Continuing my notes on the book Mating in Captivity. Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, I made notes on one more book. This time it is about sex in human history.
The book was written by two authors, a married couple: Cacilda Jetha and Christopher Ryan.
Since Darwin, official science, religion, and cultural institutions have claimed that men and women evolved in families where property and protection were exchanged for female fertility and fidelity. The authors challenge that model.
In the book, the authors describe the forces that shaped the sexual behavior of our ancestors and why, to some degree, those same forces still shape us now.
- Humans do not descend from ape-like creatures. We are apes.
- Culture makes people believe that some things are naturally right while others are wrong.
- Figure out which social groups you belong to. Then begin separating yourself from the untested assumptions each of those groups accepts as truth. That is how you get closer to reality.
- Our ancestors maintained far more simultaneous, open sexual relationships than modern society can imagine.
“Those who have studied the subject closely, and whose judgment is worth much more than mine, believe that group marriage was the original and universal form throughout the world. The indirect evidence in favor of this supposition is extremely strong.” Darwin
- The bleak picture of human sexuality is false. Men did not evolve into naturally unfaithful creatures, and women did not become lying gold-diggers.
“The tiger didn’t go crazy, the tiger went tiger! You know when he was really crazy? When he was riding a unicycle in a fascist helmet in the circus arena!” Chris Rock on the circus tiger that attacked its trainer
- Humanity pays a price for denying its sexual nature. It pays in what E.O. Wilson called “the least tangible currency of human happiness” that we spend trying to deceive our natural tendencies and inclinations.
- We are built to be efficient animals, not happy ones.
- Men are firefighters. For them sex is like a fire, an emergency: they drop everything and can be ready in two minutes. Women are like fire itself: seductive, but igniting only under certain conditions.
- The mainstream model claims that sexual exclusivity is the foundation of the family, because throughout evolution it was supposedly the only way to guarantee paternity.
- If you believe standard evolutionary theory, our only purpose in life is to leave a genetic legacy. A woman who cheats threatens that purpose. A man risks raising offspring that are not his.
- It turned out that women suffer more from emotional infidelity, while men are more disturbed by sexual infidelity.
- Chimpanzees and bonobos are genetically closer relatives to us than gorillas, orangutans, monkeys, and other primates.
- Bonobos have sex to reduce tension, encourage food sharing, relieve stress during travel, and reaffirm friendly ties when reuniting after separation.
- The only permanent interest in primates is an interest in novelty and variation. In females, preference for a stranger has been observed more often than any other trait.
- Members of the Ache tribe in Paraguay say that if a woman and a man sleep in the same hut, they are married. But if one of them takes the hammock and goes to another hut, then they are no longer married. That is it. A distinctive kind of no-hard-feelings divorce initiated by either side.
- The most common complaint women have related to sex is that men are too quick and too direct. At the same time men are dissatisfied with how slowly women become aroused. If men and women evolved together as sexually monogamous pairs for millions of years, then why are we so incompatible?
- It is as if we sat down to dinner together for thousands upon thousands of years, but one half wolfed down all the food in a few minutes while the other was still setting the table and lighting the candles.
- Women are not the only primates that make loud sounds in the throes of passion.
- Loud cries during mating serve to attract males to a sexually receptive female during her fertile period. In this way she triggers sperm competition.
- Female vocalization during mating is associated with promiscuous sexual behavior, not with monogamy.
- Men prefer the body scent of a woman when she is near ovulation. Women who are closer to peak fertility are more inclined toward provocative behavior: they wear more jewelry, use more cosmetics, go out more often, seek casual sexual encounters more often, and are less likely to use condoms with new lovers.
- A woman’s orgasm changes the acidity of the vaginal environment. These changes apparently help the reproductive cells of the lucky man who brought her to orgasm.
- The male needs a long period of rest after orgasm, when he no longer wants sex. By this move he leaves the stage, freeing space for other males, while the female wants and is able to continue sexual activity far longer than was required for the first male’s orgasm.
- Children born to parents with different immune systems are more likely to inherit broader, more resilient immune responses.
- One of the persistent mysteries of human sexuality is why heterosexual men, according to surveys, usually report more sexual contacts and partners than heterosexual women. It is a mathematical paradox.
- When women believed they could not lie, they reported numbers of partners 70% higher.
- Sexologist Lisa Diamond studied fluctuations in female desire for more than ten years. In her book Sexual Fluidity she says women are more often attracted to particular people than to those people’s membership in a particular sex.
- Married men have lower testosterone levels than single men of the same age, and fathers of small children have lower levels still. Married men who have affairs, however, have higher testosterone than those who do not.
- Researcher James Roney and his colleagues found that a short conversation with an attractive woman can raise a man’s blood testosterone level by an average of 14%.
- One of the few things that reliably restores a man’s reduced testosterone level is a new lover.
- How many families have been destroyed because middle-aged men mistakenly took the surge of vitality caused by a new sexual partner for love and emotional closeness?
- Once the first rush of novelty fades, men find themselves face to face with reality again: strong and lasting relationships are built through mutual respect, admiration, shared interests, things to talk about, a sense of humor, and similar qualities. A marriage built on sexual passion alone is no stronger than a house built on winter ice.
- Lie, cheat, and try not to get caught. This is the most common option, but perhaps also the worst one. You will have to lie to your life partner. Deceive the mother of your children, the person with whom you planned to grow old. Are you really that kind of person? The man she expected to live her whole life with?
- Why does society consider it more moral to break up a marriage, go through a divorce, traumatize children, possibly for life, all in order to have sex with someone who will become just as boring as your first love once did?
- If you trust a person, maybe you can try to accept even what you do not understand.
- Passionate toe-curling sex may be an important part of a marital union, but it is a deep mistake to believe it is the foundation of such a union in the long term.
“The prerequisite for a good marriage, in my view, is the license to be unfaithful.” Carl Jung, from a letter to Freud, January 30, 1910
“Love is ideal, marriage is real. The confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe