On the Shelf: Sex at Dawn

Why monogamy goes against our nature – from testicle size to our slutty ancestors, a new book explains what human history teaches us about sex and couples.

Sex at Dawn, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, has just hit the shelves in the US and UK but it has already generated a lot of debate among reviewers and bloggers alike on both sides of the pond.

Product Description

Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. Mainstream science – as well as religious and cultural institutions – has maintained that men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity. But this narrative is collapsing. Fewer and fewer couples are getting married, and divorce rates keep climbing as adultery and flagging libido drag down even seemingly solid marriages.

How can reality be reconciled with the accepted narrative? It can't be, according to self-proclaimed “renegade thinkers” Ryan and Jethá. While debunking almost everything we "know" about sex, they offer a bold alternative explanation in this provocative book.

Ryan and Jethá's central contention is that human beings evolved in egalitarian groups that shared food, child care, and, often, sexual partners. Weaving together convergent, frequently overlooked evidence from anthropology, archaeology, primatology, anatomy, and psychosexuality, the authors show how far from human nature monogamy really is. Human beings everywhere and in every era have confronted the same familiar, intimate situations in surprisingly different ways. 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.

Ryan and Jethá show how our promiscuous past haunts our struggles over monogamy, sexual orientation, and family dynamics. They explore why long-term fidelity can be so difficult for so many; why sexual passion tends to fade even as love deepens; why many middle-aged men risk everything for transient affairs with younger women; why homosexuality persists in the face of standard evolutionary logic; and what the human body reveals about the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality.

Sex at Dawn unapologetically upends unwarranted assumptions and unfounded conclusions while offering a revolutionary understanding of why we live and love as we do.

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OK, so that’s the hype – what’s the real story? In a terrific and far-reaching interview of author Ryan, Thomas Rogers challenges many of the book’s conclusions. His interview appears in the Salon. I have included it in full below, or read it directly at the Salon’s website.

By Thomas Rogers
For the Salon

According to Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, the authors of the new book "Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality," the state of the American marriage is awfully grim. We have a stratospheric divorce rate and a surge of single parents. Couples who stay together are often trapped in sexless, passionless unions. An entire industry — from couples therapy to sex supplements — has emerged to help people "rekindle the spark" without straying from the confines of monogamy.

But Ryan and Jethá also have a theory for what's causing this misery: From a biological perspective, men and women simply aren't meant to be in lifelong monogamous unions. In "Sex at Dawn," which uses evidence gathered from human physiology, archaeology, primate biology and anthropological studies of pre-agricultural tribes from around the world, they argue that monogamy and the nuclear family are more recent inventions than most of us would expect — and far less natural than we've come to believe.

Before the advent of agriculture, they argue, prehistoric humans lived in a much less sexually possessive culture, without the kind of lifelong coupling that currently exists in most countries. They also point to the bonobos, our closest relatives, who live in egalitarian and peaceful groups and have astronomical rates of sexual interaction, as evidence of our natural inclinations. While Ryan and Jethá's book (Ryan is a psychologist, and Jethá a practicing psychiatrist, in Spain) is often a bit scattered and hard to follow, its provocative argument is also impossible to dismiss.

Salon spoke to Ryan over the phone from Barcelona about the problem with American marriages, why gay men understand relationships better than straight men, and the hidden meaning of human testicle size.

You paint a bleak picture of the state of marriage in the West, particularly in the United States. What makes it so bad?

Marriage in the West isn’t doing very well because it’s in direct confrontation with the evolved reality of our species. What we argue in the book is that the best way to increase marital stability, which in the modern world is an important part of social stability, is to develop a more tolerant and realistic understanding of human sexuality and how human sexuality is being distorted by our modern conception of marriage. Certainly growing up in the '70s and '80s there were very few kids I knew whose parents weren’t divorced at least once. The economic, emotional, psychological cost of fractured relationships is a major problem in American society — with single mothers and single-parent families.

You argue that much of this misery stems from changes that occurred when humans developed agriculture, around 8000 B.C. What happened?

The advent of agriculture changed everything about human society, from sexuality to politics to economics to health to diet to exercise patterns to work-versus-rest patterns. It introduced the notion of property into sexuality. Property wasn’t a very important consideration when people were living in small, foraging groups where most things were shared, including food, childcare, shelter and defense. It makes perfect sense that sexuality would also be shared — why wouldn’t it be when paternity wasn’t an issue?

When you have agriculture, men started to worry about whether or not certain children were theirs biologically, because they wanted to leave their accumulated property to their own child. At that point, people also made a very clear connection between sexual behavior and birth. Lots of people didn't have a very clear understanding of the cause and effect of sex and birth, but when you have domesticated animals living side by side with people, they start to notice that the characteristics of a certain male that has mated with a certain female show up in the offspring.

One of the central ideas of much biological and genetic theory is that animals will expend more energy protecting those they’re genetically related to — siblings, parents, offspring — as opposed to those they're not related to. Why wouldn't that apply to humans?

There are many, many exceptions to that rule in nature. One of the exceptions we talk about in the book are the vampire bats that share blood with each other. They go out and they suck the blood at night and then they come back to the cave and the bats that didn’t get any blood will receive blood from other bats. They share, and that has nothing to do with genetic connection. And in terms of animals that are much more closely related to humans, when you look at bonobos and their promiscuous interaction, it’s virtually impossible for a male to know which of his offspring are related to him biologically. So to say that there’s this inherent concern with paternity within our species, I just don’t see evidence for that.

Does this mean that humans didn't form couples before the advent of agriculture?

Because human groups at the time knew each other so well and spent their lives together and were all interrelated and depended upon each other for everything, they really knew each other much better than most of us know our sexual partners today. We don’t argue that people didn’t form very special relationships — you can see this even in chimps and bonobos and other primates, but that bond doesn’t necessarily extend to sexual exclusivity. People have said that we’re arguing against love — but we're just saying that this insistence that love and sex always go together is erroneous.

Given that these people have been dead for thousands of years, and we don't have a fossil record of sexual activity, isn't this hard to prove?

The evidence comes from several different areas. We look at pre-agricultural people who have been studied today and horticultural people who have been studied by anthropologists. There’s a fair amount of information about the sexuality of people who haven’t been deeply exposed to Western influence. There are accounts from travelers and colonialists, first-contact accounts from historical records, that we rely on. But you can also extract a great deal of information from the human body itself — from the design of the penis to the volume of the testicles to the sperm-producing potential of the testicular tissue and the way we have sex.

What does our testicle size tell us about the way we have sex?

Our testicles aren’t as big as those of chimps and bonobos, but our ejaculation is about four times as big in terms of volume. The theory is that when males compete on the level of the sperm cell, they develop much larger testicles, because in promiscuous animals, the sperm of the different males is competing with the sperm of other males to get to be the first to the egg. And the fact that our testicles are not as small relative to our body as the monogamous gibbon or gorillas reinforces the idea that we have been non-monogamous for a long time.

Plus the design of our penis strongly suggests that it evolved to create a vacuum in the female reproductive system, thereby pulling out the semen of anyone who was there previously. There are all kinds of indications of sperm competition in the human male. And one of the things that we suggest in the book that no one else has suggested is that because the testicles are genetically the part of the body that adapts fastest to environmental pressure, it’s quite possible that our testicles are much smaller than they were as recently as fifteen or twenty thousand years ago, to reflect the historical cultural imposition of monogamy. And of course we all know that sperm count is dropping precipitously even as we speak.

But that drop in sperm count has been reported over the last few decades, and I don't think American culture has becoming less sexualized since the 1950s — I think the opposite is true.

Well, it’s hard to say because it’s only been measured for about the last 100 years. So it’s very difficult to know what was happening before that. But yeah, it does seem to be plummeting faster and faster, and there are indications that it has a lot to do with industrial contaminants in the environment, and antibiotics and growth hormones in the food supply and so on.

But I think there’s this bifurcation of American culture where you’ve got the liberalization on one side with states passing gay marriage, but then you have other states veering off in the other direction. I think the Bill Clinton and Lewinsky situation could have been such a great opportunity for the culture to grow up instead of wasting so much time and money and political capital in this investigation of a victimless crime. If the Clintons had gone on their "60 Minutes" interview and just said, "You know what, our sex life is nobody’s business but ours," I think the country would have been so much better off.

I think from a cultural standpoint the idea of strict monogamy has far less currency within the gay male world than it does within the straight world. I’m a gay man, and I think probably about half the gay male couples I know are in open relationships. Why do you think that is?

First of all, they’re both men, so they both know what it’s like to be a man. They both know from experience that love and sex are two very different things, and it seems that for women the experience of sexuality is much more embedded in narrative, in emotion, in emotional intimacy. But also it’s really hard to judge what women would be like if they hadn’t been persecuted for the last five or six thousand or ten thousand years for any hint of infidelity.

Gay men in the United States have also by definition gone through a process of self-examination. The whole process of coming out is a process of integrating sexuality into your life in a way that takes courage, and it’s not something that happens naturally. I think gay people have an advantage because they’ve already gone through a process of saying: "Look, my sexuality is what it is. I’m not ashamed of it. I’m going to live openly and in accord with it." That puts them on a different level than most heterosexual people who are able to pass along and pretend that they fit into the normal parameters.

It seems like many Americans, in particular, have a very strong notion that a marriage must remain monogamous at all costs — and that any infidelity is grounds for divorce. In other countries, like France, for example, that doesn't seem to be the case.

I’ve been living off and on for almost 20 years here in Barcelona, and from outside, the United States looks very adolescent, in a positive and negative sense. There's its adolescent energy — its idealism — but there’s also an immaturity and intolerance toward the ambiguity of life and the complexity of relationships. The American sense of relationships and sexuality tends to be very informed by Hollywood: It’s all about the love story. But the love story ends at the wedding and doesn't go into the 40 years that comes after that.

So if monogamous marriage isn't the right arrangement for us, what is?

We’re not really arguing for any particular arrangement. We don’t even really know what to do with this information ourselves. What we’re trying to do in the book is give people a more accurate sense of where we came from, why we are the way we are, and why certain aspects of life feel like a bad fit. I think a lot of people make a commitment when they’re in love, which is a sort of a delusional state that lasts a couple of years at most. I think it was Goethe who said that love is an unreal thing, and marriage is a real thing, and any confusion of the real with the unreal always leads to disaster.

All we’re really hoping for is to encourage more tolerance and more open discussion between men and women about sexuality and about marriage, and to come to see that marriage isn’t about sex. It's about things that are much deeper and more lasting than sex, especially if you have children. And the American insistence on mixing love and sex and expecting passion to last forever is leading to great suffering that we think is tragic and unnecessary.

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Editorial Reviews

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“The writing is engaging, the material covered is appropriate, and really it is the best non-technical summary I have read of the relevant issues.” (Todd K. Shackelford, Ph.D., professor of psychology, Florida Atlantic University, and editor of Evolutionary Psychology)

“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)

“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)

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I applaud the authors for developing such challenging theories, and for doing so through real, scientific research. I also cheer the Q & A interview that did a lot to provide in depth understanding to those theories. Whether you agree or disagree with the book’s authors, it’s an important book to read for anyone interested in human sexuality, or behavior.

— The Curator

On the Shelf...

New in book stores is “Whip Smart,” a fascinating look into the S&M world penned by Melissa Febos who spent four years as a dominatrix while going to college.

Below is information about the book, about Ms. Febos, an excerpt from the book and published reviews.

Product Description

While a college student at The New School, Melissa Febos spent four years working as a dominatrix in a midtown dungeon. In poetic, nuanced prose she charts how unchecked risk-taking eventually gave way to a course of self-destruction. But as she recounts crossing over the very boundaries that she set for her own safety, she never plays the victim. In fact, the glory of this memoir is Melissa's ability to illuminate the strange and powerful truths that she learned as she found her way out of a hell of her own making.

About the Author

Melissa Febos is co-curator and host of the Mixer Reading and Music Series, she holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and teaches at SUNY Purchase College and The Gotham Writers’ Workshop.

Excerpt

Part One

1

STEVE KNEW TO BE KNEELING when I walked into the Red Room, his torso bent over his knees, forehead resting on the rug. He knew to be clean. He knew to undress, and to fold his clothes neatly behind the door, so that I walked into an immaculate room, nothing between me and the softly folded fist of his body but anticipation. While desire rose off Steve in fumes, steeping the whole room in its cloying vapor, I reveled in its absence. Just minutes before entering the Red Room, I adjusted my garters before the dressing room mirror, wrapped my fingers in electrical tape, and felt that happy absence, whose vacancy made room for some other, unnamed thing to fill me. I felt it already, the way you can smell autumn coming. Steve was into heavy flogging, and the tape protected the clefts between my index and middle fingers where I would soon clench a flogger handle in each hand.

I had cued the music—which piped from the main office into all twelve rooms of the dungeon—to begin just a few seconds before I walked into the Red Room. The music I sessioned to was all the same; while I preferred angrier music for meaner sessions, all that really mattered was the bass line. I didn’t need a plan to have a good session; I needed a pulse.

If that great red-walled room was a womb, I was its heart. I was the moving center, my will a muscular force. There was nowhere I could go, it seemed, that the cushion of my client’s longing wouldn’t support me. It happened to be 10:45 in the morning, but the only time that mattered in that room was indicated on the wall-mounted timer that I turned a full circle when I walked in. There was only ever one hour in the dungeon.

As I closed the door behind me, the pale stripe of my body shifting on the mirrored walls, I dropped my supply box on the floor by the door. Steve flinched at the sound, as I’d intended. I let my heels fall heavy against the wood floor on my way to a row of hooks lining the wall. Retrieving a smooth length of rope, I draped it around my shoulders. Then, finding Steve’s favorite floggers, I held one in each hand, letting their thick tassels swing against my legs as I approached him, knowing the gentle slap of leather against my legs would agitate him. Standing over his curled body from behind, I dropped a flogger to the floor on either side of him and bent over so that only the tips of my hair, and my breath, touched him.

"Get the fuck up," I whispered.

"Yes, Mistress," he exhaled, and hurried to his feet, head still bowed toward his chest. Steve also knew that looking at me was a privilege he had to earn. Pulling his hands behind his back, I slid the rope off my shoulders and looped it around his wrists. With a few quick loops and a single knot, I securely bound his arms from wrists to shoulders. I paused then, giving him a few moments to absorb the warmth of my body so close behind him, and the embrace of the rope, which I knew would only feel tighter as our hour progressed. There were clients I cowed with words, but with Steve his own anticipation was enough to wilt him into submission; I just had to pause and let it accumulate. Slowly dragging the tip of my finger from the base of his spine to the hard vertebral knuckle at the base of his neck, I watched a shudder follow my touch up his body. Pausing again, I let my fingertip rest on him, and knew how the heat of my touch rippled out across his body. No job, indeed, no exercise I’ve ever done, has been so coldly empathic as this one. I grabbed a handful of hair from the back of Steve’s head and pulled hard. Steve yelped, and sank jerkily to his knees. I stepped around in front of him, keeping my handful of hair so that when I crouched down to face him, his head was thrust back to face the ceiling, eyes wide and wild. His mouth trembled with short breaths, lips parted. Pressing a finger against his chin, I gave his hair an extra tug to open his mouth wider.

"Thirsty, Steve?" I asked. He knew I alluded to the golden shower I would end the session with, if he was good. Steve was always good. Between now and then, however, I would tan his ass with those leather tails until he cried for mercy.

Who pays to get peed on before their breakfast has been digested? It’s a logical question, and one I’ve answered after nearly every explanation of my working hours. The day shift began at 10:30 A.M. on weekdays and ended at 5:30 P.M. Often I would arrive at the dungeon at 10:20 and already have a client waiting for me. It didn’t take long to figure out that most of the patrons of the dungeon were not, as I had originally suspected, social outcasts who spent their time in basement apartments fondling pet snakes and watching pornography. They were seemingly normal. The majority of them were married fathers, and they were nearly all professionally successful. My client base consisted of stockbrokers, lawyers, doctors, rabbis, grandpas, bus drivers, restauranteurs, and retirees. Getting peed on, spanked, sodomized, or diapered was less often a delicacy than a basic provision to these men. And while the need for it was compulsive, it was also routine; it was an itch that they had been compulsively scratching for many years, and it did not require an atmosphere of nighttime, intoxication, or great fanfare. The day-shift crowd scheduled their whippings the way they scheduled business luncheons: out of necessity and convenience. En route to the dungeon they dropped off the dry cleaning, or their wives at Macy’s. Just as the cafés all over midtown Manhattan had their lunch rushes, so did we.

After Steve’s thirst had been quenched and he’d showered and dressed, we exchanged the usual pleasantries: I asked after his wife, and he tipped me a crisp fifty-dollar bill. Leaning my head out the door of the Red Room, I called, "Walking out!"—our practice of warning the occupants of nearby rooms to stay put. Clients could never meet in the halls of the dungeon. Then I led Steve down the opulent passageway to the magnetically locked chamber leading to the elevator.

"I’ll see you on Friday," I said.

"Thank you, Justine." Steve smiled warmly and adjusted his tie. Before I had even heard the click of the door’s lock, I pulled my hair into a bun, kicked off my heels, and headed back to clean the Red Room. I had an exam the next morning to study for.

Excerpted from Whip Smart by Melissa Febos.

Copyright © 2010 by Melissa Febos.
Published in 2010 by Thomas Dunne Books.

From Publishers Weekly

Febos's candid, hard-slogging debut about her four years working as a dominatrix at a midtown Manhattan dungeon cuts a sharp line between prurience and feminist manifesto. Having grown up on Cape Cod, Mass., then dropped out of high school before moving to New York City and enrolling in the New School in the fall of 1999, Febos slipped into drug use and needed a way to finance it. An attractive law-school graduate neighbor in her Brooklyn apartment building mentioned that she worked as a domme, and Febos decided to give it a go. She spanked grown men, professionals, fathers, and rabbis, sometimes inserted enemas, sodomized them with dildos, and otherwise verbally humiliated them, all for $75 an hour, plus tips. At first, Febos managed the grueling, unsavory work while high on heroin and cocaine, and gained a tremendous sense of confidence, even invincibility at being able to justify her livelihood as one of the few well-paid acting gigs in this city. In time, she also became addicted to her job; she eventually joined AA to help get clean of drugs, but kicking her addiction to sadomasochism was harder, and in this emotionally stark, excoriating work, Febos mines the darkest, most troubling aspects of human interaction. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Other Reviews

"All memoirs are an attempt to follow a trail of breadcrumbs home, yet WHIP SMART steps off the path, into the wooded shadows, and names that part of ourselves that could linger there forever. Melissa Febos masterfully brings us into these unexpected, unsettling places, the least of which are the dungeons she so vividly – briefly – occupies. WHIP SMART is a wild, bright-eyed, ride home."
— Nick Flynn, New York Times bestselling author of Another Bullshit Night In Suck City"

“WHIP SMART is remarkably honest, brave and provocative about growing up: the pleasures and perils of being visible, the temptations of being numb, and the weird kick of being desired.”
— Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone critic, and NY Times bestselling author of LOVE IS A MIX TAPE

“Mesmerizing. A brave, darkly wild and powerful memoir, Melissa Febos's fearless journey through drugs and dungeons into the uncharted territory of true intimacy will shock, inspire, and leave you breathless. Don’t even think about resisting."
— Rachel Resnick, author LOVE JUNKIE

“Melissa Febos takes us by the hand and leads us into a curious, disturbing, and funny world of a dominatrix, and she does so with often startlingly beautiful, expansive prose. That would be engaging enough. But what's even more gripping is Febos' fierce intelligence as she examines herself inside it. A must read for anyone interested in enlarging his or her understanding of sexual politics.”
— Kerry Cohen, author of LOOSE GIRL

"Melissa Febos writes with lacerating wit and insight into the world of the professional dominatrix, saving the sharpest sting for herself. An unsparing, deep, and dazzling read.
— Janice Erlbaum, author of GIRLBOMB and HAVE YOU FOUND HER

Whip Smart is widely available in book stores and onling, including at Amazon, as well as across the pond. It is also available for digital download at Amazon for its Kindle e-reader. You can also check out Ms. Febos’ website, which also links to her blog. You can also follow her on Twitter.

— The Curator