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There are a variety of ways of viewing sexual morality, either in a comparison of different cultures or within the boundaries of a single evolving culture. A simplification of one sort or another is usually involved. The struggle between liberalism and puritanism (or, to load the dice the opposite way, between conservatism and libertinism) is a standard. The idea that shifts in the morality of sex reflect changing economic patterns, scientific growth and development, political trends, and the basic soundness or weakness of a society as a whole—all of these are handy analytical tools. Whatever type of historian one may be—Marxian, economic determinist, Freudian, or whatever—there are ways for one to view the history of sexual morality according to one’s own special bent.
This book is not the place for the formulation of a theory of this sort. Our major concern with sexual morality is that of seeing how sexual taboos come into being and how they are perpetuated.
In a sense, we have taken the second aspect before the first. We have seen how sexual restrictions may be originally dictated as pure questions of good and evil, of god’s will, and how they are subsequently reinforced in higher civilization through considerations of health, cleanliness, the rights of others, and the vague specter of public morality. Now we might well seek to know how they come about in the first place. Foregoing the convenience of the religious explanation—that certain acts are simply right or wrong and that one need probe no further—can we develop any logical explanations for some of these prohibitions?
Perhaps it will be helpful if we begin with the one sexual act that is almost universally proscribed—incest. While the definition of incestuous behavior varies from one culture to the next, almost every society condemns and prohibits sexual relationships between those who are somehow related by blood or marriage. Sexual relations between parent and child—and most especially between mother and son—are taboo in all but a tiny minority of primitive tribes. Sexual relations between brother and sister are next most frequently prohibited. Sexual relations between uncle and niece or aunt and nephew follow, with relationships between first cousins further down the list. The extent of incest taboos is extremely variable; some groups, such as the Australian aborigines, carry incest restrictions to the point where an individual cannot marry within his own tribe.
The most tempting explanation for this well nigh universal taboo is biological at root. When incest becomes a predominant practice it exerts a distinctly detrimental effect upon the species. Undesirable recessive traits that might otherwise lie permanently submerged in the genetic background suddenly match up one with another and leap into prominence. The hemophilia of the crowned heads of Europe and the physical and mental retardation of the Jackson Whites of Rockland County, New York, bear similar witness to the dangers of inbreeding over an extended period of time. Thus it is reasonable enough to argue that incest taboos are a natural means of preventing the deterioration of the race.
But it simply won’t wash. A savage in a loincloth is not apt to have a very profound acquaintance with Mendelian genetics. Nor can one expect him to reason from cause and effect. An incestuous marriage will not inevitably produce a defective child, and the occasional idiot thus created could as well be blamed upon the tides or the whim of the gods as upon his parentage.
In this instance the anthropological explanation is more successful. Close relatives exist in a certain sort of role relationship. A mother and a son, for example, relate to one another in a certain socially defined and societally predicable manner. If the two become lovers, another wholly different role relationship is brought into play. The two are at once mother-and-son and wife-and-husband. Their relationship to one another is confused and chaotic. Their relationship to the community at large, and most especially to their mutual relatives, is similarly chaotic. The son is his father’s son and his father’s love rival. The old “I’m My Own Grandpa” is simply an extension of the confusion inherent in any incestuous relationship. The individuals themselves find the chaos intolerable, and their society concurs in the finding.
This is, of course, an extreme simplification of a careful anthropological theory. Yet it should not be hard to grasp. It has led one culture after another to the establishment of a taboo so rigid that Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother in utter ignorance of what he was doing, had to put out his own eyes and go into exile. A taboo so unyielding even to the present time that motherfucker remains the ultimate epithet.
Once we see incest in this light, we can look upon other instances of sexual taboos as having grown out of the need for society to protect itself from chaos and to maintain order. Adultery interfered with property rights—a man’s wife was for his own sexual pleasure. She was to produce his children and no other man’s. Fornication produced unwed mothers and fatherless children. Taboos in terms of technique are more apt to have psychological origin. The restrictions against oral-genital and anal-genital connections have been explained on the grounds that homosexuals engage in them and this renders them offensive to heterosexuals with a strong latent homosexual repressive factor. This may have some basis, but on the other hand may seem quite ridiculous—homosexuals also hold hands, kiss, and fondle one another; yet these acts are not similarly prohibited.
Another explanation with considerable claim to validity lies in the association of the genitalia and the anus with filth. The male and female genitalia are associated with urinary functions, the anus with defecation. This automatic association no doubt plays a large part in the basic taboos against oral and anal copulation. Many persons with no moral objections to such extracoital copulation find the idea somehow offensive, generally expressing the feeling that there is something “dirty” about these acts. It seems likely that their own unconscious association, reinforced inevitably by social taboos, has this effect.
One could readily conjure up explanations for all the forms of sexual behavior that one culture or another sees fit to forbid. A good many of these would probably be nonsensical, for it is all too easy to reason after the fact and present a powerful theory on the basis of data on hand.
The object of all this, however, may make it all worthwhile. If we are to approach the sphere of Eros and Capricorn with the proper perspective, we must manage to get beyond the notion of good and evil in the area of sexual behavior. A cross-cultural survey of sexual techniques demands the mental agility to duck out from under the taboos of one’s own culture in order to assess the full range of human experience. As long as one is willing to label acts “right” and “wrong,” “moral” and “immoral,” “good” and “evil”—as long as one will apply these labels out of hand and let it go at that, one cannot delve much deeper into more important areas.
This is not to say that utter permissiveness is the sine qua non of the sexual researcher. It is not to argue for a moment that a maturity of sexual outlook implies the acceptance of all forms of behavior and the desire for the elimination of all codes of sexual morality. Nor is it to infer that one’s ability to accept sexual acts as beyond good and evil for others means such acceptance of these acts for one’s self. We have come a long way since the eighteenth-century concept of man operating upon reason alone. We are all the products of more than our own making and are moved by forces many times in excess of our own intellects.
Eros and Capricorn
The Techniques of Provoking Desire
A Haitian plucks a few hairs from a young woman’s head. Later he hands them over to a voodoo doctor, who wraps them in the dried skin of a small fish, buries the parcel for two days in the soil beside a tall tree, exhumes it, burns it, and returns the ashes to the young man, who stirs them into a cup of liquid and drinks them.
In a Chicago cocktail lounge, another young man chooses the right moment to drop a tranquilizer into his date’s daiquiri.
In the hills of Afghanistan, a man boils the testes of a mountain ram until they are reduced to liquid. He adds a variety of hot spi
ces and a dollop of milk, cooks and stirs, and devours the resulting mixture.
And in Los Angeles, an aging account executive stops at his doctor’s office for a lunch-hour hormone injection, downs four raw eggs for lunch and a dozen raw oysters for dinner, and sips a pony of Benedictine while waiting for an expensive call girl to arrive at his apartment.
Each of these mythical males is engaging in a personal experiment in the alchemy of Eros. The ways and means of provoking sexual desire—either to facilitate seduction or to guarantee one’s own performance—has long been a universal human problem. However primitive or sophisticated the prescription may be, the elements are the same at any point in space or time. The aphrodisiac, for oneself or for another, is a permanent fixture in the scheme of sexuality.
Psychologists tell us that the love potion in any of its aspects derives largely from sexual insecurity and feelings of sexual inadequacy. When a love potion is employed in seduction, the seducer uses it because he feels that he is unworthy of being desired for his own sake, that he is not sufficiently skillful to seduce successfully without higher assistance, and, finally, that he will suffer—through deprivation, loss of manly image, or whatever—through a failure to seduce the object of his affections.
Similarly, the man who takes an aphrodisiac to ensure his own potency does so because he doubts his ability to perform without it. When age has diminished his sexual power, he is attempting to gain pleasure and to recapture lost youth at the same time. When his impotence is psychological in origin, it generally owes its existence in large measure to a virility anxiety of one sort or another; such a syndrome engenders a situation in which a “magic” cure is especially attractive, and it matters little whether the magic takes the form of witchcraft or science.
The Superman concept has always delighted children. Their fantasies are full of it, and their fictional heroes—successful heroes because they echo these fantasies—are, however, vulnerable. The Man of Steel with X-ray vision is not immune to Kryptonite. The Shadow, able to cloud men’s minds so they cannot see him, is not immune to bullets. All these heroes possess special assets but also their own Achilles’ heels.
The aphrodisiac is this special power, this formula for the production of the sexual Superman. Armed with a pinch of Spanish fly, the schoolboy seducer doesn’t have to worry about his girl holding out on him. Fortified by monkey glands, the old man knows he will be able to perform like a youth.
The various types of aphrodisiacs employed in different cultures at different times may be conveniently divided into two major categories—those for one’s own use and those to be used upon one’s partner. Within these two classes, aphrodisiacs take one of several forms. The most ingenuous of these is the pure magic of the voodoo artist or some comparable mystic. Here neither a scientific nor a pseudoscientific basis for the potion exists. The user wears an amulet about his neck or some other logical part of his anatomy, or he recites a magical incantation, sleeps on the top of a mountain, gives up a burnt offering to his gods, or otherwise follows the directions of his counselor of his culture’s traditions. Insofar as the application of these methods to our modern age is concerned, we might say that they are nil.
And yet the striking fact about aphrodisia by mumbo-jumbo is simply that it is rather apt to work. Impotence is most often psychological and this is so even in many cases where sexual powers have faded with the passage of time. When magic renders the user certain that he is fully virile, he may indeed achieve this virility; his assurance overcomes his original anxiety, and nature is able to take its course. An amulet is worthless in and of itself; it is the wearer’s belief that makes the magic work.
Magic designed to win another’s love has a similar claim to validity, if in a less positive fashion. Convinced that his mystic charm is working for him, a young gallant will be less concerned with the prospect that the object of his intentions will spurn him. As a result he is more likely to be relaxed in the seduction process, and consequently more effective.
Pseudoscientific recipes for awakening desire are as limitless as the Tibetan search for all the possible names of the Lord. In the main, the various aphrodisiacal compounds are either to be taken internally or to be applied to the sex organs. The enormous inventive capacity of mankind outdoes itself in the first area. It is barely possible to name a solitary substance that has not at one time or another been devoured as an aphrodisiac.
In a privately printed work entitled Paneros, author Norman Douglas cautions his readers against putting their trust
in Arabian skink, in Roman goose-fat or Roman goose tongues, in the Arplan of China … in spicy culinary dishes, erongoe root, or the brains of lovemaking sparrows … in pine nuts, the blood of bats mingled with asses’ milk, root of valerian, dried salamander, cyclamen, menstrual fluid of man or beast, tulip bulbs, fat of camel’s hump, parsnips, hyssop, gall of children, salted crocodile, the aquamarine stone, pollen of date palm, the pounded tooth of a corpse, wings of bees, jasmine, turtles’ eggs, applications of henna, brayed crickets, or spiders or ants, garlic, the genitals of hedgehogs, Siberian iris, rhinoceros horn, the blood of slaughtered animals, artichokes, honey compounded with camel’s milk, oil of champak, liquid gold, swallows’ hearts, vineyard snails, fennel-juice, certain bones of the toad, sulphurous waters and other aquae amatrices, skirret-tubers or stag’s horn crushed to powder: aphrodisiacs all, and all impostures.
A fascinating group of delicacies, to be sure—and one quite beyond the scope of even the most comprehensive of gourmet shops! Yet the list does not do more than scratch the surface. Such tidbits as the penises, testes, vulvae, ovaries, and breasts of almost every imaginable animal have been consumed in the search for a sexual stimulus. The most homespun of vegetables and fruits have been so visualized—the tomato is to this day known as the pomme d’amor, or love-apple, and similar attributes have been claimed for the banana, the potato, the carrot, the asparagus spear, the apple, the mango, the pomegranate—the list is endless.
All seafood would go on the list, of course. And eggs most often taken raw, perhaps beaten up in a glass of milk with a dollop of sherry added. And fish eggs, inevitably, combining the best of both worlds, both fish and egg at once. Caviar has long been considered erotically stimulating, and a recipe for a caviar omelet, allegedly the last word in conditioning a man or woman for the bedchamber, was for years a possession of the family of the author of The Arabian Nights.
The idea that meat is sexually stimulating and vegetarian diet less apt to stir one’s passion has persisted up to the present day. One bright lady is supposed to have told playwright George Bernard Shaw that should the crusty old bachelor give up his vegetarian diet, no woman would be safe on the streets of London.
The fantastic novels of the Marquis de Sade abound with references to aphrodisiacs of one sort or another, and Sade infers a definite connection between appetite, choice of food, eating habits, and sexual capacity. Gluttonous gourmandizing is frequently either prelude or accompaniment to a sadistic orgy. In Justine, one precious character is in the habit of bleeding his wife at periodic intervals and drinking her blood; he ascribes his extreme satyriasis to the excessive production of spermatozoa caused by the diet of human blood. Other characters build sexual strength by eating male or female sexual excrescence or by feeding upon the genitalia of their victims.
Cannibalism in general is the source of strength of the monster Minski in Sade’s Juliette. Summarizing an episode in the novel, the noted sexologist Iwan Bloch writes in Marquis de Sade: His Life and Works:
On the trip over the Apennines they (Juliette and a card cheat named Sbrigani) became acquainted with a seven-foot three-inch anthropophagic monster, by the name of Minksi, who lived in a lonely fortified house on an island. The chairs in this house were made from human bones; the house itself was full of skeletons. The victims set aside for consumption were placed in cells in the subterranean cellar of the house. Minski … ate chiefly human flesh and a
scribed his strength to this practice. He lay in wait for the travelers who were to be served at his table as roasts and ragouts. Juliette, her servant and Sbrigani were also doomed to this fate.
But first he did the honors and showed them about his well-populated harem and the cellars with their enormous treasures. Enchanted by the loveliness of Juliette he finally promised to let her live if she would never attempt flight. They next went to eat. Minski, an extreme alcoholist, drank 60 flasks of wine! They were served on a living table! A row of naked women, one pressed on top of another, formed the “table” on which they were served…
The food was excellent. Juliette, after tasting a very succulent ragout, asked what it was. She did not know whether it was beef or veal, venison or bird, that made such a delightful dish. “It’s your chambermaid,” answered the monster with a lovely smile. The poor tribade and true companion of her mistress had been turned into a ragout! This charming cannibal then showed his guests a menagerie of wild animals, had some women brought from his harem and thrown between the lions and tigers for their meal…
Although the endless list of aphrodisiacal foods seems so extensive as to defy analysis, a closer look points up some of the reasons why men are apt to endow certain foods with stimulating properties. A more or less obvious sexual symbolism is at the root of the greater number of cases.
The actual genitalia of animals are obvious choices, certainly. And the animals most often chosen for this dubious distinction are those who possess sexual members of notable dimension—the jackass, the ram—and those who are synonymous with potency—the stag, the stallion, the bull. Foods with a physical resemblance to sex organs rank next in our list, and it would be hard to mistake the sure sexual symbolism of the mandrake root (which Leah fed to Jacob to entice him to bed and which John Donne challenged his audience to impregnate), the carrot, the banana, the oyster, the clam, the snake, the eel, asparagus, celery, all of them symbolically equivalent to either the male or the female sex organs.
Eros & Capricorn: A Cross-Cultural Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Techniques (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 1) Page 3
