Sex at Dawn

How could I resist?  I heard this was a best-seller; it has a blurb from Dan Savage on the front cover; it was cheap at the used bookstore with all the cats; and it has "Sex" in the title.  I like sex.  It can be a natural, zesty enterprise.  All of which is to say that I went in with low and prurient expectations and was pleasantly surprised.  The book has many problems, but it stimulated a lot of thought.

Most of Sex at Dawn is taken up with refuting the idea that humans are a naturally pair-bonding monogamous species.  The "dawn" in the title accordingly refers not to a time of day but to our long prehistory as recently descended apes foraging in small bands.  Ryan and Jethá (the couple co-authors -- please don't call them married) argue that before the advent of agriculture human mating was promiscuous.  Chimps and Bonobos, our closest relatives, are both promiscuous species where females sleep with many males (and vice-versa).  Bonobos in particular seem to use sex as a tool for cementing cooperative bonds and defusing tensions within a group.  They are not worried about keeping track of paternity, and women and children are not treated as property of the males.  The authors think early humans behaved much the same way, and that this is our 'natural' state.  Then civilization came and fucked us up.  

I'm sympathetic to this counter-cultural perspective, and not just because I've long considered sex a very friendly sort of activity.  I've read a number of things in the past decade that have convincingly painted the Neolithic Revolution as a quality of life disaster.  This distrust of the innate greatness of civilization and progress is the message of books like: Against the Grain, Sapiens, Why the West Rules -- For Now, Dirt,  and Neanderthals, Bandits, and Farmers (any of which I would recommend).  And if we follow Deleuze -- with his propertyless nomads and monstrous paternity of interbreeding Ideas -- the strictures of civilization are even a quality of thought disaster.  Maybe, provisionally, the scientific and industrial revolutions have finally made the whole enterprise of civilization look like it was worth it.  5,000 years later.  Maybe.  Provisionally.  If we can adapt to some of the strains that our imperfect self-domestication has created. 

Sex at Dawn extends this same theme about how much better life was before agriculture.  Not only were humans better fed, healthier, more cooperative, and less oppressed by a surplus-harvesting elite, but even the sex was better and more plentiful.  Truly, they contend, it was the good old days.   Naturally, this sounds almost too good to be true, and one has to guard against some idealization of the noble savage.  Also, as anyone sympathetic to revisionist history is already aware, if you criticize civilization like this it will criticize you back.   So it's not surprising that the book has been the subject of some controversy, including a whole 'nother book rebutting it.  Given that I'm not a primatologist, anthropologist, or evolutionary biologist, I'm poorly placed to adjudicate a scientific dispute.  Certainly, the pop science tone in which Sex at Dawn is written does not make it able to do much more than make suggestions and ask rhetorical questions.  Nothing is being proved here.  In fact, there are plenty of gaping holes and missing nuances in their argumentation.  But then, that doesn't make it wrong either.  We should be equally wary when we see scientists circling the wagon to defend their discipline against interlopers, especially when there is a charged political question at stake.  For example, a review of Sex at Dusk (the refuation) seems to contain many valid specific points, but also some bullshit about how Ryan and Jethá, "suffer lacunae in even rudimentary understandings of evolutionary theory".  I'm sure that's what the Social Darwinists said to anyone who objected to white supremacy.  There's nothing in the book that merits this sort of sneer; their entire theory of the pre-history of human sexuality may be substantially wrong, but then so might the vast bulk of sociobiology or evolutionary psychology.  In fact, in the latter case, most of it has already been wrong. 

Ultimately though, the point of reading a book like this is not to figure out the truth about 'human nature'.  Not least because there is no such fucking thing.  Some things change fast, some things change more slowly.  That's it.  With our limited imagination and experience, we call the slow stuff 'natural'.  The distinction between natural and artificial is only useful when we understand it this way.  We normally lose this perspective though, and instead lend whatever status quo we are accustomed to the force of a natural moral inevitability.  The best thing about Sex at Dawn is that, in throwing the history of our species' sexuality into question, it enables us to imagine a world in which sex and power are distributed differently than our own.  You might say that this is purely an imaginary exercise, a pipe dream about a new and different kind of ape society.  But then again, so was civilization back in the day.  The deeper question is not which of these visions of society is more accurate or realistic, but about how we might move from one to the other, and what the change might feel like.  

On this front the book unfortunately falls totally flat.  They spend 268 out of 312 pages trying to call into question the "standard narrative" of human sexuality that centers around the differential investment strategies of men and women.  Eggs cost a lot, while sperm is cheap.  Therefore, game theory dictates that women should look for sap guys who will help raise children, but cuckold them with genetically superior strangers.   Men, in turn, should try to control a woman's sex life to ensure that they are really the father of any kids they care for, while slipping out the back door to hit it and quit with the ovulator next door.  As a result, monogamous pair-bonding is an uneasy but evolutionarily necessary detente that dictates distinct steroptypical attitudes towards sex for men (horny and casual) and women (frigid and calculating).  The book spends the bulk of its time giving grounds to doubt this story about the 'natural' inevitability of these attitudes, and providing reasons to think they may have instead originated with the 'artificial' imposition of agriculture.  

Then, with their last 44 pages, they try to imagine what men and women might think about sex if their views had not been poisoned by civilization.  And they pretty much don't know.  They have a puzzling chapter about the 'inscrutability' of female desire, which, despite their attempt to level the playing field, they agree is not the same as male desire (even in what they assert is its 'natural' pre-civilizational state).  Basically, they assert that female sexuality is complex and contextual.  They also have a weird chapter about what men would be like in this brave new (old) world.  Here, they do have a clear vision; men would be the same but they wouldn't feel guilty about sleeping around.  And maybe, since they would never need to pull up in a Ferrari to impress chicks they'll never get to control anyhow, they would stop stressing over, you know ... having Ferraris.  After spending so much time taking down the standard narrative of sex, would they offer in its place feels a bit anticlimactic.  Jajaja.

Now, don't get me wrong.  Everybody (consensually) getting what they want sexually without having to be ashamed of what that is, sounds like a fine idea to me.  And functioning as less of a tournament species sounds like a great idea all around (especially since I don't own a Ferrari).  I have no sympathy for people who dismiss possible changes in sexual behavior as unnatural or immoral or just plain hippy pie in the sky.  The future is always 'impossible' until it happens.  But how are we going to get there from here, and how does their 'naturalization' of promiscuity help us do that?  In fact, all you can say for this is that it renders the concept thinkable for those who don't do a lot of thinking.  Do we really believe that the polayamorous hoards would be unleashed if only they were to realize that monogamy is 'unnatural'?  Do we really want to base ethical and lifestyle choices around this concept at all?  Wouldn't we rather just have people think about whether a different set of sexual mores might be right for them?  Go read Esther Perel, or consider becoming an Ethical Slut, or a full blown practical polyamorist.  Why would you take science's word for what should happen naturally in your bedroom?  I know there's a critical mass of societal disapproval to overcome here if we want to try these ideas out more thoroughly.  So perhaps breaking the spell of natural inevitability that clings to our current arrangement serves a larger purpose.  But I'm deeply wary of the desire to let what will always be a fairly dubious science of evolutionary prehistory -- whether it be the standard or the alt narrative  -- be the guide to our present day actions.  In this sense, I think it would have been more useful if Ryna and Jethá had written in less polemic fashion.  If they weren't busy trying to prove to us how 'natural' promiscuous sex really is, they might have been able to spend more time telling us if studying this science might actually help us recreate this world in detail.  

P.S.  I took a moment to look back at Richard Prum's recent book The Evolution of Beauty.  He argues compellingly that sexual selection is a far more pervasive force in evolution than strict Darwinian adaptationists have given it credit for.  Most of the book is about the evolution of the amazing mating displays in birds, but it also contains several chapters about the evolution of human sexuality.  While his discussion neither refutes nor confirms the hypothesis of Sex at Dawn, it does fit well with its political agenda of increased female sexual autonomy.  It's also a much more tightly argued with respect to the science of evolution -- Prum is an expert, though with a very out of consensus view.  While Sex at Dawn is a quick thought provoking read, I would definitely recommend The Evolution of Beauty as the better book overall, and hands down the more scientifically accurate.