The Naked Ape (10 page)

So we can sum up by saying that with both appetitive and consummatory behaviour, everything possible has been done to increase the sexuality of the naked ape and to ensure the successful evolution of a pattern as basic as pair-formation, in a mammalian group where it is elsewhere virtually unknown. But the difficulties of introducing this new trend are not over yet. If we look at our naked ape couple, still successfully together and helping one another to rear the infants, all appears to be well. But the infants are growing now and soon they will have reached puberty, and then what? If the old primate patterns are left unmodified, the adult male will soon drive out the young males and mate with the young females. These will then become part of the family unit as additional breeding females along with their mother, and we shall be right back where we started. Also, if the young males are driven out into an inferior status on the edge of society, as in many primate species, then the cooperative nature of the all-male hunting group will suffer.

Clearly some additional modification to the breeding system is needed here, some kind of exogamy or outbreeding device. For the pair-bond system to survive, both the daughters and the sons will have to find mates of their own. This is not an unusual demand for pair forming species and many examples of it can be found amongst the lower mammals, but the social nature of most primates makes it a more difficult proposition. In most pair-forming species the family splits up and spreads out when the young grow up. Because of its co-operative social behaviour the naked ape cannot afford to scatter in this way. The problem is therefore kept much more on the doorstep, but it is solved in basically the same way. As with all pair-bonded animals, the parents are possessive of one another. The mother ‘owns’ the father sexually and vice-versa. As soon as the offspring begin to develop their sexual signals at puberty, they become sexual rivals, the sons of the father and the daughters of the mother. There will be a tendency to drive them both out. The offspring will also begin to develop a need for a home-based ‘territory’ of their own. The urge to do this must obviously have been present in the parents for them to have set up a breeding home in the first place, and the pattern will simply be repeated. The parental home base, dominated and ‘owned’ by the mother and father, will not have the right properties. Both the place itself and the individuals living in it will be heavily loaded with both primary and associative parental signals. The adolescent will automatically reject this and set off . to establish a new breeding base. This is typical of young territorial carnivores, but not of young primates, and this is one more basic behavioural change that is going to be demanded of the naked ape.

It is perhaps unfortunate that this phenomenon of exogamy is so often referred to as indicating an ‘incest taboo’. This immediately implies that it is a comparatively recent, culturally controlled restriction, but it must have developed biologically at a much earlier stage, or the typical breeding system of the species could never have emerged from its primate background.

Another related feature, and one that appears to be unique to our species, is the retention of the hymen or maidenhead in the female. In lower mammals it occurs as an embryonic stage in the development of the urogenital system, but as part of the naked ape’s neoteny it is retained. Its persistence means that the first copulation in the life of the female will meet with some difficulty. When evolution has gone to such lengths to render her as sexually responsive as possible, it is at first sight strange that she should also be equipped with what amounts to an anti-copulatory device. But the situation is not as contradictory as it may appear. By making the first copulation attempt difficult and even painful, the hymen ensures that it will not be indulged in lightly. Clearly, during the adolescent phase, there is going to be a period of sexual experimentation, of ‘playing the field’ in search of a suitable partner. Young males at this time will have no good reason for stopping short of full copulation. If a pair-bond does not form they have not committed themselves in any way and can move on until they find a suitable mate. But if young females were to go so far without pairformation, they might very well find themselves pregnant and heading straight towards a parental situation with no partner to accompany them. By putting a partial brake on this trend in the female, the hymen demands that she shall have already developed a deep emotional involvement before taking the final step, an involvement strong enough to take the initial physical discomfort in its stride.

A word must be added here on the question of monogamy and pologamy. The development of the pair-bond, which has occurred in the species as a whole, will naturally favour monogamy, but it does not absolutely demand it. If the violent hunting life results in adult males becoming scarcer than females, there will be a tendency for some of the surviving males to form pair-bonds with more than one female. This will then make it possible to increase the breeding rate without setting up dangerous tensions by creating ‘spare’ females. If the pair-formation process became so totally exclusive that it prevented this, it would be inefficient. This would not be an easy development, however, because of the possessiveness of the females concerned and the dangers of provoking serious sexual rivalries between them. Also working against it would be the basic economic pressures of maintaining the larger family group with all its offspring. A small degree of polygamy could exist, but it would be severely limited. It is interesting that although it still occurs in a number of minor cultures today, all the major societies (which account for the vast majority of the world population of the species) are monogamous. Even in those that permit polygamy, it is not usually practised by more than a small minority of the males concerned. It is intriguing to speculate as to whether its omission from almost all the larger cultures has, in fact, been a major factor in the attainment of their present successful status. We can, at any rate, sum up by saying that, whatever obscure, backward tribal units are doing today, the mainstream of our species expresses its pair-bonding character in its most extreme form, namely long-term monogamous coatings.

This, then, is the naked ape in all its erotic complexity: a highly sexed, pair-forming species with many unique features; a complicated blend of primate ancestry with extensive carnivore modifications. Now, to this we must add the third and final ingredient: modern civilisation. The enlarged brain that accompanied the transformation of the simple forest-dweller into a co-operative hunter began to busy itself with technological improvements. The simple tribal dwelling places became great towns and cities. The axe age blossomed into the space age. But what effect did the acquisition of all this gloss and. glitter have on the sexual system of the species? Very little, seems to be the answer. It has all been too quick, too sudden, for any fundamental biological advances to occur. Superficially they seem to have occurred, it is true, but this is largely make-believe. Behind the facade of modern city life there is the same old naked ape. Only the names have been changed: for ‘hunting’ read ‘working’, for ‘hunting grounds’ read ‘place of business’, for ‘home base’ read house’, for ‘pair-bond’ read ‘marriage’, for ‘mate’, read ‘wife’, and so on. The American studies of conteporary sexual patterns, referred to earlier, have revealed that the physiological and anatomical equipment of the species is still being put to full use. The evidence of prehistoric remnants combined with comparative data from living carnivores and other living primates has given us a picture of how the naked ape must have used this sexual equipment in the distant past and how he must have organised his sex life. The contemporary evidence appears to give much the same basic picture, once one has cleaned away the dark varnish of public moralising. As I said at the beginning of the chapter, it is the biological nature of the beast that has moulded the social structure of civilisation, rather than the other way around.

Yet, although the basic sexual system has been retained in a fairly primitive form (there has been no communalisation 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 art 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’ manoeuvres.

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 stylised. The handshake has become a rigidly fixed pattern. The greeting kiss has developed its own ritualised form (mutual mouth-to-cheek touching) that sets it apart from mouth-to-mouth sexual kissing.

Body postures have become de-sexualised 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 depilitate 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 nonsexual.

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.