Sex at Dawn

His smug satisfaction in tormenting children is striking and disturbing, but Kellogg’s “no child left alone” policy is anything but unusual or limited to ancient history. The anti-masturbation measures quoted above were published in 1888, but more than eighty years were to pass before the American Medical Association declared, in 1972, “Masturbation is a normal part of adolescent sexual development and requires no medical management.” But still, the war continues. As recently as 1994, pediatrician Joycelyn Elders was forced from her post as Surgeon General of the United States for simply asserting that masturbation “is part of human sexuality.” The suffering caused by centuries of war on masturbation is beyond calculation. But this we know: all the suffering, every bit of it, was for nothing. Absolutely nothing.

John Harvey Kellogg, Anthony Comstock, and Sylvester Graham (inventor of Graham crackers—like corn flakes, a food specifically designed to discourage masturbation) were extreme in their grim campaigns against eroticism, but they weren’t considered particularly eccentric at the time.¹⁶ Recall that Darwin probably had had little or no personal sexual experience when he married his first cousin a month before his thirtieth birthday, and that Sigmund Freud—the other towering giant of nineteenth-century sexual theory—was a self-proclaimed thirty-year-old virgin when he married in 1886. No wonder Freud was hesitant sexually. According to biographer Ernest Jones, Freud’s father had threatened to cut off young Sigmund’s penis if he didn’t stop his obsessive masturbating. ⁷

The Curse of Calvin Coolidge

Last time I tried to make love to my wife nothing was happening. So I said to her, “What’s the matter, you can’t think of anybody either?”

RODNEY DANGERFIELD

Men don’t care what’s on TV. They only care what else is on

TV.

JERRY SEINFELD

There’s a story about President Calvin Coolidge and a chicken farm every evolutionary psychologist knows by heart. It goes like this: The president and his wife were visiting a commercial chicken farm in the 1920s. During the tour, the first lady asked the farmer how he managed to produce so many fertile eggs with only a few roosters. The farmer proudly explained that his roosters happily performed their duty dozens of times each day. “Perhaps you could mention that to the president,” replied the first lady. Overhearing the remark, President Coolidge asked the farmer, “Does each cock service the same hen each time?” “Oh no,” replied the farmer, “he always changes from one hen to another.” “I see,” replied the president. “Perhaps you could point that out to Mrs. Coolidge.”

Whether the story is historically factual or not, the invigorating effect of a variety of sexual partners has become known as “the Coolidge effect.” While there’s little doubt that the females of some primate species (including our own) are

also intrigued by sexual novelty, the underlying mechanism

appears to be different for them. Thus the Coolidge effect

generally refers to male mammals, where it’s been

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documented in many species.

But that doesn’t mean women’s only motivation for sex is relational, as is often argued. Psychologists Joey Sprague and David Quadagno surveyed women from twenty-two to fifty-seven years of age and found that among those under thirty-five, 61 percent of the women said their primary motivation for sex was emotional, rather than physical. But among those over thirty-five, only 38 percent claimed their emotional motivations were stronger than the physical hunger for contact.¹⁹ At face value, such results suggest women’s motivations change with age. Or one could also argue that this effect could simply reflect women becoming less apologetic as they mature.

First-time travelers to Istanbul, Bali, Gambia, Thailand, or Jamaica may be surprised to see thousands of middle-aged women from Europe and the United States who flock to these places in search of no-strings sexual attention. An estimated eighty thousand women fly to Jamaica looking to “Rent a Rasta” every year.²⁰ The number of female Japanese visitors to the Thai island resort Phuket jumped from fewer than four thousand in 1990 to ten times that just four years later, outnumbering male Japanese tourists significantly. Chartered jets carrying nothing but Japanese women land in Bangkok every week, if not daily.