Caught in the Act

A dispassionate history of sex and the powerful mythologies that have surrounded it down the ages

Ten years ago, a friend in publishing told me every book he published was about sex. It had to be, or it wouldn’t sell. That year, one of his authors had won the Bad Sex Award so I could allow him literary fiction, but what about the rest?

Travel writing, for instance—

That too, he said.

Everything was about doing it.

Travel was where, history when, crime why, psychology why not, romance whether, biography with whom, health just in case, and as for how, he had that covered between sci-fi and self-help.

Cookbooks? I challenged.

He sniggered. Had I seen a cookbook lately? Chemists ordered cookbooks by the tonne when they ran out of Viagra.

He, of course, was talking about what makes a book sell.

Or was he?

I was reminded of this conversation last week when reading about a brain imaged in flagrante delicto. The very thought is anhedonic, but apparently people have cheerily volunteered to orgasm inside an MRI machine. Surely such service in the name of science would have been, in an earlier age, decently obscured in anonymity?

Think again. In 1677 Anton Leuwenhock told the world about the cute ‘animalcules’ he saw when he put a drop of his ejaculate under his new invention, the microscope—albeit a little nervously, worried ‘that the world, which is coarse and vicious enough, might use the knowledge of nature for its own ruin and increasingly debauch itself in depravity.’ He was also careful to clarify he was not guilty of the horrific sin of self-pollution: the semen under scrutiny was merely the dregs of legitimate intercourse.

In a famous medical goof-up, the eighteenth century British surgeon John Hunter allegedly inoculated his penis with gonorrheal discharge from a patient who also had syphilis, and then went on to suffer all the ravages of syphilis in public gaze. That myth is now busted. Hunter’s own (May 1767) account of the inoculation doesn’t say who  was so inoculated. John Hunter’s life was bold and aggressively brilliant. His death (16 October 1793) was in character: he slumped dead after a furious argument at a board meeting. His body was autopsied by his brother-in-law Everard Home, and the findings carefully documented. There were no signs of syphilis. John Hunter had died, like so many of his present day colleagues, of ischaemic heart disease. 

Hunter’s martyrdom to syphilis was a clever invention. The world first heard of it at a commemorative lecture in 1925. It was a good story, and great press for the dead man. The Lazarus trick worked so well that all that survives of Hunter’s genius today is this bit of baloney.

The French neurologist Brown-Sequard injected himself with an extract of monkey’s testes in 1889. In several scientific papers the 72-year-old detailed his new improved physiology. He proclaimed an ‘increase in strength’ that took 30 years off him. The news spread. An ageing Europe stampeded to Africa and hunted the monkey to the brink of extinction.

Twenty years later, Sigmund Freud signed up for a vasectomy—but not for the usual reasons. Freud, then in his fifties, underwent ‘the Steinach operation’ to rejuvenate his mental and physical (read sexual) prowess. Freud didn’t talk about it, but another rejuvenate, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, was less reticent. Determined not to go gently into that good night, he had his tubes tied and gleefully reported a ‘strange second puberty.’

And a century after Brown-Sequard publicly bared his soul, history had a flamboyant rerun.

At a solemn conclave of urologists in Las Vegas in 1983, Professor GM Brindley read a landmark paper on the first medical treatment of Erectile Dysfunction. Professor Brindley, who had injected his penis with papaverine an hour before the lecture, concluded his presentation by dropping his pants.

In such eminent company, the nurse who recently masturbated inside an MRI scanner seems almost modest. In her case the subject of scrutiny was her brain, and not her pelvis. The results can be seen on YouTube and other repositories of sensational trivia on the net. Do watch it, if you haven’t yet. It is much more dramatic and less likely to be censored than Professor Brindley’s revelation, but fun apart, it is news. Like Leuwenhoeck’s animalcule, Hunter’s mythical chancre, Brown- Sequard’s restored libido and Yeats’ lubricity—it is one more milestone in an endless human quest. The same one my publisher friend was talking about.

In the video, the colours are based on the ‘hot metal scale’—the more blood flow there is, meaning the faster and more oxygen is used up as fuel, the colour changes from red hot to incandescent. It is a seven-minute record of buildup to orgasm, and the downswing to quiescence.

It begins with a tentative lick of scarlet over the sensory cortex. That shows where the action is. The cerebral cortex has a map of the body on it, and that is the genital area. Within seconds the limbic system is aglow, which means all the emotional baggage is being dragged in, haunted by memory. That is the cingulate gyrus, lighting up as the heart beats faster, the septum pellucidum and nucleus accumbens, the brain’s G-spot—all this is old hat, we’ve been reading about this all our lives. The cerebellum pitches in, only to be expected with all that muscular brio—and hello! the supercilious frontal cortex and its snooty accompaniments switch on the lights too.

At climax, the entire brain is one whitehot supernova.

Nothing about this is really new, neurologically speaking, though we didn’t see it in Eastman colour until now. Yet, it feels like the final frontier, and there seems to be the conviction that the fMRI has boldly gone where no man has gone before. So that’s what it’s all about, gasp the news reports. The incandescent brain is the ultimate epiphany. Finally, the elusive mystique of sex is common knowledge.

I disagree. The whitehot image is simply the all-systems-go signal of an all-body happening, and it is sad if we need an MRI to tell us that.

But epiphany? There have been so many of them on this 2 million year long quest for a 2 million year old joy that all 7 billion of us present day humans experience.

So many epiphanies can only mean we’re still far from understanding what sex is all about. We’ve always known it is bigger than rules. Bigger than gender, courtships, relationships, heredity, procreation, DNA—and even mating. We’ve altered all that stuff, turned it inside out, even got round to disconnecting procreation from sex. It hasn’t made an iota of difference. Homo sapiens is still hooked on sex, and still not sapient on why. We’re not hooked on sex for reproduction or bonding or social relevance, but on sex for sex’s sake, for the pure aesthetic joy of it—and what’s it all about, anyway?

Before we leave the brain to simmer down to quiescence, there’s a slightly older epiphany we ought to notice. This has to do with those cookbooks my friend mentioned. It has to do with the idiom of food writing and the voluptuous images—sheen, texture, colour, all synaesthetised to make you drool secretions not necessarily gastric.

Chocolate—dark silk, or satin plump, sensuous as skin; moist vanilla, warm as a body cavity; cream; fruit, where colours unravel their juice in luxury.

‘Orgasmic’ pronounced a chef on a cookery show last week while sampling, of all things, a wobbly mousse. That may not have been all metaphor. The pleasure chemicals from sugar and chocolate that drenched his brain were all bliss molecules. Opiates, endorphins, serotonin, tryptophan, dopamine, oxytocin and the appropriately named anandamide: the nurse’s incandescent brain simply squelched with the lot of them.

So is that all it takes, a chemicalcocktail?

Not quite.

Despite muscular efforts to push these as ‘love chemicals’ and ‘cuddle hormones’, there seems to be more to sex than a Hallmark fix. Sure, chocolate can simulate the heightened awareness of sexual anticipation, but so can anything enjoyable. And certainly, it isn’t the real thing.

So what is?

Professor Brindley’s hydraulic feat was not so much epiphany as vindication of the world’s most prevalent faith: phallocentric sex. The drug he had injected himself with—papaverine—did not have a long run only because, a few years later, along came a little blue pill. Sildenafil citrate, also known as Viagra.

Originally developed for the treatment of erectile dysfunction, Viagra, and its cousins, were quickly overprescribed on a demand and supply basis. The drug company Pfizer has been quoted as saying there have been more than 35 million prescriptions. Considering there are about 3.5 billion male humans, and at least 40 per cent of them are sexually active—what does that mean? Are we in the grip of an ED pandemic?

Obviously, Viagra has been prescribed not for treatment, but as enhancement. And it somersaulted over the counter long ago. It is, now, a recreational drug.

As a career move, that’s fatal for a therapeutic molecule. There are fewer prescriptions these days. Of course the pill works. It does what it promises to do. And all it does is maintain an erection. Is that enough? It could be enough if that alone was deficient. But it takes more than a boner to bridge the abyss.

In a way the euphoria over sildenafil citrate wasn’t so much priapic glee as control. The beast had been mastered. It was also a backlash to the epiphany that had come earlier. The epiphany that threatened to upstage the penis…

…the clitoral epiphany.

It all happened, as Larkin said, between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, but this was quite a different happening.

Freud, quite the high priest of human sexuality, had vehemently dissed the clitoris. Any woman who had a clitoral orgasm was, of course, nuts. And, not to say, infantile. A fringe industry of clitoris-snipping quietly grew in surgical clinics all over Europe and America. Baby girls who ‘looked different’ were brutally made to conform. Bigger girls, unlike Freud’s disciple Marie Bonaparte, seldom went willingly to the knife, but were often dragged by father or husband.

Then, in the 1960s, the Kinsey and Hite Reports revealed that women simply laughed at Freud. With Masters and Johnson making it explicit that the clitoris was the power centre, just as the feminist movement gained momentum, it happened all at once. After centuries of anonymity, the clitoris went public.

Centuries of anonymity?

In the body politic, perhaps.

Since the 17th century, western medicine, and therefore popular practice, had either ignored the clitoris or actively mutilated it. It was a polite erasure in medical textbooks.

But the private life of the clitoris is as old as sex itself. It may have dropped out of textbooks and journals, but it never dropped out of people’s lives.

Still, it has always been ammunition in the war between the sexes. In earlier centuries it was misogyny’s principal target, and still is, in some cultures. The clitoris was laughing up its nymphae now as feminist polemic attacked the penis, chortling a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

Since Freud, the penis had been in charge of much more than sex. It had imbued the arts with meaning, and had practically usurped the mind. Now all that had been challenged, leaving it wrinkled with anxiety.

Thinking of sex as merely phallic took the edge off its mystique. One of Freud’s disciples, William Reich, contended that sex was based on a ‘cosmic energy.’

Sounds familiar? No, his idea was not as Tantric as it sounds. He thought up an actual physical form for Freud’s idea of the libido. This ‘energy’ he called orgone. When orgone was permitted to drench the body, the result—you guessed it—was an orgasm. He tried to trap (and sell) orgone in little iron boxes or accumulators. Until he was tried, and imprisoned, by the American FDA, Reich had boasted celebrity clientele who swore by their little metal boxes.

Reich was not promoting orgone for sexual pleasure. In his view, orgasms were essential for good health. One of his early exhortations read: ‘Comrade lovers! For your health’s sake: fuck freely.’

Reich died in prison, ridiculed by the press, scorned by his colleagues. Yet, his only crime seems to be that he tried to market, in little boxes, the prevalent thought of his day.

American housewives of the early 1900s were an eager market for the new ‘electric’ appliances. And, not just toasters and fans. Vibrators, under various euphemistic tags, sold at a little over five dollars. There was nothing shocking about that. Electricity saved on the doctor’s bill.

That’s right.

‘Pelvic massage’ was a time-honoured practice in western medicine for the cure of any number of female ailments ranging from epilepsy to the need to vote. Sometimes, but not very often, the male physician employed a nurse or a female assistant for this chore.

It is difficult to read medical literature on this very lucrative practice with a straight face. Ayurveda and Unani describe it too, and so did Hippocrates.

It is shocking to realise that ‘medicalising’ the orgasm is almost as old as medical science itself. Around the time that American and European physicians were making a fortune off massaging their patients into orgasm, they were also cashing in on another ‘ailment’—masturbation. Women, as expected, suffered more. Little girls had their genitals scalded with alkali. If they didn’t ‘mend,’ the clitoris was cut off. London’s Isaac Baker Brown had a thriving practice in clitoridectomy. Brown recommended removal of the clitoris as suitable expiation for the sin of masturbation, although his book was published as On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy and Hysteria in Females.

Men didn’t have it very much easier. The teenager suspected of masturbation was punished with sadistic cruelty. Flogging and cold water baths (in European winters) were mild compared to the complicated devices, often fanged with electrified points, designed to clamp down on the excited penis. Circumcision was optimistically recommended. When it failed, metal probes often coated with corrosives were enthusiastically used.

Scary, and lest we console ourselves this was more than a century ago, it is worth remembering that in 1994, Bill Clinton fired Jocelyn Elders from her post as US Surgeon General for opining that masturbation was more advisable than promiscuous sex that resulted in teenage pregnancy.

Strangely, I find this epiphany the most illuminating of all. Why the dread and guilt? I don’t consider cultural or religious pressures an adequate answer. As a rationalist, I believe all cultural and religious beliefs to be based on human needs.

So what does this dread and punishment signify? I’d say it is based on the need to subjugate and domesticate the young. To make them conform to the prevalent norm so that they remain dependent on the matrix, not just for sustenance but also for the luxury of pleasure.

Sex is neither phallic nor clitoral nor vaginal nor societal. It is not located in the genitals nor in the gonads. Nor is it a cocktail of clever chemicals.

The researchers who recently put that nurse in the MRI made some very interesting observations some years ago. They found that women who had lost all genital sensation following spinal cord injury could experience orgasm by caresses to the arm or neck or face—to practically any random body part. Many people experience deep sexual pleasure entirely without touch.

There is no part of the body that isn’t erogenous. As the MRI of the incandescent brain reveals, sex is a state of being. Every cell participates. It is possible the future will tell us that it is a moment of intense communication. But for now it is a moment of intense expression of self.

The heightened sensations that we call ‘sexual’ go way beyond the genital. The body becomes acutely aware of everything, it is all sentient, and at its most creative.

 ‘I paint with my genitals,’ Paul Gauguin said.

‘I write with a hard dick and a soft pencil,’ wrote the protagonist in Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy.

Neither of them meant it literally.

My publisher pal didn’t either. Or again, perhaps he did.

About The Author

Kalpish Ratna

Kalpish Ratna is the author of The Secret Life of Zika Virus (2017) and Synapse (2019)