Sex at Dawn

There's a problem with writing a blog of opinions as opposed to, say, a diary. When you've said all the things that are important to you it's hard to find anything else to say without repeating yourself. I do so hate repeating myself! In consequence, I haven't written on here for well over six months.

Here's something I've never done before, though: A book review. It's by a psychologist called Christopher Ryan and a psychiatrist called Cacilda Jethá, and it's called,

SEX AT DAWN

Sex at Dawn, I feel, is going to become a very important book, partly because it's so radical but also because it's so accessible. I'm not naturally academic, and dense, heavy reading gives me a a headache, which is why I feel qualified to write a review - because I could read and actually understand it without having to go over paragraphs several times out loud!
Unfortunately, Sex at Dawn isn't available in the UK yet, although the lovely people at Waterstones are very accommodating if you don't mind waiting. You can always try Amazon, I suppose, but I prefer personal interaction. That's sort of what the book is about.

The main premise is very simple and something I believe already - that the basic assumptions we hold as a society about prehistoric life and human sexuality are wrong. The book explains why better than I can. You can even look up bits on their website.

What's Wrong?

The first couple of sections look at what sort of ape we are, and what sort of pre-farming societies still survive.
Genetically we're almost identical to two of the great apes, chimpanzees and bonobos - sharing 98.4% of our DNA. Evolutionary science has always looked at chimps to gain clues about our earliest behaviour, but there's absolutely no reason why bonobos shouldn't be equally studied, or perhaps even more.
I like bonobos and have written about them before, here. Looking at bonobos rather than chimps shows a society based on co-operation rather than competition, where sex is used for pleasure and social bonding and infanticide is unknown.
They've also come up with a wonderful new word, Flintstonization. Briefly, we have a powerful tendency to assume our own way of life is "normal" and apply that pattern to other times and societies. In other words we imagine that Stone Age life was a bit like the Flintstones in that monogamy and male dominance were the norm - but without any real evidence. In fact there are multiple societies in existence even now which simply don't fit that pattern.

Prehistory

There's a section in the book which looks at our assumptions of stone-age hunter-gather life, and questions whether it really was, as Hobbes said, poor, nasty, brutish and short. The writers put forward some telling arguments, that I make no apologies for stealing here:


Poor? The pre-agricultural human population was less than a billion people. Food was (generally) extremely plentiful and the diet was far wider than our own modern diet. Hunter-gather people almost never consider themselves poor and sharing is considered the norm. Wealth and poverty are relative terms.
Many archaeologists who have studied human remains from the advent of agriculture consider it a disaster for the human race in terms of health. We acquired masses of new diseases, suffered previously unknown malnutrition problems and (yes, really) shrank in stature.

Nasty? A human being alone in a world full of predators has a likely lifespan of minutes. Individually we're useless. We have no natural weapons, we're not big or strong or fast. On our own we're nothing more than a meal. In a group, however, we're the most successful creature ever. The point is that living in a pre-agricultural society (the vast majority of human existence so far) requires a group mentality, and co-operation. We're built for it, it's the only thing we're really good at, and it makes us happy.

Brutish? We're back to the co-operation angle here. Why fight if there's nothing to fight for? Food's plentiful, nobody owns everything because it's all shared, when you run out of stuff you simply move on.

Short? We're often told that people are living longer nowadays. It's bullshit. The normal human lifespan of "threescore years and ten" has been about standard forever. The reason people believe (against all evidence) that primitive people had short lives is that the ones who make such statements don't understand statistics. An average lifespan is NOT a normal one.
The average human lifespan has been increased immensely because of one simple improvement, infant mortality. In many cultures (including our own until fairly recently) the life of a baby was precarious at best. If a child could make it to 2, they might make it to 5. If they could make it to 5 they would likely make it to 10. If they could get to 10, the likelihood of hitting 20 was pretty damn good, but if they got to 20 they were almost guaranteed a full and normal lifespan reaching to somewhere between 65 and 90.

Biology.

There's some lovely stuff about human biology, and sexual behaviour in the modern world. Like the reasons for female multiple orgasm and sexual "vocalisations", and the weird shape of the human penis and unusually large testicles (for an ape). Also there's a surprising amount of evidence about how having an affair is good for your health and your relationship.
A particular question which struck me was why, if monogamy is the natural state for people, adultery is so common. Even in those sick and uncivilised countries where it's punishable by death, adultery is incredibly common.

It's tempting to quote the whole book, but I wanted to keep this fairly short and simple. I also want to encourage people to read it because I haven't made the arguments they have, I've just stated a few bits and pieces.
Essentially what they are stating is that monogamy is a patriarchal social construct which they believe began when we started farming. Previously human society consisted mostly of nomadic groups of a hundred or more individuals who worked in a female-dominated and totally co-operative manner, sharing everything. Sexual relations were multiple and non-possessive, children being brought up by the tribe as a whole. We haven't evolved our sexuality to cope with our modern lives because we simply haven't had time, we've just attempted to force it into new patterns.

Fitting it into now.

We don't live in tribes any more and we're taught to be sexually possessive from a very early age. It's inherent in our culture, but really it's unnatural. So two methods are considered as possible aids to human harmony. One is polyamory (look here for my views on that) and the other is that we start to take sex less seriously - a one-night stand isn't a betrayal, it's just a bit of fun.

Personally, I don't believe monogamy is natural either, but we do a lot of things which aren't natural - I wear spectacles! We just need to accept that if we do something which isn't natural for us we'll have consequences to deal with. Shaving is unnatural and has the consequence of blocked hair follicles and sensitive skin. Monogamy's consequences are a bit more wide-ranging and complex.
Sex isn't simply for creating children. This much seems to me (if not, apparently, to evolutionary psychologists) blatantly obvious. If the opposite were true we'd only be interested in sex when it was possible to conceive.
Yet humans are hypersexual. We're at it all the time, even more than our old friends the bonobos. We have even created ways of enjoying sex so that we can't possibly conceive, which seems the opposite of evolutionary psychology.

I'm going to leave with a quote from the book which I think is a beautiful attitude to sex and to society. There are tribes in the Amazon who believe that a child is made of accumulated semen. A woman will keep on having sex during pregnancy so that her child grows strong and develops well. If she were to stop the child would, they believe, stop growing.

"... a woman from these societies is eager to give her child every possible advantage in life. To this end, she'll typically ... solicit 'contributions' from the best hunters, the best storytellers, the funniest, the kindest, the best-looking and so on - in the hopes her child will literally absorb the essence of each.
... Far from being enraged at having his genetic legacy called into question, a man in these societies is is likely to feel gratitude to other men for pitching in to help create and then care for a stronger baby ... men in these societies find themselves bound to one another by shared paternity."

Love (in a prehistoric stylee),
Seán