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in particular, which seems only very distantly related to sex, can nonetheless spark orgasmic feelings in men. This is aggression.Aggression and male orgasm are closely connected; nerve tissue in the brain associated with aggression is reportedly so closely intertwined with that carrying sexual messages that it is difficult to separate the two. Fulfilling the sexual urge and the aggressive urge can become confused for men. In
Pumping Iron
, the 1977 documentary on Arnold Schwarzenegger, the performer now known as the Governor of California admits that flexing his biceps is as satisfying for him as ejaculating. Furthermore in a wide variety of men, the compulsion to dominate, humiliate and subdue through sex can, additionally, override the desire for orgasm.
    The murderer Jack Henry Abbott, who was briefly lionised by literary New York after Norman Mailer championed his writing from jail, once described his sexual thrill on stabbing a man through the heart: ‘You can feel his life trembling through the knife in your hand. You must
masturbate
to the violence taking place inside your mind.’
    The seemingly inextricable correlation between sex and violent aggression is no better demonstrated than in the behaviour of conquering armies. Not the first such instance by any means, but by far the best documented, was the Soviet Red Army’s advance toward Berlin in 1945. By historian Antony Beevor’s calculation, the Red Army’s 2.5 million men were responsible for the ferocious gang and individual rape throughout eastern Prussia of two million German women. The key question so far as the subject of this book is concerned is, was the raping Soviet soldiers’ primary motivation the satisfaction of sexual desire through easily obtained orgasm? Or the gratifying, temporary dousing via orgasm of anger-fuelled aggression? The answer surely has to be the latter, just as in ordinary criminal cases of rape, aggression, with a desire for domination and control, fuelled by a childhood pattern of exposure to violence plus a history, real or imagined, of sexual rejection and inadequacy, are clearly the most important elements for the rapist – rather than some sudden, urgent desire to behave in a sensual manner.
    In the case of the Red Army in 1945, Beevor believes, sexual opportunism, enhanced by the feeling among the Russians that they were already effectively dead men with nothing to lose, also played a part.
    There is also a small, new revisionist movement afoot in evolutionary psychology arguing that rape, whatever its immediate motivation, is at root no less than an evolutionary strategy. The Greeks often portrayed the god Zeus raping women, and some scholars have argued that rape was the Ancient Greek man’s ‘right of domination’. Any libidinous male politician or CEO, furthermore, even if he is ugly, will confirm that aggression in males tends to beget a surfeit of sexual partners. This applies even though the more ‘red-blooded’ type of male is typically a selfish and incompetent lover, often, as we commonly read in anecdotal accounts of alpha-male men in possession of great political power, something close to a licensed rapist.
    We have no such anecdotal evidence of sexual proclivities in the case of, to name but one powerful political figure, the late President Mobutu of Zaire. But most people will draw their own conclusions on learning that the dictator’s official name, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, translates as ‘the cock who goes from hen to hen knowing no fatigue’. When we look at a dictator like Benito Mussolini, however, we start to get a distinct picture of super-priapic behaviour, poor sexual technique and huge political power going hand in hand.
    A New Life
, the 2003 biography by Nicholas Farrell of the Italian Fascist leader, reveals that Mussolini managed to have sex with a different woman every day for fourteen years, more than 5,000 in total from