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Book: Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships
Quotes of Book: Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why
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  1. Christopher Ryan _ Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why

    nonreproductive sex is "natural," a defining characteristic.5 Does all this frivolous sex make our species sound "animalistic"? It shouldn't. The animal world is full of species that have sex only during widely spaced intervals when the female is ovulating. Only two species can do it week in and week out for nonreproductive reasons: one human, the other very humanlike. Sex for pleasure with various partners is therefore more "human" than animal. Strictly reproductive, once-in-a-blue-moon sex is more "animal" than human. In other words, an excessively horny monkey is acting "human," while a man or woman uninterested in sex more than once or twice a year would be, strictly speaking, "acting like an animal.
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  2. Christopher Ryan _ Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why

    Modern men and women are obsessed with the sexual; it is the only realm of primordial adventure still left to most of us. Like apes in a zoo, we spend our energies on the one field of play remaining; human lives otherwise are pretty well caged in by the walls, bars, chains, and locked gates of our industrial culture.
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  3. Christopher Ryan _ Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why

    There's an old story about the trial of a man charged with biting off another man's finger in a fight. An eyewitness took the stand. The defense attorney asked, "Did you actually see my client bite off the finger?" The witness said, "Well, no, I didn't." "Aha!" said the attorney with a smug smile. "How then can you claim he bit off the man's finger?" "Well," replied the witness, "I saw him spit it out."
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  4. Christopher Ryan _ Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why

    What if we didn't all grow up hearing that true love is obsessive and possessive? What if, like the Mosuo, we revered the dignity and autonomy of those we loved? What if, in other words, sex, love, and economic security were as available to us as they were to our ancestors?
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  5. Christopher Ryan _ Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why

    Malthus concluded that poverty is as inescapable as the wind and the rain. Nobody's fault. Just the way it is. This conclusion was very popular with the wealthy and powerful, who were understandably eager to make sense of their good fortune and justify the suffering of the poor as an unavoidable fact of life.
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  6. Christopher Ryan _ Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why

    Our model might strike you as absurd, salacious, insulting, scandalous, fascinating, depressing, illuminating, or obvious. But whether or not you are comfortable with what we present here, we hope you'll keep reading. We are not advocating any particular response to the information we've put together. Frankly, we're not sure what to do with it ourselves.
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  7. Christopher Ryan _ Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why

    In March of 1558, Andahazi tells us that Colombo proudly reported his "discovery" of the clitoris to the dean of his faculty.6 As Jonathan Margolis speculates in O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm, the response was probably not what Colombo had anticipated. The professor was "arrested in his classroom within days, accused of heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft and Satanism, put on trial and imprisoned. His manuscripts were confiscated, and his {discovery} was never permitted to be mentioned again until centuries after his death."7
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  8. Christopher Ryan _ Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why

    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.
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  9. Christopher Ryan _ Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why

    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 a man to earn and defend, along with his house, slaves, and livestock.
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  10. Christopher Ryan _ Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why

    We are enriched not by what we possess, but by what we can do without.
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  11. Christopher Ryan _ Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why

    the world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.
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  12. Christopher Ryan _ Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why

    What isn't debatable is that conventional marriage is a full-blown disaster for millions of men, women, and children right now. Conventional till-death-{or infidelity, or boredom}-do-us-part marriage is a failure. Emotionally, economically, psychologically, and sexually, it just doesn't work over the long term for too many couples.
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