Christopher Ryan - Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality

One muggy afternoon in 1988, some local men were selling peanuts at the entrance to the botanical gardens in Penang, Malaysia. Id come with my girlfriend, Ana, to walk off a big lunch. Sensing our confusion, the men explained that the peanuts werent for us, but to feed irresistibly cute baby monkeys like those we hadnt yet noticed rolling around on the grass nearby. We bought a few bags.

We soon came to a little guy hanging by his tail right over the path. His oh-so-human eyes focused imploringly on the bag of nuts in Anas hand. We were standing there cooing like teenage girls in a kitten shop when the underbrush exploded in a sudden simian strike. A full-grown monkey flashed past me, bounced off Ana, and was gonealong with the nuts. Anas hand was bleeding where hed scratched her. We were stunned, trembling, silent. Thered been no time to scream.

After a few minutes, when the adrenaline had finally begun to ebb, my fear curdled into loathing. I felt betrayed in a way I never had before. Along with our nuts went precious assumptions about the purity of nature, of evil as a uniquely human affliction. A line had been crossed. I wasnt just angry; I was philosophically offended.

I felt something changing inside me. My chest seemed to swell, my shoulders to broaden. My arms felt stronger; my eyesight sharpened. I felt like Popeye after a can of spinach. I glared into the underbrush like the heavyweight primate I now knew myself to be. Id take no more abuse from these lightweights.

Id been traveling in Asia long enough to know that monkeys there are nothing like their trombone-playing, tambourine-banging cousins Id seen on TV as a kid. Free-living Asian primates possess a characteristic I found shocking and confusing the first time I saw it: self-respect. If you make the mistake of holding the gaze of a street monkey in India, Nepal, or Malaysia, youll find youre facing a belligerently intelligent creature whose expression says, with a Robert DeNirolike scowl, What the hell are you looking at? You wanna piece of me? Forget about putting one of these guys in a little red vest.

It wasnt long before we came to another imploring, furry face hanging upside down from a tree in the middle of a clearing. Ana was ready to forgive and forget. Though I was fully hardened against cuteness of any kind, I agreed to give her the remaining bag of nuts. We seemed safely distant from underbrush from which an ambush could be launched. But as I pulled the bag out of my sweat-soaked pocket, its cellophane rustle must have rung through the jungle like a clanging dinner bell.

In a heartbeat, a large, arrogant-looking brute appeared at the edge of the clearing, about twenty yards away. He gazed at us, considering the situation, sizing me up. His exaggerated yawn seemed calculated to dismiss and threaten me simultaneously: a long, slow display of his fangs. Determined to fill any power vacuum without delay, I picked up a small branch and tossed it casually in his direction, making the point that these nuts were definitely not for him and that I was not to be trifled with. He watched the branch land a few feet in front of him, not moving a muscle. Then his forehead briefly crinkled in eerily emotional thought, as if Id hurt his feelings. He looked up at me, straight into my eyes. His expression held no hint of fear, respect, or humor.

As if shot from a cannon, he leapt over the branch Id tossed, long yellow dagger fangs bared, shrieking, charging straight at me.

Caught between the attacking beast and my terrified girlfriend, I understood for the first time what it would really mean to have a monkey on your back. I felt something snap in my mind. I lost it. In movement quicker than thought, my arms flew open, my legs flexed into a wrestlers crouch, and my own coffee-stained, orthodontia-corrected teeth were bared with a wild shriek. I was helplessly launched into a hopping-mad, saliva-spraying dominance display of my own.

I was as surprised as he was. He pulled up and stared at me for a second or two before slowly backing away. This time, though, Im pretty sure I saw a hint of laughter in his eyes.

Above nature? Not a chance. Take it from Mr. Allnut.

Another Well-Intentioned Inquisition

Forget what youve heard about human beings having descended from the apes. We didnt descend from apes. We are apes. Metaphorically and factually, Homo sapiens is one of the five surviving species of great apes, along with chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans (gibbons are considered a lesser ape). We shared a common ancestor with two of these apesbonobos and chimpsjust five million years ago.1 Thats the day before yesterday in evolutionary terms. The fine print distinguishing humans from the other great apes is regarded as wholly artificial by most primatologists these days.2

If were above nature, its only in the sense that a shaky-legged surfer is above the ocean. Even if we never slip (and we all do), our inner nature can pull us under at any moment. Those of us raised in the West have been assured that we humans are special, unique among living things, above and beyond the world around us, exempt from the humilities and humiliations that pervade and define animal life. The natural world lies below and beneath us, a cause for shame, disgust, or alarm; something smelly and messy to be hidden behind closed doors, drawn curtains, and minty freshness. Or we overcompensate and imagine nature floating angelically in soft focus up above, innocent, noble, balanced, and wise.

Like bonobos and chimps, we are the randy descendents of hypersexual ancestors. At first blush, this may seem an overstatement, but its a truth that should have become common knowledge long ago. Conventional notions of monogamous, till-death-do-us-part marriage strain under the dead weight of a false narrative that insists were something else. What is the essence of human sexuality and how did it get to be that way? In the following pages, well explain how seismic cultural shifts that began about ten thousand years ago rendered the true story of human sexuality so subversive and threatening that for centuries it has been silenced by religious authorities, pathologized by physicians, studiously ignored by scientists, and covered up by moralizing therapists.

Deep conflicts rage at the heart of modern sexuality. Our cultivated ignorance is devastating. The campaign to obscure the true nature of our species sexuality leaves half our marriages collapsing under an unstoppable tide of swirling sexual frustration, libido-killing boredom, impulsive betrayal, dysfunction, confusion, and shame. Serial monogamy stretches before (and behind) many of us like an archipelago of failure: isolated islands of transitory happiness in a cold, dark sea of disappointment. And how many of the couples who manage to stay together for the long haul have done so by resigning themselves to sacrificing their eroticism on the altar of three of lifes irreplaceable joys: family stability, companionship, and emotional, if not sexual, intimacy? Are those who innocently aspire to these joys cursed by nature to preside over the slow strangulation of their partners libido?

The Spanish word esposas means both wives and handcuffs. In English, some men ruefully joke about the ball and chain. Theres good reason marriage is often depicted and mourned as the beginning of the end of a mans sexual life. And women fare no better. Who wants to share her life with a man who feels trapped and diminished by his love for her, whose honor marks the limits of his freedom? Who wants to spend her life apologizing for being just one woman?