Sex fascinates me, as an observer, as a practitioner, and as a parent and grandparent. As I am sure it fascinates you. How can something so amazing as sex have anything to do with reproduction?
There was once a comedy skit of two guys talking about women and sex, with shopping carts loaded with diapers in the aisles of Costco, with floor to ceiling boxes of diapers surrounding them. It slowly dawns on us that sexual activity leads to something quite different from the ecstatic communion of sexual bliss. It leads to little copies of yourself who strangely differ from you and your mate, wondering about the world, demanding lunch and entertainment. It also frequently leads to marriage, and eventually, depending on your choice of mate, divorce and custody arrangements.
As to the amazing and by no means obvious relationship of sex to reproduction I am not alone in wondering.
Sex at Dawn joins the growing ranks of books on human nature, as seen through an evolutionary perspective. It is subtitled “How we mate, why we stray, and what it means for modern relationships”. It covers some of the same ground as Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn and Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind, albeit from different perspectives.
Anthropologists and biologists are asking how it is that man has come to dominate the planet, and what critical differences distinguish man from the other four great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and gibbons.
We have gone in the space of a several hundred thousand years from chipping rocks on the African plains to colonizing every available part of the planet. How this has occurred is, in effect, the Question. What mechanisms, what processes, could have caused to domesticate and transform ourselves in such a brief timespan as 150,000 years?
Apparently it has to do with sex. Our sex lives are essential to our rapid evolution. Many people are repelled by that answer, but according to Darwin, there are only two ways of doing it: natural selection and sexual selection.
As Geoffrey Miller puts, only sexual selection is directed, rapid and intelligent enough to have produced us, because natural selection, in the Darwinian sense, is too slow and random to have moved us up the food chain from dimwitted rock shapers of 400,000 years ago to people able to play Bach and appreciate it. That means women have selected men to be as they are: capable of violence but good around the kids, able to bring home the bacon, and faithful enough to be tolerated. And women have been selected by men to be as they are: good with kids, able to forage for themselves and the family, handy, beautiful (no facial hair please), and smart enough to appreciate our jokes.
This is a depressing conclusion for those who imagine the perfectibility of man is only held up by the existence of bad social structures (economic and religious arrangements). It is of no consequence to those who believe that man – in whatever condition he then was – received revelation as to how he should behave.
Sex includes better brains, which offer more entertainment value, bigger dicks and more beautiful chicks, and cleverer, more emotionally engaged men and women loving one another. I could have written that differently, but that is the main conclusion of Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind. We have conquered the planet by being smarter, which has entailed and caused us to be more sexy, to be more rapidly reproductive, and to share the burdens of reproduction better as between men and women.
We are each the result of sexual selection. Men have been selected by women, and women by men, and what you experienced in your mate selection days is what everyone has gone through. And, by and large, despite the fact that less than one percent of our sexual activity is aimed at reproduction, we have populated the planet with ourselves quite effectively.
This brings us to the controversy dealt with in Sex at Dawn. How much were we ever intended to be sexually faithful?
This issue bedevils our understanding of ourselves. The time before agriculture spreads backwards from 10,000 years ago into the mists of time. It is in this time that anatomically modern humans emerged, probably about 50,000 to 30,000 years ago. This long period is a sort of blank slate onto which writers project their theories of how we got be so smart and well adapted.
Did the family unit mean that much then? Did we pair-bond for longer than a few years, in order to raise children? Was the family the engine of human survival? Was evolution accelerated by sexual exclusivity, however short term, which is implied in the idea of family?
Or, to the contrary, did people just boink and move on? Did the hunter-gatherer pack or tribe enforce any kind of sexual exclusivity in the days before we had more property than we could carry on our backs? Did men choose sexual exclusivity for some relevant period of time as they supported their mates in breeding? In the absence of accumulation of property, did we have something to defend that made patrilineal relationships a sensible social institution? Did we grow up as a species knowing who our fathers were, and did they and their brothers teach us how to hunt? Or was dad just one of the guys who fucked mother on occasion, and also taught us how to catch fish and shape a spearpoint?
This is the context in which books like Sex at Dawn are written.
Sex at Dawn is engaging in an argument about the family and the pair-bond which lies at the core of it. Essentially it is stating that the human being was not meant for sexual fidelity and it is time we recognized that fact.
The argument goes like this.
1) The behavior of the human species since the invention of agriculture is of no relevance. Since we began to accumulate property (beyond what we could carry on our backs and pack-animals) only with the advent of settled existence, and that only with agriculture, the history of the last 10,000 years reveals nothing of our true nature. It is a distortion caused by property. Property enforces the need to assure ourselves of the fatherhood of our children, and therefore the sexual exclusivity of our pair-bonds.
2) If you want to know about how we behaved sexually before agriculture, compare the human body to those of the other 4 great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and gibbons. The evidence, in the form of penis size and shape, external testicles, female ovulation – whether hidden or evident, shows that we are designed to be sexually promiscuous. The existence in humans of “sperm competition” means that we were and are promiscuous, and that males have fucked women in group situations forever. Sexual exclusivity is a fantasy, a lie we keep telling ourselves.
3) As we pass out of the agricultural epoch, sexual arrangements are starting to leave behind the mould imposed by the property-obsessed homo economicus of the previous era.
As the authors state, “despite centuries of religious and scientific propaganda, the basic illusions underpinning the supposed “naturalness” of the conventional nuclear family are clearly exhausted…we need to seek peace with the truths of human sexuality. Maybe this means improvising new familial configurations” (p.310)
That, in essence is the book. I have rendered it as logically as I could, and spared you the ranting tone and the irrelevant asides on the religious suppression of human sexuality.
To which I respond:
1) The whole thing is an argument against the concept of marital fidelity over the course of a lifetime, fair enough. But who is arguing for marital fidelity over the course of a lifetime? The anthropologists argue merely that the human pair-bond was an engine of our reproductive success, in the raising of children and the transmission of culture to them. So it is pointless to argue about the pair-bond with people who are not saying it was ever wholly exclusive or meant for life.
2) That leaves institutional religion. The Christian Church and Islam have both praised the institution of faithful marriage and repressed sexuality in the interests of family stability. If you had responsibility for the human species in your hands, over the course of centuries, would you argue for anything less? Would your religion make explicit allowance for group sex and seasonal orgies? Point me the way to one such and I might join. But I doubt it would last for centuries, as the sexually repressive ones have.
3) As to improvising new familial configurations, what do you think has been going on for the last fifty years? As soon as we could escape the bonds of one man or woman for life, we have done so. Though the results are not entirely in yet, there is little ground for total confidence that sexual liberation is possible where children are involved. I am not ready to join David Warren in wholly condemning the modern era, but the importance of the family to the welfare of children is a non-negotiable truth, and free-form boinking will always take second place to the requirements of child-rearing. Child-rearing is the twenty to twenty five year mortgage. And if marriage fails, it is always a tragedy, even if leads to better outcomes eventually for the couple engaged in it. How it affects the children is the crucial test, and we do not yet have confidence to say it carries no cost to them. It is a price they pay for their parents’ inability to love one another for a lifetime.
4) Societies are in competition. The improvising of familial configurations in which we have been engaged for fifty years is a novelty. There is no reason to believe the society which engages in it will always prevail against those which suppress sexuality in favour of everyone doing their duty, and out-breeding the pleasure-seeking improvisers of family configurations.
So the advocates of the pair-bond may, with Baronness Thatcher, say that the facts of life are conservative, even if humans were, are and remain a randy bunch of adulterers, group-sex devotees, and polymorphously perverse libertines.