The Naked Ape (11 page)
Most of these controls are maintained by the simple, unanswerable strategy of referring to the phenomena they restrict as ‘not nice’, ‘not done’, or not polite’. The true anti-sexual nature of the restrictions is seldom mentioned or even considered. More overt controls are also applied, however, in the form of artificial moral codes, or sexual laws. These vary considerably from culture to culture, but in all cases the major concern is the same—to prevent sexual arousal of strangers and to curtail sexual interaction outside the pair-bond. As an aid to this process, which is recognised to be a difficult one even by the most puritanical groups, various sublimatory techniques are employed. Schoolboy sorts, for example, and other vigorous physical activities are sometimes encouraged in the vain hope that this will reduce the sexual urges. Careful examination of this concept and its application reveals that by and large it is a dismal failure. Athletes are neither more nor less sexually active than other groups. What they lose from physical exhaustion, they gain in physical fitness. The only behavioural method that seems to be of assistance is the age-old system of punishment and reward-punishment for sexual indulgence and reward for sexual restraint. But this, of course, produces suppression rather than reduction of drive.
It is quite clear that our unnaturally enlarged communities will call for some steps of this kind to prevent the intensified social exposure from leading to dangerously increased sexual activities outside the pair bond. But the naked ape’s evolution as a highly sexed primate can take only so much of this treatment. Its biological nature keeps on rebelling. As fast as artificial controls are applied in one way, counteracting improvements are made in another. This often leads to ridiculously contradictory situations.
The female covers her breasts, and then proceeds to redefine their shape with a brassiere. This sexual signalling device may be padded or inflatable, so that it not only reinstates the concealed shape, but also enlarges it, imitating in this way the breastswelling that occurs during sexual arousal. In some cases, females with sagging breasts even go to the length of cosmetic surgery, subjecting themselves to subcutaneous wax injections to produce similar effects on a more permanent basis.
Sexual padding has also been added to certain other parts of the body: one only has to think of male codpieces and padded shoulders, and female buttock-enlarging bustles. In certain cultures today it is possible for skinny females to purchase padded buttock brassieres, or ‘bottom-falsies. The wearing of high heeled shoes, by distorting the normal walking posture, increases the amount of swaying in the buttock region during locomotion.
Female hip-padding has also been employed at various times and, by the use of tight belts, both the hip and breast curves can be exaggerated. Because of this, small female waists have been strongly favoured and tight corseting of this region has been widely practised. As a trend this reached its peak with the ‘wasp waists’ of half a century ago, at which time some females even went to the extreme of having the lower ribs removed surgically to increase the effect.
The widespread use of lipstick, rouge and perfume to heighten sexual lip signals, flushing signals, and body-scent signals respectively, provide further contradictions. The female who so assiduously washes off her own biological scent then proceeds to replace it with commercial ‘sexy’ perfumes which, in reality, are no more than diluted forms of the products of the scent-glands of other, totally unrelated mammalian species.
Reading through all these various sexual restriction and the artificial counterattractions, one cannot help feeling that it would be much easier simply to go back to square one. Why refrigerate a room and then light a fire in it? As I explained before, the reason for the restrictions is straightforward enough: it is a matter of preventing random sexual stimulation which would interfere with the pair-bonds. But why not a total restriction in public? Why not limit the sexual displays, both biological and artificial, to the moments of privacy between the members of the mated pair?
Part of the answer to this is our very high level of sexuality, which demands constant expression and outlet. It was developed to keep the pair together, but now, in the stimulating atmosphere of a complex society, it is constantly being triggered off in nonpair bond situations. But this is only part of the answer. Sex is also being used as a status device—a well-known manoeuvre in other primate species. If a female monkey wants to approach an aggressive male in a nonsexual context, she may display sexually to him, not because she wants to copulate, but because by so doing she will arouse his sexual urges sufficiently to suppress his aggression. Such behaviour patterns are referred to as re-motivating activities. The female uses sexual stimulation to re-motivate the male and thereby gain a non-sexual advantage. Similar devices are used by our own species. Much of the artificial sexual sign is being employed in this way. By making themselves attractive to members of the opposite sex, individuals can effectively reduce antagonistic feelings in other members of the social group.
There are dangers in this strategy, of course, for a pair-bonding species. The stimulation must not go too far. By conforming to the basic sexual restrictions that the culture has developed, it is possible to give clear signals that ‘I am not available for copulation’, and yet, at the same time, to give other signals which say that ‘I am nevertheless very sexy’. The latter signals will do the job of reducing antagonism, while the former ones will prevent things from getting out of hand. In this way one can have one’s cake and eat it.
This should work out very neatly, but unfortunately there are other influences at work. The pair-bonding mechanism is not perfect. It has had to be grafted on to the earlier primate ‘system, and this still shows through. If anything goes wrong with the pairbond situation, then the old primate urges flare up again. Add to this the fact that another of the naked ape’s great evolutionary developments has been the extension of childhood curiosity into the adult phase, and the situation can obviously become dangerous. The system was obviously designed to work in a situation where the female is producing a large family of overlapping children and the male is off hunting with other males. Although fundamentally this has persisted two things have changed. There is a tendency to limit artificially the number of offspring. This means that the mated female will not be at full parental pressure and will be more sexually available during her mate’s absence. There is also a tendency for many females to join the hunting group. Hunting, of course, has now been replaced by ‘working’ and the males who set off on their daily working trips are liable to find themselves in heterosexual groups instead of the old all-male parties. All too often it collapses under the strain. (The American figures, you will recall, indicated that 26 per cent of married females and 50 per cent of married males have experienced extramarital copulation by the age of forty.) Frequently, though, the original pair-bond is strong enough to maintain itself during these outside activities, or to re-assert itself when they have passed. In only a small percentage of cases is there a complete and final break-down.
To leave the matter there would overstate the case for the pair-bond, however. It may be able to survive sexual curiosity in most cases, but it is not strong enough to stamp it out. Although the powerful sexual imprinting keeps the mated pair together, it does not eliminate their interest in outside sexual activities. If outside matings conflict too strongly with the pair bond, then some less harmful substitute for them has to be found. The solution has been voyeurism, using the term in its broadest sense, and this is employed on an enormous scale. In the strict sense voyeurism means obtaining sexual excitement from watching other individuals copulating, but it can logically be broadened out to include any non-participatory interest in any sexual activity. Almost the entire population indulges in this. They watch it, they read about it, they listen to it. The vast bulk of all television, radio, cinema, theatre and fiction-writing is concerned with satisfying this demand. Magazines, newspapers and general conversation also make a large contribution. It has become a major industry. And never once throughout all this does the sexual observer actually do anything. Everything is performed by proxy. So urgent is the demand, that we have had to invent a special category of performers—actors and actresses—to pretend to go through sexual sequences for us, so that we can watch them at it. They court and marry, and then live again in new roles, to court and marry another day. In this way the voyeur supplies are tremendously increased.
If one looked at a wide range of animal species, one would be forced to the conclusion that this voyeurist activity of ours is biologically abnormal. But it is comparatively harmless and may actually help our species, because it satisfies to some extent the persistent demands of our sexual curiosity without involving the individuals concerned in new potential mateship relationships that could threaten the pair-bond.
Prostitution operates in much the same way. Here, of course, there is involvement, but in the typical situation it is ruthlessly restricted to the copulatory phase. The earlier courtship phase and even the pre-copulatory activities are kept to an absolute minimum. These are the stages where pair-formation begins to operate and they are duly suppressed. If a mated male indulges his urge for sexual novelty by copulating with a prostitute he is, of course, liable to damage his pair-bond, but less so than if he becomes involved in a romantic, but non-copulatory, love affair.
Another form of sexual activity that requires examination is the development of a homosexual fixation. The primary function of sexual behaviour is to reproduce the species and this is something that the formation of homosexual pairs patently ails to do. It is important to make a subtle distinction here. There is nothing biologically unusual about a homosexual act of pseudo-copulation. Many species indulge in this, under a variety of circumstances. But the formation of a homosexual pair-bond is reproductively unsound, since it cannot lead to the production of offspring and wastes potential breeding adults. To understand how this can happen it will help to look at other species.
I have already explained how a female may use sexual signals to re-motivate an aggressive male. By arousing him sexually she suppresses his antagonism and avoids being attacked. A subordinate male may use a similar device. Young male monkeys frequently adopt female sexual invitation postures and are then mounted by dominant males that would otherwise have attacked them. Dominant females may also mount subordinate females in the same way. This utilization of sexual patterns in non-sexual situations has become a common feature of the primate social scene and has proved extremely valuable in helping to maintain group harmony and organisation. Because these other species of primates do not undergo a process of intense pair bond formation, it does not read to difficulties in the shape of long-term homosexual pairings. It simply solves immediate dominance problems, but does not have long-term sexual relationship consequences.
Homosexual behaviour is also seen in situations where the ideal sexual object (a member of the opposite sex) is unavailable. This applies in many groups of animals: a member of the same sex is used as a substitute object ‘the next best thing’ for sexual activity. In total isolation animals are often driven to more extreme measures and will attempt to copulate with inanimate objects, or will masturbate. In captivity, for example, certain carnivores have been known to copulate with their food containers. Monkeys frequently develop masturbatory patterns and this has even been recorded in the case of lions. Also, animals housed with the wrong species may attempt to mate with them. But these activities typically disappear when the biologically correct stimulus—a member of the opposite sex—appears on the scene.
Similar situations occur with high frequency in our own species and the response is much the same. If either males or females cannot for some reason obtain sexual access to their opposite numbers, they will find sexual outlets in other ways. They may use other members of their own sex, or they may even use members of other species, or they may masturbate. The detailed American studies of sexual behaviour revealed that in that culture 13 per cent of females and 37 per cent of males have indulged in homosexual contacts to the point of orgasm by the age of 45. Sexual contacts with other animal species are much rarer (because, of course, they provide far fewer of the appropriate sexual stimuli) and have been recorded in only 9.6 per cent of females and 8 per cent of males. Masturbation, although it does not provide ‘partner stimuli’, is nevertheless so much easier to initiate that it occurs with a much higher frequency. It is estimated that 58 per cent of females and 92 per cent of males masturbate at some time in their lives.
If all these reproductively wasteful activities can take place without reducing the longterm breeding potential of the individuals concerned, then they are harmless. In fact, they can be biologically advantageous, because they can help to prevent sexual frustration which can lead to social disharmony in various ways. But the moment they give rise to sexual fixations they create a problem. In our species there is, as we have seen, a strong tendency to ‘fall in love’—to develop a powerful bond with the object of our sexual attentions. This sexual imprinting process produces the all-important longterm mateship so vital to the prolonged parental demands. The imprinting is going to start operating as soon as serious sexual contacts are made, and the consequences are obvious. The earliest objects towards which we direct our sexual attentions are liable to become the objects. Imprinting is an associative process. Certain key stimuli that are present at the moment of sexual reward become intimately linked with the reward, and in no time at all it is impossible for sexual behaviour to occur without the presence of these vital stimuli. If we are driven by social pressures to experience our earliest sexual rewards in homosexual or masturbatory contexts, then certain elements present in these contexts are likely to assume powerful sexual significance of a lasting kind. (The more unusual forms of fetishism also originate in this way.)