Babes

Is it conceivable that Wilt Chamberlain really slept with twenty thousand women in the course of his womanizing career? To those unfamiliar with the life of the 7'1" “Wilt the Stilt” (he hated the name, apparently), here is a quick biography: Chamberlain was born in 1936 in Philadelphia, where he took up basketball at Overbrook High School before progressing to a professional career with the Harlem Globetrotters, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the San Diego Conquistadors, eventually retiring in 1974. Chamberlain so dominated basketball in his time that he still holds seventy-two NBA records, such as being the only player to score one hundred points in a game, or to average over fifty points a game for an entire season. What of his score in the bedroom, though? True, certain facts about Chamberlain seem to lend credence to his extraordinary claim. The fabulous pad he built in Bel Air, Los Angeles, during his years with the Lakers was known as the venue of Playboy-style parties, and Chamberlain is documented as once sleeping with twenty-three women in ten days.1 Given these appetites, and the fact that a total of twenty thousand would merely require Chamberlain to sleep with an average of one woman per day for fifty years (between the ages of thirteen and his death at sixty-three), the figure seems difficult but perhaps possible. But look a little closer and doubts arise.

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.)

image 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 them—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. image

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 women, 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

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.”

image 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. image

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 delusional 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.

image 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 image

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 percent 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.

image 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. image

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?

image 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. image

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.

Though humiliating, this at least holds out hope for improvement. Even we, after all, can’t resist learning new tricks forever. More troubling is the fact that Malinowski also reported his teenage informants mocking their employers’ limited stamina:

…the brevity and lack of vigour of the European performance were caricatured…the white man achieves orgasm far too quickly…the Melanesian takes a much longer time and employs a much greater amount of mechanical energy to reach the same result.64

Here Malinowski’s subjects had put their finger on a disturbing (for us, at any rate) prospect: that there might be physical deficiencies in the sexual abilities of European men. Compare, for example, the frequency of our two major current sexual problems—premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction. Even the lowest figures given in modern studies show that 26 percent of modern men ejaculate within two minutes of entering the vagina.65 (Kinsey’s figures from the 1940s and 1950s were even worse, with an amazing 75 percent of men lasting less than two minutes.) The evidence of the men of Truk and the Trobriand Islands, on the other hand, suggests that premature ejaculation was much rarer among at least some tribal men. The same applies to erectile dysfunction. The United Kingdom’s National Health Service estimates that more than 50 percent of Western men aged over forty experience at least occasional failure to achieve or maintain an erection. Contrast that with those middle-aged Mangaian womanizers of the Cook Islands, with their thrice-weekly romps and consistent orgasms. The only extenuating circumstance for us is that the environmental stressors of modern life are clearly often to blame. Premature ejaculation, for instance, is often caused by stress and anxiety. Erectile dysfunction, similarly, is often the result of high blood pressure, arteriosclerosis, alcoholism, and smoking, all products of a modern lifestyle largely unavailable to tribal men.

Disturbingly, however, not all our performance problems can be sheeted home to environmental factors. Some appear to be genetic. A 1999 study of male identical twins compared with male non-identical twins66 found that around 23.3 percent of problems in getting an erection had a hereditary origin, and 26.7 percent of problems maintaining an erection did. A 2007 Finnish twin study found roughly the same genetic correlation for premature ejaculation.67 Anthropological accounts, on the other hand, indicate that genetic impotence and sexual dysfunction were very rare among tribal men. What few cases there were appear to have been caused by disease or injury.68

What accounts for the difference? How can there even be one, given that we are talking about sex, the very mechanics of natural selection? How could sexual incompetence have been selected for in Western societies, but against in tribal ones? It’s all wild speculation, of course, but I suspect it’s a case of culture changing the selective landscape. Think of it—in which selective environment are the premature ejaculators and non-erectors going to thrive (or slip through the cracks, at any rate)? The promiscuous environs of an ancient Polynesian island, peopled with sexually demanding and discriminating women with the power to choose between multiple, virile partners? Or the backward realm of a medieval Europe where sex is the fumbling, shameful business of clueless peasant men and women barred from even saying the word “sex,” let alone comparing notes about its performance?

I think we all, sadly, know the answer to that one.