cornerstone of sexual morality upon which Moses built his law and Jesus laid his capstone was also the man who gave the West its first lesson that morality could be used as a justification and inspiration for invasion and conquest.
In return for Canaan, however, God required a sacrifice from Abraham and the followers he was then recruiting: the agonizing cutting off of a part of the penis in circumcision, which at the outset of life put the imprimatur of God and His priests on the pleasure source of males, who in the patriarchal society of the Hebrews ruled their wives’ sexuality as well as their own. It was to be the founding ritual of our Western religious heritage and the origin of all the moral rules that teach us our sexuality is not our own (and that to behave like the Canaanites is to risk dying like dogs). Still practiced by Muslims and Jews, the sacrifice has been superseded in ritual by Christian faiths, but the original message remains the same: your sexuality is the property of a moral power you must obey, or pay the consequences. “Thus shall My covenant be marked in your flesh as an everlasting pact,” God decreed to the new chieftain-cum-head priest, a double portfolio not infrequently held by rulers throughout history, right down to our time of mullahs.
The moral Abraham dutifully circumcised himself and his son Ishmael, the antecedent of all Muslims, then ordered the circumcision of “all his retainers, his homeborn slaves, and those that had been bought from outsiders.” No one knows how many “retainers” he had at this time, although the Bible tells us (without moral judgment) that a famine in Canaan had forced Abraham to move to Egypt and prostitute Sarah in the Pharaoh’s palace for a few years, making Abraham “very rich in cattle, silver, and gold” as well as slaves. “And because of her, it went well with Abram.”
What happened next in this morality tale was catastrophic for the sinners of the capital cities of Canaan—and serves as a warning to all the rest of us, equivalent in historical terror to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. “The outrage of Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grave!” God told Abraham regarding the swingers and gays. Then He sent down two destroying angels who announced to nephew Lot in Sodom, “We are about to destroy this place, because the outcry against them before the Lord has become so great.” Lot and his wife and daughters fled for their lives and “the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah sulfurous fire from the Lord out of heaven” (which the King James Version of the Bible famously refers to as fire and brimstone, the antisexual sparks of preachers ever since). “He annihilated those cities and the entire Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities and the vegetation of the ground.” (God did this, we are told, not Abraham’s warriors.) Now much of the land of Canaan belonged to the sexually righteous leader and his people.
As with Abraham’s prostitution of Sarah and his adulterous fling with Hagar that resulted in the birth of Ishmael, the Bible then reinforces the message that there are two kinds of sexual morality: one for the rulers, who get off scot-free for their sexual crimes, and one for the ruled, who wind up slaughtered if they transgress. No sooner were Sodom and Gomorrah annihilated for their sins, taking Lot’s wife with them as a result of her curious backward glance (wives who like to watch, beware) than Lot, over the course of the next two nights, committed incest with both his daughters—supposedly at their coercion. “There is not a man on earth to consort with us in the way of all the world,” they pined. “Come, let us make our father drink wine and let us lie with him.” So we are told. Who benefited?
Four hundred years later, on a mission from God to reclaim Canaan for the Hebrews returning from bondage in Egypt, the warrior Joshua again used the “accursed” sex lives of the Canaanites as justification for razing every other town between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. In this time-honored fashion one sexual pogrom followed another over the next thirty-five hundred years. Sexual immorality was used as righteous justification by the mass murderers of the Inquisition, who pocketed the possessions of their victims; by the judges of “concupiscent” women at the Salem witch trials, who profited in a similar manner; by the American settlers when they slaughtered some groups of openly sexual “savages,” then seized their land; and it was behind the whole range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sexual-degeneracy theories and “vice” laws that led to the imprisonment of thousands and the empowerment of judges, police, and preachers. It was certainly the motivating logic behind the oft-repeated call for God to do to America what he had done to the violators of nature in Sodom and Gommorah.
The problem for swingers is that enlightened media oracles still take these medieval imprecations seriously. Consider the judgments made in an article in the April 1997 Vanity Fair, titled “Polanski’s Inferno,” written by Jill Robinson, daughter of the former MGM boss Dore Schary. Reflecting back to a night twenty-eight years before, when Charles Manson’s minions broke into a Bel Air ranch house and taunted, beat, hanged, stabbed, and shot a pregnant Sharon Tate and her three houseguests, Robinson deduced that Manson was a moral avenger. Why? Tate and her absent husband, Roman Polanski, were, like many others in that summer of ’69, swingers. “The murders seemed the consequence of everything all of us had done,” Robinson wrote guiltily, confessing that she too had sped wildly down the fast lane during the years she identified as “the Golden Age of Sex,” the “period between the invention of the Pill and AIDS.” “We had gone too far, done all the things our parents had warned against—and more. But Polanski, it was believed, had gone farther than anyone. ‘It’s not like it came from out of the blue,’” Robinson quoted Polanski’s former neighbor Bob Rafelson as surmising. “Something he had done had tempted the Fates.”
The mysterious “Fates” were never named, their workings never explained, probably because most readers rooted in the moral myths related above would have understood Robinson’s mystical logic that powerful gods and their avenging angels punish orgiasts by massacring them. Perhaps that was why Robinson reminded us that “Manson… loomed large” over a sexually liberated America that “had got heavy, dark and complicated…. ‘I am what you have made me,’” Robinson quoted a Manson hex. ‘“In my mind’s eye my thoughts light fires in your cities.’”
Now, Polanski himself is not to be defended as a sexually liberated hero. Eight years after the slaughter, he seduced a thirteen-year-old and fled to Europe. But we should examine why Robinson could imply that, long before Polanski’s crime, Sharon Tate and the others died in this insane way because of their noncriminal sexual sins. The essayist Lawrence Osborn has labeled the belief in this murderous karma “sexual pessimism … the equation of sexual love outside the prerequisites of reproduction with death,” and the sexologist John Money has coined the term “sexosophy” to describe the negative philosophy of sex reinforcing our dread of the Fates. “Sexosophy is to sexology as alchemy is to chemistry, or astrology is to astronomy,” he wrote in a volume he appropriately titled The Destroying Angel. “With the certainty of doctrinal truth revealed” sexosophy uses occult logic or pseudo-science to prove eroticism causes “depravity and degeneracy [which] in turn are accused of being the cause of the afflictions of both the individual person and the society.”
In “Polanski’s Inferno,” the very modern Robinson was a metaphysical practitioner of both sexual pessimism and sexosophy, since the nonsuperstitious fact of the Tate-La Bianca killings is that Charles Manson’s motives had nothing whatever to do with the sexual lifestyle of his victims. According to the court testimony of his cohorts, Manson planned his mad butchery so that it would seem the work of black terrorists, which he hoped would ignite a race war that would lead to his emergence as king. He had 35 other millionaires of no particular sexual immorality on his hit list when he was arrested. But Robinson mentioned not a word of this courtroom evidence; instead she told us: “Polanski himself, working in London at the time of the tragedy, became a citizen suspected of lasciviousness, excess, even witchcraft.” What realistic connection those suspicions had to do with the mass murder of innocent people across the ocean we are never told.
Who is benefiting from this non sequitur posing as moral logic?
Vanity Fairs conclusion was that Manson’s victims paid the price of their pleasure—yet, paradoxically, Robinson’s moral message rubbed shoulders in the same issue with a titillating sexual carrot—a bunch of carrots, actually. “HOLLYWOOD 1997, THE GLAMOR, the stars, the scandals,” read the tabloid-esque coverlines, with a foldout triptych featuring ten languorous starlets whose erogenous zones were minimally covered to maximally stimulate the sexual imagination. “Starring MADONNA, Nicole Kidman… and dozens more.” Abutting a nude Giorgio Armani ad, just a short flip from portraits of the avowedly orgiastic Madonna in crotch-peeking fishnets and Kidman in furry heels and a see-through teddy on a bed, Robinson concluded that everyone had learned their sexual lesson from the bloodbath in the Bel Air sin house, and now things were safe again in a more moral Hollywood. “I noticed how much the city is returning to the family feel that the studios had tried to maintain before blacklisting, before the 60s,” she wrote. “The conversations are about children and bringing them up the way we lucky Hollywood kids were brought up. Implicit is the sense that at some time things had slipped and are now being put right
.”
Implicit, rather, is the sense that things are as they have always been in Hollywood, and in Vanity Fair as well, where producers and editors almost always imbed an absolving message of moral condemnation within their profitable sale of forbidden sex. That tactic is the way of the West, where, since Abraham, religious and political leaders have regulated sexual expression by warning against the wrath of invisible Fates, frequently visiting that wrath on offenders as they have enjoyed the forbidden pleasures themselves. “I call it the moral hypocrisy of the commanders,” Friedrich Nietzsche observed in Beyond Good and Evil, at the height of the Victorian era’s hypersensitive repression of sex. “They know no way of defending themselves against their bad conscience other than to pose as executors of more ancient and higher commands.”
Every step in the elaborate codification of moral rules in the West illuminates the superstitious vulnerability of humans to threats of divine punishment for their excessive enjoyments, which has allowed the savvy to profit from that vulnerability. Nietzsche discerned a cynical conspiracy between religious and political rulers who, by declaring sexual pleasure a sin, and themselves as protective intermediaries between sinners and avenging angels, established their divine power over the guilt-burdened multitudes. Recently rediscovered by evolutionary psychologists, the iconoclastic Nietzsche was one of the first to have conducted a “revaluation” of the sexual moral history of the West, from the Dionysian orgies of the Greeks, which he believed emancipated individuals from the power of rulers, to the antisexualism of his own day, which he believed enslaved them to rulers. “I know no higher symbolism than this Greek symbolism of the Dionysian festivals,” he wrote in Twilight of the Idols. “Here the most profound instinct of life, that directed towards the future of life, the eternity of life, is experienced religiously—and the way to life, procreation, as the holy way. It was Christianity, with its ressentiment against life at the bottom of its heart, which first made something unclean of sexuality: it threw filth on the origin, the presupposition of our life.”