Future Perfect What next? And other impossible questions

6. The Future of Sex – And Why We Do It

I am naturally monogamous-except when married. My impression is that most people are the same.

There is something distinctly anti-aphrodisiacal about the business of household duties: the spousal talk of bills, of broken drains, of electronics gone bung, of catshit on the lino, of mess. Children, too, are off-putting, all of them malevolent disciples of Saffy (the finger-wagging, snarly, termagant-daughter from Absolutely Fabulous); their disapproval, even disgust, at their parents’ clandestine antics must be the biggest sexual downer since bromide. How can any moderately sympathetic, loving, omniscient Creator have thought that sex could survive even a year or two of standard married humdrum, let alone a lifetime?

Something ought to be done!

The paradox is profound. Sex is now a commodified, ubiquitous aspect of life: every women’s mag offers advice on blow-job techniques or dogging sites; every newspaper has updates on genital flashing by no-knickers celebs; mainstream movies don’t even simulate sex any more, instead requiring actors actually to fuck. But private life can be a desert. The backdrop is a brothel, yet the bedroom at home is monastic. Not really a surprise when you appreciate the desperation of media facing extinction in a ruthlessly competitive, lucrative and changing market where anything goes. Websites offer your favourite film and pop stars (well, second-favourite) with close-ups of pink bits and every imaginable priapic contortion.

How are folk supposed to cope with this? When I first went to Israel many years ago, I saw a bus shelter that had been blown up by a bomb planted by the Orthodox Jews, who didn’t like the bikini advert that adorned it. It was madness-but I can understand how they felt. Everywhere you look, bodies are being thrust at you to sell gear. Sensitive types will-must-inevitably be affronted.

I am nearly always against censorship. It doesn’t work, least of all online. Yet you have to wonder at the sheer quantity of smut. The US alone spends $US10 billion a year on porn, more than Hollywood does on feature films; and the figure is expected to grow, according to Bill Asher, president of Vivid Entertainment Group, by 500 per cent every year as Internet videos improve. Why do so many citizens of a largely devout Christian nation, led by a born-again fundamentalist, need to watch so many strangers bonk? This is an industry, don’t ever forget, that rivals armaments in its global reach and impact. We are not talking about an occasional peccadillo, a rare sticky indulgence most of us might smile at. The World Is Awash.

What am I missing? I have never seen actual contemporary porn. I did, on your behalf just now, try to put key words or terms into Google; but I instantly got demands for credit card numbers (you’d be insane to comply) or infinite nonsensical reroutes. So I gave up.

I wanted to see how producers manage to get any variety beyond the yelping and the humping. Twenty positions or combinations, yes, but thousands’? What do they all do?

My enquiry (research, officer!) is strictly ethnological, of course. There may be, you see, an educational function to watching others having sex. I once had a long and thoughtful discussion with John Williams, the brilliant Australian guitarist, about his father Leonard’s studies of woolly monkeys. These charming creatures need to see adults copulating to know how it’s done. If kept innocent they are incapable, wrote Leonard Williams, of reproducing. Other monkey species may be similar in this.

This may be the clue. Porn is educational! These days we in the West no longer occupy forest dwellings, where once bucolic bonkers could be observed and notes taken; nor are we still bundled together in houses where, even as late as the eighteenth century, so many were crammed together that you’d be inches away from a loud coupling whether you liked it or not. Now we are all in sepulchral isolation and only the thin wall of the kit home can bring us close to the secrets of real sex. Even then it sounds more like suppressed asthma than conjugal delight.

(Porn may indeed have a role in education, but the real question is why it is such big business. Every posh hotel with exquisitely courteous, swooning staff has rooms replete with Hot Adult Filth on the TV. Does the manager, Sir Humphrey Appleby personified, actually vet this stuff?)

What do you know about sex if no one tells you? I worked out some of it by the age of eight. I knew that somehow willies were involved and was impressed at the size of babies. I thought hard on this and came up with the answer: testicles are the new life forms, and to get things going you had to place one or two testicles inside the mother’s belly. I’d seen enough inflated women to know that part, though how you got such an egg-sized bollock in there through her navel was the real mystery. And why would you want to? Must hurt men horribly, and she wouldn’t fancy it much either!

Yet there were children, so someone must have been facing up to the task. One of life’s endurance tests, I thought to my young self-like the prospect of death. My musings were not much improved by talking with kids at school (this was my volkschule in Vienna), all of whom provided their own appalling variations on a sex theme of Hogarthian squalor that would have sent most sensible girls screaming to nunneries and boys to the eternal distractions of mountain climbing, slalom practice and invading Poland.

Did our ancestors know what made babies? You have to wonder. The sex writer Shere Hite convened a meeting of anthropologists at the American Association of Science conference a few years ago and the consensus was that the hominids and their modern human successors did not know much. But life was so relatively restricted (governed, as David Attenborough once observed, by the three Fs: feeding, fighting… and the other one) that sex had to have been something a little more than just an evening’s entertainment. But whether they did or not, all those thousands of years ago, there must have been plenty to observe-and to learn from.

Porn, in this analysis, must therefore be seen as a modern cry for help. It is not necessarily something dirty or vile but an avenue for learning. Young people need to know what their parts are for and what the fuss is about. Grown-ups need to build ways out of routine and repetition. (Most pornography is crude, even brutal, just as teenage sex is appallingly unsophisicated and positively unhealthy. Porn is to good sex as Blazing Saddles is to animal husbandry.) Sex skills and pornography therefore need to be-isn’t this obvious?-on the high school curriculum and part of tertiary courses.

And not only studies but practical classes. This raises the tricky question of where to get the attractive expert sex surrogates, but I am sure we can leave this to the federal education minister and his or her bureaucrat grandees. These hands-on sex educators must not look like teachers-otherwise we’d be warped for life-but be attractive members of a slightly older age group. High schoolers would be taught by twentysomethings, seniors by those in their thirties. I am not sure how these sex instructors would be tested and themselves given certificates, but Canberra would find a way. It would be a kind of national service. Many would be pleased to do their duty. Fucking for Australia.

Adults as practical sex educators have appeared, perhaps apocryphally, in many anthropological accounts of other societies. This may turn out to be part of the explanation of the brutal rites of Pitcairn Islanders-more capitulation to uncle than anything edifying-but there are precedents, I’m assured. The boy’s dream (usually damp) is of a winsome young lady who takes him through Rumpy Pumpy 101, all gentle show-and-tell with no fear of failure. Onwards and upwards (downwards?) to advanced or even scholarship level. Now, before you become incandescent, do remember that most of our renowned Lotharios-from Dylan Thomas to Errol Flynn-have turned out to be sexual squibs, so remedial courses for men are well overdue.

Reversing the genders in this example is trickier. Nowadays no sensible older person would dare go within shouting distance of a teenage girl-let alone tickling distance, even when she is well beyond the age of consent. What needs to be understood is how far these ideas can be taken, and how quickly. Would it not be worth trying sex lessons, then-like drug use, guided by someone medically responsible-to see whether this can be of benefit?

If only robots were clever enough, and halfway sexy. Maybe the Stepford Wives experiments were on to something. How far could we go? How flexible and pliable are human cultures? This is complex and difficult to predict. (The possibility of using robots for sexual tuition in the future is not as straightforward as it seems. Though wet-dream cyber-surrogates might be designed to suit your wishes, perhaps even by 2012, there are potentially adverse side effects. The Ig-Nobel Prize for Medicine three years ago was awarded to the author of a paper on how a Norwegian seaman caught gonorrhea from an inflatable rubber woman borrowed without permission from an unsuspecting fellow sailor’s bunk. This award, given in a ceremony at Harvard, stands as a warning about the limits of robotic surrogacy.)

On the one hand most of us accept that societies cannot be engineered from the top down. Stalin failed in Russia, George W. Bush in Iraq. We are usually solidly wedded to our traditional ways. Yet, in the West today, sexual mores are spectacularly different from the grope-and-grieve ways of our grandparents. With the exception of the British aristocracy, professional porn stars, and a number of American evangelical Christians (until they were caught), most of our elders have always been strictly buttoned up. Poor dears. How boggled they are by the present apparent free-for-all.

Other cultures, too, seem strict. Yet appearances can be deceptive. I remember an incident in 1967, when I was studying biology at the University of London. My then wife and I had just finished hitchhiking across the world. An extensive part of our trip was in India, where we stayed with an immensely rich family in Amritsar, in the Punjab. Their overwhelming hospitality, with its morning jugs of scotch (Amritsar is dry!) and daily curried banquets, left us eternally grateful and we said so: ‘Any time you’re in London, do call and we’ll do you proud!’ And off we went.

Some nine months later I was doing an essay on fossil botany in our five-pounds-a-week flat in Wandsworth when the bell rang. I swore and leapt downstairs, pulling the front door open like a man in a hurry about to give two Mormons marching orders. But, no. There stood eight of my Punjabi friends, smiling and nodding-one a sublimely elegant matron dressed in a priceless shawl made from the throat feathers of small birds-waiting to accept my largesse.

I took them upstairs, frantically made a pot of tea (we had four cups) and discovered some sad biscuits from the previous week. They sipped, shuffled-and politely suggested we repair to their hotel, just across from Kensington Palace and Gardens.

Off we went. Once installed there, with curry couriered from the best Indian restaurant in London and vast glasses of scotch in hand, we settled in for a comfortable evening. More guests came, from distinguished Punjabi families resident in England. Then my host came over to me suavely and asked: ‘Robyn, do you know where we can get some pornographic films?’

I was so taken aback I could not answer. It was as if the Pope had asked for a willing harlot. ‘Sorry, not my line, I’m afraid,’ came out eventually. ‘That’s OK, Poppy,’ intervened one of the smooth fellows based in England, who had all the graces and fine garb of the top diplomat. ‘I know a chap. He can get here in no time.’ Calls were made.

Mystified, I sat next to the lady in the shawl and began to hear how Indian women are chaperoned everywhere, with mother or elder brothers before marriage and in the company of senior relatives or other wives afterwards. ‘We are not permitted to go out alone, ever, or just walk solo down the street as we fancy. Certainly not our girls. Absolutely strict!’ And she smiled with approval, nodding.

At which point a bloke in a raincoat and cap-a sleaze from Central Casting-came into the luxurious hotel room, set up an old-fashioned two-reel projector, plugged it in and spooled film through the settings. With a mere nod to the assembled, who were chatting over drinks as if at a reception hosted by Indira Gandhi, he pressed a switch and the film started. There, on the pristine white wall of the Kensington Gardens Hotel, hostelry to the world’s great dignitaries, we saw rough sailor shagging willing tart in Roedean School uniform, from every angle known to man plus a few more. No one missed a beat. Apart from me.

My distinguished shawled companion, employing the Oxford tones of an Indira Gandhi, continued blithely to describe the protocols of female incarceration as her relatives did quiet business in different parts of the room, while sailor and ‘schoolgirl’ reenacted the Kama Sutra in front of them. I am still at a loss to understand the gap between public propriety and private prurience in this traditional upper-class Indian social group. It is

The Future of Sex typical of contradictions about sex throughout every society on Earth.

I am not sure whether the future of sex really will involve practical classes at school and afterwards, but I remain available to help any education minister, state or federal, who is willing to take things further.

More worrying than missing skills is the possibly imminent end of sex itself. Many scientists, of whom Bryan Sykes is the most famous, have warned of the demise of the male. Our Y chromosome is puny, responsible for too many of the ills of civilisation and on the way out. His book Adam’s Curse shocked the world when it came out in 2003, not least because he described the end of men as an advantage. Men are troublesome, noisy, rapacious and, now that science has offered alternatives, unnecessary. Eggs can be fertilised by means of the nuclei of body cells from other women. You don’t need sperm any more. Men have done their historic bit, says Sykes, so it is time to exit stage right.

Barbara Ellen, of the London Observer, wrote a piece on this a while ago. She looked forward to a future existence free of masculinity.

I can easily imagine a world without men. It is the year 2061 and men have been barred from the reproductive process for 60 years. For 40 years, they’ve been banned completely, even as pets. We keep them in cages at Man Zoos, feeding them scraps, beating them when they complain. Occasionally, we take our artificially conceived girl children to Man Zoos to see what females used to have to put up with. There are only girls, because it has long been possible to choose the sex of the baby, and no one wants boys. What men still exist are in these zoos, and dying off, but it is considered unethical to breed them.

Many years later, in what is called the post-Bridget Jones age, Ellen’s Time Lady reflects:

I am still alive, an old woman now, a relic from the past, with my naturally conceived daughter, and memories of ‘heterosexuality’, which I am frequently asked to give lectures about in halls full of shuddering, disbelieving students. I have to do it. I’ve been virtually unemployed for the past half century because, with no men around, there’s no longer any market for my journalistic speciality: ‘Carping About Men.’ I tried to scratch a living, writing about music, but with testosterone outlawed, many types of music went with it. Oasis were captured in the spring of 2010, hiding out on the moors. They were placed in Man Zoos, but had to be taken out, because they were upsetting visitors with their bravado displays of ‘Mooning’. Eminem is still at large, as are Nick Hornby, Martin Amis, Russell Crowe, Tony Blair and other male luminaries. Salman Rushdie was spotted hiding out in a Welsh cave in 2017, moaning to his companion: ‘Not again!’

I can face up to my future, but I am not entirely convinced. In Dr Sykes’s undoubtedly scientific prognosis I find the small flaw that the old Y chromosome, however diminutive, has been shown to have greater significance- and endurance-than he once thought. It could go (maybe should go), but not yet. And Barbara Ellen’s vision, though enchanting, misrepresents testosterone. Girls need it too; otherwise they suffer in both mood and sexual élan. Heterosexuality is with us for just a little longer. Bryan Sykes’s dreaded wars will endure for even more years.

So much for a scientist and a journalist looking to the future of sex. The novelist Michel Houellebecq has done so too in his book The Possibility of an Island. In it, as is his wont, he writes vividly of free and spectacular sex, of girls with no knickers and micro-skirts who do sex like moneymen in the 1980s did lunch. Automatically, unhesitatingly and without love-just like sneezing. Human beings develop generations later as isolated clones, cocooned in their solitary chambers, safe because unsullied by hormone-driven rushes that formerly made them such victims to irrational needs. Life, in this Island future, resembles that in a secluded monastery (except that you don’t see the other monks), where every day is spent looking at your screen, writing your thoughts, liberated at last from base impulses. You are free because you are no longer human.

Houellebecq’s starting point is the flaw in his vision, in my view. His dystopia follows not from sexual indulgence but from the sheer absence of anything to go with it. It is as if his humanity is made up entirely of Paris Hiltons, devoid of finer feelings and incapable of physical affection. This may be unfair to Ms Hilton (she could be acting and may grow out of it) but there are lots of us who are having a jolly nice time and will not surrender in any way to this de-sexed, disengaged, disembodied Possibility of an Island. Retreat? I thought the French knew better!

What worries me more is the fading of that essential to human society: the gay element. In my last book I argued that the only credible manifestation of intelligent design is the presence of homosexuals in society. God was very keen on this experiment, having created no fewer than 450 different animal species showing same-sex inclinations. They could not be a Darwinian example of natural selection, because their genes obviously could not have been passed on. Therefore, they must be a special part of God’s creation, giving us such supremely talented icons as Stephen Fry, k.d. lang, Leonardo da Vinci, Julian Clary, Alan Turing, Dusty Springfield, Virginia Woolf, Elton John, T.E. Lawrence, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Dr Bob Brown, Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward, Franz Schubert, Patrick White, Gertrude Stein and a million others.

This was clearly connived at, secretly, by the Catholic Church’s insistence that contraception be eschewed. So it was that large families were commonplace and the likely cause of male homosexuality-an increasing immune reaction of the mother to her foetus-more likely. Women have often been found to have in their tissues cells XY chromosomes, leaked from their male babies, years after they gave birth to them. As the XYs accumulate with each successive boy, so is the possibility of an abreaction and therefore a gay offspring increased. This research was published in 2006 following twenty similar findings over the last ten years. Professor Anthony Bogaert, from Brock University in Canada, showed in his paper presented to the National Academy of Science in America that later boys, but not girls, are more likely to be gay.

On this basis I would expect there to be fewer male homosexuals in China, where the one-baby policy has held sway for some time. I would also expect, however, that gaiety will diminish now that family size has gone down in Western Europe and some parts of America. This could be catastrophic for the creativity of Western civilisation. Something should be done.

The future of sex will not-as you know, dear reader- have much to do with most of these science fiction fantasies. As usual, the path will be everyday and seemingly prosaic. You may agonise about the handful of ‘designer’ babies everyone from Peter Singer to Cardinal George Pell broods about, but the real worry is a billion babies who should not have been born at all.

There may be a beat-up in the media every five years or so about the demise of males, but the real worry is why half of the three billion men who do prevail treat women like muck. In Russia alone, 12,000 to 14,000 women a year are killed by their husbands; the world figure for abuse-physical violence-is three million every year (in case you had doubts). I tried to check reliable figures for the ‘honour’ killing of women-the number murdered by their families because of real or suspected relationships outside strict rules. What’s really creepy is the fact that these statistics are not readily available (though very high) because they are so willingly covered up by authorities.

Meanwhile, having children as an automatic reflex is tacitly encouraged in nearly every country. In Australia you have ‘one for him, one for her-and one for the Federal Treasurer’. (Peter Costello tells a joke about a woman who contacted him to say she’d done this, and would he like to come and collect the baby.)

Everyone under the age of 40 is continually badgered about procreation, as if making another human being and spending twenty years coping with the consequences is the easiest accomplishment on earth (not to mention the effect on global population). It isn’t. It is a responsibility requiring skills and endurance worthy of a saint.

The model Elle Macpherson is instructive on how to meet the demands of looking after young children: instead of only two daytime nannies, you should employ a night nurse as well! Hire a staff of three and you’ll be fine, she advises. Go to it.

Our age has fewer extended families. The job of bringing up kids is typically either solitary or done with just a couple of helpers. This is horrendously hard on any woman or man alone, and should be recognised as such. People must be discouraged from having children until ready, just as we are prohibited from flying jet aircraft if we are not pilots.

It is not a valid response to look at little Jack or Emma and ask how we could ever imagine a life without them. Every child, when born, is a real person. Asking for restraint is not to wish those we know out of existence. It is the infinite number of nameless ones who do not yet exist that we must reduce. Why won’t young people, especially young women, agree to wait? How sensible is it to groan, cow-like, that you are driven to procreate? You are not a cow. Unless you live in one of those slum estates in The Bill.

Another challenge for sex, in future, is the one I began with: monogamy. It seems to me unlikely that any relationship that is going to last many years can reasonably be expected to be free of dalliance. If staying in thrall to one partner is your genuine preference, then good luck to you-you will have much spare time to apply creatively. If, on the other hand, you are the kind of person who is refreshed by a romantic interlude and happy to return home quietly (and women may often be more inclined to do this than men), it seems bizarre to wreck an entire relationship, home and indeed the welfare of children over anything so very nineteenth century as jealousy.

When I returned to my beloved Vienna (as described in Chapter 5), I visited the offices of the UN Population Division. There they told me that one of the worst influences on greenhouse gases was divorce. Every time a couple splits, another household has to be formed with yet more paraphernalia-energy burning, water flowing, garbage. In places like India, children are seen as their parents’ old age insurance-you have plenty of children so you’ll be cared for later on. The result of this, and the poverty that ensues, is there are 44 million child labourers in India. We cannot afford this free-for-all any more. Paul Ehrlich was right back in 1968. There are too many people. Six and a half billion and counting!

Who will make us face up to the future of sex? I don’t know. But I suspect educated women will be one answer.

The Hunches of Nostradamus

2008 Universal right to orgasm demanded by Swedes for inclusion in UN Charter.

2009 Robots replace girls in LA brothels. Men form queues.

2010 McBrothels open on three continents. Hookers demand compensation.

2011 McHooker (robot) in UK has wiring malfunction and pulps client’s member. British men line up for similar service.

2012 Pfizer launches drug guaranteed to make women multi-orgasmic.

2013 A-levels in Sex Technique offered at 27 schools in England.

2014 Marriage becomes minority relationship in OECD countries.

2015 McBrothels offer permanent companions designed ‘for your every need’. They can change shape as you fancy. They are solar powered and can be charged during the day.

2016 Richard Branson launches Virgin rival to McHookers.

2017 Fourteen per cent of Arab women turn out to be robots wearing veils.

2018 Pope agrees to sex for priests as long as no other human involved.

2019 Female Danish performance artist Stella Bang claims to have had 396 orgasms in one day. Found to have a labial South-East Asian cattle tick. Dies.

2020 Sex-free holidays corner singles market.

5500 Men and women become distinct species. (Again.)