Another cross that has long since lost its original meaning is the famous Maltese cross. The ancient prehistoric ruins of Malta were full of phalluses, most of which have been lost, stolen, or destroyed. Amongst them was a cross consisting of four huge stone phalluses which, as one writer put it, ‘were subsequently metamorphosed by the virtuous Knights of St John’ and served as their arms.
Easter festivities have also shown a reduction in phallic overtness. In ancient cultures this was often a time for baking phallic cakes. They were made in the shape of both male and female genitals, but today they have been transformed, appearing in certain countries as sweetmeats made in the shape of a fish (the male cake) and a doll (the female cake). The phallic nature of the fish symbol was also originally involved in the ritual of eating fish on Fridays, but this has long ago lost its sexual significance.
There are many other examples one could give. The bonfire, for instance, although still retaining an almost magical, ritual quality on certain occasions, has lost its sexual properties. It was originally lit in a special way by rubbing a ‘male’ stick against a ‘female’ stick in an act of symbolic copulation, until a spark was generated and the bonfire burst into sexual flames.
Many buildings used to display carved phalluses on their outer walls to protect them against the ‘evil eye’ and other imagined dangers. These symbols, being aggressive, dominant Status Sex threats to the outside world, guarded the buildings and their occupants. In certain Mediterranean countries today one can still see symbols of this kind, but they have become less overtly sexual. They now usually consist of a pair of bull’s horns, firmly fixed high up on an outer surface or the comer of a roof. However, despite these expurgations and censorships, which have turned the tree of carnal knowledge into the simple tree of knowledge and have replaced the obvious codpiece with the less obvious necktie, there are still areas where aggressive phallic symbols retain their original overt properties. In the realm of insults we find them still very much in evidence.
Verbal insults frequently take a phallic form. Almost all the really vicious swearwords we can use to hurl abuse at someone are sexual words. Their literal meanings relate to copulation or to various parts of the genital anatomy, but they are used predominantly in moments of extreme aggression. This again is typical of Status Sex and demonstrates very clearly the way in which sex is borrowed for use in a dominance context.
Visual insults follow the same trend, several kinds of phallic actions being employed as hostile gestures. Sticking out the tongue originated in this way, with the protruded tongue symbolizing the erect penis. Hostile gestures known as giving the ‘phallic hand’ have existed in various forms for at least two thousand years. One of the most ancient consists of aiming the middle (i.e. second) finger, stiffly and fully extended, at the person being subjected to contempt. The rest of the fist is clenched. Symbolically, the middle finger represents the penis, the clenched thumb and first finger together represent one testicle, and the clenched third and fourth fingers together represent the other testicle. This gesture was popular in Roman times, when the middle finger was known as the digitus impudicus, or digitus infamis. It has become modified over the centuries, but can still be seen in many parts of the world. Sometimes the first finger is used instead of the middle finger, probably because this is a slightly easier posture to hold. Sometimes the first and second finger are extended together, emphasizing the size of the symbolic penis. It is usual today for this type of phallic hand to be jerked upwards into the air one or more times, in the direction of the insulted person, symbolizing the action of pelvic thrusting. The two extended fingers may be held together or separated into a V shape.
An interesting corruption of this last form appeared in recent times as the victory-V sign, which did far more than merely copy the first letter of the word victory. Its phallic properties also helped it. It differed from the insult-V by the position of the hand. In the insult-V the palm of the hand is held towards the insulter’s face; in the victory-V it is held towards the admiring crowd of onlookers. This means, in effect, that the dominant individual making the victory-V sign is really making the insult-V, but on their behalf; for them, not against them. What they see as they watch their signalling leader is the same hand position as they themselves would see if they were making the insult-V. By the simple device of rotating the hand, the phallic insult becomes a phallic protection. As we have already observed, threat and protection are two of the most vital aspects of dominance. If a dominant individual performs a threat towards a member of his group, it insults the latter, but if the dominant one performs the same threat away from the group towards an enemy, or an imagined enemy, then his subordinates will cheer him for the protective role he is playing. It is astonishing to think that a leader can change his whole image simply by twisting his hand through 180 degrees, but such are the refinements of modern Status Sex signalling.
Another ancient form of ‘phallic hand’, also dating back at least two thousand years, is the so-called ‘fig’. In this, the whole fist is clenched, but as it is aimed at the insulted person the thumb is pushed through between the base of the curled first , and second fingers. The tip of the thumb then protrudes slightly, like the head of a penis, pointing at the subordinate or enemy. This gesture has spread throughout much of the world and almost everywhere is known as ‘making the fig’. In English, the phrase ‘I don’t give a fig for him’ means that he is not even worthy of an insult.
Many examples of these phallic hands have been found on ancient amulets and other ornaments. They were worn as protections against the ‘evil eye’. Some people today might look upon such emblems as improper or obscene, but this was not the role they played when they were worn. They were used then, quite properly, as protective Status Sex symbols. In specific contexts the symbolic phallus was seen as something to be acclaimed and even worshipped as a magical guardian ready to ravage, not the members of the group, but threats coming from outside it. At the Roman festival of Liberalia an enormous phallus was carried in procession on a magnificent chariot into the middle of the public place of the town where, with great ceremony, the females, including even the most respectable matrons, hung garlands around it to ‘remove enchantments from the land’. In the Middle Ages many churches had phalluses on their outer walls to protect them from evil influences, but in almost all cases these were later destroyed as ‘depraved’.
Even plants were called into phallic service. The mandrake, a plant with phallus-shaped roots, was widely used as a protective amulet. It was improved for its symbolic role by embedding grains of millet or barley in it in the appropriate area, re-burying it for twenty days so that the grains sprouted, then digging it up again and trimming the sprouts to make them look like pubic hair. Kept in this form it was said to be so effective in dominating outside forces that it would double its owner’s money each year.
It would be possible to go on and fill a whole book with examples of phallic symbolism, but the few I have selected are sufficient, I think, to show how widespread and varied this phenomenon is. We arrived at this topic by singling out just one of the elements of the aggressive male Status Sex display, namely penis erection. Other important developments have also occurred, however, which we should not overlook. The original, straightforward pattern of copulation is, for the male, as I have already stressed, a fundamentally assertive and aggressive act of penetration. Under certain conditions it can therefore function as a Status Sex device. A male can copulate with a female primarily to boost his masculine ego, rather than to achieve any of the other nine sexual goals I have listed in this chapter. In such cases he may speak of making a ‘conquest’, as if he has been fighting a battle rather than making love. And when I say he speaks of it I mean this literally, for boasting to other males is an important part of the Status Sex victory. If he keeps quiet about it, it can always feed his ego privately, but it provides him with a much stronger status boost if he tells his friends. Any female who finds out about this can be
reasonably sure what kind of copulation she has been involved with. The details of pair-forming copulations are, by contrast, strictly private.
The male who uses females for Status Sex purposes is more concerned, in fact, with showing them off than with anything else. He may even be content to display his dependent females to his group without bothering to copulate with them. Providing they are clearly seen to be subordinate to him, this will often suffice.
The huge harems that were assembled by the rulers of certain cultures acted largely as a Status Sex device. They did not indicate the existence of multiple pair-bonding. Frequently a favourite wife emerged from the group of females, with whom some sort of pair-bond developed, but the business of Status Sex really came to dominate the whole scene. There was a simple equation: power = number of females in harem. Sometimes there were so many that the ruler had neither the time nor the energy to copulate with all of them, but as a symbol of virility he did attempt to sire as many offspring as possible. The would-be present-day harem overlord usually has to make do with a long series of females, dominating them one at a time, instead of gathering them around him all at once. He has to rely on his verbal reputation rather than on a massive visual display of sexual power.
It is relevant here to mention the special attitude of heterosexual Status Sex devotees towards homosexual males. It is an attitude of increased hostility and contempt, caused by the unconscious realization that ‘if they won’t join the game, they can’t be beaten’. In other words, the homosexual male’s lack of sexual interest in females gives him an unfair advantage in the Status Sex battle, for no matter how many females the heterosexual expert subdues, the homosexual will fail to be impressed. It then becomes necessary to defeat him by ridicule. Inside the homosexual world there will, of course, be Status Sex competition as vigorous as that found in the heterosexual sphere, but this in no way improves the understanding between the two groups, since the objects competed for are so different in the two cases.
If the modern Status Sex practitioner is unable to achieve real conquests, there are still a number of alternatives available to him. A mildly insecure male can express himself by telling dirty jokes. These carry the implication that he is aggressively sexual, but an obsessive, persistent dirty-joke-teller begins to arouse suspicions in his companions. They detect a compensation mechanism.
Males with a greater inferiority problem can frequent prostitutes. I have already mentioned other functions of this sexual activity, but status-boosting is perhaps the most important. The essential property of this form of Status Sex is that the female is being degraded. The male, providing he has a small amount of cash, can demand sexual submission. The fact that he knows the girl does not welcome his advances, but submits to them anyway, can even help to increase his feeling of power over her. Another alternative is the striptease display. The female, again for a small sum of money, has to strip herself naked in front of him, debasing herself and thereby raising the relative status of the watching males.
There is a savage satirical drawing on the subject of striptease, captioned simply ‘tripes-tease’. It shows a naked girl who, having removed all her clothes and still being faced with shouts for ‘more’, makes an incision in her belly, and, with a seductive smile, starts to pull out her entrails to the beat of the music. This brutal comment reveals that with the subject of strip-tease we are moving into the realm of that extreme form of Status Sex expression, the realm of sadism.
It is an unpalatable but obvious fact that the more drastic the need for male ego-boosting, the more desperate the measures; the more degrading and violent the act, the greater the boost. For the vast majority of males, these extreme measures are unnecessary. The level of self-assertion achieved in ordinary social life is sufficiently rewarding. But under the heavy status pressures of super-tribal living, where there can be so few dominants and must be so many suppressed subordinates, sadistic thoughts nevertheless tend to proliferate. For most men they remain nothing more than thoughts; sadistic fantasies that never see the light of day. Some individuals go further, avidly studying the details of whippings, beatings and tortures in sadistic books, pictures and films. A few attend pseudo-sadistic exhibitions, and a very, very few become actual practising sadists. It is true that many men may be mildly brutal in their love-play and that some perform mock-sadist rituals with their mates, but the full-blooded sadist is fortunately a rare beast.
One of the most common forms of sadism is rape. Perhaps the reason for this is that it is so exclusively an act of the male that it expresses aggressive masculinity better than other types of sadistic activity. (Males can torture females and females can torture males. Males can rape females, but females cannot rape males.) In addition to the total domination and degradation of the female, one of the bizarre satisfactions of rape for the sadist is that the writhings and facial expressions of pain he produces in the female are somewhat similar to the writhings and facial expressions of a female experiencing an intense orgasm. Furthermore, if he then kills his victim, her immediately limp and passive condition presents a gruesome mimic of post-orgasmic collapse and relaxation.
An alternative pattern for meeker males is what might be described as ‘visual rape’. Usually referred to as exhibitionism, dais consists of suddenly exposing the genitals to a strange female, or females. No attempt is made to effect physical contact. The aim is to produce shame and confusion on the part of the unwilling female spectators, by presenting them with the most basic form of Status Sex threat display. Here we are right back to the penis threat of the little squirrel monkey.
Perhaps the most extreme kind of sadism is the torture, rape and murder of a small child by an adult male. Sadists of this type must suffer from feelings of the most intense status inferiority known to man. In order to obtain their ego boost, they are forced to select the weakest and most helpless individuals in their society and impose upon them the most violent form of domination they can perform. Happily, these extreme measures are rarely taken. They appear to be more common than they in fact are, because of the enormous publicity that such cases receive, but in reality they comprise only a minute fraction of the total picture of ‘crimes of violence’. All the same, any super-tribe that contains even only a few individuals that are driven to dominance excesses of this kind must constitute a society operating under immense status pressures.
One final point on Status Sex: it is intriguing to discover that certain individuals with a demonstrably vast lust for power suffered from physical sexual abnormalities. The autopsy on Hitler, for instance, revealed that he had only one testicle. The autopsy on Napoleon noted the ‘atrophied proportions’ of his genitals. Both had unusual sex lives, and one is left to wonder just how much the course of European history would have been changed had they been sexually normal. Being structurally sexually inferior, they were perhaps driven back on to more direct forms of aggressive expression. But no matter how extreme their domination became, their urge for super-status could never be satiated, because no matter how much they achieved it could never give them the perfect genitals of the typical dominant male. This is Status Sex going full circle. First, the dominant male sexual condition is borrowed as an expression of dominant aggression. Then it becomes so important in this role that if there is something wrong with the sexual equipment, it becomes necessary to compensate by putting a stronger emphasis on pure aggression.
Perhaps there is something to be said for Status Sex (in its very mildest forms) after all. In its more ritualized and symbolic varieties it does at least provide comparatively harmless outlets for otherwise potentially damaging aggressions. When a dominant monkey mounts a subordinate, it manages to assert itself without recourse to sinking its teeth into the weaker animal’s body. Swapping sex jokes in a bar causes less injury than having a punch-up or a brawl. Making an obscene gesture at someone does not give him a black eye. Status Sex has, in fact, evolved as a bloodless substitute for the bloody violence of direct domination and aggression. It is only
in our overgrown super-tribes, where the status ladder stretches right up into the clouds and the pressures of maintaining or improving a position in the social hierarchy have become so immense, that Status Sex has got out of hand and gone to lengths that are as bloody as pure aggression itself. This is yet another of the prices that the super-tribesman has to pay for the great achievements of his super-tribal world and the excitements of living in it.
In surveying these ten basic functions of sexual behaviour we have seen very clearly the way in which, for the modern urban human animal, sex has become super-sex. Although he shares these ten functions with other animals, he has pushed most of them much farther than the other species have ever done. Even in the most puritanical cultures, sex has played a major role, if only because there it was constantly on people’s minds as something that needed suppressing. It is probably true to say that no one is quite so obsessed by sex as a fanatical puritan.
The influences at work in the trend towards super-sex have been interwoven with one another. The main factor was the evolution of a giant brain. On the one hand this led to a prolonged childhood and this in turn meant a long-term family unit. A pair-bond had to be forged and maintained. Pair-formation Sex and Pair-maintenance Sex were added to primary Procreation Sex. If active sexual outlets were not available, the ingenuity of the giant brain made it possible for various techniques to be employed to obtain relief from physiological sexual tension. Man’s strengthened urge for novelty, his heightened curiosity and inventiveness, gave rise to a massive increase in Exploratory Sex. Because of its efficiency, the giant brain organized his life in such a way that man had more and more time to spare and a greater sensitivity available to him while filling it. Self-rewarding Sex, sex for sex’s sake, was able to blossom. If there was too much time to spare, then Occupational Sex could step in. If, by contrast, the increased strain of super-tribal pressures and stresses became too heavy, then there was always Tranquillizing Sex. The added complexities of super-tribal life brought increased division of labour and trading, and sexual activity became involved here too, in the form of Commercial Sex. Finally, with the vastly magnified dominance and status problems of the huge super-tribal structure, sex was increasingly borrowed for use in a non-sexual context, as all-pervading Status Sex.
The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Study of the Urban Animal Page 11
