CARNAL NATION

"But it's unnatural!" is the all-too familiar cry of moralists who want to register their objections to whatever sexual behavior upsets them most. We suspect that if they could get away with it, there are those who would claim that even heterosexual, non-contraceptive, missionary-style sex was in some way unnatural if they could only find a way to sell it to the masses. The problem with the claim that we should declare something completely verboten because it is somehow against nature is that these things invariably show up in nature. Take prostitution, for example. Research shows that this isn't a strictly human behavior. Apparently female chimps will accept meat from males in exchange for sex. The exchange is on a long-term basis, and applies whether the female is fertile or not, although fertile females were favored. It seems that meat is the only currency among chimps that will get mating privileges; when chimps exchanged grooming or fruit and nuts, the male chimps weren't rewarded with sex. The researchers suspect that similar meat for sex exchanges took place among early hunter-gatherer humans, based on studies that show better hunters tend to have more sexual partners. It seems like "the world's oldest profession" might even be older than speech.