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In light of the recent sex scandal involving New York Governor Spitzer, I thought I’d share a passage from a book that I’m reading titled “Casanova Complex” by Peter Trachtenberg. A very interesting examination of why men do the things that we do. I know that you women don’t believe it but it’s true. In the words of my man Eddie Murphy, “You have to have a dick to understand”. LOL. This is pretty long but VERY interesting. Please try to read the whole thing if you have time.

~Pog

Sons Of The Sheik

A 1968 survey of 807 human cultures found that 708 of them - more than 75 percent - were polygynous, with one man enjoying the sexual and childbearing services of several wives or concubines. There are those who argue that polygyny is the “ideal” male evolutionary strategy, for it enables men to mate with as many women as possible in order to produce the maximum number of offspring. In practice, of course, only those who have the means to support several of their offspring - can truly afford polygyny. It remains the option of the wealthy and powerful, of tribal chieftains, Arab sheiks and the Mormon elders of the previous century.

The polygyny of the powerful gave birth to two institutions. The first was the harem, in which a wealthy man kept his wives and concubines, usually under the guard of eunuchs. The object was not only to house the women but to guarantee their fidelity and ensure that his children were indeed his own. But if the harem represented a sexual monopoly of older, more prestigious men, there had to be some outlet for those too young and too poor to support even one wife, let alone many: the alternative was rape and relentless class and age warfare. Thus the harem bred its antithesis, the brothel, where several men could enjoy the sexual services of a single prostitute. As John Money has observed, the division of women into Madonnas and whores begins with these twin structures, the one devoted to procreation, the other to what we now call recreational sex.

The polygyny of the powerful is, of course, a part of the Judeo-Christian tradition as well. It was the ethic of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of David and Solomon. For all His sternness, the God of the Old Testament tolerated all sorts of sexual misconduct among the forefathers of Israel, as long as that conduct was fruitful. Lot could lie with his own daughters and Jacob could bed Leah and her sister Rachel without provoking divine punishment. The Seventh Commandment, prohibiting adultery, seems to have been intended less as a curb on male sexuality than as a way of ensuring the purity of Israel’s bloodlines, which were then still reckoned patrilineally. It certainly didn’t keep the kings of Israel from taking new wives when they wanted sexual variety or favorable alliances with other tribes or wished to father more children. In the New Testament, we find both the courtesan Mary Magdalene and a reference to eunuchs (Matthew 19:12), which suggests that the brothel and the harem were fixtures in Hebrew society. For the Jews, polygyny endured into the Middle Ages: it was not outlawed by the rabbinates of the West until A.D. 1000.

Theoretically, monogamy has been the standard - and the only approved - form of marriage in the West since the Christian era. The Christian fathers listed adultery and fornication among four sins against the body. But in practice Western monogamy has been a kind of sieve, riddled with loopholes that admit men but until recently were sealed to double standard as “strict fidelity demanded of the wife, relative fidelity accepted for the husband” and claims that it satisfied the cultural requirements of pre-industrial Europe: “it meant that one knew who one’s mother was, while one’s paternity was a matter of belief.” Although the Catholic Church construed fornication and adultery as offenses for which men and women were equally punishable, it seems to have enforced its marital and sexual codes selectively: men, at least continued to enjoy sex before and outside marriage without much interference.

The harem vanished in the West, but the brothel endured in spite of intermittent crackdowns. In fifteenth-century France, for example, prostitution was not only tolerated but enshrined as a public institution. Most towns had a municipal brothel or bathhouse. In the larger cities, entire districts dedicated to recreational sex were officially protected. The women who worked there enjoyed the status of public servants, and prostitution was considered a respectable occupation for women of the lower and middle classes, even if they were married. While these municipal brothels were theoretically closed to local husbands, there was nothing to prevent a married man from visiting the prostibula of a neighboring town. Courtesans were among the chief citizens of sixteenth-century Venice. These erotic technicians not only produced and controlled much of the city’s wealth but shaped its mores and etiquette, leading the writer Aretino to observe, “A good pair of buttocks is possessed of greater power than all that has ever produced from philosophers, astrologers, alchemists and necromancers.”