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The exclamation mark in the !Kung name represents a popping sound in their language made by forming a vacuum between the tongue and the top of the mouth and then snapping the tongue down – although it might equally be a commentary on the fact that the male !Kung, unusually, manage to be semi-erect at all times. These priapic Bushmen believe that babies are produced by the combination of menstrual blood and semen, which poses the question of how many little !Kung are ever conceived since when women are menstruating they are highly unlikely to conceive. But the tribe is immensely positive about sex, equating it with food as both a medium of survival and pleasure. !Kung women demand their orgasms; if a man has ‘finished his work', they say, he
must continue until the woman is satisfied, too. They hold that if a girl grows up without regular sex, she will lose her mind and end up eating grass and dying. The !Kung do not perform oral sex, but both men and women masturbate energetically.

In Murian society, as studied in the mid-twentieth century by the Oxford-educated anthropologist Verrier Elwin, sex is a duty performed by men for women, whether married or not. A devout Christian who went to India as a missionary, Elwin converted to Hinduism, married a Muria woman, Kosi, and lived among the people for much of his life. He became convinced that the tribal traditions were superior to those of the ‘civilised' societies, as there was no sexual inequality and responsibilities were equally distributed.

‘The Muria have a simple, innocent and natural attitude to sex,' Elwin wrote. ‘[They] believe that sexual congress is a good thing; it does you good; it is healthy and beautiful; when performed by the right people [a male and female who are not taboo to each other], at the right time (outside the menstrual period and avoiding forbidden days), and in the right place … it is the happiest and best thing in life. This belief in sex as something good and normal gives the Muria a light touch. The saying that the penis and vagina are
hassi ki nat
, in a ‘joking relationship' with each other, admirably puts the situation. Sex is great fun … it is the dance of the genitals; it is an ecstatic swinging in the arms of the beloved. It ought not to be too intense; it must not be degraded by possessiveness or defiled by jealousy.'

A Muria proverb collected by Elwin was, ‘Woman is earth; man cannot plough her' – meaning, according to Elwin, that just as a single plough cannot break up the earth, no man can really satisfy a woman. Sexual pleasure, Elwin concluded, is regarded by the Muria as a woman's right, her compensation for the pains of menstruation and childbearing. And the Muria woman uses her sexuality as a means of dominating and subjugating males. On the other hand, it might be noted by sceptics that, citing tribal tradition, Elwin took another
woman, Leela, the daughter of a village head as an occasional alternative to Kosi.

Four thousand miles away in the Amazon basin, sex is the major leisure pursuit for the jungle-farming Mehinacu people, who were studied in the 1970s by the anthropology professor Thomas Gregor, of Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Sexual maxims collected from Mehinacu tribesmen by Gregor include: ‘Good fish get dull, but sex is always fun', and, ‘Sex is the pepper that gives life its verve'. Sex for the Mehinacu ends the instant the male ejaculates, which does not sound promising. The Mehinacu are well aware that the clitoris hardens during sex and that it is the seat of pleasure. But they have no expression or word for female orgasm, which suggests that they do not have them. (In the West, at least we have developed a term – i.e. female orgasm – even if it is not of the most elegant.) They also have no concept of romantic love. After hearing a Portuguese song on the radio, Gregor wrote, one of the Mehinacu asked him: ‘What is all this, “I love you, I love you”? I don't understand it. I don't like it. Why does the white man make himself a fool?'

In the Melanesian islands of the south-west Pacific, female orgasm is first achieved by mutual masturbation, with penetrative sex only starting just before a simultaneous climax. Another Pacific people, on Mangaia, southernmost of the Cook Islands, meanwhile, enjoys a profoundly erotic culture. Young boys on the island are instructed at the age of thirteen or fourteen in the erotic arts by older women. A typically ‘good' girl has had three to four lovers between the ages of thirteen and twenty; and all women are said to orgasm, usually several times, during intercourse.

Mangaia's sexual culture was known to nineteenth-century anthropologists, but was obviously an awkward subject for them to explore in their own prevailing anti-sexual culture. At the time, the Mangaians were better known for being rather dour and truculent; they gave Captain Cook a particularly fierce reception when he ‘discovered' the island in 1777. So it
was left to Donald S. Marshall, an American anthropologist, to make the island famous for its relaxed attitude to sex. His landmark essay, ‘Sexual Behavior on Mangaia,' appeared in
Human Sexual Behavior. Variations in the Ethnographic Spectrum
, in 1971.

Young male Mangaians, Marshall noted, learn several techniques of intercourse, plus cunnilingus, kissing and sucking of breasts, and are taught always to bring their partner to orgasm several times before allowing themselves to ejaculate – and only then in time with one of the partner's climaxes. The boys' instruction ends with a practical intercourse session with an older woman. Mangaian boys are expected to pay attention to their sex lessons, too; men who prove sexually inattentive are prone to have their partners swiftly leave them for more skilful males, and the women will often go out of their way to ruin the failed lover's reputation
en passant
. Mangaian women have several partners before they marry.

Girls on Mangaia are also coached by older women; but it is believed that while orgasm ‘must be learned' by a woman, this can only ultimately be done with the help of a skilled man. Perfect sex on the island consists of no more than five minutes of foreplay, followed by fifteen to twenty minutes of energetic thrusting, with active female participation and encompassing, for her, two or three orgasms. The female's final orgasm should coincide precisely with the man's. The typical eighteen-year-old Mangaian couple make love three times a night, every night, until their thirties, when the weekly average drops to a mere fourteen.

Western sexual researchers have since become a near-permanent feature of Mangaia, a fair definition of a South Pacific paradise, with 1,000 inhabitants and a handful of discerning tourists. The island's sexual traditions (now largely Judaeo-Christianised) have been of particular interest because they exist outside any religious construct; they seem to reflect a joy in bodily pleasure for its own sake rather than the indulgence of a religious duty.

Mangaia's sex life has been also been cited as an ideal for a more liberated attitude to children's sexuality in Western societies. Dr Alayne Yates, Professor Director of the University of Hawaii Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, wrote in a 1982 book,
Sex Without Shame: Encouraging the Child's Healthy Sexual Development
, that on Mangaia: ‘infants are special people, rocked and indulged by all family members. Bare genitals are playfully or casually stimulated and lingual manipulation of the tiny penis is common … Privacy is unknown, as each hut contains five to sixteen family members of all ages. Adolescent daughters often receive lovers at night and parents “bump together” so that young children may be awakened by the slapping sound of moist genitals. Although adults rarely talk to children about sex, erotic wit and innuendoes are common.

‘At the age of three or four,' Dr Yates continues, ‘children band together and explore the mysteries of the dense tropical bush … Sex play flourishes in the undergrowth and coital activity may begin at any time … The young boy is taught at puberty by older males … [he] is coached in techniques such as the kissing and sucking of breasts. He is told about lubrication and trained in methods of bringing his partner to climax several times prior to his own ejaculation.'

For anyone with a mind, however, to believe that caveman sex, after all, was probably peremptory and brutal, there is a thread of evidence in the apparently liberated sex life of Mangaia. Marshall detected more than a trace of a darker side, too.

Although it seems that the women of Mangaia are their men's equals in their desire for casual sex, Mangaian men, according to Marshall, still succeed in being far more promiscuous than the women. ‘The average girl has had at least three or four lovers between the ages of thirteen and twenty whereas the average boy has had over ten,' wrote Marshall, adding that boys often travel to neighbouring islands to expand their experience. So while the Mangaia culture may be more promiscuous than
Western cultures, men still allow themselves within its generous confines to be more libidinous than women. Marshall additionally discovered that Mangaian men believe they naturally desire sex more frequently than their womenfolk. As a result, he concluded, ‘some husbands beat their wife into submission'.

Since Marshall, although Mangaia is still routinely used as a standard argument in favour of extreme sexual liberality, there has been a parallel process of scales falling from researchers' eyes. The island's violent side now attracts more academic attention than its sexual free-for-all. Sociologist Murray Strauss of the University of New Hampshire headed up a more recent report, published as part of a project on intra-family violence for the US National Institute of Mental Health, with this statement from a Mangaia woman: ‘How do I know that he loves me if he doesn't beat me?'

‘Sex and the City
star Kim Catrall and husband Mark Levinson have split up shortly after forty-six-year-old Kim said he was the first lover to give her earth-shattering orgasms. The thrice-married star now claims he has become obsessed with sex. They are co-authors of a book called
Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm.'

December 2002 news item quoting
US gossip columnist Cindy Adams

The chapter that follows is in many respects the core of this book. It seeks to examine how the sexual desires and orgasmic sensations of the two genders have diverged; how this might account for some of the ways our societies have become ordered; whether women, freed from cultural restraints and taboos, from physical and social conditioning, are naturally as promiscuous and gratification-centred as men; whether the very different Nature of the female orgasm from the male has developed as a Darwinian adaptation, with specific reproductive benefits, or whether it is a pointless if pleasurable biological quirk.

‘The desire for intercourse is the genius of the genus,' wrote Schopenhauer. But what a complex genius it turns out to be. By virtue of a series of devilishly clever evolutionary
tricks, or perhaps due to sheer happenstance shaped by cultural factors, or by the deliberate design of a devious God, women and men have quite different sexual desires, different sexual experiences and different sexual aims. They probably always have had different expectations from sex, since the dawn of humankind. And as men and women are aware, they do not actually need one another to enjoy orgasm.

Yet from prehistory up to the present, most members of these two very different tribes have continued to seek out one another's company and spend their lives broadly together, centring a large part of their shared emotional existence on an activity, sexual intercourse, of which they have a very different experience. The genius of the genus is that the huge majority of the world's population is not homosexual – that, for one reason or another, the complex attraction of otherness has always managed to outweigh the easy pleasures of sexual like-mindedness, and the furtherance of the species has thus been assured.

It is a close-run thing whether the most striking disparity between the male and female yearning for orgasm is emotional or physical. On the emotional front, it is axiomatic, if not everyone's experience, that women fall in love first and later discover lust, while men fall in lust and only subsequently learn to love. Put another way, there is a broad, cross-cultural, popular perception, accurate or not, that women set out with a generalised longing for romance, affection and security that only finds proper fulfilment with the relief of a localised neural desire in the pelvic region; whereas men set out with a localised neural desire in the pelvic region that only finds proper fulfilment in romance, affection and security.

The most basic physical disparities between the male and the female orgasm are the most conspicuous. Take the obvious point, as delineated by Kinsey in his 1948 debut on the sexology scene,
Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male
, that, ‘Men have orgasms essentially by friction with the vagina, not the clitoral area, which is external and not able to cause friction the way penetration does.'

Or take another major conclusion of the same work, that, Tor perhaps three-quarters of all males, orgasm is reached within two minutes after the initiation of the sexual relation.' (A time some men will regard as quite impressive!) Or the demonstrable fact that the average female has to be twenty-nine before she can match the orgasm rate of a fifteen-year-old boy – a remarkable inequality given that, according to Stephen Jay Gould in
Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples
, male and female humans are anatomically very nearly the same creatures. Typical male orgasm also lasts no more than a couple of seconds, while in women, climaxes of up to a minute are known.

‘Males and females are not separate entities, shaped independently by natural selection,' Gould argued. ‘Both sexes are variants upon a single ground plan … The external differences between male and female develop gradually from an early embryo so generalised that its sex cannot be easily determined. The clitoris and penis are one and the same organ, identical in early form, but later enlarged in male foetuses through the action of testosterone. Similarly, the labia majora of women and the scrotal sacs of men are the same structure, indistinguishable in young embryos, but later enlarged, folded over, and fused along the midline in male foetuses.'