Manthropology

by Peter McAllister

  Remarkably, that’s not the only information the twin herpes simplex viruses can give us about past human sexual behavior. The mere fact that there are two strains—one associated with the human mouth, and the other with the human genitals—probably shows that male hominins didn’t perform oral sex on female hominins for almost the entire 4-million-year period since they split from the lineage of chimpanzees21—if they had, the two viral species would not have diverged in the first place.22 In terms of oral sexual techniques, then, it seems Homo masculinus modernus really is a superstar performer compared to earlier species of man, as well as his own species’ brothers of thirty years ago.

  His brother Homo sapiens of one hundred to ten thousand years ago, though, are another story. The explorers who first contacted Polynesian islanders in the Pacific were fascinated and repelled to discover that Polynesian men were experts at stimulating their women using body parts that would, in the explorers’ opinion, have been better employed reciting biblical verses. On the Truk Islands, for example, cunnilingus was unabashedly performed by those older men who had lost the ability to otherwise satisfy their voracious young female lovers.23 Polynesian men even anticipated the infamous food scene in the steamy film 9 1/2 Weeks with their practice of nibbling delectable morsels of fish direct from their lovers’ vaginas. Similarly, the ancient Greeks, as we have seen from the works of Aristophanes, were quite familiar with cunnilingus, however much they decried it. The Romans, as well, depicted the act on numerous artworks, even though they, too, thought it shameful, and likely to cause permanent bad breath. At the same time, on the opposite side of the world, Chinese Taoists had developed an obsession with the practice, viewing it as a means of imbibing the sacred feminine essence necessary to prolong life. Given the frank eroticism of the Kama Sutra, it is surprising that Indian sensualists of the same era were not quite as enthusiastic, but in fact that manual mentions cunnilingus just twice—once as a practice of sexually frustrated women in harems, and once to remark that it was “not recommended…[but]…if it feels good, do it.”24 Remarkably, the Islamized Arabs of the same period were far keener, eagerly obeying the prophet Muhammad’s hadith (“official pronouncement”) that “every game a person plays is futile except for archery, training one’s horse, and playing with one’s wife.”

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  The cave girl’s best friend?

  For over a century archaeologists have been puzzled by certain implements found in the caves of Stone Age Europe. Averaging around six inches in length, and carved from bone and antler, they resemble nothing identifiable—except possibly a field marshal’s baton, leading early archaeologists to label them bâtons de commandment. Those same archaeologists were too refined to point out that the tools also look like some other implements used to put men in their rightful place: dildos.

  Arguments have raged back and forth ever since about what the implements might be. Based on the handhold at one end, complete with a hole for the index finger, one archaeologist suggested they were spear-throwers. Another, noting the multiple grooves carved in the sides of many bâtons de commandment, suggested they were records of lunar cycles. Hardly any have seen fit to ask the obvious question—what if they really were dildos?

  It’s not just their phallic shape that suggests bâtons de commandment might have been the playthings of lonely Palaeolithic cave girls. Their dimensions also conform closely to those of modern sex toys. Some have phallic veins and glans penises carved into them. Many even terminate in the same upturned curve that modern G-spot vibrators do. It’s all speculation, of course, but if bâtons de commandment really were dildos, it might open up the remarkable possibility that those incised grooves on their sides aren’t some complex form of lunar notation at all, but simply there to provide texture for the stimulation of their discerning users. They would then be, in effect, the Palaeolithic equivalent of the French Tickler.

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  The picture is even worse for us when it comes to sex toys. True, those satisfied Finnish women do vouch for our increased willingness to experiment with devices that pleasure. And a quick stroll down the aisles of any sex store will reveal a bewildering variety of sexual implements—G-spot vibrators, nipple clamps, penis sleeves, and so on. Tribal lovers of our prehistoric past, however, would have laughed at our lily-livered approach to pleasuring women. They turned their own genitalia into sex toys, usually through dangerous and painful surgery. For example, the nineteenth-century father of Italian anthropology, Paolo Mantegazza, recorded that a Dayak tribeswoman of Borneo could legally divorce her husband if he refused to mutilate his penis to accommodate the ampallang—a two-inch rod of silver or gold, capped with small balls at either end, which was pushed horizontally through the member so that the balls protruded either side of the glans, thereby stimulating her vaginal walls.25 Spanish explorers reported that tribesmen in the Visayas Islands of the central Philippines did the same, substituting the balls for a rotating metal star, which “by the prickings of that star…[left] their inconceivably voluptuous mates thoroughly satisfied.” Neither group of tribesmen, though, went quite as far as those Indian men, described by fifteenth-century Venetian traveler Niccolò de’ Conti, who surgically implanted numerous “jingle-bells” in their penises. These men, de’ Conti wrote:

  …purchase bells of gold or silver; and the same women who hawk them come to lift up his skin for him in various places. After the jingle-bells have been inserted and the incision has been sewed up, the wound heals in a few days. Some of them put in a dozen or more…the men who are thus fitted out are in the greatest grace and favor with the ladies; and many of them, as they go walking down the street, are proud of letting the sound of their bells be heard.26

  Technique-wise, then, the picture for modern males is mixed. Though we are certainly more enthusiastic than our grandfathers and great-grandfathers (not to mention earlier species of men) about activities such as cunnilingus, it turns out our more ancient forefathers were often even more comfortable with them. We have also proven less than total in our commitment to pleasuring our lovers with sex toys—at least compared to Dayak, Visayan, and Indian tribesmen of five hundred years ago. But what, then, of the second of our claims to prowess—performance?

  Again, we have certainly lifted our game, and our stamina, since the pre-sexual-revolution era. Whereas foreplay lasted just twelve minutes on average in the 1950s, and actual intercourse just two, by 1995 the majority of men were reporting at least occasional sexual encounters that lasted over an hour.27 Men below the age of thirty now also report having sex at least twice a week.28 Impressively horny this may be, but it still falls short of the sexually supercharged men of earlier days. The nineteenth-century novelist Herman Melville, for example, described the Typee men of the Pacific Marquesas Islands, among whom he was briefly imprisoned, as sexual athletes who had to be at their lovers’ disposal for multi-orgasmic adventures at any time of day or night.29 More precise statistics were recorded by anthropologists on Mangaia, in the Pacific Cook Islands, where young men were found to engage in intercourse until orgasm three times a night, every night. Even men in their late forties copulated at least three times a week, climaxing each time.30 This is approximately double the rate of men in their late forties today, who average just over one sexual encounter a week. Even the Polynesians, however, were shamed by men of the Pokot tribe in early twentieth century East Africa, whose women commonly demanded sexual fulfillment five to ten times a night.31

  It seems incredible, finally, that given these apparent failures in our sexual performance we could bring women to orgasm anywhere near as often as we apparently think we do. And the evidence is, in fact, against us on that score. True, the Finnish women mentioned earlier do report a higher frequency of orgasm than their sisters of 1971,32 but the actual figures are still not encouraging. A mere 28.6 percent of American women surveyed reported that they were always able to orgasm during sex with their male partners.33 This is pathetic when considered in the light of the delu
sional male responses to the same survey, in which 56 percent of men stated that their female partners always orgasmed during sex. It is doubly pathetic when placed alongside late twentieth-century sexologist Shere Hite’s finding that 95 percent of the women in her survey were able to orgasm consistently through masturbating. Some women in our tribal past, however, apparently weren’t forced to rely on autoeroticism for fulfillment. They really could depend on their men to help them orgasm through intercourse every single time. Trukese men, to give one example, regarded sex as a competition in which the partner who orgasmed first lost. If he was pathetic enough to allow it to be him, he faced not just contempt from his lover, but also from his whole tribe.34 Malinowski, similarly, wrote that men having sex in the New Guinean Trobriand Islands had to wait for their partner to ipipisi momona, “climax,” before they could proceed to orgasm themselves. In fact, the example of the Trobriand Islanders shows that yet more of our claims—to have discovered female orgasms and ejaculation—are bogus, too. The Trobriand Islanders were so familiar with both female orgasms and ejaculation that they used the same word to describe them as male orgasm: the ipipsi momona mentioned above. Nor were they alone in their precocious knowledge. Not just other Polynesians, but native peoples as diverse as the East African Batoro and the North American Mohave fully understood the existence and mechanism of both female orgasm and ejaculation. More civilized peoples in Asia were also cognizant of it: several medieval Indian temples feature carved statues showing female ejaculation, and an earlier Chinese sex manual, The Secrets of the Plain Girl, discusses it, too. Even the ancient Greeks were aware of female ejaculation—no less of an authority than Aristotle described it in detail when he wrote in On the Generation of Animals that:

  …the pleasure she experiences is sometimes similar to that of the male, and also is attended by a liquid discharge. But this discharge is not seminal…The amount of this discharge, when it occurs, is sometimes on a different scale from the emission of semen and far exceeds it.

  This is not a bad effort from Aristotle, almost two thousand five hundred years ago, considering that even today some sex researchers still don’t accept that female ejaculation really exists.

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  A neverending obsession

  The ancient Greeks were unique in their preference for small, neatly proportioned penises. Just about all other ancient and tribal men shared our own modern obsession: that their penises should be as large as humanly, or preferably inhumanly, possible. They only differed in how they went about trying to get them.

  Those belligerent men of Truk, for instance, repeatedly struck their penises hard enough to bruise them, on the theory that this >would help them grow. The Portuguese explorer Amerigo Vespucci reported that some South American Indian men went a step further and really did enlarge their members by rubbing them with a certain herb (though how permanent the increase was he doesn’t say).

  South American men in general seem to have been obsessed with penis size. Other explorers reported that Cholomec males in Peru also tied weights to their penises to lengthen them. The most extreme super-sizers, however, were men of the Brazilian Topinama tribe who repeatedly allowed venomous snakes to bite their members in order to enlarge them. We modern men shouldn’t come over too superior, however. After all, the Topinama aren’t among the four hundred thousand American men who handed over U.S. $66 million in 2001–02 to the spam advertisers of just one (completely useless) penile enlargement pill called “Longitude.”35

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  Perhaps it’s lucky that we are not the great seducers we imagine ourselves, since we obviously don’t know quite what to do with those unlucky women we do get our hands on. All is not lost, however. We do have some fallback credits to our name—according to televangelists such as Billy Graham at any rate. He has described modern men as so immoral that they outdo even those of Sodom and Gomorrah in God’s disfavor. Our adultery, wife swapping, swinging, threesomes, foursomes, and other orgies of group sex apparently mark us as the most dissolute men ever. Partisans of the sexual revolution, on the other hand, cite the same habits to label us the most liberated and unrepressed men in history. They can’t both be right, obviously.

  But who is wrong?

  Both, as it turns out. We are neither the most shockingly immoral, nor the most refreshingly liberated men to have ever walked God’s earth. In fact, our adultery, wife swapping, swinging, and group sex wouldn’t have impressed our tribal forefathers one bit.

  Our supposed extramarital extravagance, for example, evaporates under even preliminary inspection. Despite Billy Graham’s condemnation, modern Western men are actually more faithful than not. A large, anonymous survey done in the early 1990s revealed that just 24.5 percent of married men had cheated on their wives at any time during their marriage—usually with a single extramarital partner. Compare this to the adulterous adventures of the Mehinaku, noted percent of men cheating, with an average four to five partners at any one time, let alone over the course of their marriage.36 Nor was it the case that the Mehinaku simply weren’t jealous. Gregor records that both Mehinaku husbands and wives were strongly angered by each other’s affairs, that they “prized each other’s genitals highly.” Ancient Hawaiian philanderers were slightly less omnivorous than the Mehinaku, but infinitely more creative. The custom on those surfing islands was for any man and woman who successfully rode the same wave together to take “certain liberties with one another” on the beach, whatever their marital status.37 In some tribal societies, indeed, adultery was such an accepted part of life that different styles of lovemaking were used for extramarital partners, as opposed to spouses. On Truk, for instance, during sex with a lover:

  …vigorous mutual pain infliction, including lacerating scratching, was considered desirable and was conducted as a kind of contest of strong affection. Between spouses however, convention called for decorous restraint, which was regarded as less enjoyable and which led most married persons to engage in extramarital affairs.38

  Rather than lipstick on the collar, Trukese philanderers apparently had to explain raked scratches on their backs to their furious wives!

  An even more heinous offense than cheating on one’s wife, according to those outraged morals campaigners of the Billy Graham era, was swapping her. Wife swapping apparently started among American military communities in 1950s California and by the early 1970s was being treated as an epidemic that was sapping the moral fiber of the nation. Yet one study from that era shows that wife swapping occurred in just 2 percent of all marriages.39 Given this overreaction, one can only wonder how these good gentlemen (they were mostly men) of the church would have reacted to the habits of prehistoric Inuit men. Eskimo men not only traded wives frequently—sometimes for months or even years—they also lent them, hospitably, to visitors for sex. Lest it be thought Inuits, too, were free from the jealousy inherent to this remarkable practice, it should be noted that even the practice of Inuit husbands sharing a wife, which was supposed to be an equitable and non-jealous arrangement, often resulted in the murder of one husband by the other, usually with the secret connivance of the woman (see “Crimes of passion”). Australian Aboriginal men of Arnhem Land, similarly, shared their wives as a matter of course, making them sexually available to all their “brother cousins”—cousins on their mother’s side. Even this promiscuous partner swapping paled beside that of the Ulithi people in the Caroline Islands, however—they boggled the mind of visiting anthropologist William Lessa with their pi supuhui (“100 pettings”) festival, in which:

  …all persons of the village who are not excessively old or young…pair off and go into the woods…Married couples are not allowed to go off together…[and]…one does not remain with the same partner throughout the occasion…“tagging” is practiced…If visitors…happen to be present at the time, they are invited to join in…The people describe it as “nice play” and make no apologies for it.40

  Comparing the Ulithians’ rate of partner swapping—almost 100 pe
rcent to our paltry 2 percent—is particularly telling, since Lessa’s study was undertaken in the late 1960s, supposedly the height of the American wife-swapping craze.

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  Crimes of passion

  Crimes of passion are standard filler for modern tabloid newspapers. Hardly an edition goes by without featuring the murder of some jilted lover’s ex-girlfriend, or a love triangle ending in tragedy. Inuit lovers of one hundred years ago, however, would have laughed at the supposed violence of our passions.

  The Danish explorer Peter Freuchen recorded that a headman of the Caribou Eskimo, when rebuffed by the parents of a girl he wanted as his wife, ambushed and harpooned her entire family of eight in revenge, only then marrying her. Love triangles were also a particular danger for Inuit men, since strong hunters could, and did, simply demand to sleep with other men’s wives regardless of either party’s agreement. In one case of this kind, this time among the Copper Eskimo, a husband who suffered such an indignity took the unchivalrous step of killing his wife, since he didn’t dare murder the would-be cuckolder but was still unwilling to share. He himself was then promptly killed.

  With behavior like this it is no surprise that another Danish explorer, Knud Rasmussen, found that every single man in a camp of Musk River Eskimo he visited had been involved in a murder over women. It is probably lucky Inuit societies didn’t have newspapers—they would have carried nothing but tragic tales of love gone wrong.

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