The Lifestyle (12 page)

The fears for the future of civilization that swingers arouse are so ancient, and the metaphors used to describe them so consistent over time, that our modern judgments on their practices shed light on the origin of moral preaching itself. Why, for instance, do the authorities get so angry at swingers that they barge into their private clubs, charge them with being “found-ins in a common bawdy house,” and then force them out into the street in front of leering cameras—denigrating them as a lesson to all who transgress? A 1998 raid on Club L’Orage in Montreal publicly humiliated forty-two white-collar people, including a physician, an airline pilot, an ophthamologist, and a hairstylist. The police actually phoned the press beforehand so they could photograph the raid. Back in 1992, a team of thirty-five officers wearing riot gear surrounded Club Eros in Mississauga, Ontario, then poured through the doors and arrested 149 people. Six months later the police phoned the press to ensure coverage of a judge’s decision—which turned
out to be an acquittal. As this book goes to press the Club L’Orage case is still before the courts—but why is it there to begin with? Why, by sexually indulging themselves, do swingers become liable to the baleful exorcism of rulers, backed up by priests and scribes, who declare their pleasures a violation of a universal moral order founded on the laws of nature?

Most of those who are certain that morals and sex are synonymous rarely pause to consider that both the
Oxford
and
Webster’s
definitions of “moral” mention sex almost as an afterthought. The Latin root
moralis
merely means “manner, custom, or habit,” and, true to its origin, “moral,” (in
Webster’s)
, is “concerned with establishing principles of right and wrong in behavior” and is “characterized by excellence in what pertains to practice or conduct.” The standards of right and wrong in sexual behavior are astonishingly variable among societies, and the sexual customs of societies are all moral
within
societies—sanctioned by their own gods even though considered immoral and of the devil by other gods.

This is a disquieting thought for those who believe there is only one kind of sexual morality governed by “the laws of God.” But some religions worship gods and goddesses who flaunt their licentiousness before congregations and some of these have been around longer than the gods of the West. The five-thousand-year-old deities Vishnu, Lakshmi, Parvati, and Shiva are depicted in Hindu shrines across India cavorting amid daisy chains of copulation and fellatio. The pantheon of Greek gods, which lasted a thousand years and still crops up in literature to this day, was filled with promiscuous tricksters such as Priapus, Dionysius, Silenus, and Aphrodite (who ordained that men hold their testicles while taking an oath, giving us our word testify). Not so lucky in his competition
with the West’s gods was Topileta, of the openly sexual Vakutans, who once guided moral worshippers to unending sex after death on a heavenly island called Tuma. And then there was the fertility goddess Asherah in Canaan who welcomed orgies in her temples and whose destruction by the Hebrews marked the establishment of a new morality that would come to dominate the lives of 2.3 billion Muslims, Christians, and Jews. More than a hundred nations are now peppered with thousands of multimillion-dollar shrines where if an artwork depicting sexual couples is shown at all it is of Adam and Eve fleeing malediction, or the souls of Sodom and Gomorrah falling to hell and being torn apart by wild animals (whose sex lives they supposedly mirrored).

Indeed, given the age-old image we have in our minds of sexually immoral humans behaving “like animals”—implying that the worse one is at controlling a pleasurable urge the more animal one is and the less human—it is understandable that we don’t blink when we read of a swinger described as an iguana or a hippo. The truth is—cloven-hoofed gods of the Greeks notwithstanding—we are unwittingly being unfair to animals, most of which have sex less in any given year than an average human. In fact, almost all species of mammals and birds that live in social groups are rigidly bound by their own codes of sexual behavior, and if we look closely at that behavior we notice something telling about morality: it serves the interests of the beasts who enforce it. Morals are without exception dictated by the dominant figures in a group, who ruthlessly attempt to constrain the sexual expression of others. Animal morality may not be based on a righteous code handed down from a holy gazelle or a lion god, but it is enforced by the kings and queens of the herd, flock, or pride who act like gods—and it is tied strictly to reproduction for the most part.

There are, however, two animals that do not adhere to this reproduction-oriented morality. They engage year-round in
sex acts that in the vast majority of cases do not result in off-spring. One species is our closest relative, the bonobo chimpanzee. Whether females are in estrus or not, male and female bonobos enjoy sex several times a day with an ever-changing array of partners in their close-knit group, reproducing only once every five years. The other species is modern humans. About three-quarters of men and women in the United States have sex anywhere from a few times a month to four or more times a week. They do so in sessions lasting from fifteen minutes to over an hour, with about one-third of women and more than half of men having five or more partners after the age of eighteen—and whose total copulations produce an average of only two offspring per female per lifetime. This seems consistent with what the archaeologist Timothy Taylor discovered in his comparison of the sexual behavior of prehistoric peoples to bonobos. “Sexual pleasure has been taken yet further by humans—and so has sex as an aspect of power,” he wrote in
The Prehistory of Sex
. “Effective plant-based contraception was available to our prehistoric ancestors, freeing sex from any necessary reproductive shackles.” For Taylor there seemed to be a clear “evolutionary development of sensual and sexual pleasure.”

Given the thousands of species of animals that have sexual intercourse only during the widely spaced intervals when they are likely to reproduce, and the mere two species that have intercourse week in and week out without reproducing—one human, the other humanlike—an argument can be made that sex done purely for pleasure with a variety of partners is actually
more
human than it is animal, while sex done strictly for reproduction is actually
less
human than it is animal. After studying “the varied, almost imaginative, eroticism” of the group-sex-loving bonobo for a decade, the zoologist Frans De Waal concluded: “The possibility that these aspects have characterized our lineage from very early on has serious implications,
given how often moralizing relies on claims about the naturalness or unnaturalness of behavior: what is natural is generally equated with what is good and acceptable. The truth is that if bonobo behavior provides any hints, very few human sexual practices can be dismissed as ‘unnatural.”’

In terms of a moral assessment of the behavior of lifestylers this natural versus unnatural debate does indeed have “serious implications.” For the morality that we employ to judge them is founded upon ancient rules dictated by the supposedly divinely inspired chiefs of a sparsely populated tribe, once surrounded by enemies and desperate to procreate in a manner that assured paternity. According to the
moralis
prescribed by the rulers of that Hebrew tribe, masturbation, birth control, homosexuality, abortion, group-sex fertility rites, prostitution, spouse exchange, sex during menstruation, and all other forms of nonprocreative sex-pleasure the human body is capable of were banned as “immoral,” and they still retain that taint. How did the leaders of the Hebrews convince their followers not to have a nonreproductive orgasm when and where and how they felt like it—when all around them other tribes were doing so in a manner “natural” to humans? The ancient rulers and priests, in league with their well-rewarded scribes, convinced their people that their sexuality was not their own but was controlled by God and His agents on earth. The mechanisms of sexual control were fear, as in “fear of God,” and guilt, as in guilt for the “original sin” of sex—the ultimate taboo humans were condemned to break again and again, keeping them perpetually fearful and guilty and in need of priests, rulers, and literary proselytizers who all claimed to be closer to God than they were.

At the turn of the second millennium A.D. the wealthy and powerful officials of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths, their allies in the state, and their moral mirrors in the mainstream media have two things in common besides their
roughly consistent brands of sexual morality. One is “the sexual hypocrisy” evidenced by the exponents of morality, which is “of particular interest” to evolutionary biologists such as Robin Baker “because… the most successful exponents are those who try, through force or criticism, to prevent other people from behaving in a particular way while secretly behaving in precisely that way themselves…. Rule-makers and enforcers are in fact the people who most indulge in behavior they seek to prevent in others.” The other pattern of conduct they share is that they regularly help us to assuage our sexual guilt by asking for our money. Religious leaders pressure us for donations; their allies in the state, who swear themselves into office holding not their testicles but a holy book, solicit campaign contributions and levy taxes; and most moral advocates in the media harvest ample rewards in wages and royalties paid out by a chastised public.

Instead of continuing to accept on faith what the agents of God and their scribes tell us is immoral, or even what our own good sense tells us is moral, we can reappraise all our ancient proscriptions by posing a single question at every juncture in our analysis of the history of sexual morality. It is a question employed by evolutionary theorists who like to sharpen the discussion surrounding moral rules pronounced by politicians, preachers and reporters.

“Cut bono?”
is the question. “Who benefits” from the preaching of these moral rules?

Moral preaching began in earnest in the West in 2000 B.C., when God appeared to the wandering Abraham and commanded him to take his wife, Sarah, and his nephew, Lot, to Canaan. “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you,” God told the seventy-five-year-old patriarch. “I will give
this land to your offspring.” The land was already occupied, of course, but since the Canaanites resembled today’s pleasure-loving swingers and homosexuals, they “were very wicked sinners against the Lord,” and were therefore less worthy of the territory than the new arrivals from Babylon. Thus, the man who laid the cornerstone of sexual morality upon which Moses built his law and Jesus laid his capstone was also the man who gave the West its first lesson that morality could be used as a justification and inspiration for invasion and conquest.

In return for Canaan, however, God required a sacrifice from Abraham and the followers he was then recruiting: the agonizing cutting off of a part of the penis in circumcision, which at the outset of life put the imprimatur of God and His priests on the pleasure source of males, who in the patriarchal society of the Hebrews ruled their wives’ sexuality as well as their own. It was to be the founding ritual of our Western religious heritage and the origin of all the moral rules that teach us our sexuality is not our own (and that to behave like the Canaanites is to risk dying like dogs). Still practiced by Muslims and Jews, the sacrifice has been superseded in ritual by Christian faiths, but the original message remains the same: your sexuality is the property of a moral power you must obey, or pay the consequences. “Thus shall My covenant be marked in your flesh as an everlasting pact,” God decreed to the new chieftain-cum-head priest, a double portfolio not infrequently held by rulers throughout history, right down to our time of mullahs.

The moral Abraham dutifully circumcised himself and his son Ishmael, the antecedent of all Muslims, then ordered the circumcision of “all his retainers, his homeborn slaves, and those that had been bought from outsiders.” No one knows how many “retainers” he had at this time, although the Bible tells us (without moral judgment) that a famine in Canaan had forced Abraham to move to Egypt and prostitute Sarah in the Pharaoh’s palace for a few years, making Abraham “very rich
in cattle, silver, and gold” as well as slaves. “And because of her, it went well with Abram.”