Recently SexualityResource reviewed Sex at Dawn, a new book drawing on a vast amount of cultural and physical anthropological scholarship to suggest that our human ancestors lived in sexually promiscuous groups of hunter-gatherers. And that the development 10,000 years ago of agriculture, an ownership society, and sexual monogamy brought an end to this golden age of sexuality.
Lead author Christopher Ryan is an American psychologist living in Barcelona. I was able to persuade him to make time for the following interview.
Chris, among sexuality scholars there’s always a tension between the essentialists who look for enduring truths, and the social constructionists who say all sexual norms are dictated by culture. Your book seems to move back and forth between these tendencies.
How so?
Sex at Dawn gives great examples of the social construction of tastes and attitudes, both sexual and non-sexual. For instance, some hunter-gatherers report that grub worms taste great. You suggest that if we saw our parents eating them, we would eat them too.
But I should stipulate that I’ve never eaten a grub worm. I’m as much a victim of cultural programming as anyone!
But then you tack in an essentialist direction – saying that we are “essentially” promiscuous by design.
I think it’s pretty clear that human beings are both. We’re highly adaptive and responsive to cultural conditioning, but our experience and behavior also reveal deeply ingrained structures reflective of evolutionary pressures. Our culture has convinced many of us that a Big Mac, fries, and a milkshake constitute a good meal. But when we eat this way, our bodies inevitably rebel. So we’re highly malleable, but only within certain biologically-imposed parameters.
The media have paid lots of attention to your claim that monogamy is the equivalent of a Big Mac with fries. The social constructionist part of your book, with its careful exploration of culture’s influence on sexual attitudes, has been pretty much neglected.
As Tony Soprano would say, “Whaddyagonnado?”
You’re not discouraged?
Frankly, we’re thrilled the book’s getting any attention at all! As Oscar Wilde said, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”
Your vision of early human male sexuality is pretty consistent with our standard notions of “essential” masculine nature.
Yes.
But your depiction of early human female sexuality is a radical departure: you depict early hunter-gatherer women as sexually bold, confident, autonomous, and novelty-seeking.
I think it’s difficult for most of us to really imagine how women would behave if they weren’t backed into a corner by being economically dependent on men – and carrying several millennia worth of sexual repression on their backs. Even as we speak, clitorectomies are taking place in North Africa, women in Iran are being stoned to death, and American girls are committing suicide because their classmates call them “sluts” online. The world is hardly a safe place for women to express sexual curiosity, and hasn’t been for a very long time.
I was surprised by the book’s ending. Given your argument that monogamy was a natural outcome of our transition to an ownership society, it surprised me that you argued that we could now incorporate non-monogamy.
We argued for incorporating honest communication about our true feelings and experiences. A recent Gallup poll found that Americans considered marital infidelity the worse thing a person could do, beating divorce, suicide, abortion, medical testing on animals and the death penalty. Clearly, there’s room for a bit of realism to be interjected!
I came away from Sex at Dawn convinced that once you have an ownership society, you’re stuck with monogamy.
Maybe. But there are different types of ownership societies. Denmark is very different from the U.S., for example, and those differences are reflected in family structure and sexual behavior.
But let me ask you. How would you have ended the book?
I’d have said that abandoning our hunter-gatherer ways was tragic in many respects — but that we can’t go back to Eden.
Good luck selling that proposal to a publisher!
Come to think of it, maybe a good sequel would be to explore Sex at Dawn‘s religiousimplications.
Forget it. I’m in enough hot water already, thank you.