Tag: sex at dawn

“Sex at Dawn” – a review

I have just finished reading Chris Ryan and Cacilda Jetha’s Sex at Dawn. The book is such a revelation that it is hard to know where to start. This is not only one of those books that will change your life. It’s going to change a whole lot else too.

The experience one has reading it is much akin to the one I had five years ago when I attended my first tantra workshop. A whole load of stuff that previously existed as isolated islands, unconnected, suppressed or misunderstood, suddenly falls into place – in this case not only things I have felt inside, but numerous aspects of the contemporary world as well. Reading the book launches me into filling in many of the gaps it leaves open, as well – something I will no doubt be doing over the next series of posts.

For those who don’t know, the books central thesis is that humankind evolved as a group-living, cooperative species in which sexuality was shared and played an important social role in building and maintaining group ties.

I am totally convinced. Not just by their breadth of argument, though it is impressive. Above all, it just. makes. sense.

There are enough summaries of the book elsewhere, from every conceivable viewpoint, so I won’t attempt another (though I would advise you to read it yourself). In this post, I want to try to qualify the book and give a preliminary assessment of its importance.

Although basing itself widely on earlier work and despite its conversational tone – which heaps ridicule on conventional thought – this is a book which is likely to be as fundamental to humankind’s self-understanding as was Darwin’s On The Origin of Species. In a way, it is a completion of Darwin’s thought. The voyage of self-discovery on which Darwin launched our species has now come into port; and whilst there is surely much still to be discovered and said and plenty of meat to put on the bones, the essential features of that destination are now known.

Coming to terms with them under the conditions of modern life is going to be more of a challenge. In the first place, Ryan’s and Jetha’s conclusions are going to be subject to a bitter rearguard action. Far too many vested interests, many of them household names, are going to find it difficult to climb down from the positions they have taken; and especially when assailed with so little pity. Such vested interests are not only in academia of course, but across the spectrum of society. It looks to me like we are in for the last, and I fear not universally peaceful act in the culture wars which started with Copernicus and Galileo.

It’s time to take sides in those culture wars, or as the authors challenge us in their closing chapter, very aptly, to “come out”. If you recognize yourself as a member of the species they describe, now is the time to say it. Subgroups defined on the basis of sexual orientation or preferences have fought numerous partial wars in the past (and go on, of course, doing so today). Now, though, we have an overarching label for all these struggles: human being. We should, and will likely need to, combine our forces.

What else is new? Closest to the epicenter, is the need to reevaluate love and its associated emotions. I want to say more on this in a future article because it is where I find the book most liberating and hopeful. Then, of course, there is the need to reevaluate and reimagine social institutions suited to the “sexual exiles” we now know we are (to use a term coined by Stephen Snyder, featured in an earlier post). This is already an agenda of unimaginable breadth – but it does not stop there. As an economist (yes, I am in reality an economist), I find an enormous set of related challenges in the need to reassess the fundamental and highly useful simplifying assumptions of mainstream economics regarding so-called “rational” behavior. Of course, this is not an entirely new agenda; but it is lent a great deal new weight by these insights into a model of human nature quite at odds, at least within a defined sphere, with neoclassical assumptions. The use of the term “households” to define the basic unit of consumption was already a (reluctant and awkward) concession to the commonsense understanding that there existed individuals within the boundaries of the welfare-maximizing economic unit other than its (presumably) titular head, whose welfare was part of the objective function that this “head” would endeavor to maximize (we are not told with what discount factor). Now, I think, we know that we are capable of being cynical – but not wired for it. Whatever the exact form is that such “wiring” takes. (This is a matter I have frankly no understanding of – if anyone can enlighten me).

In fact it is difficult to conceive of any area of the social sciences which will not now have to question its basic assumptions – from anthropology to (even) psychoanalysis: how do Oedipus and Elektra complexes look once we redefine the family unit?.  (A problem with the standard discourse of psychoanalysis which has always, of course, been quite a challenge to adequately theorize).

What Ryan and Jetha have achieved is what is correctly known as a paradigm shift. The course which human history is about to take has been set out by the seminal philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. It will not be easy and it may not be nice: but there is no turning back until, eventually, the fact of our polyamorous ancestry is as much a part of our mental universe as the theory of evolution itself.

It’s my hope, of course, that in the inevitable onslaughts which will follow, the fundamentally beautiful human insights which follow from the book’s findings will not be lost from view. This is no crude defence of marginal sexual lifestyles. We are all a part of it, and all estranged from our core natures by no fault of our own. This calls for courage and conviction, but also empathy and compassion. Something, it turns out, we as a species are actually quite capable of.

 

Nine rooms of happiness?

I have recently discovered Stephen Synder’s very thought provoking blog on sexuality at Psychology Today. Warmly recommended to interested readers.

In this article, he describes a common situation (at least in his therapy room): women who feel their men are interested only superficially in their erotic potential, and that this never gets discovered.

As a rule, I tend to be very sceptical of the glorification of women by men – often by men who have a low image of themselves or of their sex. Whenever I have encountered it, it has had a strong flavor of mother-projection, under which lay plenty of mother-related grievances. Anecdotal evidence also suggests to me that women are as responsible for childhood neuroses as men. Why would they be better lovers than they are parents? So quantitatively I do not see a lot of difference.

I can hardly sit by and accept, either, the portrayal of men as one-dimensional erotic retards. Descriptively, Snyder doubtless identifies a real pattern. But not to dig somewhat under the surface seems a major abdication. Looked at over time, what is going on? I believe it is not so, and I suppose Synder would agree, that male disinterest in the whole woman already typically characterizes the early stages of a relationship. On the contrary, the experience of falling in love is typically one in which there is a high degree of consciousness of the woman in many of her aspects, not merely her propensity to have sex. So we are talking here about a feeling and a pattern of behavior which establishes itself over time; women feel the initial erotic promise remains unfulfilled while men feel that it loses importance.

If this is so, one is entitled to ask why. Part of the reason lies, perhaps, in our social biology. Male/female encounters are not supposed to be characterized by enduring and deepening enchantment. That’s just a myth. Men are resigned to it (even if the less sedentary may prefer affairs to baseball), while women are not. Because women feel they have no chance of full sexual expression except with the one man they married ages ago, they go on building up a greater and greater degree of resentment towards that man, whose fault it is not really.

And therein lies the rub – for while women hope for men to blossom as erotic creatures, they at the same time deny the basic precepts of male sexuality – and indeed of their own. The legitimate aspiration to delve deeper into their erotic being then turns into guerilla warfare against the forces of nature. This leads to deepening estrangement rather than rapprochement, and an eternal, dull and doleful stand-off ensues. Both allow their erotic natures to wither in the wasteland they have created.

Having said which, I am not quite as fatalistic. I think we have been repressing our true nature as a species for far too long to be anything other than ignorant about what would be possible between men and women if we stopped. It is a vast, unexplored frontier. Let us therefore be modest.

The image of all those cold and unexplored rooms is a compelling one. I’m more than willing to believe there are vast spaces inside every woman which neither I nor any other man has yet penetrated (pun intended). I would just like my female readers to understand that there are similarly vast spaces inside me.