Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality

[lightreads]

Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


My girlfriend and I had one of those gradual comings-together where you're going along fine, life is good, and then you look up one day and . . . wait . . . hang on . . . you're dating that person you thought you were just sleeping with. (For the record, some of us *cough* figured this out much sooner than others of us.) When it happens like that, it's hard to figure out what "counts," if you care about that sort of thing -- anniversaries, firsts, all those markers of 'real relationshipness.' Luckily, neither of us cares what counts. Just, sometime over the past five years, we got to The Thing -- The Real Thing -- and that's cool.

Except the part where it isn't cool is that there are a lot of other people who care about what counts. They care a lot. To a lot of people, we can't have The Real Thing, and not because we're both women. No, see, it doesn't matter how much our lives have glommed over the past five years, or how we collectively meet her cancer diagnosis and me conceiving a child to carry as my sister's surrogate. None of that counts because we occasionally sleep with other people, together and separately. Because if you do that, well, that's not a relationship at all.

Which has never made sense to me on a logical level, or an instinctive one. Monogamy might be nice for some people (some of my best friends are monogamists, dontcha know), though more often it looks to me like it makes everyone ashamed and unhappy. But for me . . . no. I mean, I've been in monogamous relationships for years at a time, once before I knew what I wanted, and once after I had started to suspect but couldn't experiment to find out, because if your partner is not down with it like mine wasn't, then obviously you respect that. And I just . . . it's not that I was unhappy. Or not just that I was unhappy. I did not feel like myself. I felt like the person I was being in the relationship was untrue on some fundamental level of existential being. That sort of thing wears you down from the inside over time. And I strongly suspect it's a bit like being a closeted gay person trapped in a heterosexual relationship.

Anyway. So this book (woo! I got there!). This book is all about how our cultural investment in monogamy doesn't make sense. Or at least how the narratives we're told about it are bullshit. You know this story: men don't want to be in relationships, but they need fidelity from women to be sure the children are really theirs (because otherwise why spend any resources raising them?), and so women trap men into relationships with their sneaky hidden ovulation, but what they're really doing is trading access to their vaginas for resource stability. It's the pigs and prostitutes model. The one that gets used to defend patriarchy, gender inequality, you name it, because it's biology, don't you know.

This book is about how it's crap, and how it doesn't make sense given what we know about pre-historic sexuality, about multiple partner procreation now and in the past, and our evolution. It's also a pretty snotty bitchslap to evolutionary psychology which, well, yes.

I totally dug it, because it made sense out of a lot of stuff that has never made sense to me. (And the last quarter in particular has some great stuff about different arousal patterns that just -- yes, thank you.) I just really really wish it was less pop and more science, because honestly the thing this book convinced me of the most is that the vast majority of anthropological work has all the scientific rigor of a wet noodle. And I wish this book supplied more of that rigor, since it demonstrated very clearly that the material is there. Also that it was a bit more careful not to continuously fall into the same stereotyped patterns of thinking about gendered behavior that it is chiding its readers for, but, you know, lack of rigor.




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Comments

[ecaterin]

ExACTly!!! I honestly read through the whole thing waiting for TEH RIGOR to kick in - because clearly they *had* all the data! .....and then the book ends. I was like, "This was the introduction to the best thesis of all time you guys!"

Okay, I totally understand that they had to publish the book that would sell. I get the realities of the market. But now I want them to publish the companion volume with The Hardcore Research!! Cause I WOULD EAT THAT WITH A SPOON. :)

It's also a pretty snotty bitchslap to evolutionary psychology which, well, yes.

rofl!!! Yes, yes indeed. They didn't quite camouflage their titters at the expense of evolutionary psychology, anthropology or biology that ever ever suddenly contradicted itself when the researcher came smack up against his/her own prejudices :P

[cahn]

Okay, so, first, can I say how much I LOVE your book-review-rants?

Also, I am very sad, because this sounded very very much like something I would like to read, until your last paragraph. Because you know how I feel about pop science. GAH. I NEED CITES.

I might read it anyway, though, it sounds that good in all other respects (I'd really like to see the takedown of evolutionary psychology, which honestly I don't know much about), and just prepare to beat my head against the wall a lot when I want to see data...

[ecaterin]

In the book's defense, there are about one bazillionty foot notes. It's not that sources aren't cited, it's that the citations are treated as "stuff that would bog down the flow of the narrative," rather than "stuff that the reader would love to have more detail on." (readers like us!)

The structure is clearly to make the book more salable - but it's not flimsy science....it's just not a "science book," if you get what I mean :)

[cahn]

Ah, I see. That sounds much better than what I was thinking; I might be okay with it.

(What I really want to know is, if it is possible as a reader with no background in the subject to come up with an alternate hypothesis for a given set of data in five minute, does the author actually talk about that alternate hypothesis and talk about what studies have been done to address it? Not that this makes me beat my head against the wall on a regular basis when reading nonfic, or anything... :) )

[lightreads]

No, not always. At least not for my hypotheses.

Also, don't get the audiobook. It doesn't have the footnotes at all.

[cahn]

bah. Okay, well, thanks for the warning. It's always easier for me to bang my head against the wall when I know it's coming...

[ecaterin]

But....but....the footnotes & index take up FULLY ONE QUARTER OF THE LENGTH OF THE BOOK!

*headdesk*

I'm trying to imagine an audio-book structure for footnotes. It could be kinda like those "read along with the record" 45 rpm records around in the 70s - every time you were suppose to turn a page, the voice reading on the album would pause & you would hear DING! Everytime there's a footnote, you hear DING! and can somehow magically skip to hear it, then skip back...? That would be a tough one. And for this particular book there would be half sentence DING! three more words DING! another sentence DING! - kinda intrusive :D

[lightreads]

Actually...sometimes they do it that way. It depends on the book and the source -- Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic does textbooks and nonfiction, mostly and they are faithful about footnotes. Sometimes in--text, sometimes at the end of a chapter. The National Library Service is less good about it, though they tend to keep footnotes with content as opposed to citation. And commercial audio like Audible -- which is where I got this -- almost never does it.

[ecaterin]

No, most of the time their conclusions are pretty damn water tight - which is a huge part of why this book is so satisfying. The biological & anthropological indicators that we evolved with multiple male/female sexual partners are VAST. It's not one or two maybes, it's HUGE INTRICATE physiological structures of attack and counter attack at the biological level that ONLY make sense if multiple inseminations happened back to back (for example). And what makes the authors (and the reader) headdesk and laugh so often, is how frequently the researchers write their papers, faithfully take down all the evidence....and then through some really impressive magical thinking, conclude, "So hominids have been monogamous throughout their evolution - just like the good lord instructs!"

The authors do get delightfully snarky about it :D

[jmtorres]

Thank you! I've seen this book at work (it's on our bestseller rack) and was curious about it but had no idea if it was in the bullshit end or the interesting end of writings about sex.