Anal Sex Throughout History
The History of the Forbidden Fruit: Babylon and the Moche
The history of human sexuality is a long and winding tale of various practices, customs, and expressions of human affection, as we endeavor to encapsulate our deepest passion for our partners, and who them ultimately our love. This boundless desire, the raw, sheer passionate emotion that we feel within ourselves is the burning fuel for our sexual practices, whichever form they may take in whichever culture they seek to reflect.
Anal sex has been around for a very, very long time, probably for as long as there have been human beings walking around on this Earth. People have done this practice for various reasons I’ve discussed at length in The Psychology of Anal Sex (below).
It turns out, history has a lot to say about our sex habits as well.
Especially anal sex.
The Trobriand Islanders
We know that anal sex has been practiced since time immemorial as a form of birth control for couples who didn’t want to have children, and we have sculptures dating back to as far as 4,000 years ago which likely display the act, considering the thoughts of the cultures of the ancient Fertile Crescent at the time. Researchers know that many cultures, even then, used the practice to circumvent having any children, knowing full well that anal sex would not produce children.
But that’s not to say that the practice was only performed as a means of birth control before other methods, such as contraception, were invented. The practice is ubiquitous throughout the world because a certain percent of the population simply seems to like it.
A Polish anthropologist by the name of Bronislaw Malinowski explored many of cultures which have been encapsulated in time through their remoteness and lack of contact with other cultures. One of the cultures he wrote about, the Trobriand Islanders who live near New Guinea on a very remote island had no clue how babies came to be, and it’s likely that many older cultures were much the same. These people believed, quite simply, that a “ghost” (yes, an actual ghost) came and impregnated women, and thus the responsibilities of adulthood didn’t belong to the father but the community, as they had no conception of fatherhood.
Imagine having no conception of fatherhood at all and an entire civilization of people running around having whatever kind of sex they wanted with whomever they wanted — the tribe communalized the responsibilities of raising the children while everyone else played. Human history was likely much more radical than you think, and an understanding of this ancient and prehistoric sexual liberty will shed some insight into other cultures who loved doing it in the backdoor long before we showed up on the scene.
There is, and always has been, literally nothing in the way of morality stopping the Trobriand Islanders from doing whatever they wanted to sexually. No worries of childbirth, no conception of sex leading to childbirth, even — much like a certain corporate slogan tells us to do, they just did it.
Ancient Babylon
While anal sex specifically isn’t mentioned in the literature pertaining to the Trobriand, these people deserve to be mentioned here specifically for their lax attitudes towards sex, which were much like those of the ancient Babylonians, (a topic I’ve covered extensively here).
The main difference between the two cultures is the fact that the Babylonians practiced marriages and wives were forced to remain faithful to their husbands. The Babylonians were no strangers to anal sex and practiced homosexuality freely and openly, including anal sex.
In short, both cultures seemingly take lovers as they please, simply going around and having sex with anyone who strikes their fancy, which gives us an insight into the world of sex before Christianity came along and made things significantly more puritan, especially when it came to anal sex, or “sodomy.”
Cultures like these give us a precious glimpse into the past so we can see what life was like before our modern-day structures of civilization arose, and it’s safe to say that a lot of anal sex took place long before it became taboo with the rise of Christian orthodoxy.
Babylon, one of the first major cities on Earth, definitely practiced anal sex, and definitely loved it —ancient Greek historian Herodotus writes telling us of an ancient Babylon whereby people had sex anywhere, anytime, without regard for anyone else around — and it was perfectly legal. There were meat markets where women were sold to the highest bidder, likely comparable to the male slave labor market of the day.
In the Babylonian religion, chastity was actually a sin, and there were temple prostitutes which served the public at large to win favor of the gods. Sex orgies and massive sex festivals also took place. Kings had harems for both men and women, and everyone simply had sex with everyone who wasn’t married — nothing was off limits.
Men in ancient Babylon would have anal sex with a man one day and a woman the next if they so chose. This was enough to make Herodotus blush, and the Greek historian looked upon these people as a group of sex-craved maniacs, thirsty for anything that walked. The tablets we’re finding thousands of years later show that he likely wasn’t lying. What are the odds that anal sex of all types and positions would survive long enough to be found if it wasn’t totally prominent?
The ancient Greeks weren’t exactly a chaste bunch, as they themselves loved to induldge in sex of all types, heterosexual or homosexual, and were no strangers to anal sex — the Greeks loved the practice — so to be called all sorts of “filthy and disgusting” by the ancient Greeks, means that Babylon definitely held it down as one of the most sexualized, and kinky cultures of all time — a lot of anal sex happened in those temples where the prostitutes practiced their services in the name of the religion of the day, along with all sorts of other types of sex.
Herodotus was particularly disturbed by the love the Babylonians had for being urinated on during sex, mainly the men, but also women enjoyed it as well, apparently. What’s actually the most startling, is that the women were out in ancient Babylon, about the city living their lives, and of course, having sex — this liberty of the women was likely what shocked Herodotus the most about the city, much less was he shocked that the Babylonians were having anal sex, but that the women were allowed to have anal sex in public, or even freely be in public in the first place.
Which seems so unusual and bizarre from our point of view, going to show that much of our views on sex and notions of sexual morality are truly relative.
The Moche
As has been mentioned elsewhere, anal sex seems to have experienced a bit of a bell curve, starting out as extremely popular in early cultures, then being curbed by rigid Christian morality, and now is experiencing a resurgence in popularity as the puritanical ideals of old are lifted.
No work on the history of anal sex is complete without a mentioning of the Moche culture of modern-day Peru and other parts of South America, a culture who thrived from 100 CE to 800 CE, and left us a slew of ceramic pots which displayed their various sexual acts, much like those of the ancient Greeks, with their lusty sex pots. One thing is conspicuously absent from these sex pots: vaginal sex.
So rare is the depiction of vaginal sex that some scholars completely missed it, even claiming that the pots never portrayed vaginal sex, though this is inaccurate, but it speaks to the minds of the Moche people, and there has been some debate about whether or not this was done by the Moche as a means of birth control or just plain old fun. Moche culture was the ass-obsessed culture of history.
While it’s hard for us to shift outside of the framework that vaginal sex ends up in children, this knowledge had to be stumbled upon through trial and error ideas, and many cultures around the world simply believed that any sex, including anal and oral sex resulted in children.
The Moche people likely believed this, and this means that the Moche likely preferred anal sex for the simple enjoyment of it, all the while believing that it too led to the creation of children just like they believed that oral and vaginal sex did. The work titled Moche Sex Pots: Reproduction and Temporality in Ancient South America by Mary Weismantel notes in conclusion:
“On Moche ceramics, images of anal sex and male masturbation are often shown together with a baby, posing a puzzle that is best addressed by turning from Western notions of conception to a cross-cultural search for ethnographic analogies. But now that we have finished our wanderings, are we any closer to answering the question , ‘Why all the anal sex?’”
The Moche weren’t just liberal when it came to the subject of anal sex, also depicting acts like breastfeeding children during sex, and more, which was a likely reality of prehistoric life that we don’t think much about in our hushed-up cultures today which tend to view such a practice as disgusting.
The Moche sometimes had several positions on the same pot, and it was virtually always anal and oral sex being performed on a man, or a man being masturbated by himself or a woman.
Perhaps time will tell what drove the Moche people to build so many almost outlandish, though crafty and artful clay pots and other ceramics that we have today, all of which depicted sexual practices, some of those practices being things we find taboo even today.
They were absolutely sexually uninhibited, and weren’t afraid to show it, as could be expected after the analysis of the other two civilizations, especially Babylon. The Moche were probably the most anal-obsessed culture ever to grace the face of the Earth, and have left us much in the way of cultural richness to show for their time here.
Some deny that these cultures were that sexualized, uninhibited, and liberated in regards to sex, an interesting phenomenon of denialism, showing how ingrained Christiandom and its extent morality has become, that even some secularists can’t handle the ancient anal sex of old when looking through the lens of today.
Do our ancestors frighten us? Were those who lived before us too wild, too kinky for those of us alive in todays’ modern, technologically advanced society? I’ll let you answer that for yourselves.
Or do we just like to feel somehow superior when it comes to sexuality, do we become afraid of ourselves and our own humanity when we look ourselves in the faces in the mirror, and take a closer look, realizing that they aren’t so much different than we are?