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A male anatomical reality, meanwhile, again suggests persuasively that the female orgasm
is
a pointless but pleasant relic rather than the product of ruthless evolutionary selection. It is the bothersome question of how on earth men with small penises have managed to survive the rigours of evolution? Desmond Morris's assertion that human beings have evolved to be the sexiest primate is supported by the human penis being so large. But it is not always that large, and if women's universal assertion that size
does
matter – and very much so – is to be believed, small penises should have been bred out
of the population hundreds of generations ago by women voting with their vaginas.

Penis size, however, comes in two dimensions, length and width, and it is width that is the critical factor, Helen Fisher explains. Even if a wide penis does not often produce orgasm on its own, it certainly seems to provide a more satisfying sensation to more women, and this should, Fisher says, have ensured that males with thick penises have more lovers and more children and that penises accordingly became thicker over the generations. Without fossilised soft-tissue evidence one way or another, it is impossible to know if penis size has increased down the generations. The likely reality is that the most minuscule or string-like penises have died out, but that, through the millennia, men have generally been able to make up for any deficit in their penis size with such attractive attributes as charm, kindness, bravery, power and brains.

One very important problem that tends to be by-passed by all these theories of the orgasm, however, is whether women really are as inclined towards monogamy as tends to be assumed. The received wisdom among evolutionary psychologists and their like is that men, with their implausibly large testicles pumping out sperm by the billion, are inveterate philanderers, while women, with a finite supply of eggs that require a significant investment, are naturally reserved and choosy about whom they sleep with, the question of sexual pleasure being very much secondary in their lives. Men, as a result, are biologically inclined to be promiscuous, while women concentrate on sifting through potential mates in search of ideal father material.

David Buss demonstrated this divergence between the sexes experimentally in a 1993 study of college undergraduates. The women in his research typically stated that they would ideally like around five sexual partners in a lifetime. Men's idealised figure was in a range from 18 up to 1,000. Women invariably had high standards even for one-night stands. For short-term
partners, however, Buss concluded, men ‘are willing to go down to the tenth percentile, as long as she can mumble'.

Even what Symons cuttingly calls the ‘Sherfian paradise' -of endless wild sex for women, the older they get – does not necessarily imply female promiscuity. It is telling in the extreme that only one of the four female lead characters in
Sex and the City
, the aspirational manifesto for so many twenty-first-century Western urban women, is truly promiscuous. Sherfey would take heart that the wanton Samantha is the oldest of the four women, but it can be assumed that, informally or otherwise, the show's creators did their market research, and that they must have been persuaded that true promiscuity, as opposed to serial monogamy, does not resonate very well with even that show's target female viewers.

Sexual pleasure and proper, non-masturbatory male orgasms have always been a scarce resource controlled by women who, in prehistoric societies, were both in a minority and, like now, sexually available for only two-thirds or less of their life. But it seems probable, too, that women have always had affairs; for every philandering male, after all, there has to be a philandering female.

A clue as to the real state of women's sexual faithfulness through the ages may be gleaned from modern data on the sex drive of females. In the 1950s, psychologists Clellan Ford and Frank Beach showed that women around the world begin sexual advances, and subsequent studies have shown that a perceived equality of sex drive is more prevalent than not in the large majority of societies. Helen Fisher regards it is as curious that Westerners still cling at all to the image of man as seducer, woman as submissive. She argues that this is a relic of our agricultural past, when women were pawns in property exchanges at marriage and their value depended on their ‘purity'. This meant girls' sex drive was denied, effectively, for financial reasons. Today, economically more independent, women are often sexual pursuers – and not merely in
Sex and the City
-style fiction.

Prehistory (plus the usual healthy dose of informed guesswork) must hold the most important clues as to whether women are naturally as prepared as men to encompass promiscuity in pursuit of sexual pleasure. So what may we reliably garner from what we know of our ancestors? Their sexual morphology seems to have been similar to ours, so they almost certainly practised face-to-face copulation; from that, we can be fairly confident that couples were recognised. But were prehistoric couples faithful?

The consensus among anthropologists is that prehistoric females did mate with more than one male in one cycle. But males at some level understood that their sperm was competing with that of other men, because notions of jealousy grew up despite (or because of) the affection-producing hormone oxytocin. This would suggest that women took advantage of their seller's market in sex, but that they also liked to reserve a particular lover as ‘theirs' – quite possibly because of his special skill in giving them orgasms.

From the seemingly instinctive territory-marking habits that survive among some women today – scratching a man's back with their fingernails as they reach orgasmic ecstasy is one such – we may intuit that women, too, were capable of sexual jealousy. There is also cultural evidence of formal pair bonding, which leads to the contention that relationships developed in prehistory as a norm in spite of a promiscuous desire in both sexes. Unfaithfulness came to be seen as non-ideal, but frequently necessary to ensure the survival of the tribe or the species.

According to Helen Fisher, there is plenty of genetic advantage to women as well as men in having offspring with a variety of mates. Women could assure themselves of extra resources for them and their children, a measure of insurance, and, although they could not have the foggiest idea they were so doing, better genes and more varied DNA for their children's biological futures. ‘Hence those who sneaked into the bushes with secret lovers lived on,' Fisher writes in her
Anatomy of
Love
, ‘unconsciously passing on through the centuries whatever it is in the female spirit that motivates modern woman to philander.' She does not mention the more obvious construction on this – that it simply felt nice to women to have orgasms with more skilful or varied lovers. But she does consider it perfectly possible that female prostitutes accept money and gifts for sex not necessarily for economic motives, but because they enjoy sexual variety.

Fisher tells how the high sex drive of the human female has led University of California Professor of Anthropology Sarah Blaffer Hrdy to a novel hypothesis about prehistoric female adultery. Hrdy maintains that female apes such as the bonobo have (without quite realising, one imagines) a lot of non-reproductive sex with successive partners, and that this has to do with the females pursuing a brilliantly Darwinian end – to confuse paternity so that every male in the community will act generously towards her and paternally towards her children, thus helping ensure their wellbeing and success.

In humans, Hrdy argues, the same must have happened, the females pursuing sex with a string of males to keep friends. When the first stirrings of civilisation came, with the move four million years ago from tree-dwelling to a bipedal life on the African grasslands, pair bonding evolved, and young females turned from open promiscuity to secret copulation. But there was bound to have been a substantial pleasure reward involved here as well as a genetic one. And, it may be extrapolated from Hrdy, it is only because female unfaithfulness implies not all men give good orgasms that it is such a strong taboo in primitive cultures.

Helen Fisher adds that it is probable that the veil evolved in Muslim societies and the chaperone in places like Andalusia in direct response to this seductive, sexually acquisitive, orgasm-seeking trait in women. The Talmudic requirement for a man to satisfy his wife sexually, which we will discuss in the next chapter, was also very likely occasioned by the ancient experience of women having a strong sex drive. The expressly
matriarchal society adopted by the Ancient Jews may have been a product of or a precursor for this acceptance of powerful female sexuality. The female clitoridectomy too may have been designed by jealous men in the African societies where it exists to curb the high female libido. It similarly stands as an interesting commentary on what must have been a sophisticated early understanding of how female sexual feeling works; to believe the clitoris needs removing to stabilise women's rampant sexual desire requires a pre-existing folk knowledge of female orgasm.

Current research, counter-intuitive though it may seem to many, is that the accepted, age-old economic contract between the sexes of female fidelity and guaranteed paternity in exchange for meat for the family does not quite hold up – that ‘slutty' female behaviour is good for the species because it improves the gene pool by giving women a variety of men with whom to mate.

Even evolutionary psychologists, who have generally been rigorous in upholding the validity of the ‘fidelity for food' bargain, have moved towards accepting that a bit of female promiscuity can give a woman a measure of back-up insurance if the father of her children is killed. The idea that women in such a situation sleep around for the sheer orgasmic pleasure of it has yet to gain universal currency, however.

The institutionally promiscuous concept of woman, prompted by evolutionary logic discreetly to seek out sexual adventure, seems to be supported by research by the Pennsylvania anthropologist Stephen Beckerman, in communities such as the sexy Canela people in the Amazon, and also by Kristen Hawkes, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah, who has spent years studying the licentious Aché, a Paraguayan people, and the North Tanzanian Hadza tribe, who also enjoy a richly varied love life.

The till-death-do-us-part, missionary-position couple of Desmond Morris's model is just a tiny part of human history,
in Beckerman's and Hawkes' view. ‘The patterns of human sexuality are so much more variable,' Hawkes told Sally Lehrman, of the online magazine AlterNet.org, in 2002. The average Hadza hunter, he found, can only bring in a big game carcass once a month, and he is obliged to share his kill with everyone in the community, his wife and children receiving no special bonus. Strong emotional bonds with extra mates help a Hadza woman remain safer in dangerous times. But, again, the idea of these promiscuous women seeking extramarital sex for pleasure alone is not even on the agenda.

‘Pair bonding,' Helen Fisher declares in
Anatomy of Love
after some scholarly humming and hahing, ‘is the trademark of the human animal.' Even in polygamous ‘families' and free-sex communes, she says, men and women have favourite spouses and tend to form
de facto
couples. And in arranged marriages, couples will frequently form romantic bonds retroactively

Fisher cites data that only 16 per cent of the 853 cultures on record require monogamy, whereas 84 per cent of all societies permit polygyny, the practice of men having more than one wife. Polygyny (as opposed to polygamy, which can cut both ways) would not seem to be particularly conducive to female promiscuity. Yet, Fisher notes, in societies where polygyny is allowed, only 5-10 per cent of men actually have more than one wife at the same time. One wife is, in reality, the global norm, as is, for that matter, one husband.

Fisher's conclusion is that it is unclear which sex is more interested in the pleasure of sexual variety, but that overall we can be said to follow a mixed reproductive strategy -monogamy
and
adultery. Kristen Hawkes believes, however, that the promiscuous traditions of our female prehistoric ancestors have come through the selective process to remain quite rampant in modern society. High infidelity, remarriage and divorce rates for Hawkes may have less to do with modernity than with our collective sexual past. ‘It makes the variation
we're seeing in modern society so much more understandable,' she says.

‘If the anthropologists are right, monogamy may well be counter-evolutionary or an adaptation to modern life. Or perhaps the nuclear family has always been more of an ideal than a reality,' Lehrman concluded in her AlterNet article.

‘Let his left hand be under my head and his right hand embrace me,'

from the ‘
Song of Solomon
'

Very early civilisations may have been the Petri dish in which the culture that became large-scale organised religion began to grow. But while the leading brand faiths, with the responsible goal of long-term species survival on their mind rather than the frippery of momentary pleasure, placed a premium on reproductive sex, their predecessors seem to have been less fussy over whether their orgasms were attained by heterosexual or homosexual intercourse, just so long as they were attained.

Institutionalised male-on-male anal sex is thought to have been quite common in preliterate civilisations across the world; typically, in societies as diverse as the Chuckchee of Siberia, the Aleuts and Konyages of Alaska, the Creek and Omaha of the US, and the Bangala of the Congo, the practice was legitimised by a form of religious marriage between a man and a transvestite. Anal sex was as revered as vaginal, and was associated with the worship of androgynous, hybrid male and female gods. Even when formal temples began to appear in Middle Eastern cultures there are said to have been priests who used anal intercourse as a way of being a go-between between cult adherents and their gods.