Notes about Sexuality and Religion

by Desmond Morris.

“It is strange that there is this discrepancy between the male and female as regards the time taken to reach sexual climax and relief from tension.”

https://archive.org/details/TheNakedApeMorrisDesmond/page/n1/mode/2up

Because of the extremely long period of dependency of
the young and the heavy demands made by them, the females
found themselves almost perpetually confined to the home
base. In this respect the hunting ape’s new way of life threw
up a special problem, one that it did not share with the
typical ‘pure’ carnivores: the role of the sexes had to become
more distinct. The hunting parties, unlike those of the ‘pure’
carnivores, had to become all-male groups. If anything was
going to go against the primate grain, it was this. For a virile
primate male to go off on a feeding trip and leave his females
unprotected from the advances of any other males that might
happen to come by, was unheard of. No amount of cultural
training could put this right. This was something that de-
manded a major shift in social behaviour.

The answer was the development of a pair-bond. Male
and female hunting apes had to fall in love and remain faith-
ful to one another. This is a common tendency in many other
groups of animals, but is rare amongst primates. It solved
three problems in one stroke. It meant that the females re-
mained bonded to their individual males and faithful to
them while they were away on the hunt. It meant that
serious sexual rivalries between the males were reduced.
…

Nakedness

Another suggestion along the same lines pictures the loss
of hair as an extension of sexual signalling. It is claimed that
male mammals are generally hairier than their females and
that, by extending this sex difference, the female naked ape
was able to become more and more sexually attractive to
the male. The trend to loss of hair would affect the male, too,
but to a lesser extent and with special areas of contrast, such
as the beard.

This last idea may well explain the sex differences as re-
gards hairiness but, again, the loss of body insulation would
be a high price to pay for a sexy appearance alone, even with
sub-cutaneous fat as a partial compensating device. A modi-
fication of this idea is that it was not so much the appearance
as the sensitivity to touch that was sexually important. It
can be argued that by exposing their naked skins to one an-
other during sexual encounters, both male and female would
become more highly sensitized to erotic stimuli. In a species
where pair-bonding was evolving, this would heighten the
excitement of sexual activities and would tighten the bond
between the pair by intensifying copulatory rewards.
…

This problem [nakedness] has puzzled experts for a long time and many
imaginative theories have been put forward. One of the most
promising ideas is that it was part and parcel of the process
of neoteny. If you examine an infant chimpanzee at birth
you will find that it has a good head of hair, but that its body
is almost naked. If this condition was delayed into the
animal’s adult life by neoteny, the adult chimpanzee’s hair
condition would be very much like ours.
…

There is one way we can do this, and it may give the best
answer yet to the whole problem of our nakedness. The
essential difference between the hunting ape and his carni-
vore rivals was that he was not physically equipped to make
lightning dashes after his prey or even to undertake long
endurance pursuits. But this is nevertheless precisely what
he had to do. He succeeded because of his better brain, lead-
ing to more intelligent manœuvring and more lethal weap-
ons, but despite this such efforts must have put a huge
strain on him in simple physical terms. The chase was so
important to him that he would have to put up with this,
but in the process he must have experienced considerable
over-heating. There would be a strong selection pressure work-
ing to reduce this over-heating and any slight improvement
would be favoured, even if it meant sacrifices in other direc-
tions. His very survival depended on it. This surely was the
key factor operating in the conversion of a hairy hunting
ape into a naked ape. With neoteny to help the process on
its way, and with the added advantages of the minor second-
ary benefits already mentioned, it would become a viable
proposition. By losing the heavy coat of hair and by increas-
ing the number of sweat glands all over the body surface,
considerable cooling could be achieved-not for minute-by-
minute living, but for the supreme moments of the chase-
with the production of a generous film of evaporating liquid
over his air-exposed, straining limbs and trunk.
…

Chapter 2 SEX

The copulatory phase is typically much briefer than the
pre-copulatory phase. The male reaches the consummatory
act of sperm ejaculation within a few minutes in most cases,
unless deliberate delaying tactics are employed. Other fe-
male primates do not appear to experience a climax to their
sexual sequences, but the naked ape is unusual in this
respect. If the male continues to copulate for a longer period
of time, the female also eventually reaches a consummatory
moment, an explosive orgasmic experience, as violent and
tension-releasing as the male’s, and physiologically identi-
cal with it in every way except for the single obvious ex-
ception of sperm ejaculation. Some females may reach this
point very quickly, others not at all, but on the average it
is attained between ten and twenty minutes after the start
of copulation.

It is strange that there is this discrepancy between the
male and female as regards the time taken to reach sexual
climax and relief from tension. This is a matter that will have
to be discussed in detail later when the functional signifi-
cance of the various sexual patterns are being considered.
Suffice it to say at this point that the male can overcome the
time factor and arouse the female to orgasm either by pro-
longing and heightening the pre-copulatory stimulation, so
that she is already strongly aroused before penis insertion
takes place, or he can employ self-inhibitory tactics during
copulation to delay his own climax, or he can continue to
copulate immediately after ejaculation and before he loses
his erection, or he can rest briefly and then copulate for a
second time. In the latter case, his reduced sex drive will
automatically ensure that he takes much longer to reach his
next climax and this will give the female sufficient time on
this occasion to reach hers.
…

The penis of the male undergoes a dramatic modification
with sexual arousal. From a limp, flaccid condition it ex-
pands, stiffens and erects by means of intensive vaso-conges-
tion. Its normal, average length of nine and a half centimetres
is increased by seven to eight centimetres. The diameter is
also considerably increased, giving the species the largest
erect penis of any living primate.
…

It is interesting that, if one measures sexual responsiveness
in terms of frequency of orgasm, the male is much quicker to
reach his peak of performance than the female. Although
males begin their sexual maturation process a year or so be-
hind the girls, they nevertheless attain their orgasmic peak
while they are still in their teens, whereas the girls do not
reach theirs until their mid-twenties or even thirties. In fact,
the female of our species has to reach the age of twenty-nine
before she can match the orgasm rate of the fifteen-year-old
male. Only 23 per cent of fifteen-year-old females will have
experienced orgasm at all, and this figure has only risen to
53 per cent by the age of twenty. By thirty-five it is 90 per cent.
…

The fact that the female orgasm in our species is unique
amongst primates, combined with the fact that it is physio-
logically almost identical with the orgasmic pattern of the
male, suggests that perhaps it is in an evolutionary sense a
‘pseudo-male’ response. In the make-up of both males and
females there are latent properties belonging to the opposite
sex. We know from comparative studies of other groups of
animals that evolution can, if necessary, call up one of
these latent qualities and bring it into the front line (in the
‘wrong’ sex, as it were). In this particular instance we know
that the female of our species has developed a particular
susceptibility to sexual stimulation of the clitoris. When we
remember that this organ is the female homologue, or coun-
terpart, of the male penis, this does seem to point to the fact
that, in origin at any rate, the female orgasm is a ‘borrowed’
male pattern.
This may also explain why the male has the largest penis
of any primate. It is not only extremely long when fully erect,
but also very thick when compared with the penises of other
species. (The chimpanzee’s is a mere spike by comparison.)
This broadening of the penis results in the female’s external
genitals being subjected to much more pulling and pushing
during the performance of pelvic thrusts. With each inward
thrust of the penis, the clitoral region is pulled downwards
and then, with each withdrawal, it moves up again. Add to
this the rhythmic pressure being exerted on to the clitoral
region by the pubic region of the frontally copulating male,
and you have a repeated massaging of the clitoris that-were
she a male-would virtually be masturbatory.
…