First, Chamberlain got off to a late start: his schoolmates reported he was still a virgin at graduation. Second, his mini Playboy mansion, where most of this action took place, wasn’t built until Wilt was over thirty. A few years probably have to be taken off, too, at the other end of Chamberlain’s life, since he began suffering serious heart trouble in his early fifties, ten years before his death from congestive heart failure in 1999. Then there is the fact that Chamberlain claimed twenty thousand different women, when he is known to have had a couple of regular girlfriends—(this may not have stopped his womanizing, but it surely inhibited it somewhat). Taking all this into consideration, Chamberlain’s daily average might have had to be as high as two to three women per day, every day, to make his total of twenty thousand. We will never really know, of course, but it seems reasonable, given this, to mark Chamberlain down to a possible ten thousand conquests over the course of his womanizing career.
This is still an impressive total, in anybody’s language, but how does it compare to the famous players of the ancient past? To make it a fair contest, we will have to compare Chamberlain with the only class of man who could equal him in prestige, wealth, and opportunity—those rulers and potentates who were able to accumulate harems. (Athletes such as Porphyrius could, too, of course, but sadly we don’t have any information on the famous charioteer’s erotic achievements.) A quick survey shows that many of these horny tyrants would have given Chamberlain a serious run for his bunnies. King Tanga of the ancient north Indian kingdom of Varanasi, for example, apparently kept a harem of sixteen thousand maidens. Ghiyath-ud-din-Khilji, who ruled another Indian kingdom, Malwa, in the late sixteenth century, did almost as well with fifteen thousand. True, this is only six thousand and five thousand more, respectively, than Chamberlain’s amended total, but it must be remembered that there was also some movement in and out of harems as women aged and were replaced by younger beauties, meaning the true totals for the ancient womanizers could have been even higher. As late as the nineteenth century, King Mongkut of Siam—immortalized for Western audiences through the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I—maintained a harem of six thousand women. Defenders of the sexual prowess of Homo masculinus modernus and his womanizing champion Chamberlain, might, however, protest that merely having a harem of several thousand women isn’t the same as sleeping with them. Yet we do have evidence that these rulers did indulge the gluttonous sexuality that their power allowed. Mongkut, for example, fathered eighty-two children—particularly impressive considering he was a celibate monk until the age of forty-seven, giving him just seventeen years with those six thousand concubines before his death at sixty-four. Then there is the evidence, noted earlier, that approximately 32 million people, or 0.5 percent of the world’s population, are descended from Genghis Khan and his close male relatives. (The study actually found that 16 million men carry Genghis Khan’s Y-chromosome; by extension, that means approximately 16 million daughters probably descend from him, too.) Despite the Mongols’ reputation for rape, the greater part of this contribution clearly came from the massive harems Genghis and his successors maintained. Genghis’s grandson Kubilai, for example, kept a seraglio of seven thousand women, replenishing them with a yearly intake of a couple of hundred virginal beauties from within his empire.
Clearly, these libidinous lords could well have put even Wilt the Stilt to shame in the womanizing stakes. It could be argued, however, that they, as well as Chamberlain himself, represent an unusual deviation from the norm. More relevant is the experience of the ordinary man, the everyday Homo masculinus modernus schmo going about his business—part of which, presumably, includes trying to reproduce himself. How does he fare against his ancient and tribal “ordinary guy” competitors? Any inquiry into this immediately runs into a problem: reliable figures for the number of lovers the average modern Western male has in his lifetime are almost nonexistent. Every survey taken not only gives a different figure, it also shows a logical impossibility—that men average many more partners in their lives than women do.2 The only logical assumption is that men consistently exaggerate their reported number of sexual partners (and that women underreport theirs).3 A better strategy, therefore, is to look at their rate of romantic success—how often they close the deal in how many attempts. Fortunately, we do have one measure (admittedly a vague one) of the modern ordinary man’s success rate in romantic ventures, thanks to those gurus of the seduction community mentioned at the end of the previous chapter. For the uninitiated, the seduction community is a loose conglomeration of male self-help experts, now predominantly Internet-based, who grew out of the movement set off by Eric Weber’s 1970 book How to Pick Up Girls!4 These gurus pride themselves on providing, usually for a price, sure-fire pickup advice specifically for the ordinary schmo—no matter, as one pickup instructor’s book is subtitled, what he looks like, or how much money he makes. Exact claims of numbers of lovers are again hard to pick out among the general braggadocio, but they certainly are substantial: pickup guru Erik Von Markovik, who calls himself Mystery, tells readers of his book The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women into Bed that he has slept with hundreds of women.5 This is undeniably noteworthy, yet most pickup gurus will admit that these successful hits also come out of many, many approaches and rejections. So, while these superstars of “ordinary man” romancing do boast reasonably high numbers of conquests, their actual rate of success is much lower.
But is it better, or worse, than that of ancient and tribal males?
Thanks to the work of anthropologist Thomas Gregor among the Mehinaku, we do have a sample population of tribal men with which to compare. During his years of living in a Mehinaku village, Gregor compiled a list of which men were having affairs with which women. To his astonishment, he discovered that in a village of just thirty-seven adults, eighty-eight extramarital affairs were being conducted.6 Almost all the men were conducting at least three affairs at any one time, and some were involved in ten. What makes the total so striking is that incest prohibitions severely limited the number of partners from whom a man could choose, meaning that the men of the village were, effectively, having affairs with every single woman that their laws allowed them to. Their success rate, in other words, was almost 100 percent. Apart from simple bribery with gifts (which admittedly played a strong part), Gregor put this down to the erotic courage of Mehinaku men, who sometimes went so far in their pursuit of girlfriends as to simply stick their hand through the thatched walls of her hut in hopes of an intimate touch, regardless of whether her potentially enraged husband was home. They also frequently attempted the ultimate in dangerous infidelities—creeping into a girlfriend’s hut at night to copulate with her as her husband slept in his hammock just inches above. (Interestingly, the Tahitians had a very similar custom called mafera, “night creeping”—in this case, however, the main threat was from the woman’s relatives who shared her communal hut; to evade them the stealthy lothario usually greased himself with coconut oil to slip through their clutching hands.)
* * *
Rough trade
Sadomasochism is a popular form of sexual fantasy: 14 percent of American men and 24 percent of American women report at least occasional desires to be painfully violated. Once more, however, we lack follow-through—just 5 percent of couples ever graduate to incorporating real pain into their sex lives.7 Some tribal peoples, by contrast, mixed pleasure with pain in almost every sexual experience.
Lovers in the Trobriand Islands, for example, left the marks of their passion all over each other’s bodies. Not only did they frequently draw blood with bites to their lovers’ lips, cheeks, and noses, and tear out clumps of hair in their sexual frenzy—they also bit off each other’s eyelashes at orgasm and raked each other’s skin so deeply they left deep, permanent scars called kimali. More serious erotic scarring also took place in the sadistic kimali kayasa festival, this time involving weapons. In the kimali kayasa, village boys danced and sang while the girls flirted with the
m—by slashing them with bamboo knives and obsidian axes. Each girl’s aim, Bronislaw Malinowski wrote:
…was successively to slash as many men as she could; the ambition of the man to carry away as many cuts as he could stand, and to reap the reward in each case.8
Remarkably, the kimali kayasa was not even the most violent of the Trobrianders’ erotic customs. That honor goes to the yausa, an orgiastic assault inflicted on male trespassers by village women. In the yausa, Malinowski reported:
…the women will defecate and micturate [urinate] all over his body, paying special attention to his face, which they pollute as thoroughly as they can…[causing the man to] vomit, and vomit, and vomit…sometimes these furies rub their genitals against his nose and mouth, and use his fingers and toes, in fact any projecting part of his body, for lascivious purposes.
Considering even a faked version of these activities sent audiences across the modern world into vomiting hysterics (the 2 Girls 1 Cup viral Web video, in which two actresses ate supposed excrement—actually melted chocolate) it seems doubtful any but the most dedicated of modern masochists would genuinely relish a yausa session at the hands of these harpies.
* * *
Clearly, then, while the seduction-community gurus’ pickup techniques do work, they lag some ways behind those of our ancient forebears. In terms of bang for their buck (sorry), would-be Casanovas would be better off scanning a few anthropology texts and ordering in some night-vision goggles for a midnight mafera run. It isn’t just the comparative lack of success that damns the gurus’ techniques, though. Examining them in the light of those of our tribal forefathers leaves the distinct impression that the gurus, and by extension the rest of us, are such unchivalrous Romeos that we scarcely deserve the label.
The gurus’ use of language in seduction, for example, is rather different from the love talk of the ancient past. Most gurus use language as a weapon to manipulate a woman’s emotional state. The aim is to bypass her conscious self and access her deep emotional machinery, effectively removing her ability to consciously evaluate the pickup artist’s approach. The pickup artist’s language is, accordingly, often calculated, deceptive and full of purpose, but with very little beauty, poetry, or art. Sometimes, indeed, it is not even very nice. Mystery, for example, is famous for inventing the “neg,” short for negative. This is a not-quite-insult such as, “Nice nails—are they real?” that “puts the target off-guard and makes her question her own value, increasing yours on a relative basis.”9 Perhaps the most highly developed use of manipulative language, though, can be found in the “speed seduction” product offered by Ross Jeffries. Jeffries, dubbed the “King of Schwing” by Rolling Stone magazine, is a devotee of neurolinguistic programming, a pseudo-scientific motivational program that seeks to trigger emotional states through the use of supposed subliminal commands and keywords. Speed-seduction practitioners will, therefore, pepper their language with subliminal triggers such as “YOU’RE MINE”—as a deliberate mispronunciation of “your mind”—to implant an attitude of surrender in the target woman’s mind. This reaches a height of manipulative crudity in the following suggestive routine—attributed not to Jeffries but to another legendary pickup artist, Bishop—which supposedly allows novice seducers (the PUA: pickup artist) to convince women to fellate them:
PUA : Hey Alicia. What do you love to eat? [What] makes you salivate just by thinking of it?
GIRL: Oh…I love fresh ripe mangoes from Hawaii.
PUA : Ripe mangoes…IMAGINE SUCKING into one sweet, delicious, juicy mango NOW…can you taste the sweetness of the mango…INSIDE YOUR MOUTH…doesn’t that give you lots of pleasure and ha-PENIS…I bet, if there were a mango here NOW, you’d WANT IT IN YOUR MOUTH [point subliminally to your penis].10
Effective this ludicrous patter may well be,11 but poetry it isn’t.
The language of love in tribal societies, by contrast, often was (and is) richly poetic. Anthropologist Mette Bovin, for instance, writes that among the Wodaabe nomads of Niger:
A young man who wishes to impress and seduce a young girl must never be too direct. He should develop a refined language, a nonaggressive poetic language called “sweet tongue”…The seducer talks in metaphors, in images, almost in poetry. If a young man is too direct, or too fast, the girl may go away and listen to a more polite young man.12
A successful ancient Tahitian seducer, similarly, was he who “composes pretty love songs and utters them with a tender voice, tender as the taro leaf softened by the evening breeze.”13 Some tribal males even had to master a completely new language, or a new way of speaking, to engage in love talk. Tribal Mangyan men of the Philippines island of Mindoro, for instance, had to speak in pahágot—a specialized love language in which the speaker formed words not by exhaling, but by inhaling. This tricky art (try it yourself and see) was used to disguise the identity of Mangyan Romeos as they serenaded their prospective lovers from the darkness outside their huts.14
As it is with saying, so it is with doing. Seduction-community literature is full of urgings for the would-be PUA to “be the alpha male.” Tony Clink’s book The Layguide, in fact, makes this the second of his ten seduction commandments. Actually, though, what he recommends is not that the aspiring PUA be the alpha male, but that he pretend to be him, as this advice from the book makes clear:
Project the image of the alpha male and women will flock to you…You do this not by getting muscles and money, but by changing your attitude…determine what the model of an alpha male should be…then become that model. Again, this has nothing to do with strength, looks, or money… 15
Note that there is no suggestion here that the PUA actually do anything to prove himself as a capable, attractive, alpha man—master a musical instrument, say, or work out, or perform charity work with needy children. Aspiring tribal Don Juans who tried to simply assume the status of alpha males, on the other hand, would have been laughed out of their loincloths, or worse. They were judged on what they actually achieved, as this passage from an ancient Tahitian seduction guide makes clear. The man who could become a successful seducer was, the guide states:
The man who beats the drum well (women will pursue him);
The one who plays the nose-flute well (they will take him forcibly);
The handsome-faced Arioi [dancer] who bathes…in the morning;
The renowned wrestler who…will…always win;
The warrior…whose head has never been struck by his enemy’s club;
The artisan who builds a beautiful canoe;
He who builds a handsome house.16
Without wishing to rub it in, one can’t help but notice that there is not a single mention of “He who hasn’t really done anything except pump himself up into a delusional state of masculine self-worth with constant-rotation neurolinguistic programming on his iPod” there.
But perhaps that just got left out at the editing stage.
In any case, things seem clear—Homo masculinus modernus is not quite the champion seducer the gurus of the seduction community tell themselves, and us. But what about those times he, however inexpertly, actually gets the girl? How well does he satisfy her sexually? Reading the letters columns of men’s mags such as FHM and Maxim certainly gives the impression there are more satisfied women running around today than ever before. But we don’t have to just take their boasting words for it. There is also considerable scientific evidence that modern heterosexual women really are more sexually satisfied than their sisters of decades past. Forty percent of Finnish women in 1992, for example, reported satisfaction with their sex lives, as opposed to just 30 percent who had been thus satisfied in 1971 (mind you, that still leaves 60 percent unsatisfied).17 Confirming the boasts of all those men’s-mag correspondents, the Finnish women agreed that their men now used more varied and superior sexual techniques, performed better and for longer in bed, and brought them to orgasm much more frequently than their partners of twenty years before had. This seems conclusive, at least for Finnish w
omen, but a fair comparison again demands that we ask how all three of these categories—modern men’s techniques, performance, and ability to bring our partners to orgasm—measure up to those of our ancient and tribal forerunners.
Several lines of evidence show male sexual techniques really have improved over the past few decades. First, those Finnish women reported that their lovers engaged in more caressing and foreplay than before, were more willing to experiment with sex toys, and were also much more likely to take the active role in oral sex. Other figures confirm this: 76.6 percent of American men now report having given their partners cunnilingus at least once.18 In this case, once again, we don’t even have to just take their word for it—it’s also proven by the changing patterns of herpes simplex infection in the modern world. Two strains of the herpes simplex virus infect modern humans: HSV-1 and HSV-2. HSV-1 historically was confined to the mouth, causing cold sores, while HSV-2 was transferred by genital-to-genital contact, causing genital herpes. A 2006 Dutch study, however, found that over 52 percent of genital herpes cases are now caused by HSV-1, and another, Australian, study shows that more than twice as many women have HSV-1 genital infections as men.19 It seems those American men aren’t lying: they really are performing more oral sex on their partners (though that’s not, unfortunately, the only gift they’re giving them). The fact that the rate of HSV-1 genital infection was as low as 3 percent in some Western countries as late as 1980 shows how uncommon such activities were before.20
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