The Naked Ape

by Desmond Morris

  Yet, although the basic sexual system has been retained in a fairly primitive form (there has been no communalization of sex to match the enlarged communities), many minor controls and restrictions have been introduced. These have become necessary because of the elaborate set of anatomical and physiological sexual signals and the heightened sexual responsiveness we have acquired during our evolution. But these were designed for use in a small, closely knit tribal unit, not in a vast metropolis. In the big city we are constantly intermixing with hundreds of stimulating (and stimulatable) strangers. This is something new, and it has to be dealt with.

  In fact, the introduction of cultural restrictions must have begun much earlier, before there were strangers. Even in the simple tribal units it must have been necessary for members of a mated pair to curtail their sexual signalling in some way when they were moving about in public. If sexuality had to be heightened to keep the pair together, then steps must have been taken to damp it down when the pair were apart, to avoid the over-stimulation of third parties. In other pair-forming but communal species this is done largely by aggressive gestures, but in a co-operative species like ours, less belligerent methods would be favoured. This is where our enlarged brain can come to the rescue. Communication by speech obviously plays a vital role here (‘My husband wouldn’t like it’), as it does in so many facets of social contact, but more immediate measures are also needed.

  The most obvious example is the hallowed and proverbial fig-leaf. Because of his vertical posture it is impossible for a naked ape to approach another member of his species without performing a genital display. Other primates, advancing on all fours, do not have this problem. If they wish to display their genitals they have to assume a special posture. We are faced with it, hour in and hour out, whatever we are doing. It follows that the covering of the genital region with some simple kind of garment must have been an early cultural development. The use of clothing as a protection against the cold no doubt developed from this as the species spread its range into less friendly climates, but that stage probably came much later.

  With varying cultural conditions, the spread of the anti-sexual garments has varied, sometimes extending to other secondary sexual signals (breast coverings, lip-veils), sometimes not. In certain extreme cases the genitals of the females are not only concealed but also made completely inaccessible. The most famous example of this is the chastity belt, which covered the genital organs and anus with a metal band perforated in the appropriate places to permit the passage of body excretions. Other similar practices have included the sewing up of the genitals of young girls before marriage, or the securing of the labia with metal clasps or rings. In more recent times a case has been recorded of a male boring holes in his mate’s labia and then padlocking her genitals after each copulation. Such extreme precautions as this are, of course, very rare, but the less drastic course of simply hiding the genitals behind a concealing garment is now almost universal.

  Another important development was the introduction of privacy for the sexual acts themselves. The genitals not only became private parts, they also had to be privately used parts. Today this has resulted in the growth of a strong association between mating and sleeping activities. Sleeping with someone has become synonymous with copulating with them: so, the vast bulk of copulatory activity, instead of being spread out through the day, has now become limited to one particular time – the late evening.

  Body-to-body contacts have, as we have seen, become such an important part of sexual behaviour that these too have to be damped down during the ordinary daily routine. A ban has to be placed on physical contact with strangers in our busy, crowded communities. Any accidental brushing against a stranger’s body is immediately followed by an apology, the intensity of this apology being proportional to the degree of sexuality of the part of the body touched. Speeded-up film of a crowd moving through a street, or milling around in a large building, reveals clearly the incredible intricacy of these non-stop ‘bodily-contact avoidance’ manœuvres.

  This contact restriction with strangers normally breaks down only under conditions of extreme crowding, or in special circumstances in relation to particular categories of individuals (hairdressers, tailors and doctors, for instance) who are socially ‘licensed to touch’. Contact with close friends and relatives is less inhibited. Their social roles are already clearly established as non-sexual and there is less danger. Even so, greeting ceremonies have become highly stylized. The handshake has become a rigidly fixed pattern. The greeting kiss has developed its own ritualized form (mutual mouth-to-cheek touching) that sets it apart from mouth-to-mouth sexual kissing.

  Body postures have become de-sexualized in certain ways. The female sexual invitation posture of legs apart is strongly avoided. When sitting, the legs are kept tightly together, or crossed one over the other.

  If the mouth is forced to adopt a posture that is reminiscent in some way of a sexual response, it is often hidden by the hand. Giggling and certain kinds of laughing and grimacing are characteristic of the courtship phase, and when these occur in social contexts, the hand can frequently be seen to shoot up and cover the mouth region.

  Males in many cultures remove certain of their secondary sexual characters by shaving off their beards and/or moustaches. Females depilate their armpits. As an important scent-trap, the armpit hair-tuft has to be eliminated if normal dressing habits leave that region exposed. Pubic hair is always so carefully concealed by clothing that it does not usually warrant this treatment, but it is interesting that this area is also frequently shaved by artists’ models, whose nudity is non-sexual.

  In addition, a great deal of general body de-scenting is practised. The body is washed and bathed frequently – far more than is required simply by the demands of medical care and hygiene. Body odours are socially suppressed and commercial chemical deodorants are sold in large numbers.

  Most of these controls are maintained by the simple, unanswerable strategy of referring to the phenomena they restrict as ‘not nice’, ‘not done’, or ‘not polite’. The true anti-sexual nature of the restrictions is seldom mentioned or even considered. More overt controls are also applied, however, in the form of artificial moral codes, or sexual laws. These vary considerably from culture to culture, but in all cases the major concern is the same – to prevent sexual arousal of strangers and to curtail sexual inter-action outside the pair-bond. As an aid to this process, which is recognized to be a difficult one even by the most puritanical groups, various sublimatory techniques are employed. Schoolboy sports, for example, and other vigorous physical activities are sometimes encouraged in the vain hope that this will reduce the sexual urges. Careful examination of this concept and its application reveals that by and large it is a dismal failure. Athletes are neither more nor less sexually active than other groups. What they lose from physical exhaustion, they gain in physical fitness. The only behavioural method that seems to be of assistance is the age-old system of punishment and reward – punishment for sexual indulgence and reward for sexual restraint. But this, of course, produces suppression rather than reduction of drive.

  It is quite clear that our unnaturally enlarged communities will call for some steps of this kind to prevent the intensified social exposure from leading to dangerously increased sexual activities outside the pair-bond. But the naked ape’s evolution as a highly sexed primate can take only so much of this treatment. Its biological nature keeps on rebelling. As fast as artificial controls are applied in one way, counteracting improvements are made in another. This often leads to ridiculously contradictory situations.

  The female covers her breasts, and then proceeds to redefine their shape with a brassiere. This sexual signalling device may be padded or inflatable, so that it not only reinstates the concealed shape, but also enlarges it, imitating in this way the breast-swelling that occurs during sexual arousal. In some cases, females with sagging breasts even go to the length of cosmetic surgery, subjecting themselves to sub-cutaneous wa
x injections to produce similar effects on a more permanent basis.

  Sexual padding has also been added to certain other parts of the body: one only has to think of male codpieces and padded shoulders, and female buttock-enlarging bustles. In certain cultures today it is possible for skinny females to purchase padded buttock-brassières, or ‘bottom-falsies’. The wearing of high-heeled shoes, by distorting the normal walking posture, increases the amount of swaying in the buttock region during locomotion.

  Female hip-padding has also been employed at various times and, by the use of tight belts, both the hip and breast curves can be exaggerated. Because of this, small female waists have been strongly favoured and tight corseting of this region has been widely practised. As a trend this reached its peak with the ‘wasp waists’ of half a century ago, at which time some females even went to the extreme of having the lower ribs removed surgically to increase the effect.

  The widespread use of lipstick, rouge and perfume to heighten sexual lip signals, flushing signals, and body-scent signals respectively, provides further contradictions. The female who so assiduously washes off her own biological scent then proceeds to replace it with commercial ‘sexy’ perfumes which, in reality, are no more than diluted forms of the products of the scent-glands of other, totally unrelated mammalian species.

  Reading through all these various sexual restrictions and the artificial counter-attractions, one cannot help feeling that it would be much easier simply to go back to square one. Why refrigerate a room and then light a fire in it? As I explained before, the reason for the restrictions is straightforward enough: it is a matter of preventing random sexual stimulation which would interfere with the pair-bonds. But why not a total restriction in public? Why not limit the sexual displays, both biological and artificial, to the moments of privacy between the members of the mated pair? Part of the answer to this is our very high level of sexuality, which demands constant expression and outlet. It was developed to keep the pair together, but now, in the stimulating atmosphere of a complex society, it is constantly being triggered off in non-pair-bond situations. But this is only part of the answer. Sex is also being used as a status device – a well-known manœuvre in other primate species. If a female monkey wants to approach an aggressive male in a non-sexual context, she may display sexually to him, not because she wants to copulate, but because by so doing she will arouse his sexual urges sufficiently to suppress his aggression. Such behaviour patterns are referred to as re-motivating activities. The female uses sexual stimulation to re-motivate the male and thereby gain a non-sexual advantage. Similar devices are used by our own species. Much of the artificial sexual signalling is being employed in this way. By making themselves attractive to members of the opposite sex, individuals can effectively reduce antagonistic feelings in other members of the social group.

  There are dangers in this strategy, of course, for a pair-bonding species. The stimulation must not go too far. By conforming to the basic sexual restrictions that the culture has developed, it is possible to give clear signals that ‘I am not available for copulation’, and yet, at the same time, to give other signals which say that ‘I am nevertheless very sexy’. The latter signals will do the job of reducing antagonism, while the former ones will prevent things from getting out of hand. In this way one can have one’s cake and eat it.

  This should work out very neatly, but unfortunately there are other influences at work. The pair-bonding mechanism is not perfect. It has had to be grafted on to the earlier primate system, and this still shows through. If anything goes wrong with the pair-bond situation, then the old primate urges flare up again. Add to this the fact that another of the naked ape’s great evolutionary developments has been the extension of childhood curiosity into the adult phase, and the situation can obviously become dangerous.

  The system was obviously designed to work in a situation where the female is producing a large family of overlapping children and the male is off hunting with other males. Although fundamentally this has persisted, two things have changed. There is a tendency to limit artificially the number of offspring. This means that the mated female will not be at full parental pressure and will be more sexually available during her mate’s absence. There is also a tendency for many females to join the hunting group. Hunting, of course, has now been replaced by ‘working’ and the males who set off on their daily working trips are liable to find themselves in heterosexual groups instead of the old all-male parties. This means that the pair-bond has a lot to put up with on both sides. All too often it collapses under the strain. (The American figures, you will recall, indicated that 26 percent of married females and 50 percent of married males have experienced extra-marital copulation by the age of forty.) Frequently, though, the original pair-bond is strong enough to maintain itself during these outside activities, or to re-assert itself when they have passed. In only a small percentage of cases is there a complete and final breakdown.

  To leave the matter there would overstate the case for the pair-bond, however. It may be able to survive sexual curiosity in most cases, but it is not strong enough to stamp it out. Although the powerful sexual imprinting keeps the mated pair together, it does not eliminate their interest in outside sexual activities. If outside matings conflict too strongly with the pair-bond, then some less harmful substitute for them has to be found. The solution has been voyeurism, using the term in its broadest sense, and this is employed on an enormous scale. In the strict sense voyeurism means obtaining sexual excitement from watching other individuals copulating, but it can logically be broadened out to include any non-participatory interest in any sexual activity. Almost the entire population indulges in this. They watch it, they read about it, they listen to it. The vast bulk of all television, radio, cinema, theatre and fiction-writing is concerned with satisfying this demand. Magazines, newspapers and general conversation also make a large contribution. It has become a major industry. And never once throughout all this does the sexual observer actually do anything. Everything is performed by proxy. So urgent is the demand that we have had to invent a special category of performers – actors and actresses – who pretend to go through sexual sequences for us, so that we can watch them at it. They court and marry, and then live again in new roles, to court and marry another day. In this way the voyeur supplies are tremendously increased.

  If one looked at a wide range of animal species, one would be forced to the conclusion that this voyeurist activity of ours is biologically abnormal. But it is comparatively harmless and may actually help our species, because it satisfies to some extent the persistent demands of our sexual curiosity without involving the individuals concerned in new potential mateship relationships that could threaten the pair-bond.

  Prostitution operates in much the same way. Here, of course, there is involvement, but in the typical situation it is ruthlessly restricted to the copulatory phase. The earlier courtship phase and even the pre-copulatory activities are kept to an absolute minimum. These are the stages where pair-formation begins to operate and they are duly suppressed. If a mated male indulges his urge for sexual novelty by copulating with a prostitute he is, of course, liable to damage his pair-bond, but less so than if he becomes involved in a romantic, but non-copulatory, love affair.

  Another form of sexual activity that requires examination is the development of a homosexual fixation. The primary function of sexual behaviour is to reproduce the species and this is something that the formation of homosexual pairs patently fails to do. It is important to make a subtle distinction here. There is nothing biologically unusual about a homosexual act of pseudo-copulation. Many species indulge in this, under a variety of circumstances. But the formation of a homosexual pair-bond is reproductively unsound, since it cannot lead to the production of offspring and wastes potential breeding adults. To understand how this can happen it will help to look at other species.

  I have already explained how a female may use sexual signals to re-motivate an aggressive male. By aro
using him sexually she suppresses his antagonism and avoids being attacked. A subordinate male may use a similar device. Young male monkeys frequently adopt female sexual invitation postures and are then mounted by dominant males that would otherwise have attacked them. Dominant females may also mount subordinate females in the same way. This utilization of sexual patterns in non-sexual situations has become a common feature of the primate social scene and has proved extremely valuable in helping to maintain group harmony and organization. Because these other species of primates do not undergo a process of intense pair-bond formation, it does not lead to difficulties in the shape of long-term homosexual pairings. It simply solves immediate dominance problems, but does not have long-term sexual relationship consequences.

  Homosexual behaviour is also seen in situations where the ideal sexual object (a member of the opposite sex) is unavailable. This applies in many groups of animals: a member of the same sex is used as a substitute object – ‘the next best thing’ for sexual activity. In total isolation animals are often driven to more extreme measures and will attempt to copulate with inanimate objects, or will masturbate. In captivity, for example, certain carnivores have been known to copulate with their food containers. Monkeys frequently develop masturbatory patterns and this has even been recorded in the case of lions. Also, animals housed with the wrong species may attempt to mate with them. But these activities typically disappear when the biologically correct stimulus – a member of the opposite sex – appears on the scene.