A Natural History of Love

  Medieval men and women preferred a concoction of the flowers and leaves of myrtle marinated in wine. Eighteenth-century women used “angel water”—a mixture of one pint of orange flower water, one pint of rose water, and half a pint of myrtle water. The mixture was shaken well, and mixed with musk and ambergris. Then they applied it to their bosoms, which were pushed up and displayed by a bra which hid only their nipples. Sometimes they also attached a jeweled brooch to the center of their décolletage, to make sure a glance fell between the hillocks. This was the era when gems were cut in facets for the first time, revealing the brilliant fire we now associate with gemstones, and they were bound to waylay the eye. Similarly, a dab of perfume on the slopes, giving off vapors as it warmed on the brazier of the skin, would lure a wayward nose.

  The ancients believed in the magic power of the purplish-flowered mandrake root, probably because its branched shape was thought to resemble the human body. In The Odyssey, the sorceress Circe drops mandrake into her potent brew, and as late as the seventeenth century it was used in love potions. That’s why John Donne, in his sad, despairing “Song” about the infidelity of women, all of whom seem bound to betray him, says to a confidant:

  Go and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root,

  Tell me, where all past years are, Or who cleft the Devil’s foot;

  Teach me to hear mermaids singing …

  Even if his friend can do these miraculous things, and travel far and wide, he will not return from his travels having met even one woman who was true, or at least, if she was true when he left her, by the time John Donne meets her she will be false. His anguish, though soul-sapping, is temporary. One day, he’ll be finding a little Eden in Twickenham Garden, where he longs to be the stone fountain, “weeping” all year so that lovers may come with crystal vials and drink his tears. Next, he blasphemes “Love, any devil else but you”! Another day, he’s celebrating a new affair, and eloquently revealing, in “Love’s Diet,” how he restricts himself to one sigh a day, to stay somewhat in control of that ever-alert, transcendent, black-angel raptor, his “buzzard love.”

  Catherine de Médicis’s love diet included many artichokes, and Paris street vendors used to cry their commercials: “Artichokes! Artichokes! Heats the body and the spirit. Heats the genitals!” Another incendiary food, garlic, is universally celebrated as an aphrodisiac because, as Culpepper wrote, “Its heat… is vehement.” Because they create minifireworks that arouse the lower organs, black beans have always been a favorite aphrodisiac of Italian peasants. The fourth-century cleric St. Jerome would not allow the nuns under his spiritual direction to eat black-bean soup for that reason. But sometimes a concoction of rarities is the best stimulus of all. Here’s a surefire aphrodisiac from the medieval “Black Book” of “venereal pastimes”:

  Burdock seeds in a mortar pound them. Add of three-years-old goat the left testicle and from the back hairs of a white whelp one pinch of powder, the hairs to be cut on the first day of the new moon and burned on the seventh day. Infuse all the items in a bottle half filled with brandy. Leave uncorked twenty-one days to receive astral influence. Cook on the twenty-first day until the thick consistency is reached. Add four drops of crocodile semen and pass through a filter. Rub mixture on genitalia and await the result.

  Crocodile semen? I may be willing to travel far and endure hardship for a great aphrodisiac, but masturbating crocodiles is where I draw the line. An article in The Aphrodisiac Growers Quarterly (yes, it really exists) analyzed over five hundred seduction scenes in literature and found 98 percent of them preceded by a stimulating meal.

  When it comes to high-tech pharmaceuticals, cocaine is reported by many to be a sexual stimulant, albeit one with grave side effects. Errol Flynn, who claimed to have slept with women on 13,000 of his swashbuckling nights, liked to apply a touch of cocaine to the tip of his penis as an aphrodisiac. Some prescription drugs seem to work well with people suffering from impotence or aversion to sex. Wellbutrin is recommended for both men and women, and is most often used in conjunction with psychotherapy. Yocon or Yohimex, made from the bark of the African yohimbine tree, restores erections for some impotent men. There are various drugs being studied that affect the levels of dopamine and serotonin in the brain. Men can also get pumped for sex by using a tiny inflator implanted in the penis. Perhaps a man stepping into the next room for minor hydraulics sounds unromantic, but no more so than a woman taking her leave briefly to insert a spring-loaded diaphragm or inject spermicide from a plastic caulking gun. Lovers might even pump up together as a part of foreplay.

  The “goat’s eyelid” favored by the Mongols of the Yuan dynasty in China (late thirteenth century) was more of a sex aid than an aphrodisiac. Also known as a “happy ring,” it was literally the eyelid of a dead goat, with eyelashes still attached. It was first placed in quicklime, then steamed and dried until it reached just the right texture. A man would tie it onto his erect penis, so that it tickled his lover during intercourse. In many parts of the world, it’s still common for men to scar or insert objects into the penis to excite their women. For instance, men in Borneo pierce the end of the penis with a piece of bamboo or brass wire; and men in Sumatra make holes in their penises and press small stones into the wounds—the flesh grows over the stones, leaving a knobby and presumably enticing texture.

  But let us quickly return to the mystery of the French legionnaires. Spanish fly is a sexual stimulant, a proven aphrodisiac, but it’s a dangerous one. When the biologists fed meloid beetles to frogs and then measured the amount of cantharidin in the frogs’ legs, they were shocked to discover 25 to 50 milligrams of cantharidin in each gram of thigh muscle. That’s more than enough to cause priapism, and a man feasting on 200 to 400 grams—a mere half pound to a pound—of such food could die from cantharidin poisoning. “Cantharidin, when taken internally, acts as an inflammatory agent with drastic, irreversible effects on the urogenital system,” entomologist Thomas Eisner said. “This is very toxic stuff. When cantharidin is applied topically, as little as a tenth of a milligram can blister the skin. The lethal (internal) dose to humans is somewhere between ten and a hundred milligrams, and one meloid beetle can contain several milligrams of cantharidin.”

  Such beetles live in many locales around the world, including the United States. Any bird or other animal that eats them saturates its body with the poison; then any humans who eat such infected animals could be poisoned just as the legionnaires were. In fact, horses are occasionally poisoned by eating meloid beetles in alfalfa. One Australian man has the honor of being the only person known for sure to use cantharidin as a murder weapon. Feeling especially randy one day, he hid a dollop of it in his girlfriend’s ice cream, which she licked with gusto. She died soon afterward.

  By the way, Spanish fly is not a sexual stimulant for the half-inch-long meloid beetle but a form of chemical warfare. The beetle exudes drops of cantharidin-spiked fluid from the knee joints when disturbed by a predator (or a biologist with tweezers). I should add that the researchers did not concern themselves with whether or not large doses of cantharidin produced priapism in the frogs.

  *Sir Richard Burton’s term for such foods.

  *See “The Psychopharmacology of Chocolate,” in A Natural History of the Senses, p. 153.

  FIRE FROM THE FLESH: WHY SEX EVOLVED

  Room 53, Ambassade Hotel, the canal district, Amsterdam: the white marble bathroom, redolent of vanilla soap, with a shower door that opens like the hinged wings of a cricket; a flesh-pink rug, parquet writing desk, and silk-upholstered armchairs; the bed whose wooden headboard is six large quotation marks, lending silent testimony to all its couples have said; in an old print, a man fording a wild stream on a frightened horse whose eyes are bright linens; a low marble table holding a vase of roses, carnations, yellow euphorbia, and trumpeting red amaryllis that spill pollen everywhere and lift small white anthers in reply to the simplest interrogations of sunlight; four long chintz-covered windows, freckled
with rain, beyond which the canal quivers—all oil prisms and tangoing light; the tall, slender, many-paned houses across the water (from one, the husky twang of Captain Beefheart singing “Stud Puppy Blues”); a cloud-clotted sky like the lit sapphire of an Indian sari; two lovers idling down the brick street, arms entwined, aswim in each other; as they pass, a tinkling sound, as of glasses clinking, or a bicycle on cobblestone, or the bright coins in their hearts, while they stroll home to a love-crumpled bed.

  If those lovers were asked about their passion, they might say simply that sex is pleasurable, that it satisfies a wolflike need, that it leaves them feeling content and sweetly exhausted. They would not be thinking that they were acting out an ancient drama whose sole purpose was to make sure that his sperm could unite with her egg. Pleasure is their motive, not evolution. Yet they’re bound by social rituals, courtesies, and protocols whose design is to make the meeting of sperm and egg possible. And also palatable. We are suave, fussy creatures. We clothe the primal act of evolution in the latest fashions.

  Humans, like other primates, are obsessed with touching and attachment. We are colonial animals who yearn for family, friendship, community, and a loving partner. To be sociable, we’ve had to master certain skills: compromise and negotiation, organizing behavior according to rules, being competitive but not too competitive. Feeling close is not absolutely necessary for mating, but it’s a key part of lovemaking’s lure. Compared to other animals, men have very long penises for their body size. A man tends to penetrate a woman deeply during sex, which means holding her tightly in his arms. Couples mainly make love face-to-face, looking into each other’s eyes, kissing, sharing endearments. So much of having intercourse is not simply sex that we don’t even call it mating. Birds, which meet once a year for ten seconds or so, to swipe cloacas against each other, “mate.” Most people prefer to describe it as something more intimate. Sperm hurtles toward the egg just the same, but the ambiance and emotional investment are different. For us, the drug of closeness is a powerful hypnotic and sedative. We are touchoholics, we are attachment junkies, we are affectopaths. Thank heavens.

  Evolution is not a mass hysteria, not a team effort; it happens one by one, single organism by single organism. Those two lovers outside know only what’s right for them, and they require delicacy. Crude sex would not work. Whether her lover is Mr. Right or Mr. Right Now, they require romance to feel properly aroused. They are haunted by life, they are a ventriloquist’s dummies. Breed, their bodies command, pass on your genes. They gaze into each other’s eyes, their mouths open, and they sigh I love you.

  None of this surprises us. We are tangled up with the male and female forces of the planet in our actions, in our desires, in our agriculture, in our societies, in every aspect of our lives. One example is the habit of labeling words as either male or female. Why is the Spanish word for chair feminine, but the word for couch masculine? Some cases undoubtedly have to do with ease of pronunciation, but most hide a historic notion of that object’s innate masculinity or femininity, based on its use or form. Sex obsesses us, as it must if we are to procreate. So it’s only natural that some cultures dub everything they encounter male or female. It’s only natural, too, that tribespeople in New Guinea who had never seen an airplane (or even wheels) before, ran up to a bush plane just after it landed, and asked its pilot two critical questions: What does it eat? Is it male or female?

  When we see a person of ambiguous gender walking down the street, we instinctively struggle to read the clues. Is it male or female? That is the oldest question, one posed by children, shamans, and poets alike. No division is more ancient or responsible for more mischief. As Dylan Thomas writes,

  Shall it be male or female? say the cells,

  And drop the plum like fire from the flesh.

  In his free-associative lament, “If I Were Tickled by the Rub of Love,” he goes on to argue that, if he were in love, despite the torments all lovers feel, despite the disruption of one’s schedules and plans and the general “muscling-in of love,” he would be fearless, he would feel invincible. He would act as life’s barrister. He would subdue the sinister. He would not fear God, civilization, nature, carnality, or his own death, not “the apple nor the flood/Nor the bad blood of spring” … not “the gallows nor the axe/Nor the crossed sticks of war.” … Not “the devil in the loin/Nor the outspoken grave.” The world would be horizonless and personal, and yet as old and probable as the sun. As Thomas understands, love bridges the genders, the one and the many, the individual and society, the lonely soul and the vast plurality of life. Love is a messenger, a meddler, a statesman, an oracle. Love answers questions people don’t have to raise. The body asks its own basic question, and proceeds from there:

  Shall it be male or female? say the fingers

  That chalk the walls with green girls and their men.

  THE SPICE OF LIFE

  What poets don’t ask is why there should be two sexes at all. Or only two. That question has troubled scientists for some time, and there are several possible answers. If the prime directive of evolution is to pass on one’s genes, why not clone oneself? Identical twins give us an idea of what the world would look like with human clones. Some plants and animals reproduce themselves in that way, and it seems to work just fine. Our technique is to combine our genetic material with someone else’s, and the offspring gets half from each parent. This is by no means a flawless system. A healthy person can’t be sure if the partner’s genes will be healthy. Males are needed for their sperm, but only females give birth and nurse, and that leaves a lot of extra males around. With so much variety, it’s easy to inherit weak or faulty genes. Yet sexual reproduction is the preferred form for most creatures, so it must offer powerful advantages.

  At the dawn of life, simple cells dwelt on earth. They reproduced by making identical copies of themselves. Sometimes they were destroyed by hunger or by the rigors of the elements. In time, some stumbled on a dramatic solution—they became cannibals. In eating a neighbor, they fed themselves, but they also incorporated the neighbor’s DNA into their own. So, in the plainest sense, it was a sexual union. But that resulted in too much DNA being crammed into too tiny a space, so they divided, sharing the DNA among the daughter cells. Because this cannibalistic system worked, allowing cells to pass on their genetic cargo, evolution encouraged it. And the rest is history.

  This version of the origin of sex sees it as a kind of auto-repair shop, where the mechanics cannibalize some cars to fix others. Whatever did happen, one thing is certain—sex offers variety, and variety is salvation in an unpredictable world. Mongrels are stronger, healthier, better equipped to deal with unusual struggles. In life’s wilderness, survival rates are higher if an organism gifts its offspring with the genetic version of a bulky Swiss army knife. Just in case of emergency, there is a saw, a Phillips screwdriver, a fishhook, a knife, a scissors, a magnifying glass for starting fires, and so on. Toss in a map, some antibiotics, and a flask of water, and its chances are even better. That gives the offspring a fighting chance to stay alive, stay healthy, and stake out new territories. Using this metaphor, it makes sense for two parents to barter with the goods they possess, so that each can give their young a knapsack full of survival tools.

  So variety is life-giving. Then why not more sexes? Because two are plenty for mixing genes. More aren’t necessary, and, anyway, two complicates things royally. More would just get in the way. We call those two male and female, by which we mean that one produces sperm and the other produces eggs. The sperms are tiny, the eggs are big. A sperm moves fast, like a souped-up sportscar. An egg moves slowly, like a cantering horse. Males and females aren’t attracted to sperm and eggs, of course; they fall deep into the well of each other’s eyes, bowled over by a lovable face.

  THE FACE

  Close your eyes and picture the face of someone you love. Without meaning to, you will begin to smile, your eyes will squint a little as you savor the image, and a warmth will flood your heart
. As poets have said, one face is enough to launch a thousand ships, another to stock a private armada of rejection and woe.* Lovers can sit and stare for hours, soldering their hearts together with a white-hot gaze, finding in the other’s face a view of paradise. This is likely to happen, too, when a mother looks at her child. Hypnotized by the baby’s face, gladdened by the tonic of her love, she could happily sit and stare at it for days on end. The baby smiles at her, and she melts. The smile triggers her devotion and it’s absolute in its subtle tyranny. A newborn baby is the most powerful pitchman on earth. Although it can’t walk, or even roll over by itself, it controls the lives of all around it. Even children born blind know how to smile.

  Visitors to foreign lands, who know nothing of the customs or language, know instinctively how to flirt with the natives. It doesn’t matter if they’re in Holland, Taiwan, Indonesia, or Amazonia. When humans feel, they register emotion on their faces, and to do that they use the same bag of tricks. People all over the world use nearly identical facial idioms when they flirt. Practice isn’t necessary. They know just how to tempt an onlooker with a glance. For children, flirting elicits care from adults. For adults, flirting begins the mad tango of romance. But the technique is the same. To flirt with a man, classically, a woman lifts her eyebrows a little and flashes him an eager, wide-eyed look. When she has his attention, she shyly turns her head away, lowering her eyes and lifting her cheeks into an almost imperceptible smile. Then she tilts her head back toward him again, seeming to touch him once more with her eyes. Sometimes she giggles while she does this, or grins, or hides her face in her hands. This flirting drama—a combination of modesty and blunt sexual interest—is a universal behavior, one that women apparently evolved long ago to alert men that they were available for sex.