Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What it Means for Medoern Relationships is basically a history of evolutionary psychology on sex in terms of why monogamy often fails us and how wrong we are in thinking it is the “norm” and expectation for all modern day society. It breaks down how we’ve been fed the narrative that women prefer monogamy (2 people in a committed relationship) and men prefer polygyny (1 man with multiple wives) but that this isn’t scientifically (or historically) the case. We’ve been told that men and women have conflicting agendas when it comes to mating, and thus we’ll always be on opposite ends of the spectrum struggling to understand one another (think Men are from Mars, Women are From Venus), but is this really the case? Yes, we experience sex differently, but our intentions and the outcomes of the encounters don’t have to differ so widely.
Written by an assumedly non-monogamous couple, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, this book discusses how we have taken prehistory and imposed contemporary cultural proclivities into it, a process known as “Flintstonization”, thanks to Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Malthus. We want to make sense of the distant past so we assess it through the lens of our own time to justify our current way of life. These purveyors of knowledge paved the way for Charles Darwin’s natural selection theory, which unfortunately has led to false beliefs about human nature and causes us distress as we try to fight what we’ve been raised to believe is morally wrong (having multiple partners).
The overarching message of the book is that agriculture is what sent us downhill. Before the onset of it we had matriarchal societies, no war, and plentiful food among hunter gatherer environments. Agriculture, in the writers’ mindset, brought about the loss of power for women and thus made the structure of monogamous relationships appear more enticing. However, there are still tribes around the world, such as in South America and Papau New Guinea, which practice non-monogamy, away from the cities and out in more rural areas where they can exhibit such behaviors without fear of judgement. For example, many tribes follow a system where the women have multiple male sexual partners and thus their children are raised by the village as a whole, rather than sticking to 2 parents. This way paternal certainty is irrelevant, and the kids never have a lack of love or feel overlooked, since someone is always around to watch over them. This arrangement leads to less male frustration and competition, which in turn leads to more female alliances and less infanticide, so greater social cohesion as a whole. Many anthropologists recognize this as a win win situation since it defuses potential conflicts between men and promotes relationships based on mutual affection.
We know that humans evolved from apes, but we’ve often been compared to chimpanzees, whereas bonobos are our actual closest ancestors. Being able to have sex at any time during our cycle (extended receptivity) is only characteristic of us and bonobos among primates. Other apes will have their private parts swell up or turn bright red to signal fertility, and thus catch the attention of interested partners, but not us. We are ready to go regardless of the day of the month. Bonobos are the most promiscuous of the apes and live a peaceful existence maintained through social bonding between mainly females. They enjoy various positions, gaze into each other’s eyes, and kiss deeply during sex, plus have a high rate of homosexuality, like us. Chimpanzees, on the other hand, do no partake in these habits, have been found to be more violent when there is something worth fighting for, hold a hierarchical social organization and Machiavellian alliances. We are the same when put in similar situations, but for most of prehistory this wasn’t required of us since we had an abundance of food and a home that didn’t need protecting.
Even the size difference between male and female humans, human males’ ball size, and our typical positioning of face to face for sex links us to bonobos and a system of promiscuity. People want to believe that we either have always been monogamous or evolved from polygyny because either scenario keeps the female virtue intact (we all know how important that is *eye roll*), yet women have clearly evolved to be highly sexual. Just look at our fatty tissue surrounding mammary glands of our breasts. It doesn't produce milk and the pendulous shape only causes strain on women's backs, so they can only serve the purpose of signaling fertility to a potential partner. Theorists believe that the fatty deposits on the buttocks of apes were shifted upward once they started walking upright because it would make it easier to walk that way.
It’s fascinating that we think of women as having an inherently lower sex drive, but we are the ones who can have multiple orgasms back to back in one sexual encounter. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? Furthermore, adultery is documented in every human culture studied yet we have such extreme measures of punishment for this as death by stoning and it still occurs. Why would people put so much at risk to go against their own human nature? Clearly monogamy is not inherent of our species.
One point I found interesting that I’d never thought of before is how human females are in the minority among mammals with concealed ovulation, meaning most other mammals exhibit their fertile time in some outward way to make sex more likely to produce offspring, and they are uninterested in sex at other times. This is a great argument for why sex among people is meant for more than just reproduction.
Another issue with how we view the concept of monogamy is how we define marriage. Certain anthropologists have claimed that the nuclear family as we know it is universal, found in every society, but the very word “marriage” translates to other meanings in other languages. For some societies, marriage just means you both sleep in the same hut, while for others marriage is akin to dating before settling down, and others still have an undefined process which is gradual. Without a clear and concise notion of what “marriage” is, how can we claim to find it established all over the globe?
How accurate is this book? Is this the real "truth" about the history of pair bonding, or lack thereof? It's hard to say. I think that's for each individual to decide. I found it engaging and worth reading, though the humor was a little too cheesy at times and a book about sex it was incredibly PG. I just learned that there is another book written in response to this one, 2 years later, called Sex at Dusk: Lifting the Shiny Wrapping from Sex at Dawn, which uses the same sources to argue another point, so now I'm curious about that one, too. It apparently gives a less candy coated version of the story, which sounds pretty intriguing to me. You can order either book on Amazon or download audible versions.