Sex and the Myth of Monogamy

I have just read (1) a brief description of Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha’s book “Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins Of Modern Sexuality”. I haven’t read the book yet, but will do so in the next few weeks. The point is this: once agriculture started us down the road to the current iteration of civilization, the sexual process quickly became a control issue. And men co-opted the control. Rules all over the place favoring men in multiple and frequent sexual encounters while women were relegated to monogamy. Why? Well, like so many other issues, science chimed in (probably more like pseudoscience really, because there is no quantifiable data) and made the case for men spreading genes far and wide while women limited the distribution of their genes to get security.
This flies in the face of the sexual habits of every species of primate. Primates breed freely. Period. Statements like “Bonobos are Promiscuous” carry not only a description of to whom a given chimp will breed, but also a value judgment that implies that there is something wrong with promiscuity. Well folks, there isn’t anything at all intrinsically wrong with it. It violates CULTURAL norms in many societies, but it doesn’t violate biological norms. In fact it IS the norm, biologically speaking.
So you got to take your hats off to Daniel Quinn one more time: before the agricultural revolution we were primates living like other primates. Afterwards, we invented rules and gods (Gods if you prefer) to impose slavery on each other. Women enslaved to men and men enslaved to other men and cultures enslaved to other cultures. In many ways we would be much better off if we never learned to grow things, and stuck with hunting and gathering. Better for us, better for other species and better for the planet as a whole.
1. http://www.npr.org/templates/archives/archive.php?thingId=131728279
Image: blog.newearthmusichall.com