“We are at war with our eroticism”

July 11th, 2010

Forget what you’ve heard

about human beings having descended from

the apes. We didn’t 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 apes—bonobos and chimps—

just five million years ago. That’s “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.

If we’re “above” nature,

it’s 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 it’s 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 we’re something else. What

is the essence of human sexuality and how did it get to be that way? In the

following pages, we’ll 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 life’s irreplaceable joys: family

stability, companionship, and emotional, if not sexual,

intimacy? Are those who aspire to these joys

cursed by nature to preside over the

slow strangulation of their

partner’s libido?

The Spanish word esposas

means both “wives” and “handcuffs.” In English,

some men ruefully joke about the ball and chain. There’s good

reason marriage is often depicted and mourned as the beginning of the end

of a man’s 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?

Yes, something is seriously wrong.

The American Medical Association reports that some

42 percent of American women suffer from sexual dysfunction,

while Viagra breaks sales records year after year. Worldwide, pornography

is reported to rake in anywhere from fifty-seven to a hundred-billion-dollars annually.

In the United States, it generates more revenue than CBS, NBC, and ABC combined,

and more than all professional football, baseball, and basketball franchises.

According to U.S. News and World Report, “Americans spend more

money at strip clubs than at Broadway, off-Broadway,

regional and nonprofit theaters, the opera,

the ballet and jazz and classical music

performances—combined.”

There’s no denying that

we’re a species with a sweet tooth for sex.

Meanwhile, so-called traditional marriage appears

to be under assault from all sides—as it collapses from within.

Even the most ardent defenders of normal sexuality buckle under its

weight, as never-ending bipartisan perp-walks of politicians (Clinton, Vitter,

Gingrich, Craig, Foley, Spitzer, Sanford) and religious figures (Haggard,

Swaggert, Bakker) trumpet their support of family values

before slinking off to private assignations with

lovers, prostitutes, and interns.

Denial hasn’t worked.

Hundreds of Catholic priests have confessed

to thousands of sex crimes against children in the past few

decades alone. In 2008, the Catholic Church paid $436 million in

compensation for sexual abuse. More than a fifth of the victims were

under ten years old. This we know. Dare we even imagine the suffering

such crimes have caused in the seventeen centuries since a sexual life

was perversely forbidden to priests in the earliest known papal

decree: the Decreta and Cum in unum of Pope Siricius

(c. 385)? What is the moral debt owed to the

forgotten victims of this misguided

rejection of basic human

sexuality?

On threat of torture,

in 1633, the Inquisition of the Roman

Catholic Church forced Galileo to state publicly

what he knew to be false: that the Earth sat immobile

at the center of the universe. Three and a half centuries later,

in 1992, Pope John Paul II admitted that the scientist

had been right all along, but that

the Inquisition had been

“well-intentioned.”

Well, there’s no Inquisition

like a well-intentioned

Inquisition.

…

Although we’re led to

believe we live in times of sexual liberation,

contemporary human sexuality throbs with obvious,

painful truths that must not be spoken aloud. The conflict

between what we’re told we feel and what we really feel may be

the richest source of confusion, dissatisfaction, and unnecessary

suffering of our time. The answers normally proffered don’t answer

the questions at the heart of our erotic lives: Why are men and women

so different in our desires, fantasies, responses, and sexual behavior? Why

are we betraying and divorcing each other at ever increasing rates when not

opting out of marriage entirely? Why the pandemic spread of single-parent

families? Why does the passion evaporate from so many marriages so

quickly? What causes the death of desire? Having evolved

together right here on Earth, why do so many

men and women resonate with the idea

that we may as well be from

different planets?

We are at war with our eroticism.

We battle our hungers, expectations, and disappointments.

Religion, politics, and even science square off against biology and

millions of years of evolved appetites. How to defuse

this intractable struggle?

…

We’ll show that human beings

evolved in intimate groups where almost everything

was shared—food, shelter, protection, child care, even sexual pleasure.

We don’t argue that humans are natural-born Marxist hippies. Nor do we hold that

romantic love was unknown or unimportant in prehistoric communities.

But we’ll demonstrate that contemporary culture misrepresents

the link between love and sex. With and without love,

a casual sexuality was the norm for

our prehistoric ancestors.

…As we’ll explore in detail,

before the advent of agriculture a hundred

centuries ago, women typically had as much access to food,

protection, and social support as did men. We’ll see that upheavals

in human societies resulting from the shift to settled living in agricultural

communities brought radical changes to women’s ability to survive. Suddenly,

women lived in a world where they had to barter their reproductive

capacity for access to the resources and protection they needed

to survive. But these conditions are very different

from those in which our species had

been evolving previously.

It’s important to

keep in mind that when viewed

against the full scale of our species’ existence,

ten thousand years is but a brief moment. Even if we

ignore the roughly two million years since the emergence

of our Homo lineage, in which our direct ancestors lived in small

foraging social groups, anatomically modern humans are estimated to have

existed for about 200,000 years. With the earliest evidence of agriculture dating

to about 8000 BCE, the amount of time our species has spent living in settled

agricultural societies represents just 5 percent of our collective

experience, at most. As recently as a few hundred

years ago, most of the planet was still

occupied by foragers.

So in order to

trace the deepest roots of human

sexuality, it’s vital to look beneath the thin

crust of relatively recent human history. Until

agriculture, human beings evolved in societies organized

around an insistence on sharing just about everything. But all this

sharing doesn’t make anyone a noble savage. These pre-agricultural societies

were no nobler than you are when you pay your taxes or insurance premiums.

Universal, culturally imposed sharing was simply the most effective way for

our highly social species to minimize risk. Sharing and self-interest,

as we shall see, are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, what many

anthropologists call fierce egalitarianism was the

predominant pattern of social organization

around the world for many millennia

before the advent of

agriculture.

…

But human societies

changed in radical ways once they

started farming and raising domesticated animals.

They organized themselves around hierarchical political

structures, private property, densely populated settlements,

a radical shift in the status of women, and other social configurations

that together represent an enigmatic disaster for our species:

human population growth mushroomed as quality of life

plummeted. The shift to agriculture, wrote author

Jared Diamond, is a “catastrophe from which

we have never recovered.”

Several types of evidence

suggest our pre-agricultural (prehistoric) ancestors

lived in groups where most mature individuals would have had

several ongoing sexual relationships at any given time. Though often casual,

these relationships were not random or meaningless. Quite the opposite:

they reinforced crucial social ties holding these

highly interdependent communities

together.

We’ve found overwhelming evidence

of a decidedly casual, friendly prehistory of human sexuality

echoed in our own bodies, in the habits of remaining societies still lingering

in relative isolation, and in some surprising corners of contemporary Western culture.

We’ll show how our bedroom behavior, porn preferences, fantasies, dreams,

and sexual responses all support this reconfigured

understanding of our sexual origins.

…When people began living

in settled agricultural communities,

social reality shifted deeply and irrevocably.

Suddenly it became crucially important to know

where your field ended and your neighbor’s began.

Remember the Tenth Commandment: “Thou shalt not

covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s

wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor

anything that is thy neighbour’s.” Clearly, the biggest loser (aside from slaves,

perhaps) in the agricultural revolution was the human female, who went

from occupying a central, respected role in foraging societies

to becoming another possession for man to earn

and defend, along with his house,

slaves, and livestock.

“The origin of farming,”

says archaeologist Steven Mithen,

“is the defining event of human history —

the one turning point that has resulted in modern

humans having a quite different type of lifestyle and cognition

to all other animals and past types of humans.”  The most important

pivot point in the story of our species, the shift to agriculture redirected

the trajectory of human life more fundamentally than the control

of fire, the Magna Carta, the printing press, the steam

engine, nuclear fission, or anything else has

or, perhaps, ever will.

With agriculture,

virtually everything changed:

the nature of status and power, social and

family structures, how humans interacted with the

natural world, the gods they worshipped, the likelihood and

nature of warfare between groups, quality of life, longevity, and

certainly, the rules governing sexuality.  His survey of the relevant

archeological evidence led archaeologist Timothy Taylor, author of

The Prehistory of Sex, to state, “While hunter-gatherer sex had

been modeled on an idea of sharing and complementarity,

early agriculturalist sex was voyeuristic, repressive,

homophobic, and focused on reproduction.”

“Afraid of the wild,” he concludes,

“farmers set out to

destroy it.”

Sex at Dawn

(not a good book, a great one, and one which

has everything to do with the conversation

here over the last few weeks)