In the morally righteous and sexually repressed world of Queen Victoria’s Great Britain, into which Murray Levick was born, prostitution was viewed as the Great Social Evil. In London alone, it was estimated that over 8,600 prostitutes were plying their trade. They were almost exclusively poor or working-class women who turned tricks for middle- and upper-class men. For them, it provided a livelihood and a means of survival at a time when jobs were hard to come by; for the men, it was an opportunity to give vent to hormonally driven behaviors at a time when society was doing its best to put the kibosh on sex.
The earliest references to prostitution date back to the 18th century B.C.E. and it, perhaps deservedly, is often referred to as the “oldest profession.” There is an assumption—actually, much more than that, an agreement—that prostitution is a peculiarly human phenomenon. After all, it requires there to be some form of currency that can be exchanged for sexual favors. For us, that could be anything from coins to goats; anything of value, in other words.
It is hard to imagine other animals trading sex for inanimate objects or, even, goats. Least of all, penguins. Indeed, the only objects at all that have any perceived value in colonies of Adelie penguins are stones: the penguins use them to line their nests. The prospect that a female penguin might allow a male to hump her for a price measured in stones is something beyond the ken of even Murray Levick, who has witnessed everything from necrophilia to pedophilia, from self-gratification to rape by penguins. No, when it comes to sexual depravities, even the Victorian Levick knew that we humans are in a class of our own.
He had only to look at the way men fought with each other to realize the limitless bounds of the moral void that accompanies us compared to the other members of the animal kingdom.