Book: Sex at Dawn


From that article:

"Human nature? It's the bananas, stupid.

During Jane Goodall's first four years studying chimpanzees in Tanzania, according to Sex at Dawn, she observed them to be remarkably peaceful creatures. But they were difficult to observe, since they tended not to hang around her camp much. So she tried to attract them nearer by regularly feeding them bananas. The effect, evidently, was to make the chimpanzees more aggressive. Fighting between them increased dramatically.

Now, which represented the chimpanzee's true nature? The gentle chimpanzees happily feeding far apart in the forest, not bothering each other? Or the hoodlum chimpanzees shoving each other out of the way at the daily banana trough?

The answer, as Ryan and Jetha eloquently express, is neither. It's like asking whether water's true nature is ice or liquid. It all depends on the conditions. Change the conditions, and you change which of many potential natures will be manifest."


......................

This is such a true thing, and an excellent conceptual structure for understanding the practice of Buddha Dharma. In Buddha Dharma, we become what we practice at being. If we practice at being unkind, we become unkind. If we practice kindness, we become kind.... Our practice is part of the set of "conditions" which make up what we are and what we may become.
 
The kind of early human social structure that encouraged sexual promiscuity was a delicate thing. It required a small tightly-knit group of less than 150 individuals, an abundant natural food supply, and an inability to hoard resources. As I look out my front door in New York City, I don't detect much potential for the establishment of that kind of social order. It's strictly big boxes of bananas, all the way up Columbus Avenue.

Yet the popular buzz in the book's first month seems to miss all of this. "We're really meant to be promiscuous!" yell the headlines.

No. The reality is more sobering. The material conditions that would permit a stable culture of sexual promiscuity are long since gone.​

From the same article (linked above).

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The social conditions may be different for most people, but the basic biology (our bodies) isn't so much different at all. Our bodies are the same, essentially, as the bodies of our Pleistocene ancestors.

Humans During the Pleistocene:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene#Humans_during_the_Pleistocene
 
My mono co-worker is reading it. She's really enjoying it and finding it interesting. Still mono but at least recognizes that really, life long monogamy is likely not natural. She doesn't understand why anyone would want to bother with non-monogamy. She says that one man is all she can handle ;) to many othrer things to do.
 
Sex At Dawn?

Who among you here have read Sex At Dawn? I just finished it and am feeling strangely isolated. My partners and my partner's partners haven't read it, and I'm surrounded by monogamous people who are either threatened by what the book is about or aren't interested.

I was curious to see what poly people thought of it and how it affected them, if at all.

Thanks
 
Glitter: It's a book about how early man (pre-agricultural man) was naturally polyamorous. It kind of disproves the standard narrative that says that monogamous pair bonding is "natural" to our species. Full of awesome information, anthropological, archeological, sociological info that proves that we were never naturally meant to be monogamous and that monogamy arose out of a need to pass down land and ownership of property in our post agricultural societies. Really cool stuff whether you agree with it or not. I'd highly recommend it.

Magdalena: Yes! I found the book to be incredibly validating. I knew polyamory was always the right choice for me whether It was prehistorically preordained or not, but the book painted such a beautiful picture as human kind being predisposed to positivity and sexual freedom. Also, the feminist aspects were wonderful. Yes, it's OK that I'm always horny :p
 
The thing that was strange, and Mag, maybe you can give me your opinion on this. I felt like the whole book was leading up to a proud declaration that we should all be poly. I was a little let down by Christopher Ryan's last chapter being devoted to strong suggestions that married people should open their relationships to purely sexual flings in order to keep marriages happy and healthy. He made a couple of luke-warm references to polyamory, but the main emphasis in the end seemed to be "let your partners stray a little so that you can maintain your marriage" with the main emphasis being on men having purely sexual affairs so as not to fall in love and threaten their primary partners. Did you pick up on that? Or am I coloring it somehow?
 
When it first came out I read several reviews talking about how it was a treatise on how we should all be poly, based on our genetics and that monogamy was a purely social construct.

I don't need that sort of thing to work out how to do poly better, or to justify how I feel. Others might. I really dislike discussions about this sort of thing, so disregarded the book.

Here is an earlier thread on the topic where the forum regulars at the time gave their viewpoints: http://www.polyamory.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7555
 
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I find the book to stray too much into unsubstantiated generalizations from a very limited source material. As an anthropologist, these kinds of books drive me crazy.

As a species (biologically) and as social/cultural beings, we are evolving. There is no one "nature" that we can point to. I'm not disregarding biology at all here, just cautioning that there is no human nature/essence that can be disentangled from culture imo. All things must be historicized.

I do like that the author is trying to show empirically that monogamy is not natural. Fine, that's a substantiated argument and a powerful one at this present moment. But, how people choose to live and love is fully entwined with cultural norms. Desire is hardly derived from a rational response to stimuli -- we can see that all around us.

I like to argue that we don't even have to go back so far, we just have to look at the diversity of intimate, family, child-rearing arrangements that exist at the present to see that there is no one type that is "normal."
 
The thing that was strange, and Mag, maybe you can give me your opinion on this. I felt like the whole book was leading up to a proud declaration that we should all be poly. I was a little let down by Christopher Ryan's last chapter being devoted to strong suggestions that married people should open their relationships to purely sexual flings in order to keep marriages happy and healthy. He made a couple of luke-warm references to polyamory, but the main emphasis in the end seemed to be "let your partners stray a little so that you can maintain your marriage" with the main emphasis being on men having purely sexual affairs so as not to fall in love and threaten their primary partners. Did you pick up on that? Or am I coloring it somehow?

Yeah I got that out of it a bit too. More like "he will still love you only like a sister so to have a shot at keeping him, you'll have to accept him having sex with other women and hope he appreciates it enough to stick around otherwise you're slowly neutering him and guaranteeing a sexless life for you both".
 
Yeah I got that out of it a bit too. More like "he will still love you only like a sister so to have a shot at keeping him, you'll have to accept him having sex with other women and hope he appreciates it enough to stick around otherwise you're slowly neutering him and guaranteeing a sexless life for you both".

Nope, that's not what Sex at Dawn is about.

Its main argument is that human biology strongly suggests that humans as a species are evolutionarily non-monogamous. Meaning that BOTH men and women probably had multiple sexual partners during the early phases of human prehistory (and later).

In fact, most of Sex at Dawn focuses on the theory that men evolved to share female partners with other men, and that WOMEN evolved to have multiple partners.

The book's main theme is to contradict the generally held belief that a female human's "biological strategy" is to be monogamous while a male human's strategy is to seek as many females as possible.

I like the book a lot. As someone with a strong anthropological background, I have to disagree with the comment from someone who objected to the idea of books that argue general theories on anthropological grounds. Sex at Dawn has some really interesting theories to offer.
 
Nope, that's not what Sex at Dawn is about.

Its main argument is that human biology strongly suggests that humans as a species are evolutionarily non-monogamous. Meaning that BOTH men and women probably had multiple sexual partners during the early phases of human prehistory (and later).

In fact, most of Sex at Dawn focuses on the theory that men evolved to share female partners with other men, and that WOMEN evolved to have multiple partners.

The book's main theme is to contradict the generally held belief that a female human's "biological strategy" is to be monogamous while a male human's strategy is to seek as many females as possible.

I like the book a lot. As someone with a strong anthropological background, I have to disagree with the comment from someone who objected to the idea of books that argue general theories on anthropological grounds. Sex at Dawn has some really interesting theories to offer.

Then explain to me what the point was of so much emphasis on "the Coolidge Effect"?

"In biology and psychology, the Coolidge effect is a phenomenon—seen in nearly every mammalian species in which it has been tested—whereby males (and to a lesser extent females) exhibit renewed sexual interest if introduced to new receptive sexual partners,[1][2][3][4] even refusing sex from prior but still available sexual partners."

They went on to explain that males have built in genetic protection to inbreeding that would also manifest as a natural cooling towards familiar women over time. So with our siblings that time would begin when a boy and a girl were children in order to ensure that by the time they were of reproduction age, the female would be too familiar to be of interest to the male.
 
When I mentioned the "Coolidge Effect" from the book, I didn't mean to say that that is what the authors were trying to say was the correct way to live (allowing your husband some purely sexual affairs so he won't die of boredom). The whole book was chock full of examples on why both men and women were biologically created to have multiple sex partners. It's just that I feel that the ending of the book kind of wimped out by not saying "we should ALL be poly". Instead they chose to go with "we should all open our marriages a little bit".
 
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