Sex -- And Lots Of It!

Let’s talk about sex for a bit. After all, as a survey reported by The Australian informs us that there is “a strong link between people's happiness and the amount of sex they have.

” Happiest are those who have sex more than four times a week. They are about 6 per cent of the population. Unhappiest are the 22 per cent of people in the study of 16,000 Americans who didn't have sex at all in the previous year.

But not just any sex will do, it seems. Regular partners are definitely favoured:

"The more sexual partners one has (several respondents to the survey reported more than 100 in the past year), the unhappier ... People who have paid for sex are considerably less happy than others, as are those who have had sex outside their marriage."

I am also pleased for my gay friends to be assured that:

"There is no statistical difference in the happiness scores of homosexual or heterosexual sex."

None of this is a new discovery, of course. At Libido magazine, Tracy Scarpino explains that sexual pornography was rife in ancient Rome. But their depictions, apparently, had little of the iddylic golden age about them.

"Roman sexuality was about rough passions, obsessive love, and sadistic power plays. Lacking the natural grace and spirituality of the Greeks, they rarely touched on the spiritual side of sex. Perhaps what makes their sexual representations seem pornographic to the modern mind is this glaring lack of higher sentiment, making it comparable to modern-day pornography as opposed to erotica. Where erotica is considered more socially acceptable, pornography is often criticized for its purely sexual, animalistic portrayals. The very nature that produced and thrived on this raw sexuality is the same nature that made Rome powerful ...

From its earliest beginnings to its eventual fall, the Roman Empire thrived and gained power through sadism. The rape of the Sabine women is the quintessential Roman tale. The Romans chase, capture, and rape innocent girls, impregnate them, and thereby ensure the continuation of the race. And so an empire is made: by raping and conquering everything in its path, Rome subjugated the world, forcing its enemies into slavery and bondage."
[any similarity to modern day empires is purely in the mind of the reader -- ed.]

Of an entirely different stripe is the world of Tantric sex, about which Wendy Doniger writes in The Times Literary Supplement in her review of David Gordon White's "Kiss of the Yogini":

"To the extent that the general reading public is familiar with the term, Tantra has become an Orientalist wet dream, a transgressive, weird, sexy, dangerous world. Many people refer to the Kamasutra, or even The Joy of Sex, as Tantric. But Tantric practice has a narrower and more precise historical genealogy ... [David Gordon White’s account] tells us that Tantra originated some time between the sixth and eighth centuries of the Common Era in central India, among a subaltern stratum of the Indian population who used intoxicating drinks and sacrificed animals to terrifying clan deities.

In the ninth or eleventh century this ritual developed into an erotic mystical practice, and the clan deities were replaced by a horde of ravishingly beautiful, terrifying and powerful female deities called Yoginis. The Yoginis continued to be worshipped with blood offerings and animal sacrifices but came to be propitiated also by exchanging sexual fluids with the male practitioners and by consuming those fluids (as well as other prohibited foods). In return, the Yoginis would grant the practitioners, at the very least, “a powerful expansion of . . . the limited consciousness of the conformist Brahmin practitioner” and, at most, supernatural powers, including the power of flight.

While fighting off Hindu fundamentalists (who claim that Tantra has nothing to do with sex) by insisting it has everything to do with sex, White doesn't care for what we modern Westerners have done with this sacrament:

"He excoriates the Americans who “cobbled together the pathetic hybrid of New Age ‘Tantric sex’”, who “blend together Indian erotics, erotic art, techniques of massage, Ayurveda, and yoga into a single invented tradition”. New Age Tantra, he suggests, is to medieval Tantra what finger painting is to fine art, and he rails against “the funhouse mirror world of modern-day Tantra, in which Indian practitioners and gurus take their ideas from Western scholars and sell them to Western disciples thirsting for initiation into the mysteries of the East”.

One might think that with all this history and cross-cultural background, we would have pretty much mined sex of all interest. The multi-billion dollar and prostitution porn industries put the lie to that, of course. As does the constant search for the "mystery" of the orgasm. I must live in a happy unaware universe because I was actually surprised to learn that there was still a mass market for books such as "She Comes First" which is currently sponsoring the popular Gawker website. I have written elsewhere about how my generation blew most of the benefits of the 1960s; but I did think we had managed the sexual revolution OK. I guess not if these books are still needed.

Of more interest to me than the "how-to" books are the why and when volumes. In this regard, "O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm" by Jonathan Margolis has been well reviewed. It is, says one reviewer, an

"historico-anthropological odyssey, which ranges from the bedding habits of the Bedouin to the risqué activities of an eighteenth century male Scottish masturbation club known as the 'Beggar's Benison'."

Margolis notes that attitudes changed greatly over the years. For example,

"pre-Christian treatises were proponents of guilt-free pleasure between equals. The Kamasutra offers the following advice to those in search of priapic virtuosity: 'Eating many eggs fried in butter then immersed in honey will make the member hard for the whole night.' This was undertaken with the admirable intention of making your woman happy. Unfortunately women developed a pretty raw deal as the juggernaut of Christianity rolled onward; their previously celebrated oceanic sensuality became something feared and attacked by those who were no longer comfortable with tides of longing."

For example:

"Prominent Christian theologians such as the 17th-century sexpert Tomas Sanchez stipulated that any person fearing an orgasmic convulsion outside an act of procreation should 'lie still ... make the sign of the cross and pray fervently for God not to allow him to slip into orgasmic pleasure'."

Margolis doesn't spill these insights just for the fun of it, though. He has a serious scientific study in mind: the purpose of the female orgasm; and, of course, he has a theory:

"[R]ather than viewing the orgasm as a comforting adjunct, the cream in the coffee or the cherry on the cake, we should understand its pursuit as our primary motivation in life. It is hardwired into our systems, linked to the survival of the fittest ... Male and female orgasms have evolved to be deliberately mismatched for specific biological reasons; a suitable pair bond is sensed and accepted by a woman if her paramour invests the time and effort to help her climax. This indicates that the chap may be a keeper. "In short, making women feel good may help men to win the Darwinian contest of supremacy."

I'll let Tracy Scarpino have the final words on this ever-interesting topic -- for this time at least.

"Sexuality is the healthy will to life that cannot be suppressed and will find any and every way to thrive."