Global Sex
Dennis Altman
University of Chicago Press £15.50, pp192

Sexual desire is a more or less irrepressible and unchanging fact in humans. But the forms it takes are culturally conditioned and subject to influences and fashions like anything else. It is not just attitudes to sex that change in different times and places, but the act itself. The range of sexual acts is not that wide, but what a culture regards as commonplace and what seems exotic has changed and will go on changing.

Until quite recently, for instance, in Western culture, it seems to me that fellatio and cunnilingus were fairly exotic acts, an occasional divertissement. When the act was brought to the attention of England in the notorious Argyll divorce case in the Sixties, it was news to many readers of the Daily Beast that such a thing was possible or desirable, but then that was in the age of the weekly bath.

References to both in literature are relatively rare and always produced with a flourish; there is the whore in Pope who is 'at either end a common shore', or Nelly in Rochester, who has to use 'hands, fingers, mouth, and thighs/ Ere she can raise the member she enjoys'. Cunnilingus is probably rarer; as late as Lolita, Humbert's 'bay[ing] through the undergrowth of dark decaying forests' is still meant to shock.

With the improvement of personal hygiene in the West, these, and the previously still more exotic act of analingus, have become quite ordinary pastimes. Anecdotal evidence suggests that anal sex is still an exotic item of the vocabulary and one subject to negotiations between men and women; if it is a central part of male sexual fantasy, it is also an insistent, unspoken presence in the divorce courts. In other places and times, that has not been the case; the prevalence of heterosexual Aids in sub-Saharan Africa has been widely attributed to the resort to sodomy as a form of birth control.

The spread of an individual practice is explicable by Richard Dawkins's idea of the 'meme'. What militates against the introduction of a new sexual practice is precisely its novelty, which will be enough to categorise it as a perversion in most cultures. If that novelty seems less important than the pleasure derived from it, then it will spread. A hundred years ago, fisting was more or less unheard of - in Teleny, a piece of late nineteenth-century pornography unconvincingly attributed to Oscar Wilde, a sepoy is fisted to death with the lubricating aid of foie gras, but I think that must be regarded as a one-off. Now, although still more or less limited to homosexual men, it is not that uncommon a practice.

The fashions in individual acts are relatively easy to understand, but what is less susceptible to explication is the rise and fall of sexual identities which might seem fundamentally rooted in human nature. Homosexuality, in particular, is a poser; the prevalence of homosexuality now, compared to recent history, cannot entirely be explained away with reference to repression and taboo. Although there were always individuals who led a homosexual lifestyle, they were comparatively rare until recently. Astolphe de Custine was a rarity even in nineteenth-century France, where there was no legal prohibition. English law took no cognisance of lesbians, but the 'Ladies of Llangollen' were unusual enough to become a tourist attraction in the early nineteenth century.

What these shifts in practice and attitude point to is never very clear and it is never wise to try to draw conclusions about the larger psychology of a society on the basis of its peculiar sexual habits.

Occasionally, you can say something; it seems apparent that homosexual practices, until relatively recently, proceeded by analogy, and if sodomy became less common with the appearance of Aids, there was also a sense that same-gender relations need not always refer back to the penetrative habits of heterosexuals.

Dennis Altman has an interesting subject here, but has not quite managed to illuminate it. The question of rape in the Balkans wars, for instance, cannot helpfully be discussed in isolation from the political context. Similarly, discussion of sexual tourism in Bangkok falls instantly and rather sleazily into an evocation of 'colonialism', which is rather a routine assumption. The sexual history of colonialism is far more complex than that, and provides no easy conclusions. To take an example from an episode I've been doing a lot of work on; the sexual relations between the British and the Afghans during the British occupation of Kabul in the late 1830s were not clearly exploitative; a major casus belli was that many Afghan men preferred each other to their wives, and many Afghan wives took British soldiers as their lovers.

Bangkok is not a clear instance of colonial exploitation, but of economic inequality. That has always been the meaning of prostitution, and it is not very helpful to try to go much beyond that. An interesting subject, as I say, and if this book raises some real subjects for speculation, even if it fails to provide anything but the predictable responses of contemporary fashionable academia, it serves some kind of purpose.