Title: Sex at Dawn Pdf How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships
Author: Christopher Ryan
Published Date: 2011-07-05
Page: 432
“Sex At Dawn has helped me understand myself and the world so much more clearly.” (Ilana Glazer, co-creator of Broad City)“Sex At Dawn is the single most important book about human sexuality since Alfred Kinsey unleashed Sexual Behavior in the Human Male on the American public in 1948.” (Dan Savage)“Funny, witty, and light ... Sex at Dawn is a scandal in the best sense, one that will have you reading the best parts aloud and reassessing your ideas about humanity’s basic urges well after the book is done.” (Newsweek)“Sex At Dawn challenges conventional wisdom about sex in a big way... This is a provocative, entertaining, and pioneering book. I learned a lot from it and recommend it highly.” (Andrew Weil, M.D., author of Healthy Aging)“Sex At Dawn is a provocative and engaging synthesis... that has the added benefit of being a joy to read.... A book sure to generate discussion, and one likely to produce more than a few difficult conversations with family marriage counselors.” (Eric Michael Johnson, Seed Magazine)“You clearly have an exciting book on your hands, whether people agree with it or not: these are issues that will need debating over and over before we will arrive at a resolution.” (Frans de Waal, author of The Age of Empathy)“A wonderfully provocative and well-written book which completely re-evaluates human sexual behaviour and gets to the root of many of our social and psychological ills.” (Steve Taylor, author of The Fall and Waking From Sleep)“One of the most original books I’ve read in years, Sex at Dawn manages to be both enormously erudite and wildly entertaining―even, frequently, hilarious. . . . A must-read for anyone interested in where our sexual impulses come from.” (Tony Perrottet, author of Napoleon's Privates)“This paradigm-shifting book is a thoroughly original discussion of the origins and nature of human sexuality... These authors have a gift for making complex material reader-friendly, filling each chapter with humor and passion as well as dozens of revolutionary insights.” (Stanley Krippner, Ph.D.)“Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha have written the essential corrective to the evolutionary psychology literature...” (Stanton Peele, Ph.D.) In this controversial, thought-provoking, and brilliant book, renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá debunk almost everything we “know” about sex, weaving together convergent, frequently overlooked evidence from anthropology, archaeology, primatology, anatomy, and psychosexuality to show how far from human nature monogamy really is. In Sex at Dawn, the authors expose the ancient roots of human sexuality while pointing toward a more optimistic future illuminated by our innate capacities for love, cooperation, and generosity.
“Sex at Dawn challenges conventional wisdom about sex in a big way. By examining the prehistoric origins of human sexual behavior the authors are able to expose the fallacies and weaknesses of standard theories proposed by most experts. This is a provocative, entertaining, and pioneering book. I learned a lot from it and recommend it highly.” — Andrew Weil, M.D.
“Sex at Dawn irrefutably shows that what is obvious—that human beings, both male and female, are lustful—is true, and has always been so…. The more dubious its evidentiary basis and lack of connection with current reality, the more ardently the scientific inevitability of monogamy is maintained—even as it falls away around us.” — Stanton Peele, Ph.D.
A controversial, idea-driven book that challenges everything you (think you) know about sex, monogamy, marriage, and family. In the words of Steve Taylor (The Fall, Waking From Sleep), Sex at Dawn is “a wonderfully provocative and well-written book which completely re-evaluates human sexual behavior and gets to the root of many of our social and psychological ills.”
This Book Answers a Lot of Questions About Who I Am and How I Engage in Romance and Relationships To the Authors: Thank you for researching, compiling, and writing this book.To those thinking of reading it: Do it. The book is dense. It is full of citations, quotes from studies, and anthropological research, though quite fun once you get into the rhythm and style of it. What's truly awesome is what the research and data reveal about human sexuality. There's more to us than the stories told in Disney movies, religious texts, and fairy tales (and far more importantly to me, it successfully challenges the standard model of sexual human behavior held up by most scientists). I'd read a chapter a night, or several on a flight, and then spend the next day sporadically realizing why something in a past relationship happened, or why I have always felt a certain way about myself or the wonderful women in my life. The book has made me grateful, more mature, and more comfortable in my own skin and emotions.Worth it.Probably not a good anniversary gift... but, wow Without denying the seriousness of the authors's intent, "Sex at Dawn" is one of the most entertaining books I've read in awhile. The authors, Cacilda Jetha, a medical doctor, and Christopher Ryan, a psychologist, argue that human beings are not inherently monogamous and that our collective civilizational effort to shoehorn people into life-long pair-bonds goes against our biological heritage and has led to much unnecessary misery. They stake this claim on a considerable amount of reading into recent anthropological, primatological and genetic research; specifically, they say that, as humans share roughly 99% of their DNA with chimps and bonobos, and as neither of those species practices monogamy (and in fact no primate, except the gibbon, does), our own genetic inheritance tends towards polyamory. In fact, they trot out examples from such indigenous cultures as the Mosuo in China to argue that pre-historic humans were most likely not monogamous: widespread promiscuity promoted bonding among members of extended hunter-gatherer clans, reduced inter-group tension, and promoted sperm competition as females had sex with multiple male partners and rival sperm competed for the right to fertilization.It's not hard to understand why "Sex at Dawn" has been embraced by sexologists while primatologists and anthropologists have been noticeably cooler in their reception.The book is like a bomb thrown not only against the very notion of monogamy but also against the standard narrative in anthropology that pair-bonding is universal in human societies because women trade sexual access for food and protection. The authors make little effort to conceal their impatience and irritation with this 'standard narrative' and, indeed, much of "Sex at Dawn" reads as though it were written by an exasperated zealot (or over-ambitious grad student) who can't fathom why everyone else remains so in the dark. At the very least, it's not boring.But the book should probably be taken with more than a few grains of salt. First of all, "Sex at Dawn" rehashes an already well-worn Enlightenment-era belief in the uninhibited 'noble savage,' uncorrupted by the restraints of civilization. Rousseau was, of course, a proponent of this and Diderot's "Supplement to the Voyages of Bougainville" pretty much encapsulates Ryan and Jetha, albeit with more wit. As others have pointed out, there are instances of monogamous indigenous peoples too that the authors don't really consider. Also, they don't really respond to one of their central theses: if the adoption of agriculture was such a disaster (sexually and in terms of quality of life) for human beings, why did they persist with it? If agricultural village settlements forced human beings into a monogamous corset, why then did they persist with it for 6,000 years before the advent of the first civilizations?Finally, Ryan and Jetha stake much of their argument on asserting that 99% of human being's DNA overlap with that of bonobos, the most sexually promiscuous primates. Yet, we share the same percentage (99%) with chimps who are more territorial, aggressive, and somewhat less promiscuous than bonobos. Essentially, by privileging bonobos Ryan and Jetha over-correct previous writers's (like Jared Diamond) tendency to focus on our chimp heritage: we really need a book that tries to relate both our chimp and bonobo genetic backgrounds together.Still, for a book so steeped in academic research, it's a blast to read, except when the authors start to consider the implications of their own argument. Having spent 300 pages explaining how monogamy is so unnatural and sexual exclusivity is probably the main cause of marital failure (in their view), they then shy away from any prescriptive advice. They don't quite want to push marriage over a cliff and advocate polyamory (for males, anyway; they're even more reticent interestingly enough on the implications of their argument for female behavior) but the logic of the book tends in that direction. But, as Freud argued, we are stuck with civilization and its neuroses whether we like them or not. Thus, they can't quite advocate free love (not as long as we have private property, anyway) but they insist that marriage is a botch too. For all its strident confidence in our biologically-driven amorality, "Sex at Dawn" ends by waffling all over the place.I did love reading it, however, even when I recognized that the authors were pushing their case too far. At the very least, it gets you thinking about why so many marriages and pairings fail, why cheating is so rampant, and whether there is indeed an evolutionary legacy that is inimical to our social arrangements (rather than just instances of individual moral failure).While a relatively easy read and presenting some interesting and new (to me) ... While a relatively easy read and presenting some interesting and new (to me) information, I didn't really see a central idea here other than people like sex and, as a western society, we're doing it wrong.Okay, point taken. So, what's the right way?
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