Of course, Western wife swappers eventually moved on, too, graduating to genuine swinging by the mid 1970s. The swinging scene has been growing steadily ever since: if NASCA, the North American Swing Club Association, is to be believed 15 percent of U.S. couples now dabble in it. A milestone was the advent of “key parties,” gatherings in which participants’ car keys were pooled in a bowl and then drawn out at random by their partners for the night. Yet it might surprise the daring sexual adventurers who supposedly invented these events that they did nothing of the kind. Key parties had already been invented, over a thousand years before, by those amorous Hawaiians. Nineteenth-century Hawaiian preacher David Malo was basically describing a massive key party when he reported on the pili (“touched by the wand”) parties his people had once enjoyed. It was, he wrote:
…a pastime that was very popular with all the Hawaiians…an adulterous sport…played in the following manner. A large enclosure, or pa, was made…and all the people…seated in a circle within the enclosure. [Then] a man…chanted a gay and lascivious song, waving…a long wand which was trimmed…with tufts of bird feathers…As he made his circuit…the man and woman whom he indicated by touching them with his wand went out and enjoyed themselves together…when daylight came the husband returned to his own wife and the wife to her own husband.41
Even the horny Hawaiians, however, were outdone in swinging by the legendary sensual Tahitians of the same era. Young men and women in Tahiti actually had a permanent swinging fraternity known as the Arioi cult, whose members worshipped the peace god Oro by literally making love, not war. Arioi troupes traveled the island, from village to village, giving performances of erotically charged dance as a prelude to their real mission—“sampling the sexual wares of their hosts and hostesses.”42 They also sampled each other, constantly, with the highest-status members—called “black legs” from their heavy tattooing—having the right of sexual access to all other members on command. Besides beauty and skill at dance, the main qualification for membership was single status—marriage resulted in instant expulsion. Most members were, accordingly, young, but some stayed active until well into middle age (some by the simple but gruesome expedient of killing the babies that resulted from their promiscuity). Anthropologists estimated there were thousands of Arioi across Tahiti at the time of European contact, out of a total population of just fifty thousand (predictably, male Arioi outnumbered females five to one). No exact percentage is available, but Tahitian Arioi clearly proportionately outnumber American swingers by a long, long shot.
The amorous activities of the Arioi also point to problems with the last accusation of those outraged morals campaigners—that modern men have an unsurpassed appetite for threesomes, foursomes, and all manner of group sex. True, group sex in the modern world has moved into the mainstream from its onetime home among “deviant” subcultures such as bikers, yet no more than 6 percent of modern Western men (and women) report having had a threesome, let alone sex with more than three participants.43 This seems to be because we Homo sapiens have an instinctual distaste for allowing our copulations to be witnessed by others. So strong is this that even in tribal societies, where members often live in communal one-room huts, couples still strive for privacy by copulating quietly in the darkness, or in unobtrusive spots outside.44 Yet some tribal men did occasionally indulge in public sex, and when they did it was sometimes with far more than two, three, or even ten extra partners. Some Polynesian societies, for example, celebrated sporting triumphs, or even the return of successful fishing expeditions, with a public orgy. In Hawaii, this also took place upon the deaths of important chiefs, when:
As soon as the chief expired…the people ran to and fro without clothes…every vice was practised…and the gratification of every base and savage feeling sought without restraint.45
These scenes of sexual excess might involve all the adult members of a tribe—sometimes hundreds of people. More disturbing examples (to our ears at any rate) of orgiastic excess were the various tribal sex rituals. The fertility festival of the New Guinean Kiwai people, for example, involved several nights of erotic dancing and mass sex involving all the tribe’s members, with the semen being collected from the women and placed in a pot as a fertility elixir. Other group sex rituals were less offensive (to our taste) but more deadly. The funerals of Viking chiefs, for example, called for his warrior comrades to have group sex with his courageous slave girl (who had usually volunteered to accompany her master into the afterlife) as in this distressing eleventh-century eyewitness account from the Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan:
Then six men entered the tent and all of them had intercourse with her. They then laid her at the side of her master, and two took hold of her feet and two her hands; the old woman known as the angel of death put a rope around her neck and while two men pulled the rope, the old woman stabbed the girl…Thereafter, the relatives of the dead chieftain arrived with a burning torch and set the ship aflame.46
A similarly deadly orgy accompanied the grieving rituals of the Amazonian Cubeo Indians, as described in this anthropologist’s account:
…a fine young girl, painted, oiled and ceremonially costumed, is…made to lie beneath a platform of very heavy logs. With her, in open view of the festival, the initiates cohabit, one after another; and while the youth chosen to be last is embracing her, the supports of the logs above are jerked away, and…the dead girl and boy are dragged from the logs, cut up, roasted and eaten.47
Disturbing stuff, to be sure, but also enough to put even the most debauched modern group-sex enthusiast off his orgies forever more.
Once again things seem to have come to a dreadful pass. Homo masculinus modernus’s heterosexual reputation lies in tatters. There is nothing he does with his women—from getting them, pleasuring them, swapping them, or even cheating on them—that hasn’t been done better, more gently, more frequently, and with more satisfying result by his ancient and tribal forefathers. Should he, then, change tack and try to claim line honors in homosexual adventures? After all, another favored accusation of morals campaigners is that we have unleashed an unprecedented assault of same-sexed sin on the already reeling moral order. There is some scientific support for the notion, too: although only 1 percent of U.S. men describe themselves as exclusively homosexual, according to 2003 data from the National Opinion Research Center, another 4 percent describe themselves as bisexual. But are we really the gayest guys to have ever donned a leather loincloth?
Well, let’s see.
One might argue, for example, that the example of bonobos shows that even our earliest ancestors had a gay streak. Bonobos, as everybody knows, are incredibly sexy apes, and cheerfully indiscriminate in their choice of partner—the majority of bonobo sexual acts are in fact lesbian ones between older females. Male bonobos are slightly less prone to homoeroticism, but they still frequently engage in scrotum-to-scrotum rubbing and penis fencing.48 Male chimpanzees, by contrast, don’t go in for quite as much “bumping of uglies” but they do fondle each other’s scrotums as a gesture of reassurance, and clasp each other by the buttocks when reconciling after a fight. What about our more direct hominin ancestors, though? As it happens there is no evidence for gay abandon among early hominin men, not because they were super-straight, but because there is not much evidence of any sexual intercourse before about eighteen thousand years ago (apart from our own existence, of course). While we do have plenty of sexy scratchings and daubings among Stone Age rock art, strangely we have very few depicting actual sex.49 There are, however, plenty of examples of homoerotic behavior in the more recent prehistoric past of Homo sapiens males. Among the Sambia people of New Guinea, for example, homosexual behavior was (and probably still is) mandatory for males between adolescence and adulthood. From the age of nine, Sambia boys are compelled to repeatedly fellate the older men of their tribe. This sounds like the most dreadful child abuse to us, but the Sambia see it as helping their boys, since semen—the sacred “milk” that they need to become men—
is not generated by the boy’s own body, but passed down instead through generations of men.50 Though ritually driven, there is little doubt that many Sambia men, and boys, are eager participants in the erotic homosexual aspects of this semen transmission.
Lest we think this a bizarre notion only tribal men could possibly entertain, it is worth remembering that some of our own ancestors employed homosexual strategies in raising their boys, too. In ancient Sparta, adult males were actually fined for not taking a boy-lover under the age of twelve. This was because the institution of the eromenos, “boy-lover,” and his erastes, “lover-teacher,” was thought to be the only way the boy could absorb the agoge, “training,” he needed to become a Spartan man. The relationship was definitely erotic, although Spartans claimed the erastes only ever satisfied his lust by intercrural sex (thrusting the penis between the oiled thighs of the eromenos). Contradicting that, however, are the graffiti inscriptions occasionally found near ancient Spartan gymnasiums, saying things like, “Krimon f*cked Amotion here.” The Athenians, similarly, were in no doubt about the habits of their Spartan enemies: Athenian plays are full of comic references to sex “the Spartan way”—that is, sodomy. Whatever the truth of the accusation, it should be abundantly clear that male homosexuality was not invented at the Stonewall Inn in New York, 1969.
The same goes for another frequent criticism of Homo masculinus modernus—his supposed proliferation of explicit pornography. True, porn has exploded over the past forty years, going from a total value of $10 million per year in 1970—for films, magazines, books, and live services like phone sex lines and peepshows—to somewhere between $2 billion and $5 billion per year today. It all started back in 1953, of course, with the first publication of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy. Or did it? Rock art researcher Russell Dale performed an interesting experiment in the late 1970s—he compared selected female figures from Stone Age European cave paintings with centerfolds from the German edition of Playboy magazine.51 He found that the poses of the rock art women were remarkably similar to those of the centerfolds, emphasizing hips, waists, breasts, and legs. In particular, a large number of paintings show female figures from the rear, an unlikely angle unless the intention is to emphasize the sex appeal of her buttocks. Rock art paintings also often featured explicit images of the vulva, a step too far even for Playboy. Of course, modern pornography did eventually move on from Hugh Hefner’s tamer offerings, graduating to genuinely hardcore titles such as Hustler, the magazine famous for crossing the vulval Rubicon with the distastefully titled “split beaver” shot. Yet so, too, did prehistoric erotic art. The Moche people of ancient northern Peru, for example, can justly be called the original inventors of the sexpot. Their sculptured ceramic kettles, thousands of which have been recovered, often depict hardcore sex acts such as fellatio, as well as vaginal and anal sex, all fashioned in fine, realistic detail.52 Particularly impressive are the gynecologically accurate genitals of the female figures; the Moche clearly had the jump on Hustler by some one thousand five hundred years. Moche pots even sometimes featured disturbing images—such as masturbating skeletons—that would be considered illegal, necrophilic pornography in most Western countries today.53 Nor were the Moche pots under-the-counter items, as most Western porn is still legally required to be. Every Moche sexpot was not just an explicit sculpture, but also a fully functional kettle, meaning they could probably be found on nonchalant public display in many Moche dwellings. In our society, by contrast, public display of pornography is still so frowned upon that the sitcom Seinfeld once built the subplot of a whole episode around the disturbing presence of a stack of Penthouse magazines in a dentist’s office.54
After all this, it really seems that Homo masculinus modernus has but one choice: to retire from the field and give up sex completely. Some modern men, indeed, have taken that route, most notably the adherents of the “radical celibate” movement that flourished briefly in the 1980s. One prominent abstainer was the British actor Stephen Fry, who outed himself as a celibate in a memorable 1980s magazine article. Yet even in the matter of restraint we modern males seem distinctly second-rate. Fry’s celibacy, for example, apparently lasted for the sixteen years between 1979 and 1995. This is a long dry spell, to be sure, but compared to the heroic abstention of some ancient men it looks positively promiscuous. Early Christian monks known as the “desert fathers,” who lived as hermits in the Egyptian wastelands, foreswore sex for their entire lives, even though at that time there was no religious rule that they do so. Simeon Stylites, the famous fifth-century ascetic, for instance, lived for sixty-nine years without ever feeling the caress of a woman (helped enormously by the fact that he spent thirty-seven of them living atop a fifty-foot pillar). Predictably, the lengths the desert fathers went to in order to suppress their lust far outstripped those of modern celibates, too. Victorian-era doctors recommended a bland diet and plentiful cold showers to douse the fires of lust; some early Christians preferred to literally fight fire with fire, searing themselves with red-hot irons when troubled by erotic thoughts. They also put themselves on starvation diets to “dry the body”—malnutrition being an effective means of preventing both semen production and any interest in sex. Some placed poisonous snakes in their loincloths, while one intrepid hermit, troubled by the memory of a recently deceased beauty, dug up her corpse and rubbed his clothing in her rotting flesh to curb his longings.55
It could be argued, of course, that the desert fathers were extreme individuals against whom it is unfair to measure ourselves.56 Some ancient societies, however, included whole populations of men who spent their lives in total chastity. One such, apparently, was the Celtic pre-Anglo-Saxon population of England. A 2002 genetic analysis of Y-chromosome variations among English and Welsh men found that the majority of English males carry Y-chromosomes that are very similar to one another, but very different to those of the Welsh.57 Since Y-chromosomes are passed down unchanged from father to son, this would seem to indicate that the original Celtic inhabitants of Britain, represented today by the surviving Welsh, were all slaughtered and replaced in England by the invading Angles and Saxons of the fifth century. It would, that is, were it not for the intriguing fact that studies of British female mitochondrial DNA, which is likewise passed down unchanged from mother to daughter, show much smaller differences between England and Wales, indicating that Celtic women weren’t slaughtered and replaced by invading Angles and Saxons.58 Then there is the linguistic evidence for survival of at least some Celtic males. Rural folk in some parts of England until very recently employed Celtic systems of counting their livestock, indicating that some Celtic men, at least, survived for long enough, possibly as pastoral slaves, to pass on their shepherding habits.59 One possible explanation of all this is that Celtic men did live through the Anglo-Saxon invasion but were deprived of reproductive access to their women by their new overlords. Male Celtic Britons, it seems, may never have had sex again after the Anglo-Saxons invaded their turf.
How’s that for radical celibacy?
* * *
The unkindest cut of all
Newspaper reports of the 1996 demise of the world’s last living eunuch, China’s Sun YaoTing, were, to paraphrase Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated. According to a recent medical study published by Johns Hopkins University, a current Web site for self-castrators claims 3,500 members, 166 of whom have actually neutered themselves.60 Motives ranged from sexual fetishism to a desire to diminish their own sex drive. The recommended tool was the burdizzo, a farmyard castration clamp that severs the testicular blood vessels. The procedure causes 30 to 60 seconds of excruciating pain (sufficient to induce vomiting), yet the ordeal is still, predictably, mild compared to those of ancient eunuchs.
Italian castrati (boys castrated to preserve their soprano voices), for example, had their testicles crushed to destroy them, after the lads were first soaked in a scalding bath to soften them. Many didn’t survive the procedure. So lethal could testicle crushing be that it was actually used as a method
of execution by the Turkish Ottoman emperors.61
Even the Turks, though, had it easy compared to Chinese eunuchs. They had their genitals and testicles bathed in hot peppered water, supposedly to numb them, then crushed by a tight, silk bandage, after which they were sliced off at the base with a hooked blade. A metal plug was then jammed into the wound and the boy forced to walk around for several hours, before being confined to bed without liquids for three days. If he was then able to urinate he stood a chance of living, if not he was certain to die horribly.
Korean eunuchs, however, had it worst of all. In ancient times they were castrated by having their genitals smeared with human feces and then being exposed to packs of hungry dogs.
* * *
What a disaster! Even at not having sex Homo masculinus modernus runs a distant second to his male ancestors. It could be argued, of course, that this is not a failing at all in evolutionary terms, since the genes’ mission is to transmit themselves, not set abstinence endurance records. Looked at in this light the most serious of the failings raised here by far is our lackluster sexual performance. It is, after all, the one that could imperil our transmission of those genes. That being the case, let’s look a little closer at this particular shortcoming. What causes our deficient sexual performance?
The good news is that, in the West at least, it’s partly cultural. Ever since the early Christians (taking their lead from Platonism) decided the body was the prison of the soul, and its desires mere links in the chain, Christendom has been the domain of a sexual ignorance so profound that Henry VIII’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, failed to realize the reason she wasn’t getting pregnant was because her fat husband wasn’t sleeping with her. Such ignorance clearly couldn’t fail to retard male sexual techniques, and retard them it did. Thirteenth-century German church father Albertus Magnus, for example, wrote that of the five sexual positions known to man (five!) only one, the missionary position, was approved by God.62 Reliance on this sexual position may, though, partly explain the disappointing figures for orgasm frequency among modern women during intercourse. Studies seem to show that those sexual positions (of which the missionary position isn’t one) that stimulate the front wall of a woman’s vagina, location of the fabled G-spot, are far more likely to result in female orgasm.63 Interestingly, among those tribal societies with high rates of female orgasm, such as Malinowski’s Trobriand Islanders, these positions were common, and the missionary position rarely used. In fact, it was mocked—Malinowski records that a favorite activity of Trobriand Island boys who had worked with Europeans was imitating, for the amusement of their fellows, their masters’ strange and ineffective sexual position.
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