Leave it to a six-year-old to put things in perspective. When Bill Wattersons creation Hobbes the tiger reminds Calvin that the new millennium is around the corner, the hyperactive kid explodes.
"Where are the flying cares?
Where are the moon colonies?
Where are the personal robots and the zero-gravity boots, huh?
You call this the future? Ha!
"Where are the rocketpacks? Where are the disintegration rays? Where are the floating cities?..."
And then, the clincher:
"We still have weather! Give me a break."
Yes, give me a break. Just because the calendar is breaking out into new digits, is sex going to change? Sex? SEX? That short, swift act, at once tender and violent, whose rawness all religions have tried to cloak with mysticism, whose anticipation has been the theme of world literature and whose repercussions the base of medicine and psychology. That brief act of thrust and parry without which all of us would be, literally and figuratively, dead, is that going to change because a celibate monk 2,000 years ago decreed that such and such a date would be Zero Anno Domini?
Come on, give me a break, and tell me has sex changed at all over the last two millennia?
We like to think of our society of the last couple of decades as more open, more liberal and more honest about our feelings than any society of the past. We certainly talk more about sex than previous generations did and we begin to do so at a much earlier age. So much so that it is difficult for us to imagine that the Kinsey Reports, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female came out in 1948 and 1953, a mere 50 years ago, and that their findings based on thousands of interviews conducted in the US were condemned as being immoral.
While Kinsey and his team wrote of sexual practices, it was left to Masters and Johnson in the 1960s to do the first detailed study of the human bodys physiological responses to sexual stimulation. Their 1966 book, Human Sexual Response, was based on observations (using film and special instruments) of couples engaged in sexual activity and made us more aware of our tiniest body parts and how they reacted.
But did they result in better sex?Broadly speaking, humans have practiced two kinds of sex throughout history: reproductive sex and recreational sex. The former was what you had with your wife; the latter, with your mistress. One resulted in children, the other in pleasure. Advances in contraception have ensured that the first kind of sexual activity results in fewer children, but have Kinsey, Masters and Johnson plus our societys obsession with oral sex (the propensity to talk about it non-stop), resulted in more pleasure? We only have to look cursorily at the abandon of Vatsyayanas Kamasutra and the Khajuraho sculptures to compare them to the angst of todays discussions on sex to realise that the answer is no.
What has happened is this: less frequent childbirth (and consequent child-rearing) combined with the liberation of women has resulted in the merging of the two kinds of sexual activity and, therefore, the merging of the identities of the wife and the mistress. Further, our changing attitudes now decree that the woman is also entitled to receive pleasure, whereas earlier even the mistress only gave pleasure.
This change, being recent, is still confined to the more socially advanced groups of people; as the new millennium begins, its a change which will affect most people so that the traditional womans formulation that her husband "bothered" her last night will change to convey a more participatory activity in which pleasure is shared equally by both partners.
But will we have time for these pleasures? The elaborate rituals of the Kamasutra and Khajuraho could only be indulged in by gentlemen and ladies of leisure, whereas as the 20th century draws to an end what we notice is that the more leisure we have, the less we have it because we cram it with ever-increasing activity. The ease and speed of communications, the quickness of transportation and the instant access to a variety of transactions have given us more time for leisure and, paradoxically, less time to enjoy it. Before the age of cinema, television, the Internet, faxes and e-mail, people had more time to themselves, and therefore, for sex. Now we hardly switch off the lights. Which means that even with women as equal partners in pleasure and even with the worry of unwanted pregnancies no longer with us, the time we allot to sexual activity is now rationed.
But modern medicine and greater health consciousness will help us stretch it. Viagra has not only given impotent men a new lease of life, it has also provided more years of sexual activity to aging men. The female version of Viagra, said to be around the corner, will make sex physiologically and psychologically more appealing to post-menopausal women, so that, at last, when we have the time to enjoy sex, we will be physically capable of it.
What about Virtual Sex? There you will be sitting, tongue hanging out before your latest three-dimensional monitor, your body wired up for the most intense sensations. On the screen you can call up the woman/man of your dreams and get them to do what you want. It will be total mastery; it will also be totally masturbatory, the good old hand replaced by the latest electronics. The pleasure we get may be more prolonged and more sophisticated, but it will be curiously unfulfilling. Because the most important part of sex is not the four-letter word beginning with F but a four-letter word beginning with L.
And no new millennium, no new devices and no new medicines are going to change that. Love has been, and will remain, the only device that works in sex.
