Question: Why are people so obsessed with sex? And why do they care so much about the sex lives of famous people?
Answer: Sex! It's everywhere. Sex! We know that someone, somewhere, is doing something nasty. Sex! The topic is always there, hovering, stalking, waiting to suddenly - Sex! - jump out at us.In recent months we've been engrossed by sex scandals and sexual innuendo involving Woody Allen, both presidential candidates, and most of the Windsors over in England. Why are people so nosy about the details of something that we all agree is a "private" issue?
Some people would argue that our minds have been poisoned by the filth of the modern mass media. They'd say that sleaze perpetuates sleaze, an endless, escalating cycle. But scientists put forward a simpler explanation: Sex matters. Sex, in fact, is the most important thing we ever do, even more important than washing behind our ears. Sex is so important that not only do we need to be fascinated by our own sexuality but also by the sex lives of total strangers, because of the odd chance that some piece of knowledge will affect our reproductive success.
"It's important who's doing what with whom. It matters whose children are whose. It matters which relationships might be ending. It matters which relationships might have powerful influence," says Randolph Nesse, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan.
Helen Fisher, anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History, says, "We're interested in sex for our own competitive reasons, and we're interested in comparing our family values with the family values of everyone else, so we can see how we're doing, so we can measure our moral blood level with everyone else's moral blood level."
Lionel Tiger, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, says this is an ancient trait: "Who the dominant males are having sex with is a matter of considerable concern in a primate community. Males compete among each other in order to acquire access to females and to the genetic future."
Thus, in the primate community of modern America, we have practical, natural reasons for knowing about Woody Allen's relationship with Mia Farrow's daughter, because we might someday want to have a child with Woody Allen, or with Mia Farrow's daughter, or with Mia Farrow, or with Mia Farrow's ex-husband, Frank Sinatra, or with Frank Sinatra's ex-lunch partner, Nancy Reagan.
The strange thing is, you are probably more intrigued by the whiff of scandal than by the precise details of the sexual liaison itself. John Money, a professor of medical psychology at Johns Hopkins Hospital, says people love the hint of sex, the rumor that soon we will learn something tawdry, but the sexual facts themselves quickly lose their power to titillate.
"You always gossip about something that you've got the wind of but you're not quite sure about," says Money.
Thus the Gennifer Flowers/Bill Clinton miniscandal is no longer interesting because Flowers is no longer mysterious. Likewise, the rumor of trouble between Prince Charles and Princess Diana is more fascinating than the established fact of such trouble.
What sank Gary Hart's presidential candidacy in 1987 was not his relationship with Donna Rice so much as the way the story broke, that initial hurricane of allegation, denial, confusion, doubt, debate, all that guesswork and suspicion. A great scandal requires mystery - otherwise all you have is yet another guy with a midlife crisis and tickets for a cruise to Bimini.
The Mailbag:
George and Grace M. of Phenix City, Ala., ask, "At what point does something become ancient?"
Dear George and Grace: Anything that's been around a long time - a car, an animal companion, one of those 37-term Democratic congressmen - can be called "ancient" without violating the correct definition of the word. But if you want to know when the "ancient world" came to an end, that's tricky.
We passed your question on to Bernard Knox, director emeritus of the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, and he said, "The ancient world folds up sometime in the fifth century A.D."
An even more exact answer comes from Webster's Third New International Dictionary, which says the ancient world ended in 476 A.D., the fall of the western Roman Empire; "medieval" is defined as anything between about 500 A.D. and 1500 A.D.
Knox argues that any precise cutoff is too simplistic. There were about two centuries of transition, he says. "You just can't cut it that fine. Roughly speaking, I guess, St. Augustine is about on the boundary, he's late fourth and early fifth century A.D. He's at the beginning of the Christian Middle Ages, but he's still very much of the ancient world. "
That part of history has always been a mess. The emphasis on 476 A.D. ignores the earlier sacking of Rome in 410 A.D. and the later re-establishment of the western Roman Empire under the Emperor Justinian, not to mention the continuance of the eastern Roman Empire for another thousand years and the more fundamental problem of basing any historical cutoff on the actions of some alleged "barbarians" in one little corner of the globe. We'd bet money that when the ancient world ended, no one remembered to tell the Chinese.