Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (37 page)

This apparent need to punish female sexual desire as something evil, dangerous, and pathological is not limited to medieval times or remote Mayan villages. Recent estimates by the World Health Organization suggest that approximately 137 million girls undergo some form of genital mutilation every year.

The Force Required to Suppress It

Afire is never sated by any amount of logs, nor the ocean by
rivers that flow into it; death cannot by sated by all the
creatures in the world, nor a fair-eyed woman by any amount
of men.

THE KAMA SUTRA

Before the war on drugs, the war on terror, or the war on cancer, there was the war on female sexual desire. It’s a war that has been raging far longer than any other, and its victims number well into the billions by now. Like the others, it’s a war that can never be won, as the declared enemy is a force of nature. We may as well declare war on the cycles of the moon.

There is a pathetic futility animating the centuries-long insistence—against

overwhelming

evidence

to

the

contrary—that the human female is indifferent to the insistent urgings of libido. Recall the medical authorities in the antebellum South who assured plantation owners that slaves trying to break out of their chains were not human beings deserving of freedom and dignity, but sufferers of
Drapetomania,
a medical disorder best cured with a good lashing. And who can forget the “well-intentioned” Inquisition that forced Galileo to disown truths as obvious to him as they were offensive to minds calcified by power and doctrine? In this ongoing struggle between what
is
and what many post-agricultural patriarchal societies insist
must be,
women who have dared to renounce the credo of the coy female are still spat upon, insulted, divorced, separated from their children, banished, burned as witches, pathologized as hysterics, buried to their necks in desert sand, and stoned to death. They and their children—those “sons and daughters of bitches”—are still sacrificed to the perverse, conflicted gods of ignorance, shame, and fear.

If psychiatrist Mary Jane Sherfey was correct when she wrote,

“The strength of the drive determines the force required to suppress it” (an observation downright Newtonian in its irrefutable simplicity), then what are we to make of the force brought to bear on the suppression of female libido?11

CHAPTER NINETEEN

When Girls Go Wild

Female Copulatory Vocalization

Here’s a question we ask the audience every time we give a public presentation: If you’ve ever heard a heterosexual couple having sex (and who hasn’t?), which partner was louder? The answer we get every time, every place—from men, women, straight, gay, American, French, Japanese, and Brazilians—is always the same. Hands down. No question about it. Not even close. We don’t have to tell you because you already know, don’t you? Yes, the “meek,” “demure,”

“coy” sex is the source of the high-decibel moaning, groaning, and calling out to the good Lord above, neighbors be damned.

But why? Within the framework of the standard narrative of human sexuality, what scientists call
female copulatory
vocalization
(FCV) is a major conundrum. You’ll recall Steven Pinker’s claim that “[i]n all societies, sex is at least somewhat ‘dirty.’ It is conducted in private….”1 Why would the female of such a species risk attracting all that attention?

Why is it that from the Lower East Side to the upper reaches of the Amazon, women are far more likely than men to loudly announce their sexual pleasure for all to hear?

And why is the sound of a woman having an orgasm so difficult for heterosexual men to ignore?2 They say women

can hear a baby crying from a great distance, but gentlemen, we ask you, is there any sound easier to pick out of the cacophony

of

an

apartment

block—and

harder

to

ignore—than that of a woman lost in passion?

If you’re one of the ten or fifteen people alive who have never seen Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm scene in
When Harry Met
Sally,
go watch it now (it’s easily accessible online). It’s one of the best-known scenes in all of modern cinema, but if the roles were reversed, the scene wouldn’t be funny—it wouldn’t even make sense. Imagine: Billy Crystal sits at the restaurant table, he starts breathing harder, maybe his eyes bug out a bit, he grunts a few times, takes a few bites of his sandwich, and falls asleep. No big laughs. Nobody in the deli even notices. If male orgasm is a muffled crash of cymbals, female orgasm is full-on opera. Full of screaming, shouting, singing people standing around with spears, and table pounding sure to quiet even the noisiest New York deli.3

Female cries of ecstasy aren’t a modern phenomenon. The
Kama Sutra
contains ancient advice on female copulatory vocalization in terms of erotic technique, categorizing an aviary of ecstatic expression a woman might choose from:

“As a major part of moaning, she may use, according to her imagination, the cries of the dove, cuckoo, green pigeon, parrot, bee, nightingale, goose, duck and partridge.”
A goose?

Honk if You Sex!

But apart from barnyard erotic technique, it just doesn’t make sense for the female of a monogamous (or “mildly polygynous”) species to call attention to herself when mating.

On the other hand, if thousands of generations of multiple mating are built into modern human sexuality, it’s pretty clear what all the shouting’s about.

As it turns out, women aren’t the only female primates making a lot of noise in the throes of passion. British primatologist Stuart Semple found that, “In a wide variety of species, females vocalize just before, during or immediately after they mate. These vocalizations,” Semple says, “are particularly common among the primates and evidence is now accumulating that by calling, a female incites males in her group….”4Precisely. There’s a good reason the sound of a woman enjoying a sexual encounter entices a heterosexual man. Her “copulation call” is a potential invitation to
come
hither,
thus provoking sperm competition.

Semple recorded more than 550 copulation calls from seven different female baboons and analyzed their acoustic structure. He found that these complex vocalizations contained information related both to the female’s reproductive state (the vocalizations were more complex when females were closer to ovulation) and to the status of the male “inspiring” any given vocalization (calls were longer and contained more distinct sonic units during matings with higher-ranked males). Thus, in these baboons at least, listening males could presumably gain information as to their likelihood of impregnating a calling female, as well as some sense of the rank of the male they’d find with her if they approached.

Meredith Small agrees that the copulation calls of female primates are easily identifiable: “Even the uninitiated can identify female nonhuman primate orgasm, or sexual pleasure. Females,” Small tells us, “make noises not heard in any other context but mating.”5 Female lion-tailed macaques use copulation calls to invite male attention even when not ovulating. Small reports that among these primates, ovulating females most often directed their invitations at males outside their own troop, thus bringing new blood into the mating mix.6

Female copulatory vocalization is highly associated with promiscuous mating, but not with monogamy. Alan Dixson has noted that the females of promiscuous primate species emit more complex mating calls than females of monogamous and polygynous species.7 Complexity aside, Gauri Pradhan and his colleagues conducted a survey of copulation calls in a variety of primates and found that “variation in females’

promiscuity predicts their tendency to use copulation calls in conjunction with mating.” Their data show that higher levels of promiscuity predict more frequent copulation calls.8

William J. Hamilton and Patricia C. Arrowood analyzed the copulatory vocalizations of various primates, including three human couples going at it.9 They noticed that “female sounds gradually intensified as orgasm approached and at orgasm assumed a rapid, regular (equal note lengths and inter-note intervals) rhythm absent in the males’ calls at orgasm.” Still, the authors can’t help sounding a tad let down when they note, “Neither sex [of human] … showed the complexity of note

structure

characteristic

of

baboon

copulatory

vocalizations.” But that’s probably a good thing, because elsewhere in their article we learn that female baboons’

copulation calls are clearly audible to even human ears from three hundred meters away.

Before you conclude that female copulatory vocalization is just a fancy phrase for a little excitement, think about the predators possibly alerted by this primate passion. Chimps and bonobos may be out of reach up in the branches, but baboons (like our ground-dwelling ancestors) live among leopards and other predators who would be quite interested in a two-for-one special on fresh primate—especially given a mating pair’s distracted, vulnerable state.

As Hamilton and Arrowood put it: “In spite of the risk of exposure of individuals and the troop to predators these baboons habitually call during copulation, [so] the calls must have some adaptive value.” What could that be? The authors offered several hypotheses, including the notion that the calls may be a stratagem to help activate the male’s ejaculatory reflex, an analysis with which many prostitutes would presumably agree. Perhaps there is something to this idea,10

but even so, male primates are not known for needing a great deal of assistance in
activating their ejaculatory reflex.
If anything, the human male ejaculatory reflex tends to be too easily activated—at least from the perspective of women
not
being paid to activate it as quickly as possible. Especially given all the other convergent evidence, it seems far more likely that in humans, female copulatory vocalization would serve to attract males to the ovulating, sexually receptive female, thus promoting sperm competition, with all its attendant benefits—both reproductive and social.

Yet despite all the loud carrying on by women the world over,

“The credo of the coy female persists,” writes Natalie Angier.

“It is garlanded with qualifications and is admitted to be an imperfect portrayal of female mating strategies but then, that little matter of etiquette attended to, the credo is stated once again.”

Sin Tetas, No Hay Paraíso11

For better or worse, the human female’s naughty bits don’t swell up to five times their normal size and turn bright red to signal her sexual availability. But is there anatomical evidence suggesting that women evolved to be highly sexual?

No question. It turns out that every bit as much as a man’s body, the woman’s body (and preconscious behavior) is replete with indications of millennia of promiscuity and sperm competition.

Considering its almost total lack of muscle tissue, the female breast wields amazing power. Curvaceous women have leveraged this power to manipulate even the most accomplished, disciplined men for as long as anyone’s been around to notice. Empires have fallen, wills have been revised, millions of magazines and calendars sold, Super Bowl audiences scandalized … all in response to the mysterious force emanating from what are, after all, small bags of fat.

One of the oldest human images known, the so-called Venus of Willendorf, created about 25,000 years ago, features a bosom of Dolly Parton-esque dimensions. Two hundred fifty centuries later, the power of the exaggerated breast shows little sign of getting old. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgery, 347,254 breast augmentation procedures were performed in the United States in 2007, making it the nation’s most commonly performed surgical procedure. What gives the female breast such transcendent influence over heterosexual male consciousness?

First, let’s dispense with any purely utilitarian interpretations.

While the mammary glands contained in women’s breasts exist for the feeding of infants, the fatty tissue that confers the magical curve of the human breast—the swell, sway, and jiggle—has nothing to do with milk production. Given the clear physiological costs of having pendulous breasts (back strain, loss of balance, difficulty running), if they aren’t meant to advertise milk for babies, why did human females evolve and retain these cumbersome appendages?

Theories range from the belief that breasts serve as signaling devices announcing fertility and fat deposits sufficient to withstand the rigors of pregnancy and breastfeeding12 to

“genital echo theory”: females developed pendulous breasts around the time hominids began walking upright in order to provoke the excitation males formerly felt when gazing at the fatty deposits on the buttocks.13 Theorists supporting genital echo theory have noted that swellings like those of chimpanzees and bonobos would interfere with locomotion in a bipedal primate, so when our distant ancestors began walking upright, they reason that some of the female’s fertility signaling moved from the rear office, as it were, to the front showroom. In a bit of historical ping-pong, the dictates of fashion have moved the swelling back and forth over the centuries with high heels, Victorian bustles, and other derrière enhancements.