I discovered Sex at Dawn on Twitter—where the cyber-hunter/gatherers meet and feast on each other’s tweets—thanks to Bonobo Handshake author Vanessa Woods (a previous guest on The Dr. Susan Block Show). It’s appropriate that our kissin’ cousins the bonobos led me, swinging from Twitter tree to tree, to Sex at Dawn. In fact, the bonobos themselves, as well as the Bonobo Way of peace through pleasure, all but embody Ryan and Jethá’s concept of a prehistoric human forager community where “fierce egalitarianism” once ruled, war was virtually unknown, paternity was not an issue and possessiveness was not a problem—after all, what is there to possess when you’re always on the move and U-hauls haven’t been invented?
Most otherwise topnotch evolutionary psychologists, primatologists and anthropologists—like Drs. Helen Fisher, David Buss, Frans de Waal, Owen Lovejoy, Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker, Robert Wright and such notables—come up with flip, vague or convoluted ways to explain away unpopular evidence. They seem to be trying to squeeze the square peg of monogamy into the round hole of humanity. Ryan and Jethá have chosen a more well-rounded term to characterize the essence of human sexuality as practiced by our prehistoric progenitors: promiscuity.
That’s a loaded word in common parlance, but when Ryan and Jethá say “promiscuous,” they don’t mean reckless, uncaring, libertine screwing around. Rather they impart the sense of its Latin root, “miscere,” which means “to mix,” implying that our ancestors enjoyed what biologist Alan F. Dickson called “multi-male/multi-female mating systems,” involving ongoing erotic, caring relationships with a mix of selected members of their close-knit tribe. I imagine this promiscuity could take many different forms; perhaps one approach might involve serial romances with three or four partners at any given time, erotic skin-to-skin encounters with several others and an orgy around the fire every Saturday night. Sound like fun to you?
More modern fantasies about communal begetting and parenting of children being the norm before "civilization" and the rise of the nuclear family. Where is the evidence that primitive tribes weren't patriarchal?
The apparent reasoning regarding egalitarianism:
Patriarchy is evil. Patriarchy was invented to protect property, and was created in conjunction with the development of agriculture..
Agriculture --> Patriarchy. (This claim is either assumed by the anarcho-primitivists, or is established through circular reasoning.)
Lack of agriculture --> No patriarchy.
This is the fallacy of affirming the consequent.
Promiscuity being the norm of early tribal societies? This is based on a host of assumptions, especially the what a "primitive" or early human society knew and didn't know.
As for the claim that promiscuity is "natural" -- this of course assumes a materialist conception of [human] nature that denies the possibility of restraint for the sake of a good perceived to be more important than sex. The sexual appetite is not ordered to any one object, but can be stimulated by more than one object of the senses. But that does not mean that it should not be governed in accordance with reason. Once again pseudo-science is employed to defend progressive mores.
More:
Interview with the authors (caution: Susan Block is a sex therapist and her website reflects her "job" -- definitely NSFW and definitely a possible occasion of sin -- so I've decided not to post the url). Here is the audio file.
Salon
Newsweek
Psychology Today (more)
A short summary - Molly Knefel
No comments:
Post a Comment