Sex at Dawn

The shift to agriculture, wrote author Jared Diamond, is a “catastrophe from which we have never recovered.”6 (Location 362)

Clearly, the biggest loser (aside from slaves, perhaps) in the agricultural revolution was the human female, who went from occupying a central, respected role in foraging societies to becoming another possession for a man to earn and defend, along with his house, slaves, and livestock. (Location 427)

Sigmund Freud got it right when he observed that “civilization” is built largely on erotic energy that has been blocked, concentrated, accumulated, and redirected. (Location 612)

“Children—(if it Please God) (Location 659)

Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one,—object to be loved and played with.—Better than a dog anyhow…female chit-chat…but terrible loss of time.” (Location 659)

“Freedom to go where one liked—choice of Society & little of it…. Not forced to visit relatives & to bend in every trifle…fatness & idleness—Anxiety & responsibility…. Perhaps my wife wont [sic] like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool.”12 (Location 662)

understandably eager to make sense of their good fortune and justify the suffering of the poor as an unavoidable fact of life. (Location 693)

One of the chronic mistakes made by would-be social Darwinists is to assume that evolution is a process by which human beings or societies become better.17 It is not. (Location 740)

And yet, despite repeated assurances that women aren’t particularly sexual creatures, in cultures around the world men have gone to extraordinary lengths to control female libido: female genital mutilation, head-to-toe chadors, medieval witch burnings, chastity belts, suffocating corsets, muttered insults about “insatiable” whores, pathologizing, paternalistic medical diagnoses of nymphomania or hysteria, the debilitating scorn heaped on any female who chooses (Location 796)

to be generous with her sexuality…all parts of a worldwide campaign to keep the supposedly low-key female libido under control. Why the electrified high-security razor-wire fence to contain a kitty-cat? (Location 800)

We’re being misled and misinformed by an unfounded yet constantly repeated mantra about the naturalness of wedded bliss, female sexual reticence, and happily-ever-after sexual monogamy—a narrative pitting man against woman in a tragic tango of unrealistic expectations, snowballing frustration, and crushing disappointment. Living under this tyranny of two, as author and media critic Laura Kipnis puts it, we carry the weight of “modern love’s central anxiety,” namely, “the (Location 825)

“Move on?” Really? Is abandonment of one’s family the “adult” option for dealing with the inherent conflict between socially sanctioned romantic ideals and the inconvenient truths of sexual passion?23 (Location 844)

Erotic exchange played an important role in linking families from distant villages in a durable web of certain aid in times of crisis. Though the harsh ecology of the Arctic dictated a much lower population density than the Amazon or even the Kalahari Desert, extra-pair sexual interaction helped cement bonds that offered the same (Location 2135)

It’s not just thy neighbor’s wife who can lead a man astray, but thine own as well. A well-known moral guide of the Middle Ages, the Speculum Doctrinale (Mirror of Doctrine), written by Vincent of Beauvais, declared, “A man who loves his wife very much is an adulterer. Any love for someone else’s wife, or too much love for one’s own, is shameful.” The author went on to advise, “The upright man should love his wife with his judgment, not his affections.” (Location 2139)

Motivated by the wonders of industrialization, many doctors had sought a way to mechanize the delivery of their treatment. American ingenuity would mass-produce orgasms for women who were denied them in their “properly chaste,” sexually deprived lives: the first vibrators were invented by these enterprising physicians. Late nineteenth–and early twentieth–century medical tinkerers designed all sorts of devices to provoke the necessary nervous paroxysms in their patients. Some were diesel powered; others ran on steam, like little locomotives that could. Some were huge contraptions hanging from the rafters on chains and pulleys, like engine blocks at an auto shop. Others sported pistons thrusting dildos through holes in tables or involved high-pressure water directed at the patient’s genitalia like a fire brigade called in to douse the consuming flames of female passion. And all the while, the good doctors never publicly admitted that what they were doing was more sex than medicine. (Location 4187)