Sex

by Angela Eun Ji Koh

Ambubiae

She's not a Lupae she-wolf outside the empire, but a baker's girl.  Sometimes she sings and Roman soldiers shout out, "Ambubiae!"  They need an outlet while away from their pregnant wives.  Maybe prostitutes around tombs make money for Roman society.  But baker girls make better bread than beds. 

Birth Control

Girls would rather cake crocodile dung doused in honey into their canals.  Or chew sweet acacia tree samplings.  Sometimes sew sacks of cloths and leather thongs for their men.  They could even decorate the glans condoms with snake skin and chimp intestines.  Anything from pig bladder or pumpkin pigments to prevent pregnancy. 

Monogamy

Men measure sex like Superbowl tickets.  Blanchflower and Oswald say happiness gains from weekly bed games equate to fifty-thousand dollars a year.  So sex makes money.  Monogamous, married couples make regular sex.  Maybe men invest in relationships to make regular money. 

Strip Club

Strippers with estrus make more tips.  Men sense estrus as signals of fertility and sex.  It's clear like cats caterwauling in a clarion call for copulating.  Only cycles in ovulation show estrus.  Meanwhile, menstruating strippers make fewer tips. 

Tantra

Ball sacs look like two quail eggs wrapped in elbow skin.  Then a beard grows along its ravine crevice.  The coarse cords are more like branches than bushes.  A Kundalini serpent is supposed to release sensate focus and sexual energy.  But tantric sex and spoon breathing still make him look silly. 

Market

Molds dipped into liquid sap make latex stretch thin.  Sturdy as surgical gloves; it's serious science.  Semiskilled workers in assembly lines spray talcum powder on products to smooth and strengthen.  Germans and Dutch pioneered slot machines for coin-operated condoms.  Peddlers with portable cases of ties sold condoms hidden at the bottom.