Sex At Dawn

Sex at Dawn challenges conventional views on sex by diving deep into our ancestors’ sexual history and the rise of monogamy, thus prompting us to rethink our understanding of what sex and relationships should really feel and be like.

The switch from our ancestors’ sexual “sharing is caring” mentality in their hunter-gatherer-tribes occurred once we started to settle down and farm our own food.

Ryan argues this was hurtful to two things:

Our diet Our sex lives

Before we’d just eat whatever we find, and thus naturally have a high variety of foods and nutrients. But once we started mass producing the same few things, we took a toll on our health.

Similarly, since hunter-gatherers didn’t settle, they didn’t own much, neither possessions, nor “people” in the form of long-term partners.

Now, for the first time in history, there was a difference between rich and poor.

Those who had more land, or a bigger farm, were more prosperous. The tendency to try and own as much as possible brought out greed and jealousy in humans.

Since the men did all the farming, the women lost their gatherer jobs, and were now stuck taking care of the children. It now became important for men to know “the children they own”, in order to pass on the prosperous life they had built to them.

The only way to make sure was to get a woman to stay with him, which ended up in public scrutiny of women who had sex with different partners, violence against women and, of course, marriage.

Simultaneously to the creation of marriage and the family, the notion arose that women’s libido is lower than men’s.

Because of men’s high testosterone levels and their (especially today) often competitive behavior around women, the message we receive in public and the media is that women are prudes and less hungry for sex.

That’s wrong.

Studies have shown that women’s libido is just as strong, and a lot more complex, than men’s.

When both hetero- and homosexual women and men were shown erotic videos while their arousal was measured by checking how much blood flowed to their genitals, all groups were aroused equally.

Women’s sexuality seems to be more fluid, however, as they were aroused by a much bigger variety of images, for example even monkeys having sex.

Interestingly, when asked to describe their arousal, the majority of the women in the study played it down. Further proof that our society encourages women to be less sexual and that the expectation is for them to be prudish.

Sadly, we’ve gotten to a point where a lot of women comply.