Daniel sent us this one — he's noticed that group sex keeps showing up in ancient history and modern pornography, and he's asking whether the skeptics who dismiss it as a porn-driven fantasy are missing the bigger picture. He wants to know the actual history, how different societies and religions have handled it, whether swinging is just an old practice with a new name, and whether strict monogamy was ever really the human default. It's a big sweep — from temple rituals to suburban key parties to whatever people are doing now.
The short answer to his framing question is yes, the skeptics are missing the picture almost entirely. Group sex isn't some modern pornographic invention. It shows up in some of the oldest written records we have. The Sumerians had sacred marriage rites that sometimes involved multiple participants. Herodotus wrote about Babylonian temple practices in the fifth century BCE where women were expected to have sex with a stranger at least once in the temple of Ishtar — and he describes crowds, queues, the whole thing operating like a religious obligation.
Herodotus also said there were giant ants in India that dug up gold, so I'm not sure we hang our entire thesis on Herodotus.
Fair, and that's actually the first thing historians flag — Herodotus is famously a mix of observation and hearsay. But the Babylonian practice has corroboration from other sources, including later Babylonian texts themselves. The point is the pattern: across Mesopotamia, the eastern Mediterranean, parts of the Indus Valley, you find ritualized non-monogamous sex that wasn't hidden in a back room. It was integrated into religious life.
The question becomes: was this group sex, or was this something else wearing a group-sex-shaped hat? Because temple prostitution and an orgy aren't quite the same thing. One's a sacred duty, the other is — well, a Tuesday.
And that distinction matters. The ancient world didn't have our category of "group sex" as a discrete sexual orientation or recreational preference. What they had were practices embedded in larger social structures. Fertility rites in Canaanite religion involved ritual intercourse, sometimes with multiple participants, because the logic was sympathetic magic — human reproduction mirrored in the fields. If you wanted the crops to grow, you enacted abundance.
The original performance review.
And this logic wasn't fringe. The Greek Dionysian mysteries, the Roman Bacchanalia — these were large-scale ecstatic rituals where sexual activity was part of the worship. Livy's account of the Bacchanalia suppression in 186 BCE describes thousands of initiates, men and women together, engaging in what Roman authorities considered debauchery. The Senate passed a decree, the Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus, that essentially outlawed the cult and executed thousands.
Here's where it gets interesting — the Roman objection wasn't purely about the sex. It was about unauthorized assembly. The Bacchanalia were private, initiatory, and operated outside state religious control. The sex was the headline, but the fear was parallel power structures.
That's the thing about moral panics around sex throughout history — they're almost always also about something else. The Bacchanalia suppression was about consolidating Roman religious authority. The later Christian crackdowns on pagan sexual practices were about drawing boundaries between the new faith and the old world. When Augustine writes about the shamefulness of lust in the early fifth century, he's doing theology, but he's also doing cultural warfare.
Let's move through the timeline. You've got the ancient Near East, you've got Greece and Rome. What about further east?
China has its own complex history. The Han dynasty period had a concept of fangzhong — the arts of the bedchamber — which were basically Taoist sexual manuals. These weren't explicitly about group sex, but they described sexual techniques in detail and were circulated openly among the elite. The idea was that sex was a health practice, a way of cultivating qi. Some texts describe multiple partners as part of longevity regimens for emperors. Then by the Song dynasty, neo-Confucianism tightens everything up dramatically, and you get the sexual conservatism that most people associate with historical China.
The pendulum swings both ways, even within the same civilization.
And that's the through-line of this entire topic. There's no linear progression from wild ancient orgies to civilized monogamy. It's cycles of openness and restriction, often tied to broader political and religious shifts. India's another fascinating case. The Kama Sutra, composed around the second or third century CE, discusses group sex explicitly — it has a whole section on what it calls gośṭhī, which is essentially an orgy. And the text is remarkably non-judgmental about it. It's a manual, not a sermon.
The Kama Sutra is the IKEA instructions of ancient sexuality. Just a calm, diagrammatic approach to everything.
That's not even wrong. And the point is, Vatsyayana wasn't writing pornography. He was writing a treatise on the good life — dharma, artha, kama. Sexual pleasure was one leg of a three-legged stool. Group sex was just one of many practices catalogued without moral panic.
Which brings us to the religious question. Because the Abrahamic traditions in particular have had a lot to say about all this.
They've said it loudly. Let's start with Judaism. The Torah prohibits adultery in the Ten Commandments, obviously, but the more specific prohibitions come in Leviticus — chapter eighteen, the laws of forbidden sexual relations. Those are primarily about incest and what the text calls "uncovering nakedness" within family structures. Group sex per se isn't named as a category, but the entire legal framework is built around exclusive marital bonds. By the Second Temple period, Jewish sexual ethics are firmly monogamous in practice, and the rabbinic tradition reinforces that.
Though the patriarchs weren't exactly poster children for monogamy. Abraham had Hagar. Jacob had four wives.
That's the counterpoint people always raise. Polygyny was practiced in the biblical period — Solomon's seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines being the absurd extreme. But the rabbinic tradition reads those narratives as cautionary. Every instance of polygamy in Genesis creates family dysfunction — Sarah and Hagar, Rachel and Leah. The text doesn't ban it outright, but it shows you the misery it produces. By the first century, monogamy is the norm in Jewish communities, and the Ashkenazi ban on polygamy, attributed to Rabbeinu Gershom around the year 1000, formalized what was already practice.
Judaism preemptively side-eyed the whole enterprise without needing to specifically legislate against threesomes.
Christianity then takes it further. Paul's letters in the New Testament are unambiguous — one man, one woman, no exceptions. First Corinthians is particularly direct about sexual immorality, and the Greek word porneia becomes the catch-all term covering everything from adultery to prostitution to any non-marital sexual activity. The early Church fathers — Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Jerome — they're not just anti-group-sex, they're deeply suspicious of sexual pleasure altogether.
Augustine really is the heavyweight here.
Augustine's the one who sets the tone for Western Christianity for the next sixteen centuries. His view, developed partly in reaction to his own youthful excesses — he famously prayed "grant me chastity, but not yet" — is that sexual desire is inherently disordered. It's a consequence of the Fall. In an unfallen world, Adam and Eve would have procreated without passion, like farmers planting seeds. Lust is the punishment. And if lust itself is the problem, then group sex isn't just a sin — it's a concentration of the fundamental human disorder.
Which is a fascinatingly bleak anthropology. You're born wrong, your desires are evidence of the wrongness, and the solution is to suppress them entirely. Group sex is just the loudest version of the problem.
That framework shapes European sexual morality so thoroughly that even after secularization, the categories persist. People who've never read a word of Augustine still feel that sex is somehow degrading, that more partners means more degradation. The structure outlasts the theology.
Islam enters the picture in the seventh century, and it takes a somewhat different approach.
The Quran permits polygyny — up to four wives — but with the crucial condition that they all be treated equally, which the text itself suggests is nearly impossible. So there's a built-in push toward monogamy. Islamic law is explicit about zina, unlawful sexual intercourse, which covers adultery and fornication. Group sex would fall squarely under that prohibition. But — and this is the interesting part — classical Islamic societies were often more sexually literate than their Christian counterparts. Medieval Arabic erotic manuals exist. The Perfumed Garden, from fifteenth-century Tunisia, is a detailed sex manual that discusses positions, techniques, and pleasure in a way that would have been unthinkable in contemporaneous Christian Europe.
You've got three Abrahamic traditions, all theoretically opposed to non-marital sex, but with very different cultural expressions of that opposition. Christianity goes for guilt and suppression. Judaism builds a fence around the family. Islam regulates rather than pathologizes.
None of them actually eliminated the practices. That's the thing. You can find court records from medieval Europe, from Islamic caliphates, from Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, all prosecuting people for what we'd now call group sex. The fact that they kept prosecuting it means it kept happening.
Which brings us to question four — has swinging always been a thing, just under another name?
Short answer: yes, with asterisks. The modern swinging movement is usually traced to the 1950s in the United States. The term "wife swapping" appears in the postwar period, initially among military communities — specifically Air Force bases in California and the Southwest. The sociologist Terry Gould has documented this. The pattern was: tight-knit military communities, high mortality risk, young couples, and a kind of informal exchange network that developed partly as mutual support and partly as sexual experimentation.
The Cold War, indirectly, gave us swinging.
In a sense. The anxiety of nuclear annihilation, the concentration of young families on bases, the postwar loosening of some social constraints — it all converged. By the 1960s, swinging had moved into the suburbs. The key party — you put your car keys in a bowl, you go home with whoever's keys you draw — became the iconic form, though how common it actually was is debated. Most historians think the key party was more talked about than done, a kind of suburban legend that a minority actually practiced.
The middle-class orgy as dinner-party anecdote.
But the broader swinging subculture was real. By the 1970s, there were swinging clubs in most major American cities. The magazine Screw published listings. The sexual revolution brought it partially above ground. And then the 1980s happened.
AIDS changed everything. The swinging scene contracted dramatically. Some clubs closed, others went further underground. The public health crisis made multiple-partner sex literally life-threatening in a way it hadn't been before, and the cultural pendulum swung hard toward caution. The 1990s saw a partial resurgence, but it wasn't until the internet era that swinging really transformed.
Because the internet makes coordination trivial. You don't need a club, you don't need a secret network — you need a website and a profile.
It changes the demographics. The old swinging scene was predominantly heterosexual couples, often with the husband initiating. The internet era brings in a much wider range of configurations, identities, and preferences. The term "lifestyle" replaces "swinging" for many. Sites like Adult FriendFinder, founded in 1996, and later apps like Feeld, create marketplaces for non-monogamous encounters. The stigma doesn't disappear, but the barriers to entry collapse.
That's where we loop back to the original observation about pornography. Because porn in the internet era didn't just depict threesomes — it made them the default category. The front page of any major porn site is essentially a menu of group-sex scenarios.
The question is which direction the causality runs. Is porn reflecting a pre-existing male fantasy, or is it shaping desire? I think the evidence points both ways. The fantasy is ancient — again, the Kama Sutra, the Roman frescoes at Pompeii, the Chinese bedchamber manuals. But the specific form it takes — the M-F-F threesome as the pornographic gold standard — that's a product of the industry's economics. Two women and one man is cheaper to produce than more elaborate scenarios, it appeals to the core heterosexual male demographic, and it generates reliable engagement metrics.
The algorithm optimized for the lowest common denominator and landed on threesomes. Of course it did.
The algorithm is the great accelerator of everything that was already there. And what was already there, across cultures and millennia, is an interest in sexual variety that includes multiple partners. The question is what societies do with that interest — channel it into ritual, suppress it, commercialize it, medicalize it.
Which brings us to the deepest question in the prompt — has strict monogamy been the ideal for most of human history?
This is where anthropology gets complicated. The standard narrative for a long time was that marriage is universal, that pair-bonding is the human default, and that deviations are exactly that — deviations. But the evidence doesn't really support that.
The evidence being what, exactly?
Cross-cultural surveys. The most cited is the Ethnographic Atlas, compiled by George Peter Murdock and later expanded. It codes over twelve hundred pre-industrial societies on various dimensions, including marriage patterns. The finding that always surprises people: about eighty-five percent of societies in the atlas permit polygyny. Not necessarily practice it widely — in most polygynous societies, only a minority of men actually have multiple wives, because the sex ratio doesn't support universal polygyny. But the norm is permission, not prohibition.
The global default is not "one man, one woman." The global default is "one man, possibly several women, and we'll see how the economics work out.
That's closer to the anthropological reality. And then there are the societies that practice polyandry — one woman, multiple husbands — which is rarer but documented, especially in parts of Tibet and Nepal where fraternal polyandry, brothers sharing a wife, was an adaptation to scarce agricultural land. You can't subdivide the farm, so you share the wife.
That's a pragmatic solution dressed up as a marriage custom.
Most marriage customs are pragmatic solutions dressed up as tradition. The idea that monogamy is the natural human state, ordained by biology or God or both, is mostly a post-hoc justification for a specific cultural arrangement that became dominant in Europe and then was exported through colonization and Christianity.
Though the evolutionary psychologists would push back here. They'd say pair-bonding is real, it's observable in hunter-gatherer bands, and it serves the function of paternal investment in offspring with long childhoods.
They would, and they're not entirely wrong. Pair-bonding is a real phenomenon. But serial monogamy is different from lifelong exclusive monogamy, and pair-bonding doesn't necessarily mean sexual exclusivity. The anthropologist Helen Fisher's work on this is useful — she argues that humans have three distinct brain systems for mating: lust, romantic love, and attachment. These can operate independently. You can be deeply pair-bonded to one person and still experience lust toward others. The question is whether you act on it, and whether your society permits you to.
The biological substrate is messy. We've got multiple drives that don't always align, and culture is the software layer that tries to make them cohere.
Different cultures have run different software. The Mosuo people in southwestern China, sometimes called the "walking marriage" society, practice what anthropologists call visiting relationships — women stay in their natal homes, men visit at night, and both partners may have multiple relationships over a lifetime. There's no marriage as Westerners would recognize it. The family unit is the matrilineal household. Children are raised by mothers, aunts, and uncles. Paternity is often unknown or irrelevant.
This isn't some ancient practice they're clinging to — they're still doing it.
Still doing it, though tourism and Chinese state pressure are changing things. The point is, here's a functioning society where the nuclear family and sexual exclusivity are not the organizing principles. It's not utopia, it's not dystopia — it's just different.
Which is the most threatening thing to any culture that insists its way is the only way.
And that's been the historical pattern. Societies with strict monogamy have tended to view alternatives as primitive, immoral, or degenerate. The Romans looked at the Celts and were shocked by reports of sexual sharing. Christian missionaries looked at Polynesian societies and saw licentiousness. The colonial encounter was often, in part, a sexual morality encounter.
Yet within those supposedly strict societies, the alternatives never went away. You mentioned court records earlier — that's the evidence that people kept doing what they weren't supposed to do.
The archives are full of it. In eighteenth-century England, there was a thriving subculture of what were called "molly houses" — gathering places for men who had sex with men, but also venues where group sexual activity occurred. The trial records from the Old Bailey give us detailed accounts because the prosecutions required explicit testimony. In France, the police des moeurs — the morals police — kept extensive files on Parisian sexual subcultures, including group encounters. The surveillance created the historical record.
The vice squad as inadvertent ethnographer.
That's exactly what they were. And when you read those records, you realize that what we think of as the sexual revolution of the 1960s wasn't the invention of new behaviors. It was the public acknowledgment of behaviors that had been private and policed for centuries.
Let's talk about the present. Where are we now? The prompt mentions that pornography is fixated on threesomes, but the reality is that non-monogamy is also more openly discussed than at any point in living memory.
The data backs that up. A 2016 study in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy found that about one in five Americans have engaged in consensual non-monogamy at some point in their lives. That's a substantial minority. The same study found that about four to five percent of Americans were currently in consensually non-monogamous relationships. That's comparable to the percentage of Americans who identify as LGBT.
We're talking about millions of people, not a fringe.
Millions of people, and growing visibility. The term "polyamory" enters the mainstream lexicon in the 1990s — Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart is usually credited with coining it in 1990. By the 2010s, you've got polyamory meetups in most major cities, you've got books like "The Ethical Slut" going through multiple editions, you've got relationship coaches specializing in open relationships. Dan Savage's column has been advocating for "monogamish" arrangements for years.
Monogamish is a great word. It captures the idea that most couples aren't fully open, but they're not fully closed either — they've got negotiated exceptions, don't-ask-don't-tell policies, the occasional hall pass.
I suspect that's far more common than the formal categories capture. The Kinsey Institute's research has consistently found that reported behavior and reported identity don't always match. People do things they don't label themselves as doing. The husband and wife who have a one-time threesome on vacation don't necessarily join the polyamory community or change how they describe their marriage. They just had an experience.
Which is probably how most group sex has worked for most of history. Not as an identity, not as a lifestyle, but as something that happened, and then life went on.
That's the thread that connects the Bacchanalia to the key party to the Feeld profile. Human beings, across vastly different cultural contexts, have found ways to incorporate multiple-partner sex into their lives. Sometimes it's sanctified, sometimes it's stigmatized, sometimes it's commercialized. But it's never absent.
The question then is: what do the religious traditions do with this reality? Because they can't simply ignore it forever.
They've tried. But the more interesting responses are the adaptive ones. Within Judaism, there's a growing conversation — still marginal, but real — about how halakhic frameworks might accommodate ethical non-monogamy. The argument, advanced by a small number of progressive rabbis, is that the Torah's sexual ethics are primarily about honesty, consent, and the avoidance of exploitation, not about the specific number of partners. It's a minority view, but it exists.
Christianity is more divided. The Catholic Church's position hasn't budged — the Catechism is unambiguous that sexual acts outside marriage are "gravely contrary to the dignity of persons." But within Protestantism, especially liberal Protestant denominations, there's more fluidity. The United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalists have had open discussions about polyamory. There are now Christian polyamorists who argue that their relationships are consistent with biblical values of love, commitment, and honesty, even if they don't fit the traditional marital form.
I can hear the traditionalists' response already — that's just justification, not theology.
And that's the debate that's been running since Paul. Every sexual ethic claims to be reading the tradition correctly. The polyamorous Christians are making an argument that would have been unthinkable fifty years ago, but it's structurally similar to the arguments made for the acceptance of contraception, then divorce, then same-sex relationships. The pattern is: the tradition appears fixed, then a minority argues for reinterpretation, then the mainstream either accepts or rejects.
Islam has the polygyny allowance already built in, so the conversation is different. The question is less about multiple partners in principle and more about the ethics of how it's practiced. Some contemporary Muslim feminists have argued that the Quran's permission for polygyny was a restriction on an already-existing practice — pre-Islamic Arabian men could have unlimited wives — and that the trajectory of the text is toward monogamy. Others defend polygyny as a valid option. But consensual group sex or swinging within a marriage would still be considered zina by orthodox interpretations.
The Abrahamic spectrum runs from "absolutely not" to "maybe, in very specific circumstances, with a lot of paperwork.
That's the theological spectrum. The lived-experience spectrum is, as always, wider. Every religious community has people who don't follow the rules as stated, and every religious community has internal debates about how much enforcement is appropriate.
Let's pull back to the biggest question. The prompt asks whether strict monogamy has been the ideal for most of human history. Based on everything we've covered, the answer seems to be no — but with a caveat.
The caveat being that ideals and practices are different things. If the question is "have most human societies idealized strict lifelong monogamy," the answer is clearly no. The ethnographic record shows enormous variation, and the majority of societies have permitted some form of polygyny. If the question is "have most individual humans lived in monogamous arrangements," the answer is closer to yes, simply because the economics of supporting multiple spouses have been beyond most people's means.
Monogamy is the common practice, but not the universal ideal. It's the Honda Civic of human mating — everyone ends up there, but not because they all dreamt of it.
The history of group sex is the history of what happens when people step outside the Civic. Sometimes it's a religious festival, sometimes it's a secret club, sometimes it's a porn category. The form changes, the impulse doesn't.
There's something almost reassuring about that. All this cultural machinery — the laws, the sermons, the social sanctions — and the thing itself keeps popping up, century after century, in completely unrelated civilizations.
It suggests that the impulse toward sexual variety, including multiple partners, is pretty deeply wired. Not in every individual — there's enormous variation in desire, and plenty of people are perfectly happy with strict monogamy. But at the population level, it keeps emerging. The historian Faramerz Dabhoiwala, in his book "The Origins of Sex," makes the case that what changed in the modern West wasn't the behavior but the belief that the behavior could be openly discussed and regulated rather than simply condemned.
That shift — from condemnation to discussion — is maybe the biggest change in the whole story. The ancient world had group sex embedded in ritual. The medieval world had it hidden and punished. The modern world has it as a lifestyle option with its own vocabulary, its own advocacy organizations, its own section in the bookstore.
The vocabulary is worth noting. "Polyamory," "ethical non-monogamy," "relationship anarchy," "compersion" — the feeling of joy at your partner's joy with another partner. These are new words for old experiences, but the words change the experience. Having language for something makes it more real, more thinkable, more socially legible.
That's a word Augustine definitely did not have.
Augustine would have had a theological category for it — he would have called it disordered. But the modern concept of compersion reframes the experience entirely. It's not a failure of jealousy, it's a positive emotional state. The whole vocabulary of ethical non-monogamy is designed to reframe what previous generations called sin or pathology as a valid relational choice.
Which is either a triumph of human liberation or a symptom of civilizational decay, depending on who's talking.
That's where we are in 2026. The culture war over sexual ethics hasn't ended. It's just moved to new terrain. The question of group sex is now part of a broader debate about whether the traditional nuclear family is the only legitimate form of intimate life, or whether other forms deserve recognition and respect.
The history suggests that whatever the answer the culture arrives at, it'll be temporary. The pendulum will swing again.
It always does. The Bacchanalia were suppressed, and then the Renaissance rediscovered classical erotic art. The Victorians covered piano legs and then the twenties roared. The sixties swung and the eighties retrenched. The question isn't whether the pendulum will swing — it's what the next swing looks like, and who gets caught under it.
For now, we're in a moment of relative openness, at least in the West. The stigma around discussing non-monogamy has decreased. The internet makes communities possible. And pornography, for better or worse, has normalized the imagery of group sex to the point where it's almost wallpaper.
Which creates its own set of problems. The pornographic representation of group sex is almost entirely oriented around male desire. The women are performers, the scenarios are scripted for the male gaze, and the actual dynamics of ethical non-monogamy — the communication, the negotiation, the emotional complexity — are invisible. So you get the image without the substance.
The musical equivalent of beige wallpaper, but make it explicit.
And that gap between image and reality is where a lot of the contemporary confusion lives. People grow up with porn as their sex education, they absorb the idea that threesomes are just what adventurous people do, and then they encounter the actual human emotions involved and it's nothing like the video.
The prompt started with that observation — that porn is fixated on threesomes, and the skeptical read is that it's just pandering. But the history shows the fantasy predates the medium by millennia.
The fantasy is ancient. The commodification is modern. The ethical framework is still under construction.
That's a good place to land. The history of group sex is not a story of progress or decline — it's a story of recurrence. The same desires, the same tensions, the same arguments, cycling through different cultural containers. Temple ritual, suburban key party, dating app — the container changes, the contents are recognizably human.
If there's one thing the historical record makes clear, it's that no society has ever successfully eliminated the practice. They've driven it underground, they've punished it brutally, they've sermonized against it — and it keeps showing up in the archives, in the court records, in the art, in the whispered stories. Whatever group sex is, it's not a modern invention and it's not going away.
Which is either a comfort or a warning, and I'm not sure the podcast needs to decide which.
I think that's exactly right. Our job was to cover the history, the religious responses, the swinging question, and the monogamy question. We've done that. The moral verdict is above our pay grade.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the 1980s, researchers studying the rapidly shrinking Aral Sea discovered that the dwindling wetlands had forced a species of gossamer-winged butterfly to lay its eggs on a non-native host plant. The butterfly's wing nanostructures, which produce an iridescent blue through light scattering rather than pigment, began showing subtle structural shifts within just a few generations — a real-time evolutionary response to ecological collapse, visible only under an electron microscope.
That's oddly poignant for a fun fact.
A butterfly adapting its iridescence to a dying sea.
Where does this leave us? I keep thinking about the gap between the historical ubiquity of group sex and the persistent cultural anxiety around it. Maybe the open question is whether we'll ever reach a point where these practices can be discussed without either moral panic or commercial exploitation — just as one of the ways human beings have always configured their intimate lives.
Or maybe the anxiety is part of the package. Maybe the tension between desire and restraint is what makes the whole thing interesting.
That's very Augustinian of you.
I'll take that as an insult and move on. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. This has been My Weird Prompts. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts.We'll be back next week.
