The following apology was printed in the Observer’s For the record column, Sunday September 28 2003

In the article below, we attributed a national sex survey to the international Congress of Mathematicians. We meant the polling body ICM (Independent Communications and Marketing Research). Apologies to both organisations.

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A TV presenter in a nudist colony has three options. To do a Joan Bakewell and wander around fully clothed talking to naked people. This seems discourteous. To go apparently naked, but – as Inspector Clouseau did in A Shot in the Dark – protected by a guitar, a hedge or a potted plant. This is horribly coy. Finally, to take off all their clothes and join in. This is the most honest, but most aesthetically hazardous choice. And the one I went for.

Those who are prejudiced won’t be surprised to hear that this was all for Channel 5, the channel which – at an entertaining nadir in its scheduling history – once offered us Keith Chegwin’s giblets in motion. But I did not spend an hour and a half in a hot tub with a naked Californian sex expert, turning an unfortunate shade of lobster, in order either to titillate or disgust the viewers. No, I was genuinely seeking the answer to a very important and serious question. Which is: why do sex and sexual attraction vary from place to place and time to time?

As I originally put it to my friend, the independent producer, over coffee in south London, it seemed strange to me that different cultures valued fat bottoms, while others fetishised large breasts, or that some Papuan tribes forced everyone to have oral sex, while the state of Texas (or was it Georgia?) tried to force everyone not to.

Sex is a biological imperative for all but parthenogenic animals. The act that is needed to secure reproduction, and the body parts required for the act, are well understood. So what then was the purpose of the great variations we see across space and time, of human sexual behaviour and attraction? What was it all for?

This high-mindedness was what propelled me over oceans and land masses, interviewing sexologists, psychotherapists and behaviouralists. I’ve tended to think of my age group as being the children of the Great Liberation, the people who fought for gay rights, were comfortable with public breast-feeding and could – with only a little help – locate the clitoris.

So what could be more natural than, having asked the question about sexual variation, than to find the answer? There might be younger, trendier and more attractive interlocutors available to sit in hot tubs in the name of science, but this was my gig and Kirsty Young wouldn’t have done it, anyway.

The problem of evidence

The first discovery I made is that everyone in the sexology world agrees on the importance of the subject, not least because of the Aids crisis and sexual health issues, but also that there isn’t much data to go on. A dozen or so countries, including the US, Britain and the Scandinavian nations, carry out significant surveys. In the rest of the world, however, the evidence tends to be fragmentary and anecdotal. When I met Dr Judith Mackay, author of the Penguin Atlas of Sexual Behaviour, in Edinburgh (my first exotic location), she suggested that one characteristic of sex that did seem to be almost universal was that people everywhere regard it as essentially private.

This can give you glimpses, like peeking through the curtains, of what is happening in the boudoirs and long-houses, but not much more. The people who have sex least often (defining sex as intercourse) are the Chinese, some of whom will even tell researchers that even the mention of the word ‘sex’ makes them physically sick. In Italy, the best evidence suggests that 20 per cent of all men visit a prostitute once a week (a statistic that I find almost incredible, since that would make whoring a more popular leisure activity than going to football or visiting the cinema). In the US, apparently, 1.5 per cent of all women have – at some time or another – ‘been paid for sex’. And here, one feels, there may be a problem of definition.

And, of course, of self-reporting. Who would not be suspicious of figures suggesting that the French make love more times per week than anyone else? During research for the programmes, to test this intuition, I looked at surveys on penis size. The most comprehensive study in Britain is (for obvious reasons) that carried out by Durex, the condom manufacturers. Unlike anyone else, they actually need to know the answer. Their (self-reported) study concluded that the average erect penis was 6.4 inches long.

However, in one of the few such exercises ever carried out, young American and Mexican men were actually measured by someone else, while at a Mexican nightclub. This survey, which did manage a statistically relevant sample, discovered an average erect penis length of 5.1 inches. You can draw one of three conclusions. First, that it wasn’t a nice nightclub; second, that for some unexplained reason, young Mexicans and Americans have significantly smaller penises than British men. Or the obvious conclusion, that if we measured height the way we measure penises, our houses would all have 10-foot doors.

The nature of attraction

Why do different cultures at different times find different things attractive? In California, a few miles south of the Lupin Naturist Resort, where I began this article, I met the cheerleaders for the San Francisco 49’ers, one of America’s best-known football teams. They were in their late teens and early 20s, different colours, but all tall, all slim, all lustrous-haired, thin-waisted, small-bummed and (relatively) large-breasted. Ask an American man what kind of girl he fancies and the word cheerleader will often feature in the answer.

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But why does he? And, more pertinently, why should this almost impossible ideal (the combination of large breasts and small bottom being quite unusual, left to nature) have spread far beyond the US, through Europe and into Asia?

In societies where food is scarce and work is hard, which, historically, has been most societies, the prize would be a partner who possessed both strength and endurance. You would value a workmate and someone who had the ability to parent and to raise or support children. What would be the point of a will-o’-the-wisp wife who succumbed during the first bad winter? Or of a man so poor and ill that you ended up destitute? You’d want sturdiness, muscularity, health and its outward show – fat.

Furthermore, any notions of physical beauty would essentially be local. Where there isn’t a great deal of population mobility, the people in your village would constitute the whole world of attractiveness and ugliness. Angel Clare might well have been the first beautiful person that Tess Durbeyfield had ever met. She certainly behaved like it.

All this can scarcely be true today. From Bangui to Bangor, we all see a thousand beautiful people by mid-morning: on billboards, on TV, in cinemas, wherever we look. And as we do, our notions of physical attractiveness seem to converge towards a global ideal.

I found this in Tokyo. Once, the most valued physical feature of Japanese women was the nape of the neck, elaborated and eroticised partly because this was all that was seen above the kimono. Japanese women tend to slight frames, and small deposits of body fat, so their breasts and bums are small. Now the ads, magazines and porn are full of narrow-waisted, big-boobed girls. Significant numbers of Japanese women are opting for breast-enlargement surgery. They want to look like Californian cheerleaders.

You could, if you liked, put this down to American cultural imperialism and the flooding of Japan with products movies and advertisements that undermine Japanese traditions. But a number of Japanese people I met favoured a more subtle explanation. The victory of the US in the Second World War and the American occupation led to the association between American ideals and success. So, as in the past a suitable spouse might exhibit their health and through a well-coloured nape or a steady tread, now it would be their Americanness that indicated (even if unconsciously) their status. Meanwhile, of course, fast food and over-consumption would have all these wannabe Californian cheerleaders actually resembling the obese caricature known in the US as a ‘polyester moose’.

This is a useful hypothesis, which is not necessarily disproved by the way in which globalisation allows other cultures their occasional moment in the sun. On Copacabana, I found out that the Brazilian emphasis on the boonda is not just some myth. With Brazil’s large African element, many of the women are naturally big-bottomed, and it is a prized characteristic. Many countries in the West also have significant numbers of fashion-leading black women, and in the last couple of years it has become cool actually to have an arse.

Not everyone is as convinced by the cultural argument for variation and choice. There are those who set far more store by the hidden persuaders, the things that we don’t even know we see or experience. A psychotherapist, used to uncovering the patterns in our relationships, will argue that we are attracted to each other through a million signals and signs that we give out about our own vulnerabilities, or that we relate to our own needs and emotions. These, they say, will be much more important than whether someone is a 36D or has a cute arse. ‘I want a gal just like the gal who married dear old Pa,’ as the song goes.

More of this later. My most disconcerting meeting was not in the hot tub, but with an olfactorist called George Dodd. Plenty of scientists, and some ancient cultures, testify to the power of pheromones. Odours that we don’t even know we detect convey information about health and, crucially, about ‘complementary immunity’ – the handing on to potential offspring of immunities which are additional to our own.

In Brazil, women will strain their lover’s coffee through their worn underwear in the belief that it will help them keep their man. In the southern states of the US, female slave descendants have for years believed in mixing vaginal secretions into hamburgers or stews, so as to ‘fix’ husbands and boyfriends who might otherwise stray.

So George invited me to sniff a number of strips impregnated with odours and see how I reacted. These were concentrations of smells found in, er, a number of places. I nearly fell off my stool.

What we do

So much for attraction. What about our actual behaviour? How much does that differ and why? I begin answering this question standing in the basement of a brownstone in Brooklyn, my finger embedded up to the second knuckle in the latex backside of porn-star Julie Ashton,

My hostess was American anal-sex crusader, Tristan Taormina, and Julie Ashton was her much-prized, lifesize eponymous replica of that fearless lady’s rear, used for demonstration purposes. There is, Tristan instructed me, an appropriate method for digital entry and several places to go once entry had been achieved. I said to Tristan that, for many people, this would seem a pointless and – given size – a slightly painful activity. Not at all, she corrected me, the anus ‘is small but trainable’, and richer in nerve endings than just about anywhere else.

I once had a suppository and that was once too often, and have successfully resisted any thermometrical assault on the area. To my generation of heterosexuals, anal sex was something gays did faute de mieux, not really something we thought about. Tristan’s view, however, seems to be shared by a growing number of young British heterosexuals.

The anecdotal evidence, from magazine columns to soccer chat-rooms, has been there for some time. But now survey evidence backs it up, both in the form of the large British Natsal (National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles) study and also in an ICM (Independent Communication and Marketing Research) survey carried out specially for Channel 5, and now published for the first time. The ICM results on anal sex show that, whereas 18 per cent of those aged 45-plus had had some experience of anal sex, the figure was 41 per cent among 25-35-year-olds.

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If this is right, that’s a hell of a change in one generation. And the obvious question is why? What would account for this alteration in behaviour? In Mediterranean countries I was told by Andrew Canessa from Essex University, anal sex had long been practised as a way of maintaining virginity before marriage. ‘There,’ he argued, ‘anal is less than vaginal sex, in Anglophonic countries it tends to be more.’ ‘More’ in the sense of more extreme and more taboo.

Which means first that, at some point, we in Britain and the US decided that ‘more’ was what we wanted out of sex. Second, we rediscovered anal sex. The possible reason for this is both fascinating and wonderfully perverse. In America, the enhanced interest in anal sex, according to San Francisco academic, Dr Carol Queen, originated during the Aids crisis of the late 80s. ‘People had never even heard of it,’ she said, ‘didn’t know they could do it, until the year that the surgeon-general circulated every household in the US mentioning what was safe sex and what was unsafe. Then all they had to do was look up a bunch of websites.’

So we now find certain things pleasurable that we never used to, and discover sexual activities that had long been part of the bedroom repertoire of other cultures. In Spain, apparently, cunnilingus is a far more culturally ‘elaborated’ than in, say Britain, where fellatio is the oral sex most often discussed. Again, this may be because of the original desire to experience sexual pleasure while maintaining virginity.

In fact, societies have very different reactions to the notion that sex is positive at all. In the US and, to an extent, in the UK as well, sex education concentrates on the perils of the act and doesn’t mention its pleasures. In Latin American countries, such a punitive attitude seems absurd. Religion seems to be a big part of the answer here, with controlling monotheisms anxious to set limits for human (and particularly female) sexual behaviour, and agriculturally based fertility religions being open to the idea of physical pleasure. Consider, for a moment, the concept of the lingam of Christ.

Fantasy

Nature, schmature. Nothing, however, suggests the power of culture over sex as strongly as the way we deal with sexual fantasy. And here I invite you to join me in a brightly lit part of Tokyo, outside what looks like a nightclub, with a bouncer on the door and rows of pictures of the delights within. But these pictures are not of strippers or cabaret artistes, but of women dressed up as secretaries, air stewardesses, college girls and bus conductors, each in their appropriate setting.

This, it was explained to me, as the bouncer gently steered me away from the steps, was an ‘image club’, a kind of brothel in which the sex worker and her client enact fantasies according to a preset menu. The most popular, as depicted, involved mile-high flirtations, sexually harassing secretaries at work (and getting your wicked way), encounters with students and – even more extraordinarily – touching up a woman on the Tokyo Underground.

Japanese society is not particularly sexually violent, and has a very clear and elaborate code about the inappropriateness of certain behaviour. It is also very hierarchical, partly explaining the uniform fetish. Marriages are still often arranged and it can be difficult for men and women to meet each other. These fantasies clearly therefore reflect not so much individual pathologies, but cultural ones.

We can talk. British fetish and S&M clubs are reputed to be – by those who know about such things – the most lively and numerous in the world. All over the country, couples arrive home from work, get dressed up and set off for an evening in PVC or high heels.

According to a ‘fetish diva’ I met in San Francisco (who kept canes specially for British visitors), the attraction of S&M is its sheer intensity. But as she tied me up in front of the cameras (her thing is rope), she also told me that S&M is not the mad pain’n’blood business that I’d always assumed, but a highly negotiated business between very straightforward adults. You say what you enjoy, I say what I enjoy, and we devise something that makes it work for both of us.

For a mad moment, this made complete sense and I wanted the crew to go away and leave me to the tender lack of mercies of Midori.

The British S&M practitioners I encountered took the safety aspect a stage further. While making me feel particularly ‘vanilla’ for never having so much as tied a lover to the bedpost (‘Not even by one hand?’ a dominatrix asked me incredulously), they were keen to stress how most of them went to clubs with their partners/wives/husbands. Trust, I was informed, was at the centre of good sadomasochism. One likened an interest in S&M to caravanning or fishing, except it is far more fun.

But here the water becomes muddied again. Most people are not fetishists, so what motivates those who are? One item that sells very well in Britain are shoes for fetishists. A famous manufacturer of kinky boots told me that a good high heel emphasises the line of the leg up to the buttock, and that this was why people liked his footwear so much.

But I was more intrigued by the explanation of the Californian psychoanalyst who theorised that such a shoe effectively gave a woman a penis. This would tend to suggest to men a woman who was strong, in contrast to the weak, needy mothers so many postwar men grew up fretting about. The same concern, he argued, might explain masochism. ‘For men who tend to feel responsible and worried about their partners, a masochistic tendency is quite attractive.’ If you’re all tied up, it can’t be your fault.

It would be impertinent of me to suggest, after a few weeks trolling around the globe in various states of dress, that I have discovered the answer to what turns people on. Signs of health and wealth, as approved by fashion and the predominating culture, seem to account for attractiveness, and religion, fashion and curiosity for what we actually do. As to what we have inside our heads, it’s always the same answer: blame your mother.

· David Aaronovitch’s three-part series, Whatever Turns You On , begins on Channel 5 on Wednesday, 10pm

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