Sunday Morning Book Review: Sex at Dawn
I have an impossibly large amount of work to do today, so I’m going to waste time and write a review of this book I shouldn’t have spent time reading, instead of doing the things I need to do.
The premise of the authors of Sex at Dawn is quite simple: Humans evolved in a highly promiscuous band based hunter-gather society, and thus all attempts to control the human libido are ultimately doomed to failure (mostly, as we’ll see). To make their point, they tackle two pieces of established social and scientific dogma: That humans are ‘naturally’ monogamous, and the ‘coy female’ with a weak libido. In the process they also take on the Hobbesian/Malthusian view of early human life (solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, short).
That the natural human state is roughly the opposite of monogamous is relatively easy to establish; researchers have been engaging in all sorts of mental gymnastics for a very long time to try to prove that monogamous marriage (with occasional dips into polygamy) is the default state of all cultures. I am not an anthropologist, but trying to shove all cultures into the monogamy box is simply an act of desperate cultural bias. However, the authors treat this premise, if not with respect, then as something worthy of demolishing in a very well researched way, and go to great lengths to show the holes in the argument, using physiology, anthropology, and evolutionary science.
Similarly, the ‘coy female’ premise is pretty easily destroyed, as it is based on the idea that women don’t like to fuck (which is just ridiculous). The terrible fact that many societies have been working overtime for millennia, in myriad disgusting ways, to control female libido proves this incorrect. This too the authors spend a great deal of energy refuting, drawing from many pools of research to make their case.
The last section of the book, however, the authors lose the thread a little bit. This section is essentially about the ramifications of the things they’ve attempted to prove. Their argument boils down to the idea that if people wish to remain in monogamous relationships for extended periods of time, they need to create sexual breathing room in the relationship, in order to prevent boredom caused by too much familiarity from strangling the sexual aspect of the relationship.
They lead into this in an odd way, first with a discussion of the sexual ‘plasticity’ of straight women, and then with a discussion of an innate need for sexual novelty in men (which they argue, quite reasonably, is intended from an evolutionary perspective to keep men from having sex with their immediate family members, who will be deeply familiar, and thus not sexually attractive).
The final argument about monogamy, on the surface, seems to boil down to “men get bored, and therefore end up cheating”. This is at first blush rather peculiar, as the majority of the text is spent ‘uncovering’ the seemingly insatiable female sexual appetite, which they have also argued is driven by a high desire of novelty, complete with mechanisms to force the sperm of multiple males to compete to successfully impregnate a woman. The authors seem to have fallen back into the ‘coy female’ trap.
What has actually happened, I think, is that they are not being entirely clear, and are possibly also not entirely willing to tell people to just start having open relationships. There are several reasons I think this is the case. Firstly, they argue that jealousy or a lack there-of are learned traits, part of the culture that is acquired through life. Secondly, they argue that while male sexuality is typically something of a strait-jacket once it has taken on its general contours in adolescence, and is impervious to reprogramming, female sexuality (in particular, that of straight women, as lesbians seems to behave more like men in this respect) is highly plastic, taking new contours as circumstances change, and being highly susceptible to culture influences in ways that males simply are not (this is the ‘mostly’ bit, from the beginning).
They appear to focus on male infidelity in the end, not because women aren’t sexual or prone to cheating, but because they believe most women can absorb the cultural pressure telling them to be monogamous while still maintaining all of their sexual firepower, and most men ultimately aren’t able to do so.
The implied argument (and they should have been clear about this, IMO) is that women can learn to be monogamous sexually, due to their high level of sexual plasticity, and be happy that way. But men, even when they are quite tightly emotionally bonded to their wives (perhaps, especially, if you think about it), will eventually find that they are less and less interested in having sex with said wives, as they slowly become too familiar (same root as ‘family’); the sexual spark will fade between them due to the evolutionary programming in place to prevent inbreeding and genetic stagnation. Which is a problem, because these happy-to-be-monogamous women still have the same sex-drive as their free-loving ancestors, but it is now focused on a single man, who is apparently doomed to lose interest, whether he likes it or not.
I have to say that I was surprised by very little in the book, as all of this is sort of common-sensical to me, and I had arrived at many of these conclusions independently, some very recently, and some a long time ago (dating strong women will rapidly eradicate any vestige of the ‘coy female’ hypothesis, in my experience). There were some particulars of research that I wasn’t familiar with, such as the banana boxes at Gombe (which is MASSIVELY RAMIFIED, to steal from Warren Ellis), and some of the sexual plasticity experiments. But lack of surprise not-withstanding, it’s an excellent, engaging, funny and pretty quick read.
I do recommend.
The premise of the authors of Sex at Dawn is quite simple: Humans evolved in a highly promiscuous band based hunter-gather society, and thus all attempts to control the human libido are ultimately doomed to failure (mostly, as we’ll see). To make their point, they tackle two pieces of established social and scientific dogma: That humans are ‘naturally’ monogamous, and the ‘coy female’ with a weak libido. In the process they also take on the Hobbesian/Malthusian view of early human life (solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, short).
That the natural human state is roughly the opposite of monogamous is relatively easy to establish; researchers have been engaging in all sorts of mental gymnastics for a very long time to try to prove that monogamous marriage (with occasional dips into polygamy) is the default state of all cultures. I am not an anthropologist, but trying to shove all cultures into the monogamy box is simply an act of desperate cultural bias. However, the authors treat this premise, if not with respect, then as something worthy of demolishing in a very well researched way, and go to great lengths to show the holes in the argument, using physiology, anthropology, and evolutionary science.
Similarly, the ‘coy female’ premise is pretty easily destroyed, as it is based on the idea that women don’t like to fuck (which is just ridiculous). The terrible fact that many societies have been working overtime for millennia, in myriad disgusting ways, to control female libido proves this incorrect. This too the authors spend a great deal of energy refuting, drawing from many pools of research to make their case.
The last section of the book, however, the authors lose the thread a little bit. This section is essentially about the ramifications of the things they’ve attempted to prove. Their argument boils down to the idea that if people wish to remain in monogamous relationships for extended periods of time, they need to create sexual breathing room in the relationship, in order to prevent boredom caused by too much familiarity from strangling the sexual aspect of the relationship.
They lead into this in an odd way, first with a discussion of the sexual ‘plasticity’ of straight women, and then with a discussion of an innate need for sexual novelty in men (which they argue, quite reasonably, is intended from an evolutionary perspective to keep men from having sex with their immediate family members, who will be deeply familiar, and thus not sexually attractive).
The final argument about monogamy, on the surface, seems to boil down to “men get bored, and therefore end up cheating”. This is at first blush rather peculiar, as the majority of the text is spent ‘uncovering’ the seemingly insatiable female sexual appetite, which they have also argued is driven by a high desire of novelty, complete with mechanisms to force the sperm of multiple males to compete to successfully impregnate a woman. The authors seem to have fallen back into the ‘coy female’ trap.
What has actually happened, I think, is that they are not being entirely clear, and are possibly also not entirely willing to tell people to just start having open relationships. There are several reasons I think this is the case. Firstly, they argue that jealousy or a lack there-of are learned traits, part of the culture that is acquired through life. Secondly, they argue that while male sexuality is typically something of a strait-jacket once it has taken on its general contours in adolescence, and is impervious to reprogramming, female sexuality (in particular, that of straight women, as lesbians seems to behave more like men in this respect) is highly plastic, taking new contours as circumstances change, and being highly susceptible to culture influences in ways that males simply are not (this is the ‘mostly’ bit, from the beginning).
They appear to focus on male infidelity in the end, not because women aren’t sexual or prone to cheating, but because they believe most women can absorb the cultural pressure telling them to be monogamous while still maintaining all of their sexual firepower, and most men ultimately aren’t able to do so.
The implied argument (and they should have been clear about this, IMO) is that women can learn to be monogamous sexually, due to their high level of sexual plasticity, and be happy that way. But men, even when they are quite tightly emotionally bonded to their wives (perhaps, especially, if you think about it), will eventually find that they are less and less interested in having sex with said wives, as they slowly become too familiar (same root as ‘family’); the sexual spark will fade between them due to the evolutionary programming in place to prevent inbreeding and genetic stagnation. Which is a problem, because these happy-to-be-monogamous women still have the same sex-drive as their free-loving ancestors, but it is now focused on a single man, who is apparently doomed to lose interest, whether he likes it or not.
I have to say that I was surprised by very little in the book, as all of this is sort of common-sensical to me, and I had arrived at many of these conclusions independently, some very recently, and some a long time ago (dating strong women will rapidly eradicate any vestige of the ‘coy female’ hypothesis, in my experience). There were some particulars of research that I wasn’t familiar with, such as the banana boxes at Gombe (which is MASSIVELY RAMIFIED, to steal from Warren Ellis), and some of the sexual plasticity experiments. But lack of surprise not-withstanding, it’s an excellent, engaging, funny and pretty quick read.
I do recommend.