Next book: Sex At Dawn

The whole purpose of this blog, here is to generate some thought experiments that I can put to use in stories that I write. I'm done with Schwartz, for now, the end of his book dissolved into speculation, some of which has been disproved since the book was published 10 years ago.

So I just started "Sex at Dawn" by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethé. Basically it's a discussion of how our cultural sexual imperatives are fundamentally at odds with our biological sexual imperatives, and this leads to some serious frustrations, and in many cases out-and-out war.

From page 14, comparing our cultural set-up since the advent of agriculture: "Land could now be possessed, owned, and passed down the generations. Food that had been hunted and gathered now how to be sowed, tended, harvested, stored, defended, bought and sold. Fences, walls, and irrigation systems had to be built and reinforced; armies to defend it all had to be raised, fed and controlled. Because of private property, for the first time in the history of our species, paternity became a crucial concern." (emphasis theirs)

This is a thought-provoking point of view. This most recent culture that we used to have seemed to be based on the idea of unity within the group. All group members were part of the tribe, and shared everything. To hoard or declare personal property was wrong, wrong, wrong, and perhaps unforgivable. Someone who did not consider themselves unified with the tribe was a negative and dangerous person, who may be completely ostracized.

It's important to note that this is not necessarily where we come from, before that we had more of a harem situation, with one alpha male having dominion over many female sexual partners and male slaves. It is, however, where we currently seem to rest biologically. Despite our recent change to want to believe that personal property, which includes our sexual partners, cannot be taken away from us, it's blatantly obvious that this system doesn't fit. Monogamy is one of the most difficult states to maintain for the human, and even if it is maintained with regard to contact with other sexual partners, it is almost never maintained when we bring pornography into the mix.