"Sip cosmos, mingle with friends and learn salacious details of love, sex and eroticism in the ancient world."

This was the billing for the sold-out "Sex and the (Ancient) City" lecture I attended last week at the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The 45-minute series was broken into three sections: "Cavemen Courtship," "Desperate Etruscan Housewives" and "Egyptians: All Wrapped Up in Sex."

I was there because 1) Smart boys are hot, and 2) I was curious how we got to be so damn inhibited. When did asceticism become the order of the day, and whose bad idea was that? And if, according to Jerry Falwell's disciples, we live so profligately in a sex-soaked world, why do I care how fat my stomach looks in the pile-driver position?

I wanted to know who sucked all the fun out of doing it.

Far as we can tell, cave folks didn't know much about birthing no babies. Australopithecus and co. left us some dots on a rock and phallus-shaped tools, but how they got stoned is still anyone's guess. If there's any truth to the hair-yanking, chest-beating, boob-ogling archetype of the Cro-Mag jock, it's just as easily found outside Glam on a Saturday night as it is in the Museum of Natural History.

B.C. goes P.C. in the W-esque writings of Greek historian Theopompus, who found the exceptional beauty and fitness of Etruscan dames to be indicative of greed, immorality and filthy slutdom. My kinda girls.

Etruscan women were into partner swapping, heavy drinking and public sex. They worked out at the boys' gym and wore the latest fashions. It was a constant race to keep up with the Samantha Joneses in this blissfully liberated society. So liberated, in fact, the betrothed were allowed to sleep with whomever they pleased before signing up for marriage. In what could be called the original bachelorette party, Etruscans screwed until they got pregnant, at which point the whole community would pitch in to raise the kid. And Jersey's worrying about serving paternity tests with its cups of coffee.

Then there are those freaky-ass Egyptians.

Egyptian mythology—and by extension, Egyptian life—was rife with tales of adultery, incest, homosexuality, drunken orgies, full-body waxings, midget porn, talking semen and the primordial equivalent of a wet T-shirt contest. And we know they were into bondage.

Unmarried women were free to gallivant as they pleased. Old-school papyrus depicts limber lovers doing it in ways that make the Kama Sutra look positively missionary, and erotic artwork shows men so well-endowed, they had to sling their manhood over their shoulder or hire slaves to carry it.

According to legend, one ruler came into power after feeding his predecessor a spooge-soaked salad. Even scholars say Egyptians believe the world came into being because god jerked off. (Never told you that one in Sunday school, did they?)

We used to be fun, people. Minus all the inbreeding/necrophilia stuff, how'd we manage to devolve into this moral morass of monogamy and religion-fueled self-reproach?

If the pendulum always swings back, here's to the next millennium.

Questions? Comments? Do you do it like they do on the Discovery Channel? E-mail ashlea.halpern@citypaper.net. No phone calls.