A Sexual Odyssey – From Forbidden Fruit to Cybersex
by Kenneth Maxwell 1996.
The Sex Wars
In ancient Rome there were several categories of marriage having different and confusing legal status. Divorce was easy, often with no more formality than the husband’s declaration that the marriage was ended. The system encouraged promiscuity, and because of the uncertainty of fatherhood, the practice was to name children after the mother’s side of the family…
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Pythagoras, who lived in the sixth century BC, taught that people should not be dominated by the flesh.
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Plato thought of love as dualistic: the sacred and the profane-the former of the mind, the latter of the body. True happiness could be achieved only through the nonphysical, the higher form of love. Other philosophers, as well, argued that pleasures of the senses were of no lasting virtue and were harmful;
Lucretius advised men to avoid sex completely.
The theme of restraint was carried into religion by others, especially Philo, a Jewish philosopher in Alexandria of the first century BC, and Plotinus, writing on Christian matters in the third century AD. Early Jewish law was probably derived from Babylonian law, encoded by Hammurabi and the main features written in stone by Moses. Two of the ten commandments relate to sex: adultery and coveting a neighbor’s wife.
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However, one of several nudist cults was a group of early Christians, the Adamiani, a sect based on The Gospel of St. Thomas that flourished in northern Africa during the second and third centuries AD. They went naked to religious services as well as often during everyday life. Their spiritual descendants, the
Adamites, calling themselves “brothers and sisters of the free spirit,” came into existence in Germany and Holland in the Middle Ages. They believed in ritual nakedness and were severely persecuted.
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The study consisted of 90-minute face-to-face interviews with 3432 randomly selected Americans ages 18 to 59, who remained anonymous. The study was first proposed in 1988 by the National Institutes of Health to gain information that might help stop the spread of AIDS. But the study was delayed because conservatives in the federal government vigorously objected, fearing that the findings might be used as justification for the sexual practices…
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According to the study, about 75% of married men and 85% of married women say they have remained faithful. These values for fidelity are much higher than those obtained in other surveys…
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Impotence is the closet malady of the human male, affecting, according to estimates, about 10% of the adult male population. Sigmund Freud, at the age of 37, wrote to a friend about his troubles with impotence.16
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The great first century Roman authority on the art of love, Publius Ovidius Naso, usually called simply Ovid, was married three times and had many affairs. He wrote from experience to women of all ages in what some people refer to as a “seducer’s manual” or a “guide to infidelity,” in his book of poetry, The Art of Love:35
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Emperor Augustus, who became a”family values” crusader, took a dim view of Ovid, and used his morality movement as an excuse to ban the popular rogue from Rome.
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Casual sex may have been a strategy among female ancestors to ensure a secondary source of support. Women must have known instinctively that a man is more apt to help provide for a woman and her child if he thinks the child is his progeny. Under trying circumstances, promiscuity would be good strategy to foster the belief among several men that each is the child’s father.
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Greek historian Herodotus, who lived in the 5th century Be, wrote of a custom among the Babylonians that he decried as wholly shameful. Every native woman of the country was required once in her lifetime to visit the temple of Aphrodite for the purpose of giving herself to a strange man
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