‘Human’ Travels the Realms of Obsession

The world isn’t fair. Desmond Morris gets to travel the globe, apparently carte blanche, to gather material on sex. The rest of us get to crawl along the freeway to sit at a desk for eight hours or more.

But for the next three nights, at least, we can watch this somewhat proper British zoologist ogle women on the beaches of Tahiti, visit “love hotels” in Japan, observe male oil wrestling in Turkey and explain exactly why some women bare their breasts at Mardi Gras.

All this is part of “Desmond Morris’ The Human Sexes,” a title that soon becomes as irritating as the Fed-Ex Orange Bowl or the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. Despite that, the six-hour miniseries, which begins tonight on the Learning Channel, is an engrossing, fast-paced travelogue through humankind’s most consuming obsession.

The timing, of course, couldn’t be more fortuitous. Sex is on the world’s mind these days even more than usual. And there are a few times throughout the six episodes when one might chuckle at the unintended parallels to the White House situation. At one point, Morris notes two attributes that make a man sexually appealing to a woman: high-risk behavior and a position of power.

But some of the sexual terrain covered in this series is too exotic even for Washington. For instance, in parts of Burma, the longer a woman’s neck, the greater her perceived sex appeal. Consequently, women there place metal rings around their necks to push their shoulders down. The record is 32 rings.

We see the familiar dinner plates implanted in the lips of Ethiopian women, and in Cameroon, young women pad their hips and buttocks before going out on the town, to impress men with their childbearing potential.

One can hardly imagine Western women, with their obsession with thinness, coming close to fathoming such behavior. Nevertheless, we come face to face with the Western “bun bra,” which counteracts one’s anorexic tendencies by pushing up the tushie.

All this, of course, is aimed at making the sexes more appealing to one another, intones Morris, seeming increasingly like Lolita’s Humbert Humbert as he cruises among phallic symbols in various museums and shrines around the world.

Speaking of males, they also indulge in “gender exaggeration” to attract the opposite sex. Young men in the Philippines, for example, have plastic pellets inserted under the skin of their penises; the aim is higher status among their peers and better stimulation of the female during sex.

At one point, it is demonstrated that when men and women are asked to think about specific tasks, their brain activity differs substantially. In their dealings with each other, though, it is clear that for both sexes, the brain is not the organ of choice.

*

* “Desmond Morris’ The Human Sexes” appears 6 to 8 p.m. and 9 to 11 p.m. tonight, Tuesday and Wednesday on cable’s Learning Channel.