SEX

From Philosopedia

SEX

• In your sex life preserve purity as far as you can before marriage, and if you indulge, take only those privileges that are lawful. However, do not make yourself offensive or censorious to those who do indulge, and do not make frequent mention of the fact that you do not yourself indulge. –Epictetus

• As far as sex is concerned, I don’t think the American man gives his woman a fair shake. There’s not enough quantity and certainly not enough quality. People talk the game, but they don’t play it very well. –Frank Sinatra, singer

The sexual attitudes of non-believers as compared to those of believers have never been definitively studied. Because of many of the organized churches’ teachings it is likely, however, that the former are more apt to enjoy sex, experimenting with different positions and partners, whereas the latter are more apt to suffer needless anxiety about sex and to feel guilty even when finding their left testicle is larger than their right (which they may not know is a universal characteristic) or when they have a pleasurable orgasm (which many women regrettably never achieve). Sex in America (1994) does state that Christian churchgoers likely have fewer partners than “heathens,” but one of the facets of studying sex is that humans have difficulty talking about it, particularly during it.

Early Practices

The sex life of early man is a mystery. Reay Tannahill, in her Sex in History (1980), remarks that “polygamy has been far more widespread than monogamy during most of the five thousand years of recorded history.” Erotic Stone Age drawings exist, and there is much evidence that it was not always known how human births came about, that “it is not altogether easy to accept that homo sapiens, after more than 100,000 years of fully-fledged existence, may still have been unaware of the biological facts of life when the Neolithic revolution began.” Evidence exists that some thought man can become pregnant (for instance, by eating possum) and die in childbirth. Some women denied that men had anything whatsoever to do with their being pregnant. Men, meanwhile, viewed themselves as superior in all ways to women, and they dominated the world’s earliest civilizations in the Near East.

Greek Practices

In Greece, where dildos were used and where masturbation was considered an emotional safety valve, Demosthenes observed, “We have hetairai for our pleasure, concubines for our daily needs, and wives to give us legitimate children and look after the housekeeping.” Hetairai were successful women in a man’s world, sometimes very successful; they also were experienced in anal intercourse. As for pederasty, “the bloom of a twelve-year old boy,” said Straton, “is desirable, but at thirteen he is much more delightful. Sweeter still is the flower of love that blossoms at fourteen, and its charm increases at fifteen. Sixteen is the divine age.” The Greeks, however, considered intercourse with a boy who had not reached the age of puberty as evil and as illegal as in other civilizations; homosexuality in the modern sense is seldom attested to in ancient Athens.

Hebrew Practices

As Tannahill among others points out, “It was the monotheistic strand of Near Eastern culture that won in the end, that of the Hebrews, who had no need to compromise between religious and secular law. The Pentateuch was a mixture of Near Eastern customs and ordinances handed down from Sinai, but both had the authority of Yahweh and were thus mandatory. So the attitudes born of the Neolithic era were preserved, and when the Christian Church, solidly based on Hebrew foundations, took over the Western world as successor to Rome, social and sexual relationships became fossilized in the amber of ancient Hebrew custom. To Near Eastern prejudices, the Church Fathers added their own. Sex was transformed into a sin and homosexuality into a danger to the state.” The Church proscribed adultery, abortion, homosexuality, infanticide, zoophilia, and masturbation. Whereas Solon had suggested “three times a month” for marital intercourse and the Jewish Mishnah prescribed, “Every day for the unemployed, twice a week for laborers, once a week for ass drivers,” the Church said never, unless children were the object. Whereas other societies regarded sex as pleasurable, in any position, to the Church sexual pleasure was a sin “and only the man-superior position was acceptable.” Meanwhile, while the Church encouraged monogamy, others compared the practice to that of a person voluntarily choosing a lifetime diet of one cup of rice per day for sustenance.

Asian, Arab, and English Practices

Tannahill has written that Asia and the Arab world added a new dimension to “pure love” that was to influence not only poets and troubadours of courtly love but also the whole image of woman in the West. “The Victorian resurrection of courtly love was largely responsible for transforming middle-class ladies into sweet, untouchable guardians of morality, whose distaste for sex led to an explosive increase in prostitution, an epidemic spread of venereal disease, and a morbid taste for masochism,” she notes. “The artificial ideal of the Victorian family was sustained until well into the twentieth century, most influentially by Hollywood rather than the Church, but the published researches of Kinsey and others, increasing familiarity with psychoanalytic theory, and simple economic reality ultimately helped to undermine it. Even so, it still survives, despite the revulsion against traditional relationships expressed in women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the free sex movement, and despite the fact that, in legal terms, the sexes have in many countries been brought almost into equilibrium.” If so, and in social terms, much remains to be accomplished, feminists will argue.

Georgian England’s most popular sex manual in the 1690s, Aristotle’s Master-Piece, remained in print for several centuries. It avoided anything that was considered to be at all problematic—homosexuality, sadomasochism, masturbation—as well as “any dialectic of sex with neurosis.”

The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution

Faramerz Dabhoiwala, the author of The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (Allen Lane, 2012, 484 pages, £25), is a lecturer in history at the University of Oxford.

His book was reviewed in The Guardian (10 February 2012):

Protestant Britain 400 years ago, unless you were fairly rich and powerful, it must have taken extraordinary courage to commit adultery or to fornicate. Even if you were not found out, you could be certain that an angry God knew of your sin, and unless you were sincerely penitent he would burn you for all eternity. But adultery and fornication were crimes as well as sins, and if you were caught, and especially if your crime led to the birth of a child, the consequences could be appalling.

Faramerz Dabhoiwala begins his book with an account of a couple convicted in 1612 of fornication and of producing a bastard child in the city of Westminster. They are stripped to the waist, tied to the tail of a cart, whipped from the Gatehouse Prison by the abbey all the way to Temple Bar, and there banished from the city, from their relations, their friends and their livelihoods. The strict sexual discipline imposed by the courts was popular, and it got stricter. By 1650 adultery was made a capital crime. The passions of adulterers must have been overwhelming to make them take such risks.

A hundred years later things looked very different. "A new openness about sex had transformed the culture of the English-speaking world" – at least for some. Buggery, of course, would be a capital offence for a century to come, and as at other times in history a new sexual permissiveness was not entirely good news for women. As the legal policing of heterosexual sex largely disappeared, the number of illegitimate births increased, and with it the number of women regarded as "ruined". But among heterosexual men, not just the rich and powerful but also the middle-class and moderately well-off, sexual behaviour had come to be seen as a largely private matter, with the paradoxical result that "a whole range of sexual ideas and practices, within and without marriage, was now discussed, celebrated and indulged more publicly than ever before".

This is Dabhoiwala's "first sexual revolution", and he sees it in relation partly to the movement of population from the country to the towns, where there were more places and occasions for the sexes to meet and less opportunity for the community at large to inspect and control individual behaviour. But he understands it too in relation to the enlightenment in Europe and north America, and the model it created of civilisation based on the principles of "privacy, equality, and freedom".

No one is likely to argue, but one of the good things about this book is that it does not offer to explain this revolution in terms of its supposed causes, but to place it in as wide a context as possible, as a "central part" of a model of civilisation that changed everything – the province of legislation, the influence of religion, the rights of citizens – as well as sexual behaviour and our beliefs about it. The result is an informative, wide-ranging book that is also compellingly readable.

Revolutions, of course, are never complete, and the male intellectuals in the vanguard of the sexual revolution were keen that this one would be no exception. The prohibition on polygamy was tirelessly interrogated, but no one seemed very keen to advocate polyandry, which raised questions about the inheritance of property that would have remodelled society to a much too revolutionary degree. The call to return to a legendary time when "women, and all other things were in common" was really a call to share women and nothing much else. Sexual desire was argued to be a natural appetite, like hunger or thirst, implanted by God, and which he must have intended us to satisfy; but though both men and women were meant to eat when hungry and drink when thirsty, it was surely not likely that God intended women to have sex whenever they felt like it. God had made the sexes different, and it was as "natural" for women to be chaste as it was for men to take pleasure wherever they found it.

Many writers on religion began to question the eternal punishments that a supposedly loving God was believed to visit on sexual offenders. For the libertines of the later 18th century, the new uncertainty about the dangers of hellfire transformed it from the strongest of all deterrents to a risk that put the spice into vice. But for men in public life, the greatest benefit of the sexual revolution may have been the increasing agreement that, as long as a man's sexual behaviour did not impede the fulfilment of his public duties, it was no one's business but his own.

Enlightenment thinking had a dramatic effect on how the phenomenon of prostitution was understood. The sexual liberation of well-off heterosexual men made it convenient to regard prostitution as positively necessary to the health of society, and to approach it as a social phenomenon: not just the result of the supposed moral failings of women too idle to get a proper job, but an effect of systemic ignorance and poverty. Fallen women who displayed the right kind of modest contrition became the object of fashionable charities. At the same time, it increasingly came to be seen that women become prostitutes as a result of their treatment by men, and a standard narrative begins to circulate, especially in the novel, about how prostitutes are made.

A teenage girl, the daughter of a country family of impeccable moral reputation, is spotted by a young gentleman who lays siege to her chastity with repeated promises of marriage. Hopelessly in love, the girl eventually agrees to elope with him to London. But the young gent speaks less and less of marriage, soon tires of his easy conquest, and passes her on to a friend or simply deserts her. Destitute, possibly pregnant, unable to return to her parents, she ends up on the streets.

The point of this narrative is less to condemn the behaviour of men than to persuade male and female readers alike that prostitutes are human and deserve our pity. The story fitted the new genre of the novel, which could offer a much fuller, more circumstantial account of why people behave as they do, than any previous form of literature, and was programmed to persuade us that the more we understood, the more we would forgive.

Dabhoiwala believes the novel played a vital part in changing how prostitutes came to be regarded, but I am not so sure: the tolerant morality of the novel was a frequent target of those who worried about female conduct, and even in novels themselves, novel-reading was often seen as predisposing young girls to seduction, and therefore (as the standard narrative had it) to prostitution. Respectable novelists such as Jane Austen tended to avoid the issue.

"To some small degree Dabhoiwala seems to me to exaggerate his sexual revolution by allowing his eyes to drift up the social scale as his story moves forward in time. In particular, I was left wondering how far ordinary, lower-class heterosexual men shared in the freedoms enjoyed by their social superiors in the 18th century; they don't get much attention. Overall, however, he has done a wonderful job. Determined to acknowledge the limitations of the sexual revolution he describes, unwilling to minimise the advantages it brought, careful to remind us that the sexual discipline often violently enforced by some non-western cultures was, for most of its history, enforced as eagerly in the west too, Dabhoiwala has to tread a difficult path through a more or less limitless field, and he manages it with great care and unselfconscious aplomb.

The Economist (11 February 2012) contains a disinterested review of Dabhoiwala's book.

United States Practices

In nine states of the United States it was illegal in 1933 for unmarried sex between consenting heterosexuals. Oral sex (giving and receiving) was illegal in twenty states for heterosexuals, twenty-seven states for homosexuals, leading activists to complain that few remember what Jefferson said in his first inaugural address in 1801: “A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.”

References to Sex

Bertrand Russell, in 1969, wrote,

I should deal with sexual morality exactly as I should with everything else. I should say that if what you’re doing does no harm to anybody, there’s no reason to condemn it. And you shouldn’t condemn it merely because some ancient taboo has said that this is wrong.

Views on sex are almost as varied as sexual positions:

• The pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable. – Lord Chesterfield

• Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble. – John Barrymore

• Is sex dirty? Only if it’s done right. – Woody Allen

• Men and women, women and men. It will never work. – Erica Jong

• Why should we take advice on sex from the Pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t. – George Bernard Shaw

• Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress. – Quentin Crisp

In 1992, a study of the sexual practices of Americans was compiled, one involving 3,432 men and women aged 18 to 59. Their study found that 22.8% of the women had been forced by men to do something sexually that they did not want to do; however, only 2.8% of the men said they had ever forced a woman into a sexual act. While only 2.8% of men and 1.4% of women in the study identified themselves as homosexual or bisexual, 10.1% of men and 8.6% of women reported they had had same-sex desires or experiences—this finding was quite different from the 1-in-10 figure that came from the 1948 Kinsey study. The statistics include how many like to watch a partner undress, receive oral sex, give oral sex, have anal intercourse, have group sex, etc. More than 80% of Americans are said to have had one sexual partner, or no partner at all, in the preceding year, and that number rises to 96% among the married. Half the population is said to have no more than three different partners, the median for men being six and for women was two, in an entire lifetime. A total of 90% of the women and more than 75% of the men claim they have never had extramarital sex. The survey findings were published in two books: Sex in America: A Definitive Survey (1994) and The Social Organization of Sexuality (1994), the latter going far beyond Kinsey and being one of the most comprehensive tour of our bedrooms ever published.

However, critics were fast to note flaws in the study’s methodology. For example, the average man was said to have had six sex partners while the average woman had had two—logically, these numbers should be equal (and imply that men exaggerate or women understate). Also, those interviewed in the presence of a spouse or a sex partner responded differently when interviewed alone. The study, which had wanted to obtain a sample of about 400 homosexuals, had fewer than 100 because the Bush Administration had agreed with conservative pressure and withdrew the project’s financing. The original survey, which was to have been paid for by the Federal Government, was opposed by religious and ultra-conservative leaders, leading to its discontinuance. Because the Government was afraid to ask, someone else found out: the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

A government can be quite effective in setting an ideological fashion. For example, and as evidence of the efficacy of the prudery of Chairman Mao’s teachings, the Chinese Legal Daily in 1994 told of two highly educated university lecturers who, after months of trying to conceive a child, sought the advice of a physician. The physician, finding the wife was still a virgin, learned that the couple thought that sleeping together, literally just sleeping in the same bed, was a reproductive act.

(See entries for Adamastor; Arthur Danto; Fuck; Sex Education; Sexuality; and Homosexuality. Also, see Joseph McCabe’s Rationalist Encyclopedia concerning sex and religion. He points out that of the 600 religious sects that are included in a Dictionary of Religion, only seven were founded by women. Wardell Baxter Pomeroy, a leading sexologist and one of the authors of the Kinsey Report, is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism’s Academy of Humanism. Vern L. Bullough, among other secular humanists, has written extensively on the topic.)

{CE; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell}}