In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honore

Author:Carl Honore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

SEX: A LOVER WITH A SLOW HAND

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

—SØREN KIERKEGAARD (1813–1855)

THERE ARE SOME THINGS a person never lives down. In an interview a few years ago, Sting confessed to a fondness for Tantric sex, and raved about making love to his wife for hours on end. In an instant, the English rocker was the butt of a million jokes. Commentators wondered how he found time to write songs, or how his wife could still walk. By the time Sting tried to play down his dabblings in Tantra, it was already too late. He was forever fixed in the public imagination as the priapic pop star. Even today, DJs introduce his songs with snide references to never-ending nooky.

Sting should have known better. There is something inherently ludicrous about taking courses to improve your sexual performance. And Tantra, a mystical blend of yoga, meditation and sex, is a particularly easy target for scorn. It conjures images of hirsute hippies romping in the nude. In an episode of Sex in the City, Carrie and the girls attend a Tantric workshop. After a long, slow buildup, the male instructor accidentally shoots his seed into Miranda’s hair. She spends the rest of the episode manically wiping her bangs with tissues.

But Tantra has more to offer than just cheap laughs. All over the world, people are warming to the very Tantric idea that slower sex is better sex. Most of us could certainly devote more time to making love. That may seem, at first glance, like an odd assertion. After all, the modern world is already saturated with sex. From movies and the media to advertising and art, everything is laced with erotic themes and imagery. You get the feeling everyone is at it all the time. Only they’re not. Even if we spend a big chunk of the day watching, talking, fantasizing, joking and reading about sex, we spend very little time actually doing it. A large study carried out in 1994 found that the average American adult devoted a meagre half an hour per week to making love. And when we finally do get down to it, it is often over before it really gets started. Though statistics on sexual behaviour must always be taken with a pinch of salt, academic surveys and anecdotal evidence suggest that an awful lot of couplings have a whiff of the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am about them. Published in the early 1950s, the historic Kinsey Report famously estimated that 75% of American husbands reach climax within two minutes of penetration.

Fast sex is not a modern invention—it goes way back, and probably has its roots in the survival instinct. In prehistoric days, copulating quickly made our ancestors less vulnerable to attack, either by a wild beast or a rival. Later, culture added extra incentives to hurry the sex act. Some religions taught that intercourse was for procreation rather than recreation: a husband should climb on, do his duty and climb off again.

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