- For many societies, virginity is so unimportant there isn’t even a word for the concept in their language
- “Marriage,” “mating,” and “love” are socially constructed phenomena that have little or no transferable meaning outside any given culture
- No creature needs to be threatened with death to act in accord with its own nature
- We simply assume our own conception of family reflects something eternal and universal in human nature
- From savoring saliva beer or cow blood milkshakes to wearing socks with sandals, there is little doubt that people are willing to think, feel, wear, do, and believe pretty much anything if their society assures them it’s normal
- The majority of research on sexuality is based upon the responses of eighteen-to twenty-two-year-old American university students (!!)
- Our laziness seems less in need of explanation than our frenzied industry
- Hysteria was one of the first diseases to be described formally; Hippocrates discussed it in the fourth century BCE, and you’ll find it in any medical text covering women’s health written from medieval times until it was removed from the list of recognized medical diagnoses in 1952 (twenty-one years before homosexuality was finally removed)
- Hysteria was still one of the most diagnosed diseases in the United States and Great Britain as recently as the early twentieth century
- Darwin’s “coy female” starts looking like what she is: an anachronistic male fantasy
- The essence of sexuality for most women seems to include the freedom to change as life changes around them
Pull Quotes ⚭
The word myth has been debased and cheapened in modern usage; it’s often used to refer to something false, a lie. But this use misses the deepest function of myth, which is to lend narrative order to apparently disconnected bits of information, the way constellations group impossibly distant stars into tight, easily recognizable patterns that are simultaneously imaginary and real.
This is a curious notion of productivity—at once overtly political and yet presented innocently enough, as if there were only one possible meaning of “productivity.” This perspective on life incorporates the Protestant work ethic (that “productivity” is what makes an animal “effective”) and echoes the Old Testament notion that life must be endured, not enjoyed. These assumptions are embedded throughout the literature of evolutionary psychology. Ethologist/primatologist Frans de Waal, one of the more open-minded philosophers of human nature, calls this Calvinist sociobiology.
Recognized as a way to build and maintain a network of mutually beneficial relationships, nonreproductive sex no longer requires special explanations. Homosexuality, for example, becomes far less confusing, in that it is, as E. O. Wilson has written, “above all a form of bonding…consistent with the greater part of heterosexual behavior as a device that cements relationships.”
If the independent, isolated nuclear family unit is, in fact, the structure into which human beings most naturally configure themselves, why do contemporary societies and religions find it necessary to prop it up with tax breaks and supportive legislation while fiercely defending it from same-sex couples and others proposing to marry in supposedly “nontraditional” ways? One wonders, in fact, why marriage is a legal issue at all—apart from its relevance to immigration and property laws. Why would something so integral to human nature require such vigilant legal protection?
Hobbes took the madness of his age, considered it “normal,” and projected it back into prehistoric epochs of which he knew next to nothing. What Hobbes called “human nature” was a projection of seventeenth-century Europe, where life for most was rough, to put it mildly. Though it has persisted for centuries, Hobbes’s dark fantasy of prehistoric human life is as valid as grand conclusions about Siberian wolves based on observations of stray dogs in Tijuana. (cf. Humankind: A Hopeful History)
Asking whether our species is naturally peaceful or warlike, generous or possessive, free-loving or jealous, is like asking whether H2O is naturally a solid, liquid, or gas. The only meaningful answer to such a question is: It depends. On a nearly empty planet, with food and shelter distributed widely, avoiding conflict would have been an easy, attractive option. Under the conditions typical of ancestral environments, human beings would have had much more to lose than to gain from warring against one another. The evidence—both physical and circumstantial—points to a human prehistory in which our ancestors made far more love than war.
The conditions necessary for devastating epidemics or pandemics just didn’t exist until the agricultural revolution. The claim that modern medicine and sanitation save us from infectious diseases that ravaged pre-agricultural people (something we hear often) is like arguing that seat belts and air bags protect us from car crashes that were fatal to our prehistoric ancestors.
How many beavers die in dam-construction accidents? Are birds subject to sudden spells of vertigo that send them falling from the sky? How many fish drown to death? Such events are all rather infrequent we’d wager, but the toll exacted upon humans by the chronic stress many consider a normal part of human life is massive.
Before the war on drugs, the war on terror, or the war on cancer, there was the war on female sexual desire. It’s a war that has been raging far longer than any other, and its victims number well into the billions by now. Like the others, it’s a war that can never be won, as the declared enemy is a force of nature. We may as well declare war on the cycles of the moon.
To Meredith Small, the story of the female’s role in conception is a miniature of the overall narrative. She sees the popular understanding of conception as “an outdated allegory of human sexuality” featuring the male as “aggressor, persuader, conqueror.” Recent research on human fertilization suggests something of a role reversal. Small suggests the ovum “reaches out and envelops reluctant sperm.” “Female biology,” she concludes, “even at the level of egg and sperm interaction, doesn’t necessarily dictate a docile stance.” (cf. The Woman in the Body)
Sexologist Lisa Diamond spent over a decade studying the ebb and flow of female desire. In her book Sexual Fluidity, she reports that many women see themselves as attracted to specific people, rather than to their gender. Women, in Diamond’s view, respond so strongly to emotional intimacy that their innate gender orientation can easily be overwhelmed. Chivers agrees: “Women physically don’t seem to differentiate between genders in their sex responses, at least heterosexual women don’t.” (interesting if true?? cf. erotic plasticity)
Much of recent history can be seen as waves of tolerance and acceptance breaking against the rocky headlands of rigid social structures. Though it can seem to take almost forever, the waves always win in the end, reducing immobile rock to shifting sand.
Author Andrew Sullivan described his experience growing up both gay and Catholic as “difficult to the point of agony. I saw in my own life and those of countless others,” Sullivan recalled, “that the suppression of these core emotions and the denial of their resolution in love always always leads to personal distortion and compulsion and loss of perspective. Forcing…people into molds they do not fit helps no one,” Sullivan wrote. “It robs them of dignity and self-worth and the capacity for healthy relationships. It wrecks family, twists Christianity, violates humanity. It must end.”
Despite centuries of religious and scientific propaganda, the basic illusions underpinning the supposed “naturalness” of the conventional nuclear family are clearly exhausted. This collapse has left many of us isolated and unfulfilled. Blind insistence and well-intentioned inquisitions have failed to turn the tide, and show no signs of future success. (cf. naturalistic fallacy)
People often say to us, “But we’re human beings. We can choose how to behave.” That’s true, to a certain extent, but our bodies rebel against decisions that go against our evolved nature. You can choose to wear shoes that are too small, but you can’t choose to be comfortable in them. You can choose to wear a corset, but you may well pass out because you can’t breathe properly…. The human body and mind have evolved for a certain kind of life. The further we diverge from that path, the greater the cost in terms of mental, emotional, and physical health.