Promiscuous but choosy

One of the difficulties that Ryan and Jetha encountered in writing Sex at Dawn was the lack of a suitable word in English to describe the sexual attitude that they claim to have found in prehistoric times. What they settle on (somewhat reluctantly) is the word promiscuous. But they explain that it is not really suitable as normally used, because it implies undiscriminating sexuality. By contrast, what they wanted was a word that meant indefinitely plural but nonetheless choosy sexuality. And they couldn't find one.

If you think about it, the idea is not so strange. Ryan and Jetha talk about sex as a tool for binding together a tribe, for enhancing social relations among the members of a community. But these people already share more than just bodily fluids. A small tribe of human beings in a world of saber-toothed tigers would have to trust each other with their lives; and since food had to be hunted or gathered, everybody needed to pitch in. So the relationships among these people had to be intimate in more than the genital sense. When they fucked each other they weren't just scratching an itch, but making friends and allies on whom they would then depend in a very real way.

The same thing is true, interestingly enough, about the first fully-modern American example that Ryan and Jetha give of a similar approach to sexuality: the "swinging" lifestyle of the Air Force's "top gun" fighter pilots. These were men who faced death on every mission, and who knew implicitly that a third of them would never come back from the war. The way Ryan and Jetha describe it, they used group sex as a bonding experience, tying the men to each other through their wives; what is more, the clear but unspoken implication was that this bonding meant the survivors would take care of the wives and children of those who died. After all, they -- the surviving pilots and the widows of the dead -- had already been lovers, and some of the children carrying a dead man's name might belong to the living. In any event, more generally, they all belonged to the community of fighter pilots. Note again: highly plural sex used to tie together a small, select community ... but with nothing undiscriminating about it.

There is one more example of this kind of sex -- promiscuous but choosy -- that I can't help but think of. It's a literary example this time: the Nest established by friends and followers (water-brothers) of Valentine Michael Smith in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. (See also the Wikipedia entry here.) The dynamic in this story is slightly different, because Valentine Smith is willing to offer his way of understanding the world to anybody willing to put in the work to master it. But the effect is the same; as Jubal Harshaw reminds him, those who don't listen to him select themselves out by choosing to ignore him. So once again, the luxuriously plural sexuality reenforces bonds that hold together a select group in contradistinction to those outside.

I said in my last post that I never resented the sexual encounters Wife had with other lovers when I was included too. Well, it's fair to ask what about that? Did I never think to establish some kind of bond with her other lovers, so that it was somehow us against the outside world? If Ryan/Jetha and Heinlein are on to something, then why not?

The answer is that I thought about it from time to time, but it never worked out. Or almost never. The only two lovers with whom it would have been a possibility were Boyfriend 1 and Boyfriend 4, because those were the only ones who ever ended up in bed with Wife at the same time I was there. And Boyfriend 4 had been a friend of mine from high school, so he was really a special case. But I could never establish that kind of bond with Boyfriend 1 because we never trusted each other. He never trusted me because Wife kept telling him so many terrible things about me (as she did to everybody that would sit still to listen). I never trusted him because, ... well, partly because he wanted to take Wife away from me (based on all the horrible things she had said about me). And partly I just didn't think much of him. I guess he was a nice enough guy, from a distance, but he had absolutely no features that made him (in my eyes) an interesting person to talk to or be around. His tastes were boring and conventional, his conversation was shallow, and he never had a new idea. Other than the sex (and Wife complained to me about that), I couldn't tell what she ever saw in him.

I think I have mentioned that I had this trouble with most of her other lovers: they seemed like losers, at least to me, and I couldn't find anything much to recommend any of them. The exceptions were Boyfriend 4 (who was an alcoholic and recurrently unemployed, but also my friend from high school and a real mensch when sober) and Girlfriend 1 (who certainly seemed destined for better things, but who had absolutely no use for me at all). Whether this was my problem, or whether (as I suggested before) it reflected something significant about Wife's taste, I may not be objective enough to tell. But the upshot was certainly that none of these other models ever worked out for us. Of course, back then (say, when she first started fucking Boyfriend 1) I didn't know anything about the "swinging" fighter pilots; and naturally I had never heard of Ryan or Jetha. But I had read heinlein; and I remember feeling vaguely disappointed somehow that -- if she was going to fuck other men -- we couldn't turn it into some kind of Nest. I have to conclude that for Wife the whole thing was more like scratching an itch; or else that, as a narcissist, she really had no idea what to look for in other people that would constitute community-building qualities, ... nor really had any idea why they might be useful. It's sad.

There is one other conclusion from this line of thought, besides my personal moping. If the only way to make a sexual community work the way that Smith's Nest worked, or the way that prehistoric tribes may have worked, is to be choosy enough about the members that you can build a community where everyone can truly rely on everyone else -- can truly trust everyone else with his life -- then how on earth could it ever be possible to build such communities in the kind of complex and highly mobile society we have today? (I mean, outside of ultra-specialized enclaves like the Air Force in wartime.) Is this another sign that "it's strictly big boxes of bananas, all the way up Columbus Avenue"? Maybe so. But if anyone has any interesting ideas about how this could be possible, I would truly love to hear them.