by Jesse Bering
There are also those, I should point out, whose sex lives have actually benefited, courtesy of their partner’s sexsomnia. Schenck and his coauthors review several such cases, including a woman who “reported infrequent and hurried sex with her [awake] husband, whom she described as distant and reluctant during wakefulness.” This lady found that, with him at least, “nocturnal sex was more satisfactory, even if associated with bruises at times.”
So, in closing, how do you determine if your partner’s overnight poking is thoughtless or thoughtful? I’ll spare you the details, but this is the very question that prompted me, several nights ago, to write this essay. Apparently, snoring during sexual behavior is a good sign and something that the partners of many sexsomniacs mention as occurring, quite out of the blue, during even the most complicated sex acts. It occurred to me also that zombified nocturnal penile tumescence episodes may be distinguished from actual conscious sexual arousal by the presence or absence of, oh, what to call it, “penile flicking.” (That’s not a technical term, but since I dredged the depths of the literature in vain trying to find the proper term for this voluntary up-and-down movement of the erect penis through the clenching of the pubococcygeus muscle—oh, c’mon, don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about—please permit me a little poetic license.) I always thought such penile flicking responses must serve some communicative signaling function in our species, but apparently nobody has thought to study them from an adaptive perspective. Imagine that.
Anyway, could a sexsomniac use his social cognition to deliberately communicate a message of sexual interest by flicking his penis at his partner? It’s probably not a fail-safe clue, but I suspect not. And bear that helpful hint in mind for whenever the apocalypse arrives, since God only knows it will come with its share of sex-crazed male zombies—a lot of randy gay ones too, according to many Christian conservatives.
Humans Are Special and Unique: We Masturbate. A Lot
There must be something in the water in Lanesboro, Minnesota, because the night I stayed over there, en route to a conference, I dreamed of an encounter with a very muscular African American centaur, an orgiastic experience with drunken members of the opposite sex, and (as if that weren’t enough) then being asked by my hostess to don a white wedding dress for my upcoming keynote presentation. “Does it make me look too feminine?” “Not at all,” she assured me, “it’s a man’s dress.”
Now, Freud might raise his eyebrows at such a lurid dreamscape, but if these images represent my repressed sexual yearnings, then there’s a side of me that I apparently have yet to discover. I doubt that this is the case. Dreams with erotic undertones are like most other dreams during REM sleep—runaway trains with a conductor who is helpless to do anything about the surrealistic directions they take. Rather, if you really want to know about a person’s hidden sexual desires, then find out what’s on his mind’s eye during the deepest throes of masturbation.
This conjuring ability to create fantasy scenes in our heads that literally bring us to orgasm when conveniently paired with our dexterous appendages is an evolutionary magic trick. It requires a cognitive capacity called mental representation (an internal “re-presentation” of a previously experienced image or some other sensory input) that many evolutionary theorists believe is a relatively recent hominid innovation. When it comes to sex, we put this capacity to very good—or at least very frequent—use. In a classic, pre-Internet-porn study (I’ll get to Internet porn in a moment) by the evolutionary biologists Robin Baker and Mark Bellis, male university students were found to masturbate to ejaculation about every seventy-two hours, and “on the majority of occasions, their last masturbation is within 48 hours of their next in-pair copulation.” If they’re not having intercourse every day, that is to say, men tend to pleasure themselves to completion no more than two days after last having actual sex.
Baker and Bellis’s quite logical argument for this seemingly counterintuitive state of affairs (after all, shouldn’t men try to stock up as much sperm as possible in their testes rather than spill their seeds so wastefully in a rather infertile swath of toilet paper or a sock?) is that because there is a “shelf life” for sperm cells—they remain viable for only five to seven days after production—and because adult human males manufacture a whopping three million sperm per day, masturbation is an evolved strategy for shedding old sperm while making room for new, fitter sperm. It’s a question of quality over quantity. Here are the adaptive logistics, according to the scientists:
The advantage to the male could be that the younger sperm are more acceptable to the female and/or are better able to reach a secure position in the female tract. Moreover, once retained in the female tract, younger sperm could be more fertile in the absence of sperm competition [sexually monogamous relationships] and/or more competitive in the presence of sperm competition [in which the woman is having sex with other men]. Finally, if younger sperm live longer in the female tract, any enhanced fertility and competitiveness would also last longer.
Unconvinced? Well, Baker and Bellis are intelligent empiricists. They also have stomachs of steel. One way that they tested their hypotheses was to ask more than thirty brave heterosexual couples to provide them with some rather concrete samples of their sex lives: the vaginal “flowbacks” from their postcoital couplings, in which some portion of the male’s ejaculate is spontaneously rejected by the woman’s body. As Baker and Bellis explain, “The flowback emerges 5–120 min after copulation as a relatively discrete event over a period of 1–2 min in the form of three to eight white globules. With practice, females can recognize the sensation of the beginning of flowback and can collect the material by squatting over a 250 ml glass beaker. [And here comes a useful tip, ladies…] Once the flowback is nearly ready to emerge, it can be hastened by, for example, coughing.”
As the authors predicted, the number of sperm in the girlfriends’ flowbacks increased significantly the longer it had been since the boyfriend’s last masturbation—even after the researchers controlled for the relative volume of seminal fluid emission as a function of time since last ejaculation (the longer it had been, the more ejaculate, on average, was present). If only the parents of teenage boys had these findings available for the first hundred thousand years of our history, think of all the anxiety, guilt, and shame that might never have been.
In fact, even G. Stanley Hall, the father of adolescent psychology research, had a particularly nasty thorn in his paw when it came to the subject of masturbation. Hall accepted that spontaneous nocturnal emissions (that is, wet dreams) in adolescent boys were “natural,” but he viewed masturbation as a “scourge of the human race … destructive of that perhaps most important thing in the world, the potency of good heredity.” In Hall’s view, the offspring of teenage masturbators would show signs of “persistent infantilism or overripeness.” Boys will be boys, Dr. Hall, and—though there’s lamentably no data on this—I’d still bet that those teenagers who deny themselves this natural behavior tend to have more issues than those who don’t.
Now back to masturbation fantasies and cognition, and this is where it gets really interesting. Baker and Bellis’s theory may be peculiarly true for human beings, because from all appearances, under natural conditions, we are the only primate species that seems to have taken these seminal shedding benefits into its own hands. Unfortunately, there has been a paltry number of studies tracking the masturbatory behaviors of nonhuman primates. Although some relevant data is probably buried in some mountain of field notes, I didn’t come across any targeted studies on the subject in wild chimpanzees, and even the prolific Jane Goodall doesn’t seem to have ever gone there. Nevertheless, by all available accounts, and by contrast with human beings, masturbation to completion is an exceedingly rare phenomenon in other species with capable hands very much like our own. As anybody who has ever been to the zoo knows, there’s no question that other primates play with their genitalia (bonobos are notorious for this); the point is that these did
dling episodes so seldom lead to an intentional orgasm.
There’s not much out there in the way of proper research on ape masturbation, but some studies, here and there, do seem to document the infrequency of masturbation in other primates. In the early 1980s, scientists observed the sexual behaviors of several groups of wild gray-cheeked mangabeys for over twenty-two months in the Kibale Forest of western Uganda. There was plenty of sex, particularly during the females’ peak swellings. But the researchers came across only two incidents of male masturbation leading to ejaculation. Yes, that’s right. Whereas healthy human males can’t seem to go without masturbating for longer than seventy-two hours, two measly cases of masturbating mangabeys were observed over a nearly two-year period.
The anthropologist E. D. Starin didn’t have much luck spying incidents of masturbation in red colobus monkeys in Gambia, either. In a brief 2004 article published in Folia Primatologica, Starin reports that over a five-and-a-half-year period of accumulated observations totaling more than ninety-five hundred hours, she saw only five—count ’em, five—incidents of her population of five male colobus monkeys masturbating to ejaculation, and these rare incidents occurred only when nearby sexually receptive females were exhibiting loud courtship displays and copulations with other males.
Intriguingly, Starin says that although females weren’t in the immediate vicinity, it is possible that they could still be seen or heard by the masturbating male while the incident at hand occurred. (In other words, no mental representation required.) In fact, the author’s descriptions of these events strike me as producing accidental, rather than deliberate, ejaculations. Not that they weren’t happy accidents, but still. “During each observation,” Starin writes, “the male sat and rubbed, stretched, and scratched his penis until it became erect, after which additional rubbing produced ejaculate.” Also, out of the fourteen female colobus monkeys tracked during this time span, “three different females were observed possibly masturbating” by self-stimulating their genitals—only possibly because none of these episodes culminated in the telltale signs of colobus orgasm: muscle contractions or facial expressions or wild screams of merciless bliss.
Perhaps the most colorful report of nonhuman primate masturbation—or rather the astonishing lack thereof, even in subordinate males that aren’t getting any—comes from a 1914 Journal of Animal Behavior study by a peculiar character named Gilbert Van Tassel Hamilton. Hamilton apparently ran something of a monkey research center-cum-sanctuary on the lush grounds of his Montecito, California, estate. He was also, clearly, a pioneering sexologist, or at least had especially liberal attitudes for his time, defending the naturalness of homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom, among other things. In justifying his research, which meant getting up close and personal with his monkeys’ genitals, Hamilton opines: “The possibility that the types of sexual behavior to which the term ‘perverted’ is usually applied may be of normal manifestation and biologically appropriate somewhere in the phyletic scale has not been sufficiently explored.”
In fact, he seems to have expected to find rampant masturbation in his animals, but to his surprise only one male (named Jocko) ever partook in such manual pleasures. “Of all my male monkeys,” wrote Hamilton,
only Jocko has been observed to masturbate. After a few days confinement he would masturbate and eat part of his semen. I have reason to believe that he lived under unnatural conditions for many years before I acquired him. In view of this fact that not one of seven sexually mature monkeys masturbated after several weeks of isolation under conditions that favored a fairly healthy mental and physical life (close proximity to other monkeys, large cage, warm climate), I am inclined to believe that masturbation is not of normal occurrence among monkeys.
Granted, Hamilton seems to have been just a tad eccentric. Earlier in the article he reports that one of his female monkeys named Maud liked to be mounted (and entered) by a pet male dog out in the yard until one day poor, horny old Maud offered her backside to a strange mongrel that proceeded to bite off her arm. More disturbing is Hamilton’s description of a monkey named Jimmy who one sunny afternoon discovered a human infant lying in a hammock. “Jimmy promptly endeavoured to copulate with the infant,” observes Hamilton matter-of-factly. It’s unclear whether or not this was the author’s own child, nor is there any mention of the look on said human infant’s mother’s face when she saw what Jimmy was getting up to. In any event, though he may have had some questionable child supervision skills, the candor with which Hamilton reports on the sex lives of his monkeys lends his tales that much more credence.
So why don’t monkeys and apes masturbate nearly as much as humans? It’s a rarity even among low-status male nonhuman primates that frustratingly lack sexual access to females—in fact, the few observed incidents seem to be with dominant males. And why haven’t more researchers noticed such an obvious difference with potentially enormous significance for understanding the evolution of human sexuality? After all, it’s been nearly sixty years since Alfred Kinsey first reported that 92 percent of Americans were involved in masturbation leading to orgasm.
The explanation for this cross-species difference, I’m convinced, lies in our uniquely evolved mental representational abilities: we alone have the power to conjure up at will erotic, orgasm-inducing scenes in the personal movie theaters of our minds … internal, salacious fantasies completely disconnected from our immediate external realities. One early sex researcher, Wilhelm Stekel, described masturbation fantasies as a kind of trance or altered state of consciousness, “a sort of intoxication or ecstasy, during which the current moment disappears and the forbidden fantasy alone reigns supreme.”
Go on, put this aside, take a five-minute break, and put my challenge to the test (you may want to take leave for the restroom if you’re on an airplane): try to masturbate successfully—that is, to orgasmic completion—without casting some erotic representational target in your mind’s eye. Instead, clear your mind entirely, or think of, I don’t know, an enormous blank canvas hanging in an art gallery. And of course no porn or helpful naked assistants are permitted for this task either.
How’d it go? If you’re like most, you’ve seen the impossibility of it. This is one of the reasons, incidentally, why I find it so hard to believe that self-proclaimed asexuals who admit to masturbating to orgasm are really and truly asexual. They must be picturing something, and whatever that something is gives away their sexuality.
Empirically capturing the phenomenology of masturbation fantasies is no easy matter. But some intrepid scholars have indeed tried to do so. In 1960, a British physician named Narcyz Lukianowicz, in an issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, published one of the most sensational scientific reports I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Lukianowicz personally interviewed 188 people (126 males and 62 females) about their masturbation fantasies. An important caveat: All of these people were psychiatric patients with “various complaints and different neurotic manifestations,” so their masturbation fantasies aren’t necessarily typical. Nevertheless, the details provided by these patients about their erotic fantasies give us an extraordinary glimpse into the rich internal imagery accompanying human masturbation. Consider the self-report of a retired civil servant, aged seventy-one, being treated for obsessive feelings of guilt on account of his “excessive masturbation”:
I see in front of me naked beautiful women, dancing and performing some most exciting and tempting movements. After the dance they lean back, and keeping their legs wide apart, show their genitals and invite me to have sexual intercourse with them. They appear so real, that I can almost touch them. They’re in a setting of an oriental harem, in a large oval room with divans and a lot of cushions around the walls. I can clearly see the wonderful gorgeous colors and the beautiful patterns of the tapestry, with an unusual vividness and with all the minute details.
Or consider Lukianowicz’s account of a forty-four-year-old schoolmaster’s fantasies, which reads like some bacchanali
an, morphine-dappled scene ripped from the pages of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch:
In them he “saw” naked adolescent boys with their penes stiffly erected, parading in front of him. As he progressed in his masturbation, the penes of the boys increased in size, till finally the whole field of his vision was filled with one huge, erect, pulsating penis, and then the patient would have a prolonged orgasm. This type of homosexual masturbatory fantasy started shortly after his first homosexual experience, which he had had at the age of 10, and it persists unchanged hitherto.
Now, obviously, there are pathological cases of chronic masturbation where it actually interferes with the individual’s functioning. In fact, it’s not an uncommon problem for many caretakers of adolescents and adults with mental impairments whose charges often enjoy masturbating in public and making onlookers squeal and squirm in discomfort. (Not unlike some captive primates housed in miserable conditions such as laboratories or roadside zoos, where self-stimulation sometimes becomes obsessive.)
One thing that clinicians dealing with this problem may wish to consider is that the individual’s cognitive limitations may not allow him to engage in more “appropriate” private masturbation because of difficulties with mental representation. In fact, frequency of erotic fantasies correlates positively with intelligence. The average IQ of Lukianowicz’s sample was 132. So perhaps public masturbation, in which other people are physically present to induce arousal, is the only way that many with developmental disorders can achieve sexual satisfaction. Sadly, of course, society isn’t very accommodating of this particular problem: between 1969 and 1989, for example, a single institution in the United States performed 656 castrations with the aim to stop the men from masturbating. One clinical study reported some success in eliminating this problem behavior by squirting lemon juice into the mouth of a young patient every time he pulled out his penis in public.