O Canada!
Saturday January 17, 2009
Human passions, however, grow more active as the territories in which they operate approach the equator, whether from north or south, with correspondingly rising climatic temperatures. Accordingly, about the 45th parallel, approximately dividing Japan from Siberia, Istanbul from Odessa, Barcelona from Marseilles and the United States from Canada, sexual concupiscence, like other dictatorial sentiments, retreats more and more from the front lines of a social group. It tends to concentrate, if at all, on artifice in the communications zones rather than on the frank and simple conjunctions ordained by nature in the raw. This is especially the case in the lands north of the 45th parallel which have enjoyed several centuries, though fewer than most of Asia and North Africa, of sophisticated civilization. It is no accident that German, British and Scandinavian sexologists have found their subject far more complex than did the solemn sixteenth century Arab Sheikh Nefzaoul of Tunis, author of the celebrated Perfumed Garden, a prose manual interspersed with a few scraps of verse, for the use of lovers. He dealt only, though at somewhat inordinate length, with the possible if often difficult varieties of the conjunction of phallus and vagina and matters appertaining thereto. He ignored altogether, except for two brief and contemptuous references to lesbianism and bestiality, the numerous divergences from normal coition and the strange practices for its stimulation which have been widely cultivated in Europe and other non-Islamic territories, for the sake of novel sensation, from a relatively early period.
—James Cleugh, A History of Oriental Orgies