Private Relations, Public Parts

By Eve Auchincloss

SEX IN HISTORY by Reay Tannahill; Stein & Day; 480 pages; $17.95

The human animal is goaded by twin appetites so similar that they serve as metaphors for each other--as food writers and Freudians are well aware. Reay Tannahill, a worldly and well-informed Scotswoman, has explored what recorded history tells about both, following Food in History (1973) with this levelheaded history of sex, drawn from sources as various as genetics, architecture, sociology, religion and etymology. As she tells it, the explosive word has a dual connotation: what people do with their private parts, and a 10,000-year-old injustice to women.

In the hunting-gathering society that flourished before the dawn of history, she argues, man and woman were equal. Then, some time during the neolithic revolution, man realized that semen made babies. The consequence: women were reduced in stature and left uneducated, housebound, perpetually pregnant.

Though chattels, women in polygamous Asia were better off than their sisters in the monogamous West because of the nature of the Tao and Tan-trie religions, which saw sex as an expression of a larger cosmic harmony. When a Chinese husband had intercourse with at least ten of his numerous wives and concubines in a night, it was less to prove his manhood than to receive an abundance of their precious yin essence.

Not so in the West, says Tannahill. There the philoprogenitive Hebrews decreed that intercourse was for sons, not pleasure. Adulteresses were stoned to death, prostitution was an abomination, homosexuality a capital offense. When Christianity augmented a religious legacy with the personal revulsion of the early church fathers against their own licentious youths, everything to do with sex became a sin, save procreation--a view still echoed in parts of the Muslim world.

As Sex in History shows, prostitution began as a liberation from matrimony. In Greece and China the great courtesans offered little sex but plenty of intelligent conversation, music, dancing and banquets. In lustful Europe matters and manners were a bit different. Thomas Aquinas admitted the value of prostitutes: without them, he said, homosexuality would engulf society. By the 19th century, wives came to be viewed as creatures far too delicate for the hurly-burly of the bedroom, and their husbands often spent their "brutish passions" elsewhere. In 1866 one bishop complained that there were as many whores as Methodists in New York City.

Such morsels fill Tannahill's lively but never prurient history. She traces the roots of contraception, the long battle against venereal diseases and the attitudes that surround them, the changing mores of the West and the sometimes prudish Third World. She seems to have examined every sexual arena from the Garden of Eden to the harems of Asia and the Middle East to the screens of Hollywood, a place she says that "most consistently, conscientiously and stylishly sustained the image of marriage as woman's natural goal." She tracks down the sources of the Top 40 love songs back through the troubadours to the Arabs, describes the correct way for concubines to enter their sultan's bed (from the bottom, wriggling up like an eel), and recounts the multiple ironies of feminine independence in the 20th century. Observed G.K. Chesterton: "Twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry, 'We will not be dictated to,' and promptly became stenographers."

Although Tannahill writes with what appears to be a feminist sensibility, she never indulges in special pleading. Despite the claims of the Sisterhood, she shows that women's history has not been one of unrelieved oppression. Even in Babylonia, she notes, females had a heady choice of employment; Roman women seem to have been respected and sometimes feared; even in Christian Europe there were those besides Eleanor of Aquitaine and Joan of Arc who had life on their own terms. (The surprise bestseller Montaillou, a firsthand record of the life of a heretical medieval French village, is vivid evidence that feisty, autonomous women existed in unlikely times and unexpected places.)

The author even concludes that the aggressive overstatements of the women's liberation movement helped to provoke the pornography and overt homosexuality of the '70s, an argument as questionable as the one claiming women were door mats for 10,000 years until freed by the Pill. Never mind. Sex in History may be overfond of overstatement, and its survey is wider than it is deep; certainly it fails to give enough space to Freud and the convulsions in sexual psychology that followed him. Still, the book is the most complete of its kind ever written. It is diligent, provocative and fascinating--from fascinum, a word sometimes used by the Romans, Tannahill cannot help observe, to mean phallus.

"Roman women and Roman men must have been equally difficult to live with. The emancipated woman of early imperial Rome had much in common with the more competitive type of feminist today--a peremptory mind, a domineering manner, and a wholehearted contempt for moderation. Socially, her husband was just as hard to take; selfish to a marked degree, intellectually finicky, prone to moralize, lacking in imagination . . . Husbands and wives, in effect, were no more compatible than they had ever been, but because there were more women of positive character in Rome than anywhere else in the ancient world, the sound of mismatched personalities grating was painfully audible."

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