Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (7 page)

women, the narrative holds that sex is about the security—emotional and material—of the relationship, not the physical pleasure. Darwin agreed with this view. The “coy” female who “requires to be courted” is deeply embedded in his theory of sexual selection.

If women were as libidinous as men, we’re told, society itself would collapse. Lord Acton was only repeating what everyone knew in 1875 when he declared, “The majority of women, happily for them and for society, are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.” 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 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?

The Greek god Tiresias had a unique perspective on male and female sexual pleasure.

While still a young man, Tiresias came upon two snakes entwined in copulation. With his walking stick, he separated the amorous serpents and was suddenly transformed into a woman.

Seven years later, the female Tiresias was walking through the forest when she again interrupted two snakes in a private moment. Placing her staff between them, she completed the cycle and was transformed back into a man.

This unique breadth of experience led the first couple of the Greek pantheon, Zeus and Hera, to call upon Tiresias to resolve their long-running marital dispute: who enjoys sex more, men or women? Zeus was sure that women did, but Hera would hear none of it. Tiresias replied that not only did females enjoy sex more than males, they enjoyed it nine times more!

His response incensed Hera so much that she struck Tiresias blind. Feeling responsible for having dragged poor Tiresias into this mess, Zeus tried to make amends by giving him the gift of prophesy. It was from this state of blinded vision that Tiresias saw the terrible destiny of Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother.

Peter of Spain, author of one of the most widely read medical books of the thirteenth century, the
Thesaurus Pauperum,
was more diplomatic when confronted with the same question. His answer (published in
Quaestiones super Viaticum)
was that although it was true women experienced greater
quantity
of pleasure, men’s sexual pleasure was of higher
quality.
Peter’s book included ingredients for thirty-four aphrodisiacs, fifty-six prescriptions to enhance male libido, and advice for women wanting to avoid pregnancy. Perhaps it was his diplomacy, the birth-control advice, or his open-mindedness that led to one of history’s strange and tragic turns. In 1276, Peter of Spain was elected Pope John XXI, but he died just nine months later when the ceiling of his library suspiciously collapsed on him as he slept.

Why does any of this history matter? Why is it important that we correct widely held misconceptions about human sexual evolution?

Well, ask yourself what might change if everyone knew that women do (or, at least, can, in the right circumstances) enjoy sex as much as men, not to mention nine times more, as Tiresias claimed? What if Darwin was wrong about the sexuality of the human female—led astray by his Victorian bias? What if Victoria’s biggest secret was that men and women are
both
victims of false propaganda about our true sexual natures and
the war between the sexes
—still waged today—is a false-flag operation, a diversion from our common enemy?

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 expectation that romance and sexual attraction can last a lifetime of coupled togetherness despite much hard evidence to the contrary.”21

We build our most sacred relationships on the battleground where evolved appetites clash with the romantic mythology of monogamous marriage. As Andrew J. Cherlin recounts in
The
Marriage-Go-Round,
this unresolved conflict between what we are and what many wish we were results in “a great turbulence in American family life, a family flux, a coming and going of partners on a scale seen nowhere else.” Cherlin’s research shows that “[t]here are more partners in the personal lives of Americans than in the lives of people of any other Western country.”22

But we rarely dare to confront the contradiction at the heart of our mistaken ideal of marriage head-on. And if we do?

During a routine discussion of yet another long-married politician caught with his pants down, comedian/social critic Bill Maher asked the guests on his TV show to consider the unspoken reality underlying many of these situations: “When a man’s been married twenty years,” Maher said, “he doesn’t want to have sex, or his wife doesn’t want to have sex with him. Whatever it is.
What is the right answer?
I mean, I know he’s bad for cheating, but
what’s the right answer?
Is it—to just suck it up and live the rest of your life passionless, and imagine somebody else when you’re having sex with your wife the three days a year that you have sex?” After an extended, awkward silence, one of Maher’s panelists eventually suggested, “The right answer is to get out of the relationship…. Move on. I mean, you’re an adult.” Another agreed, noting, “Divorce is legal in this country.” The third, normally outspoken journalist P. J. O’Rourke, just looked down at his shoes and said nothing.

“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

Darwin’s sense of the
coy female
wasn’t based only on his Victorian assumptions. In addition to natural selection, he proposed a second mechanism for evolutionary change:
sexual selection.
The central premise of sexual selection is that in most mammals, the female has a much higher investment in offspring than does the male. She’s stuck with gestation, lactation, and extended nurturing of the young.

Because of this inequality in unavoidable sacrifice, Darwin reasoned, she is the more hesitant participant, needing to be convinced it’s a good idea—while the male, with his slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am approach to reproduction, is eager to do the convincing. Evolutionary psychology is founded on the belief that male and female approaches to mating have intrinsically conflicted agendas.

The selection of the winning bachelor typically involves male competition: rams slamming their heads together, peacocks dragging around colorful, predator-attracting tails, men bearing expensive gifts and vowing eternal love over candlelight. Darwin saw sexual selection as a struggle between males for sexual access to passive, fertile females who would submit to the victor. Given the competitive context his theories assume, he believed “promiscuous intercourse in a state of nature [to be] extremely improbable.” But at least one of Darwin’s contemporaries disagreed.

Lewis Henry Morgan

To white people, he was known as Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), a railroad lawyer with a fascination for scholarship and the ways in which societies organize themselves.24 The Seneca tribe of the Iroquois Nation adopted Morgan as an adult, giving him the name
Tayadaowuhkuh,
which means “bridging the gap.” At his home near Rochester, New York, Morgan spent his evenings studying and writing, trying to bring scientific rigor to understanding the intimate lives of people made distant by time or space. The only American scholar to have been cited by each of the other three intellectual giants of his century, Darwin, Freud, and Marx, many consider Morgan the most influential social scientist of his era and the father of American anthropology. Ironically, it may be Marx and Engels’s admiration that explains why Morgan’s work isn’t better known today. Though he was no Marxist, Morgan doubted important Darwinian assumptions concerning the centrality of sexual competition in the human past. This stance

was

enough

to

offend

some

of

Darwin’s

defenders—though not Darwin himself, who respected and admired Morgan. In fact, Morgan and his wife spent an evening with the Darwins during a trip to England. Years later, two of Darwin’s sons stayed with the Morgans at their home in upstate New York.

Morgan was especially interested in the evolution of family structure and overall social organization. Contradicting Darwinian theory, he hypothesized a far more promiscuous sexuality as having been typical of prehistoric times. “The husbands lived in polygyny [i.e., more than one wife], and the

wives in polyandry [i.e., more than one husband], which are seen to be as ancient as human society. Such a family was neither unnatural nor remarkable,” he wrote. “It would be difficult to show any other possible beginning of the family in the primitive period.” A few pages later Morgan concludes that “there seems to be no escape” from the conclusion that a

“state of promiscuous intercourse” was typical of prehistoric times, “although questioned by so eminent a writer as Mr.

Darwin.”25

Morgan’s argument that prehistoric societies practiced group marriage (also known as
the primal horde
or
omnigamy
—the latter term apparently coined by French author Charles Fourier) so influenced Darwin’s thinking that he admitted, “It seems certain that the habit of marriage has been gradually developed, and that almost promiscuous intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world.” With his characteristic courteous humility, Darwin agreed that there were “present day tribes” where “all the men and women in the tribe are husbands and wives to each other.” In deference to Morgan’s scholarship, Darwin continued, “Those who have most closely studied the subject, and whose judgment is worth much more than mine, believe that communal marriage was the original and universal form throughout the world….

The indirect evidence in favour of this belief is extremely strong….”26

Indeed it is. And the evidence—both direct and indirect—has grown much stronger than Darwin, or even Morgan, could have imagined.

But first, a word about a word.
Promiscuous
means different things to different people, so let’s define our terms. The Latin root is
miscere,
“to mix,” and that’s how we mean it. We don’t imply any
randomness
in mating, as choices and preferences still exert their influence. We looked for another term to use in this book, one without the derogatory sneer, but the synonyms are even worse:
sluttish, wanton, whorish,
fallen.