Sex at Dawn

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2010_08_016440.php

This book changed my life.  I've always felt very "primitive" because of my submissive nature.  And I trust that what is primitive holds truth. 












* We humans are obsessed with sex, far more even than are our evolutionary cousins, the famously randy bonobos.
* Sexual monogamy, despite relentless claims to the contrary, was never our natural condition in prehistory. “With and without love,” Ryan and Jetha write, “a casual sexuality was the norm for our prehistoric ancestors.”
* Only with the relatively recent shift from off-the-land foraging to agriculture did our species veer away from cooperation and sharing, even sharing of mates, in small groups; hierarchy, sexual repression and violence may pass for the human normal nowadays, but it wasn’t always so.
* Current frenzied attempts to make sacred the nuclear family are not only way off the biological mark, but also terribly hurtful to women and men who fail at life-long loyalty. The dominant narrative pits “man against woman in a tragic tango of unrealistic expectations, snowballing frustration, and crushing disappointment.”

* None of our closest living relatives, the great apes, lives monogamously. Indeed, female nonhuman primates across the board are attracted to novelty, that is to say, to fresh rather than familiar males. It’s the pattern, rather than any single species’ behavior, that matters here.
* Foraging societies organize themselves around staunch principles of cooperation, including a “deeply felt, broadly shared willingness to care for unrelated children.” This openness ill-fits the standard story of how and why we pair-bond, and would only have changed with the onset of agriculture and rising population numbers.
* With low population density and abundant resources throughout prehistory, our ancestors’ sexual behavior would have mirrored that of pre-agricultural societies.
* Even today, the design of the male body reflects a trenchant sperm competition that itself points to multiple matings in short periods. Our sexual history is thus mapped out for us in a literally embodied way. In fact, “competing sperm from other men seems to be anticipated in the chemistry of men’s semen.”