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Dawkins of Oxford University, one of the world’s leading thinkers and writers on evolutionary biology, points out that contraception appears to overturn the most fundamental Darwinian dictates by offering the pleasure of sex without the reproduction. He suggests that the explanation for this is that the human brain has evolved its own, advanced, ameliorated spin on survival; in sex-for-pleasure, the brain is seeking and experiencing pleasure as another method of aiding survival. The civilised activity of sex for fun may well go back further than we imagine, too. According to a book by Jeannette Parisot,
Johnny Come Lately: A Short History of the Condom
, a fresco in the Dordogne, France, dating from 10-15,000 BC, provides the (literally) sketchy first record of a sheath being used for sex.
    Human culture meanwhile, rather than evolution, dictates even the times when we indulge in the pleasure of sex. Oestrogen and testosterone levels are at their highest at dawn, yet the mostcommon time for lovemaking in modern Western civilisations is 11 p.m., between the smoochy dinner date and the need to get to sleep so as to be up for work in the morning.
    So what about the more difficult question of the physical feeling of orgasm, and how we might assess whether that too has a history? This is bound to be a tricky question, given that even sexually aware men and women have never quite managed to impart to the opposite sex what their version of orgasm feels like. Greek myth, informed as it was by the experience of Greek mortals, had it that a man called Tiresius was privileged to spend seven years as a woman, and then invited to Mount Olympus to be debriefed by Zeus on his experiences. Tiresius’s principal conclusion was remarkable; after taking seven years to ponder on the huge number of differences between the sexes, he summed up his observations in one line. Women, he informed Zeus, enjoy sex more than men. For being the bearer of this unwelcome message for men, Tiresius was blinded.
    In the modern world, transsexuals who have undergone surgery or hormone therapy offer us a hint, possibly, of what Tiresius might have experienced had he actually existed. Even without surgery, an FTM (female-to-male transsexual) can possess both a penis produced by testosterone acting to enlarge the clitoris, and the vagina he was born with. Several people with these characteristics have reported on Internet message-boards a sensation that they describe as a simultaneous male and female orgasm in the same body — two distinct and ‘definitely different’ sensations. When pressed to differentiate between the sensation these ‘competing’ orgasms offered, one respondent reported that the only difference he could describe was that while the penis contracted from base to tip, the vagina did the reverse, contracting inward, from outside to inside.
    As for gauging what were the sexual feelings experienced by prehistoric men and women, let alone their simian grandparents, we are obviously confined to informed guesswork. It is perfectly plausible that the greatest sexual difference between prehistoric men and women was the same as, according toIrma Kurtz, it is today: when it comes to sex, Kurtz wrote in a 1995 book,
Irma Kurtz’s Ultimate Problem Solver
, the male’s greatest fear is of failure, while the female’s is of not being loved.
    But we are not completely without biological evidence on which to base our conjecture about what sex was like thousands of generations ago. Desmond Morris contends that man’s basic sexual qualities come from his ‘fruit-picking, forest ape ancestors’, and according to the American anthropologist Helen Fisher, too, the physical facility for orgasm had already evolved before our ancestors came down from the trees.
    Of course, we have no preserved soft tissue from prehistoric times to prove conclusively that pleasure has always been sought through sexual intercourse. But it