Sex at Dawn, What I Read and Where I Read It

Just finished: Sex at Dawn, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha

Currently reading: Do You Dream of Terra-Two? Temi Oh

On deck: Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

While I shared a lot of my reading this past year with my students, making a stack of finished books on one corner of my desk and adding my own titles to the class list of what we’ve read this year, there are plenty of books that I don’t share with them, or really even tend to read outside of my apartment. It isn’t that they’re necessarily “naughty” or inappropriate books, but it is that sometimes I don’t care to explain what a book is or isn’t if I’m not doing it in essay format. This is knowing what some of my students have been reading over the past year—a lot of it Ana Huang novels and similar recommended by TikTok users—but the newest covers of those novels tend to obfuscate the content of the books. You don’t have Fabio on the cover of New Adult Romance. I, however, can’t really hide a book titled Sex at Dawn, especially when it has a close-up of Lucas Cranach’s, the Elder, painting of Eve, a few dainty leaves all that covers anything.

Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships is not entirely about sex. I mean, it is, but it has a lot more to do with looking at prehistoric community, culture, and society, criticism of a narrative which posits humans as inherently violent creatures, and, towards the very end, implications of what our biological nature might have for long-term relationships. I don’t think the subtitle for this book helps clarify what Ryan and Jetha are largely speaking about until you’ve actually finished reading the book, in that yes, it is about how we, as a species, choose our mates—in comparison to other primates—as well as biological or evolutionary reasons for why it seems difficult for many people to be strictly monogamous.

I’ve been feeling like every nonfiction book that I have read in the past four years can be summed up as arguing that the way our society functions right now didn’t have to be the way it is right now. They offer the reassurance that people aren’t inherently bad, or greedy—the adoption of large scale agriculture seems to be a point in human history where there was a clear shift in attitudes away from what had been working, and which continue to work when allowed and left alone. The conclusions of these books offer suggestions for the reader in their treatment of the people around them in their personal relationship sphere as well as in their communities and into the wider world. The argument in Sex at Dawn is that we’re much more closely related to bonobos in both behavior and recent ancestry, which would imply that not only are we not like the more solitary gibbons we’re more often compared to when regarding our sexual relationships—which is really the big “get” of this book—but that because of our similarity to bonobos, we might not be as destined to being war-making creatures who are hellbent on ownership. The part of this argument regarding human sexual evolution, or evolutionary psychology, that people are more likely to get upset over is that Ryan and Jetha make the claim, contrary to the popular narrative that human men evolved to have a many partners as possible while women evolved to want only one (that is, that men are inherently more promiscuous, or have a higher interest in sex than women), that women in fact are more biologically equipped to have multiple partners—including at the same time—than men. The evidence that they present in order to support this claim falls into multiple categories, including the comparisons between humans and other apes, a focus in particular about the shapes and structures of human genital anatomy, and socio-cultural attitudes towards sex in hunter-gatherer and immediate return foraging societies.

Originally, I ordered this book last year. Some books have to sit on the shelf for a while before you read them; usually that length of time is a year, for me—if I don’t get to it by then, then it’s probably got to be weeded since it was never “checked out.” One of the authors, Christopher Ryan, had been a guest on the Duncan Trussell Family Hour, a podcast I started listening to from the beginning last year, so the book came up, and I thought that it sounded interesting, because, what’s become increasingly apparent to me, is that dominant narratives from the past three hundred years regarding humans have led us to a place where our planet is quite literally on fire. If there is another explanation for how and what we are, including some analysis of what we might need to do in order to find more peace for ourselves (that we can then, hopefully, spread to the people around us), then it seems important to me to give it attention. I have trouble believing in the super nihilist, hyper-destructive, and uber-pessimism of philosophies which argue that people are made to screw each other over: it seems like an excuse to give people who have capital permission to harm others, when I know from personal experience that all that people generally want from life is to be able to be happy, comfortable, and loved. If you’ve ever watched a group of kids, barring extreme shyness, you know how amazingly fast they are at making new friends. The kid they meet at the beach and share their toys with becomes their best friend. I don’t think you can be pessimistic about people’s inherent nature if you work with children and teens; I think that you are more likely to get angry at a society which forces these young people to become hardened and deadened to the pain and joy of the people around them. If the dominant narrative leads us down that path, we have to challenge it and find a new (or I suppose old) way of returning to the world.

There were a few other reasons I had for reading, too, though. For one thing, the subtitle—How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships—got me. The question of relationship maintenance has become increasingly important for me as I’ve gotten to an age where I’m thinking about marriage and family, and because I’m someone who is grounded in theory, books about relationships grab my attention, since they might help me do a better job at having healthier relationships than my parents did. Why are we dysfunctional? Why are so many women left dissatisfied by their partners? Why have we left men in a position where they don’t have tools to manage their own sexuality in a way that doesn’t have to mean they need to possess and dominate women, or where they don’t need to run the risk of ruining their marriages to find satisfaction down the line? Ryan and Jetha are optimistic; quoting Robert Wright, who says, “A basic underlying dynamic between men and women is mutual exploitation. They seem, at times, designed to make each other miserable,” they respond, “Don’t believe it. We aren’t designed to make each other miserable” (270). This statement alone provides the reminder that, at the end of the day, men and women are actually supposed to get along and like each other. That doesn’t happen, however, when we’re not engaged in egalitarianism, and it doesn’t happen when we’re in a society where marriage is a property agreement between a man and a woman’s father.

Which leads me to the other reason why I wanted to read—and really appreciated—this book. Once again, I’m reminded of the other nonfiction books I’ve been reading, in which the analysis and comparison of patriarchal vs. “matriarchal” societies are discussed. One major misconception it seems like almost every male anthropological research has made—and a major misconception men in general seem to have under patriarchal systems, like ours in the west—is that if women were in charge, they would wield power the same way that men do, but in an inferior way. That is, they expect the same kind of weird (I’m going to call it weird) hyper individualistic thinking, the necessity of subjugation of the other gender, ownership, and violence—just that rather than women being “owned” (for lack of a better word) by their husbands, men would be “owned” by their wives. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how women use power, and perhaps it’s a deliberate misunderstanding. In general, societies which are not patriarchal (though I hesitate to use the term matriarchal, since it’s not a vertical line of power dynamics), in which women make the majority of the decisions, “tend to be far more comfortable places for most men than societies ruled by a male elite” (134). “Societies in which women have lots of autonomy and authority tend to be decidedly male-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty sexy” (133). Women are often better at making decisions which benefit the entire group (as opposed to just themselves), and this is something that other authors and researchers have noted and reported before (for example, in women’s sports). There tends to be less violence, better food and resource distribution (hence, less conflict and less suffering), and better emotional outcomes for these societies than we experience here. Maybe men just need to accept that they are actually incredibly bad at leadership—look at the entire history of western civilization for proof. To think that there’s no possibility of a world in which we’re not made to compete for resources not because of nature’s lack of them, but because some men (very specifically men, as that still defines the corporate world) have decided that they’re industrial kings over the rest of us peasants is to accept that things have to be miserable—when there’s plenty to support that they don’t, we just have to let women run things instead of men. We have to make the decision that women aren’t subordinate to men.

Ryan and Jetha’s counterarguments against the dominant narrative do a lot to address the frequent issue of bad data collection and analysis, as well as gaps in knowledge—particularly knowledge about the female body and female desire. The book’s bibliography offers extensive resources, and both the endnotes and the index make the book an incredibly useful text. Also, there’s humor dispersed throughout the book, which provides much needed levity to a topic which deeply needs it. If you’re looking for an evolutionary explanation and support for how and why it’s possible to have a less conflict-driven society, this is a book that’s worth reading. I don’t know enough about biology and anatomy specifically to be able to contest or affirm those claims in the book, nor am I an expert on apes (in fact, they kind of scare me—like, a lot), so I can’t speak as well to those nuances, either. But when it comes to the things I do know about culture and society and attitudes about gender and sexuality, Sex at Dawn is another text which has affirmed my belief in the fact that whatever it was about agriculture in particular that encouraged early civilizations to treat women like domesticated livestock (or to choose patrilineal property inheritance when you can’t get away from your mother being your mother, even if you don’t know your father—genuinely baffling), it should continue to be criticized because of how badly it has harmed us as a species. Agriculture itself isn’t the bad guy, but maybe personal property is? You probably wouldn’t covet your neighbor’s wife if you didn’t think of her as an object to be owned in the first place? I don’t know; this has gotten away from me a little, and it was harder to write about this book than I thought it would be. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha probably do know, though.