Margaret Mead Japan China Religie en seks Moral panics Seks en robots De seksuele ontwikkeling van jongeren Seksualisering Leeftijdverschillen Geweld en misbruik Consent Sexting Prostitutie Pornografie"Despite the subjective feeling of lovers that love is timeless and boundless, it is nonetheless true that romantic love exists within a particular cultural context. () Love is a social construction." Ayala Malach PINES - Falling in love - Why we choose the lovers we choose, p. xix en xxiii
Christopher RYAN en Cacilda JETHÁFlauw verhaaltje.
"Forget what you’ve heard about human beings having descended from the apes. We didn’t descend from apes. We are apes."(8)
[Daar gaan we weer, hoor, mensen zijn dieren, "we" zijn apen.]
"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."(10)
"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?" [mijn nadruk] (14)
[De bevooroordeelde ideeën over mannen en vrouwen duiken op. ]
"We need a new understanding of ourselves, based not on pulpit proclamations or feel-good Hollywood fantasies, but on a bold and unashamed assessment of the plentiful scientific data that illuminate the true origins and nature of human sexuality. 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?"(16)
"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." [mijn nadruk] (17)
"Let’s address the question you’re probably already asking: how can we possibly know anything about sex in prehistory? Nobody alive today was there to witness prehistoric life, and since social behavior leaves no fossils, isn’t this all just wild speculation?" [mijn nadruk] (18)
[Ja, dat is precies wat het is.]
"In addition to a great deal of circumstantial evidence from societies around the world and closely related nonhuman primates, we’ll take a look at some of what evolution has spit out. We’ll examine the anatomical evidence still evident in our bodies and the yearning for sexual novelty expressed in our pornography, advertising, and after-work happy hours. We’ll even decode messages in the so-called “copulatory vocalizations” of thy neighbor’s wife as she calls out ecstatically in the still of night." [mijn nadruk] (18)
[De auteurs proberen almaar grappig te zijn. Punt is dat wat hier als bewijs genoemd wordt geen bewijs is voor het leven in de prehistorie, en niet meer is dan speculatie.]
Daarna volgt een weergave van "the standard narrative of human sexual evolution":
"
1. Boy meets girl.
2. Boy and girl assess one another’s mate value from perspectives based upon their differing reproductive agendas/capacities:
He looks for signs of youth, fertility, health, absence of previous sexual experience, and likelihood of future sexual fidelity. In other words, his assessment is skewed toward finding a fertile, healthy young mate with many childbearing years ahead and no current children to drain his resources.
She looks for signs of wealth (or at least prospects of future wealth), social status, physical health, and likelihood that he will stick around to protect and provide for their children. Her guy must be willing and able to provide materially for her (especially during pregnancy and breastfeeding) and their children (known as male parental investment).
3. Boy gets girl: assuming they meet one another’s criteria, they “mate,” forming a long-term pair bond—the “fundamental condition of the human species,” as famed author Desmond Morris put it. Once the pair bond is formed:
She will be sensitive to indications that he is considering leaving (vigilant toward signs of infidelity involving intimacy with other women that would threaten her access to his resources and protection)—while keeping an eye out (around ovulation, especially) for a quick fling with a man genetically superior to her husband.
He will be sensitive to signs of her sexual infidelities (which would reduce his all-important paternity certainty)—while taking advantage of short-term sexual opportunities with other women (as his sperm are easily produced and plentiful)."(19-20)
[Dit is nuttig om elders aan te halen. Het is een verhaal waar hoe dan ook niks van klopt. Dat is wat de evolutionaire psychologie er van brouwt. Waarop deze auteurs dan wel kritiek hebben.]
"These behaviors and predilections are not biologically programmed traits of our species; they are evidence of the human brain’s flexibility and the creative potential of community."(21)
"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."(24)
"After all, we know that the foraging societies in which human beings evolved were small-scale, highly egalitarian groups who shared almost everything."(27)
"Though this may sound like naïve New Age idealism, whining over the lost Age of Aquarius, or a celebration of prehistoric communism, not one of these features of pre-agricultural societies is disputed by serious scholars. The overwhelming consensus is that egalitarian social organization is the de-facto system for foraging societies in all environments. In fact, no other system could work for foraging societies. Compulsory sharing is simply the best way to distribute risk to everyone’s benefit: participation mandatory. Pragmatic? Yes. Noble? Hardly.
We believe this sharing behavior extended to sex as well. A great deal of research from primatology, anthropology, anatomy, and psychology points to the same fundamental conclusion: human beings and our hominid ancestors have spent almost all of the past few million years or so in small, intimate bands in which most adults had several sexual relationships at any given time. This approach to sexuality probably persisted until the rise of agriculture and private property no more than ten thousand years ago. In addition to voluminous scientific evidence, many explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists support this view, having penned accounts rich with tales of orgiastic rituals, unflinching mate sharing, and an open sexuality unencumbered by guilt or shame.
If you spend time with the primates closest to human beings, you’ll see female chimps having intercourse dozens of times per day, with most or all of the willing males, and rampant bonobo group sex that leaves everyone relaxed and maintains intricate social networks. Explore contemporary human beings’ lust for particular kinds of pornography or our notorious difficulties with long-term sexual monogamy and you’ll soon stumble over relics of our hypersexual ancestors.
Our bodies echo the same story. The human male has testicles far larger than any monogamous primate would ever need, hanging vulnerably outside the body where cooler temperatures help preserve stand-by sperm cells for multiple ejaculations. He also sports the longest, thickest penis found on any primate on the planet, as well as an embarrassing tendency to reach orgasm too quickly. Women’s pendulous breasts (utterly unnecessary for breastfeeding children), impossible-to-ignore cries of delight (female copulatory vocalization to the clipboard-carrying crowd), and capacity for orgasm after orgasm all support this vision of prehistoric promiscuity. Each of these points is a major snag in the standard narrative." [mijn nadruk] (29)
"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."(31)
"But the standard narrative insists that paternity certainty has always been of utmost importance to our species, that our very genes dictate we organize our sexual lives around it. Why, then, is the anthropological record so rich with examples of societies where biological paternity is of little or no importance? Where paternity is unimportant, men tend to be relatively unconcerned about women’s sexual fidelity."(33)
"An essential first step in discerning the cultural from the human is what mythologist Joseph Campbell called detribalization. We have to recognize the various tribes we belong to and begin extricating ourselves from the unexamined assumptions each of them mistakes for the truth."(39)
"In the following chapters, we reconsider these and other aspects of social behavior, rearranging them to form a different view of our past. We believe our model goes much farther toward explaining how we got to where we are today and most importantly, why many, if not most, sexually dysfunctional marriages are nobody’s fault. We’ll show why a great deal of the information we receive about human sexuality—particularly that received from some evolutionary psychologists—is mistaken, based upon unfounded, outdated assumptions going back to Darwin and beyond. Too many scientists are hard at work trying to complete the wrong puzzle, struggling to force their findings into preconceived, culturally approved notions of what they think human sexuality should be rather than letting the pieces of information fall where they may." [mijn nadruk] (41)
[Dus kritiek op de evolutionaire psychologie, maar wel in deterministisch biologisch denken blijven geloven waarin niemand verantwoordelijk is voor zijn handelen en iedereen alleen maar kan doen wat hij moet doen.]
[Open deur verhaal. ]
"A hyper-Victorian aversion to (and obsession with) the erotic seems to have continued in Charles’s eldest surviving daughter, Henrietta. “Etty,” as she was known, edited her father’s books, taking her blue crayon to passages she considered inappropriate. In Charles’s biography of his free-thinking grandfather, for example, she deleted a reference to Erasmus’s “ardent love of women.” She also removed “offensive” passages from The Descent of Man and Darwin’s autobiography."(50)
[Daar hebben we er weer een. Zoals Elisabeth bij Nietzsche.]
"For centuries, religious authorities disseminated this defining narrative, warning of chatty serpents, deceitful women, forbidden knowledge, and eternal agony. But more recently, it’s been marketed to secular society as hard science."(57)
"The standard narrative is about as scientifically valid as the story of Adam and Eve. In many ways, in fact, it is a scientific retelling of the Fall into original sin as depicted in Genesis—complete with sexual deceit, prohibited knowledge, and guilt. It hides the truth of human sexuality behind a fig leaf of anachronistic Victorian discretion repackaged as science."(60)
"It’s important to understand that evolution is not a process of improvement. Natural selection simply asserts that species change as they adapt to ever-changing environments. One of the chronic mistakes made by would-be social Darwinists is to assume that evolution is a process by which human beings or societies become better. It is not.
Those organisms best able to survive in a challenging, shifting environment live to reproduce. As survivors, their genetic code likely contains information advantageous to their offspring in that particular environment. But the environment can change at any moment, thus neutralizing the advantage."(60)
[Vanaf p62 een stuk over de evolutionaire psychologie. ]
"Evolutionary theory, in other words, offers explanations of how bodies came to be as they are."
[Ja, maar niet zonder meer gedrag of geest.]
"In 1975, E. O. Wilson made a radical proposal. In a short, explosive book called Sociobiology, Wilson argued that evolutionary theory could be, indeed must be, applied to behavior—not just bodies. Later, to avoid rapidly accumulating negative connotations—some associated with eugenics (founded by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton)—the approach was renamed “evolutionary psychology” (EP). (...) Beginning with Sociobiology, and On Human Nature, a follow-up volume Wilson published three years later, evolutionary theorists began to shift their focus from eyes, ears, feathers, and fur to less tangible, far more contentious issues such as love, jealousy, mate choice, war, murder, rape, and altruism. Juicy subject matter lifted from epics and soap operas became fodder for study and debate in respectable American universities. Evolutionary psychology was born.
It was a difficult birth. Many resented the implication that our thoughts and feelings are as hard-wired in our genetic code as the shape of our heads or the length of our fingers—and thus presumably as inescapable and unchangeable. Research in EP quickly became focused on differences between men and women, shaped by their supposedly conflicting reproductive agendas. Critics heard overtones of racial determinism and the smug sexism that had justified centuries of conquest, slavery, and discrimination." [mijn nadruk] (63)
"Evolutionary psychology’s standard narrative contains several clanging contradictions, but one of the most discordant involves female libido."(65)
"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?"(66)
[Heel goed weergegeven.]
"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."(69)
"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."(72)
"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."(73)
[De volgers van een denker/onderzoeker zijn meestal veel dogmatischer dan de denker/onderzoeker zelf, blijkt weer eens. Interessante man die Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) die hier besproken wordt.]
"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.”"(74)
Maar dan niet promiscue in de moderne betekenis.
"Given that groups of foragers (either those still existing today or in prehistoric times) rarely number much over 100 to 150 people, each is likely to know every one of his or her partners deeply and intimately—probably to a much greater degree than a modern man or woman knows his or her casual lovers."(75)
"For this book, promiscuity refers only to having a number of ongoing sexual relationships at the same time. Given the contours of prehistoric life in small bands, it’s unlikely that many of these partners would have been strangers."(76)
"We have good news and bad news. The good news is that the dismal vision of human sexuality reflected in the standard narrative is mistaken. Men have not evolved to be deceitful cads, nor have millions of years shaped women into lying, two-timing gold-diggers. But the bad news is that the amoral agencies of evolution have created in us a species with a secret it just can’t keep. Homo sapiens evolved to be shamelessly, undeniably, inescapably sexual. Lusty libertines. Rakes, rogues, and roués. Tomcats and sex kittens. Horndogs. Bitches in heat." [mijn nadruk] (77)
[M.a.w.: de evolutionaire psychologie wordt afgewezen, maar niet om de erkenning van de invloed van het biologische, maar om wat die invloed opgeleverd zou hebben qua gedrag? Het biologsche leverde heel wat anders op, namelijk die promiscuïteit?]
"Any attempt to understand who we are, how we got to be this way, and what to do about it must begin by facing up to our evolved human sexual predispositions. Why do so many forces resist our sustained fulfillment? Why is conventional marriage so much damned work? How has the incessant, grinding campaign of socio-scientific insistence upon the naturalness of sexual monogamy combined with a couple thousand years of fire and brimstone failed to rid even the priests, preachers, politicians, and professors of their prohibited desires? To see ourselves as we are, we must begin by acknowledging that of all Earth’s creatures, none is as urgently, creatively, and constantly sexual as Homo sapiens.
We don’t claim that men and women experience their eroticism in precisely the same ways, but as Tiresias noted, both women and men find considerable pleasure there. True, it may take most women a bit longer to get the sexual motor running than it does men, but once warmed up, most women are fully capable of leaving any man far behind. No doubt, males tend to be more concerned with a woman’s looks, while most women find a man’s character more compelling than his appearance (within limits, of course). And it’s true that women’s biology gives them a lot more to consider before a roll in the hay." [mijn nadruk] (79)
[Dat laatste is voornamelijk cultureel, lijkt me. ]
"Where most men can and do hunger for sex in the abstract, women report wanting narrative, character, a reason for sex. In other words, we agree with many of the observations central to evolutionary psychology—it’s the contorted, internally conflicted explanations for these observations that we find problematic."(79)
[Maar juist die observaties - 'these standard observations' zoals hij zelf zegt - kloppen niet eens en zijn vaak generalisaties op basis van ondoordachte waarden en normen. Dus als hij die zo overneemt met een andere biologische verklaring deugt het allemaal nog steeds niet. ]
"And make no mistake: according to the cold logic of standard evolutionary theory, leaving a genetic legacy is our sole purpose in life."(83)
[Dat is de grootst mogelijke nonsense in die EP. ]
"Women have little interest in sex, right? Despite Tiresias’s observations, until very recently, that’s been the near-universal consensus in Western popular culture, medicine, and evolutionary psychology. In recent years, popular culture has begun to question women’s relative lack of interest, but as far as the standard model is concerned, not much has changed since Dr. William Acton published his famous thoughts on the matter in 1875, assuring his readers, “The best mothers, wives, and managers of households know little or nothing of sexual indulgences…. As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband, but only to please him.”" [mijn nadruk] (85)
[Inderdaad belachelijk bevooroordeeld.]
"The sheer volume of evidence amassed to convince us that women are not particularly sexual beings is quite impressive. Hundreds, if not thousands, of studies have claimed to confirm the flaccidity of the female libido."(86)
[Dat is het akelige, die EP heeft ook nog eens invloed op de media, de standaard opvattingen van mensen, al klopt er niets van de opvattingen daar. ]
"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." [mijn nadruk] (88)
[Precies. ]
"Conventional theory suggests she’ll marry a nice, rich, predictable, sincere guy likely to pay the mortgage, change the diapers, and take out the trash—but then cheat on him with wild, sexy, dangerous dudes, especially around the time she’s ovulating, so she’s more likely to have lover-boy’s baby."(92)
"The woman’s mixed strategy would be to extract a long-term commitment from the man who offers her the best access to resources, status, and protection, while still seeking the occasional fling with rugged dudes in leather jackets who offer genetic advantages her loving, but domesticated, mate lacks. It’s hard to decide who comes out looking worse."(95)
[Nu komt dus de bewering dat mensen qua DNA, anatomie en zomeer lijken op apen. En aangezien we dezelfde biologische basis hebben, gedragen we ons ook hetzelfde, is het idee. Nee, dus. Slechte argumentatie.]
Eerst de vergelijking met chimpansees.
"Chimps are reported to be power-mad, jealous, quick to violence, devious, and aggressive. Murder, organized warfare between groups, rape, and infanticide are prominent in accounts of their behavior."(108)
"Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that so many scientists have assumed that chimpanzees are what humans would be like with just a bit less self-discipline. The importance of the chimpanzee in late twentieth–century models of human nature cannot be overstated."(110)
"So, while data from the chimps studied by Goodall and others at Gombe appear to support the idea that a ruthless and calculating selfishness is typical of chimpanzee behavior, information from other study sites may contradict or undermine this finding. Given the difficulties inherent in observing chimpanzee behavior in the wild, we should be cautious about generalizing from the limited data we have available on free-ranging chimps. And given their indisputable intelligence and social nature, we should be equally suspicious of data collected from captive chimps, which would appear to be no more generalizable than human prisoner behavior would be to humans."[mijn nadruk] (114)
"Even if we limit ourselves to the chimpanzee model, the dark self-assurance of modern-day neo-Hobbesian pessimists may be unfounded. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, for example, might be a bit less certain in his gloomy assessment of human nature: “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.” Maybe, but cooperation runs deep in our species too." [mijn nadruk] (115)
Dan de vergelijking met bonobo's.
"Whatever one concludes about chimp violence and its relevance to human nature, our other closest primate cousin, the bonobo, offers a fascinating counter-model."(118)
"[Helen] Fisher then asks the obvious question, “Did our ancestors do the same?” She seems to be preparing us for an affirmative answer by noting that bonobos “display many of the sexual habits people exhibit on the streets, in the bars and restaurants, and behind apartment doors in New York, Paris, Moscow, and Hong Kong.” “Prior to coitus,” she writes, “bonobos often stare deeply into each other’s eyes.” And Fisher assures her readers that, like human beings, bonobos “walk arm in arm, kiss each other’s hands and feet, and embrace with long, deep, tongue-intruding French kisses.”"(126)
[Hoe kun je dat zelfs maar vergelijken? De contexten zijn totaal verschillend. Veel projectie vanuit wat mensen doen op apen, het toeschrijven van menselijke kenmerken aan apen. Het is allemaal even fout.]
"This passage is bizarre on several levels. After writing at length about how strikingly similar bonobo sexual behavior is to that of human beings, Fisher executes a double backflip to conclude that they don’t make a suitable model for our ancestors."(128)
"We’ll show that husband/wife marriage and sexual monogamy are far from universal human behaviors, as she and others have argued. Simply because bonobos raise doubts about the naturalness of human long-term pair bonding, Fisher and most other authorities conclude that they cannot serve as models for human evolution. They begin by assuming that long-term sexual monogamy forms the nucleus of the one and only natural, eternal human family structure and reason backwards from there." [mijn nadruk] (132)
"By projecting recent post-agricultural preoccupations with female fidelity into their vision of prehistory, many theorists have Flint-stonized their way right into a cul-de-sac. Modern man’s seemingly instinctive impulse to control women’s sexuality is not an intrinsic feature of human nature. It is a response to specific historical socioeconomic conditions—conditions very different from those in which our species evolved. This is key to understanding sexuality in the modern world." [mijn nadruk] (133)
"This disconnect between individual and group interests helps explain why the shift to agriculture is normally spun as a great leap forward, despite the fact that it was actually a disaster for most of the individuals who endured it. Skeletal remains taken from various regions of the world dating to the transition from foraging to farming all tell the same story: increased famine, vitamin deficiency, stunted growth, radical reduction in life span, increased violence…little cause for celebration. For most people, we’ll see that the shift from foraging to farming was less a giant leap forward than a dizzying fall from grace." [mijn nadruk] (141)
"Though debate rages concerning precisely why the human brain grew so large so quickly, most would agree with anthropologist Terrence W. Deacon when he writes, “The human brain has been shaped by evolutionary processes that elaborated the capacities needed for language, and not just by a general demand for greater intelligence.”(...) Before and beyond anything else, human beings are the most social of all creatures."(143-144)
"We have another quality that is especially human in addition to our disproportionately large brains and associated capacity for language. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is also something woven into our all-important social fabric: our exaggerated sexuality."(144)
"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.”" [mijn nadruk] (145)
[Nu de antropologische kant van volkeren dichtbij de oude tijd.]
"Anthropologists Stephen Beckerman and Paul Valentine explain, “Pregnancy is viewed as a matter of degree, not clearly distinguished from gestation…all sexually active women are a little pregnant. Over time…semen accumulates in the womb, a fetus is formed, further acts of intercourse follow, and additional semen causes the fetus to grow more.” Were a woman to stop having sex when her periods stopped, people in these cultures believe the fetus would stop developing."(150)
[Een mooi voorbeeld van hoe verschillend natuurlijke fenomenen ervaren en verklaard kunnen worden. ]
"Rather than being shunned as “bastards” or “sons of bitches,” children of multiple fathers benefit from having more than one man who takes a special interest in them. Anthropologists have calculated that their chances of surviving childhood are often significantly better than those of children in the same societies with just one recognized father.
Far from being enraged at having his genetic legacy called into question, a man in these societies is likely to feel gratitude to other men for pitching in to help create and then care for a stronger baby. Far from being blinded by jealousy as the standard narrative predicts, men in these societies find themselves bound to one another by shared paternity for the children they’ve fathered together." [mijn nadruk] (153)
[Ja, waarom zou dat niet zo zijn?]
"But if it’s true that S.E.Ex. [= Socio-Erotic Exchanges] played a central role in maintaining prehistoric social cohesion, we should find remnants of such shamelessly libidinous behavior throughout the world, past and present. We do."(156)
Vele voorbeelden.
"Though the eager participation of women in these activities may surprise some readers, it has long been clear that the sources of female sexual reticence are more cultural than biological, despite what Darwin and others have supposed. Over fifty years ago, sex researchers Clellan Ford and Frank Beach declared, “In those societies which have no double standard in sexual matters and in which a variety of liaisons are permitted, the women avail themselves as eagerly of their opportunity as do the men.”" [mijn nadruk] (160)
"In light of the hypersexuality of humans, chimps, and bonobos, one wonders why so many insist that female sexual exclusivity has been an integral part of human evolutionary development for over a million years. In addition to all the direct evidence presented here, the circumstantial case against the narrative is overwhelming."(161)
"Think about that. No group-living nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in every human culture studied—including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death. In light of all this bloody retribution, it’s hard to see how monogamy comes “naturally” to our species. Why would so many risk their reputations, families, careers—even presidential legacies—for something that runs against human nature?" [mijn nadruk] (163)
"The near universality of fierce egalitarianism among foragers suggests there was really little choice for our prehistoric ancestors."(167)
"Egalitarianism is found in nearly all simple hunter-gatherer societies that have been studied anywhere in the world—groups facing conditions most similar to those our ancestors confronted 50,000 or 100,000 years ago. They’ve followed an egalitarian path not because they are particularly noble, but because it offers them the best chance of survival."(167)
"Scientists focused only on the nuclear family miss the central role of alloparenting in our species. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of Mothers and Others, laments, “Infant-sharing in other primates and in various tribal societies has never been accorded center stage in the anthropological literature. Many people don’t even realize it goes on. Yet…the consequences of cooperative care—in terms of survival and biological fitness of mother and infant—turn out to be all to the good.”"(175)
"Though it seems like common sense to most of us, our own biology-based kinship system is another case of Flintstonization. We simply assume our own conception of family reflects something eternal and universal in human nature. But as we’ve seen, there isn’t even agreement among all people that one sex act is sufficient to result in pregnancy."(176)
"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?"(181)
[Why indeed?]
"“Unquestioningly correct principle?” “Unthinkable hypothesis?” “Capital howlers?” Malinowski seems to have been personally offended that Morgan had dared to doubt the universality and naturalness of the sanctified nuclear family structure."(183)
"Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Malinowski’s position remains deeply embedded in both scientific and popular assumptions about family structure. In fact, the whole architecture of what qualifies as family in Western society is based on Malinowski’s insistence that each child everywhere has always had just one father."(185)
"In the literature of evolutionary psychology, in popular culture, in the tastefully appointed offices of marriage counselors, in religious teachings, in political discourse, and in our own mixed-up lives, lust is often mistaken for love. Perhaps even more insidious and damaging in societies insistent on long-term, sexually exclusive monogamy, the negative form of that statement is also true. The absence of lust is misread as indicating an absence of love (we’ll explore this in Part V)." [mijn nadruk] (186)
"Everyone knows these are arbitrary expressions for an almost infinite range of situations and relationships—everyone, it appears, but the experts. Many evolutionary psychologists and other researchers seem to think that “love” and “sex” are interchangeable terms. And they throw together “copulating” and “mating” as well. This failure to define terminology often leads to confusion and allows cultural bias to contaminate our thinking about human sexual nature. Let’s try to hack a path through this tangled verbal undergrowth." [mijn nadruk] (187)
"The holy grail of evolutionary psychology is the “human universal.” (...) Because evolutionary psychology is all about uncovering and elucidating the so-called psychic unity of humankind—and because of the considerable political and professional pressure to discover traits that conform to specific political agendas—readers need to be cautious about claims concerning such universals. Too often, the claims don’t hold up to scrutiny. The supposed universality of human marriage—and the linked omnipresence of the nuclear family—is a case in point." [mijn nadruk] (189)
[Daarmee ben ik het geheel en al eens. En inderdaad: de taal loopt met al die onderzoekers weg.]
"Biologist Joan Roughgarden has noted the same problematic application of present-day human mating ideals to animals. She writes, “Sexual selection’s primary literature describes extrapair parentage as ‘cheating’ on the pair bond; the male is said to be ‘cuckolded’; offspring of extrapair parentage are said to be ‘illegitimate’; and females who do not participate in extrapair copulations are said to be ‘faithful.’ This judgmental terminology,” concludes Roughgarden, “amounts to applying a contemporary definition of Western marriage to animals.” Indeed, when familiar labels are applied, supporting evidence becomes far more visible than counter-evidence in a psychological process known as confirmation bias." [mijn nadruk] (192)
"Journalist Louis Menand noted this tendency in a piece in The New Yorker, writing, “The sciences of human nature tend to validate the practices and preferences of whatever regime happens to be sponsoring them. In totalitarian regimes, dissidence is treated as a mental illness. In apartheid regimes, interracial contact is treated as unnatural. In free-market regimes, self-interest is treated as hardwired.”" [mijn nadruk] (193)
"People everywhere do pair off—even if just for a few hours, days, or years. Maybe they do it to share pleasure, to make babies, to please their families, to seal a political alliance or business deal, or just because they like each other. When they do, the resident anthropologist standing in the shadows of love says, “Aha, this culture practices marriage, too. It’s universal!” But many of these relationships are as far from our sense of marriage as a string hammock is from Grandma’s featherbed. Simply changing the jargon and referring to long-term pair bond rather than marriage is no better." [mijn nadruk] (195)
"As these examples show, many qualities considered essential components of marriage in contemporary Western usage are anything but universal: sexual exclusivity, property exchange, even the intention to stay together for long. None of these are expected in many of the relationships evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists insist on calling marriage."(201)
"Symons’s bold declaration was an expression of faith in parental investment theory and the central importance of paternity certainty in human evolution. But Symons was dead wrong on both points." [mijn nadruk] (206)
"The Mosuo approach to love and sex may well finally be destroyed by the hordes of Han Chinese tourists who threaten to turn Lugu Lake into a theme-park version of Mosuo culture. But the Mosuo’s persistence in the face of decades—if not centuries—of extreme pressure to conform to what many scientists still insist is human nature stands as a proud, undeniable counter-example to the standard narrative." [mijn nadruk] (215)
"Despite societies like the Mosuo’s in which women are autonomous and play crucial roles in maintaining social and economic stability, and plentiful evidence from dozens of foraging societies in which females enjoy high status and respect, many scientists rigidly insist that all societies are and always have been patriarchal." [mijn nadruk] (217)
"Maybe matriarchal societies are so difficult for Western male anthropologists to recognize because they expect a culture where men are suffering under the high heels of women—a reverse reflection of the long-standing male oppression of women in Western cultures. Instead, observing a society where most of the men are lounging about relaxed and happy, they conclude they’ve found yet another patriarchy, thereby missing the point entirely."(221)
[Het onvermogen om je los te maken van wat je kent, inderdaad.]
"“Marriage,” “mating,” and “love” are socially constructed phenomena that have little or no transferable meaning outside any given culture."(227)
"Far too often, the debate over the nature of human sexuality seems like a proxy war between antagonistic politico-economic philosophies. Defenders of the standard narrative see Cain’s gain as Abel’s loss, period. “That’s just how life is, kid,” they’ll tell you. “It’s human nature. Self-interest makes the world go round, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, it’s a dog-eat-dog world and always has been.”
This free-market vision of human mating hinges on the assumption that sexual monogamy is intrinsic to human nature." [mijn nadruk] (233)
"But Buss is not alone in this distorting focus on undergrads. The majority of research on sexuality is based upon the responses of eighteen-to twenty-two-year-old American university students. While one could make a case that a twenty-year-old guy is more or less like a turbocharged fifty-year-old, few would argue that a twenty-year-old woman has much in common with a woman three decades older in terms of her sexuality. Most would agree that a woman’s sexuality changes considerably throughout adulthood—for the better, if conditions allow."(236)
[De bekende methodologische slordigheden / manipulatie.]
"Beyond the distorting effects of age and class, Buss and his colleagues skip over the crucial fact that every one of their subjects lives in post-agricultural societies characterized by private property, political hierarchies, globalized television, and so on. How can we expect to identify “human universals” without including at least a few foragers, whose thoughts and behaviors have not been shaped by the effects of modern life and whose perspective represents the vast majority of our species’ experience?" [mijn nadruk] (237)
"When Harris measured the bodily responses of people being asked Buss’s questions, she found that “women as a group showed little difference in physiological reactivity,” but they still predicted, almost unanimously, that the emotional infidelity would be more disturbing for them. This finding suggests a fascinating disconnect between what these women actually feel and what they think they should feel about their partner’s fidelity (more on this later)." [mijn nadruk] (239)
[De sociaal wenselijke antwoorden.]
"Rather than a plausible explanation for how we got to be the way we are, the standard narrative is exposed as contemporary moralistic bias packaged to look like science and then projected upon the distant screen of prehistory, rationalizing the present while obscuring the past. Yabba dabba doo." [mijn nadruk] (247)
"Economics, “the dismal science,” was dismal right from the start."(249)
[Grappig. Maar het is waar. ]
Over Malthus die het helemaal fout had.
"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." [mijn nadruk] (256)
"Scientists have learned to read ancient bones and teeth, to carbon-date the ash of Pleistocene fires, to trace the drift of the mitochondrial DNA of our ancestors. And the information they’ve uncovered resoundingly refutes the vision of prehistory Hobbes and Malthus conjured and Darwin swallowed whole." [mijn nadruk] (256)
"Prior to the population increases associated with agriculture, most of the world was a vast, empty place in terms of human population. But the desperate overcrowding imagined by Hobbes, Malthus, and Darwin is still deeply embedded in evolutionary theory and repeated like a mantra, facts be damned." [mijn nadruk] (257)
"Among foragers, where property is shared, poverty tends to be a nonissue. In his classic book Stone Age Economics, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins explains that “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.”" [mijn nadruk] (265)
"When we start detribalizing—peeling away the cultural conditioning that distorts our vision—“wealth” and “poverty” may reveal themselves where we least expect to find them."(268)
"The faulty assumption that scarcity-based economic thinking is somehow the de-facto human approach to questions of supply, demand, and distribution of wealth has misled much anthropological, philosophical, and economic thought over the past few centuries." [mijn nadruk] (269)
"Many economists have forgotten (or never understood) that their central organizing principle, Homo economicus (a.k.a. economic man), is a myth rooted in assumptions about human nature, not a bedrock truth upon which to base a durable economic philosophy." [mijn nadruk] (269)
"First published in the prestigious journal Science in 1968, biologist Garrett Hardin’s paper “The Tragedy of the Commons” is one of the most reprinted articles ever to appear in a scientific journal."(273)
"Hardin’s articulation of the folly of communal ownership has provided cover repeatedly to those arguing for the privatization of government services and the conquest of native lands.
One other thing Hardin’s elegant argument has in common with that of Malthus: it collapses on contact with reality." [mijn nadruk] (275)
"Marvin Harris puts it simply: “Stone age populations lived healthier lives than did most of the people who came immediately after them.” And maybe healthier than people who came long after them, too."(284)
"Throughout the world, the shift to agriculture accompanied a dramatic drop in the quality of most people’s diets and overall health."(285)
"It’s not surprising that conservative evolutionary psychologists have found foragers’ insistence on sharing to be one of their most difficult nuts to crack. Given the iconic status of Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene and the popularized, status-quo protective notion of the all-against-all struggle for survival, the quest to explain why foraging people are so maddeningly generous to one another has occupied dozens of authors.(...) One must walk a tightrope to insist that selfishness is (and has always been) the principal engine of human evolution even in the face of copious data demonstrating that human social organization was founded upon an impulse for sharing for many millennia."(288)
"Difficult as it may be for some to accept, skeletal evidence clearly shows that our ancestors didn’t experience widespread, chronic scarcity until the advent of agriculture. Chronic food shortages and scarcity-based economies are artifacts of social systems that arose with farming." [mijn nadruk] (294)
"Just as neo-Hobbesian fundamentalists hold that poverty is intrinsic to the eternal human condition, they maintain that war is fundamental to our nature."(295)
"So we’re to understand that egalitarian, nonhierarchical, nomadic groups without property…were constantly at war? Hunter-gatherer societies, possessing so little and thus with so little to lose (other than their lives), living on a wide-open planet were nothing like the densely populated, settled societies struggling over dwindling or accumulated resources in more recent historical times. Why would they be?"(296)
Pinker wordt bekritiseerd. Zijn data kloppen niet.
"But Pinker is not alone in employing such sleight-of-hand to advance of Hobbes’s dark view of human prehistory. In fact, this selective presentation of dubious data is disturbingly common in the literature on human blood-lust."(300)
"In the wild, chimps spread out to search for food individually or in small groups. Because the food is scattered throughout the jungle, competition is unusual. But, as Frans de Waal explains, “as soon as humans start providing food, even in the jungle, the peace is quickly disturbed.”"(305)
"Margaret Power’s questions cut to the heart of the matter: why fight if there’s nothing worth fighting over? Before the scientists started provisioning the apes, food appeared throughout the jungle, so the chimps spread out in search of something to eat each day. Chimps often call out to the others when they find a fruiting tree; mutual aid helps everyone, and feeding in the forest isn’t a zero-sum endeavor." [mijn nadruk] (307)
"Nolan found that above-average population density was the best predictor of war."(310)
"But neo-Hobbesians ignore this rather straightforward analysis and the data supporting it, insisting that war must be an eternal human drive, all too often resorting to desperate rhetorical tactics like Pinker’s to defend their view."(311)
"In Beyond War, anthropologist Doug Fry rebuts the neo-Hobbesian view of universal war. “The belief that ‘there has always been war,’” Fry writes, “does not correspond with the archaeological facts of the matter.” Anthropologist Leslie Sponsel agrees, writing, “Lack of archaeological evidence for warfare suggests that it was rare or absent for most of human prehistory.” After conducting a comprehensive review of prehistoric skeletal evidence, anthropologist Brian Ferguson concluded that apart from one particular site in modern-day Sudan, “only about a dozen Homo sapiens skeletons 10,000 years old or older, out of hundreds of similar antiquity examined to date, show clear indications of interpersonal violence.” Ferguson continues, “If warfare were prevalent in early prehistoric times, the abundant materials in the archaeological record would be rich with evidence of warfare. But the signs are not there.”
Our bullshit detectors go off when scholars point to violent chimps and a few cherry-picked horticultural human societies mislabeled as foragers, claiming these as evidence of ancient tendencies toward warfare. Even more troubling, these scholars often remain mute on the distorting effects on chimps of food provisioning, ever-shrinking habitats under siege from armies of hungry soldiers and poachers, reduced living space, food, and genetic vigor. Equally troubling is their silence on the crucial effects of population demographics and the rise of the agricultural state on the likelihood of human conflict." [mijn nadruk] (313-314)
[Het zijn dus allemaal aannames, projecties vanuit het heden, zonder empirische ondersteuning. Waarom gaan die auteurs als Pinker zo tegen de bekende feiten in?]
"Given all that, perhaps it’s not surprising that Chagnon’s account of the “chronic warfare” of the “innately violent” Yanomami struck a public nerve. Desperate to understand human murderousness, the public lapped up his depictions of the day-to-day brutality of people he described as our “contemporary ancestors.” Now in its fifth edition, Yanomamö: The Fierce People is still the all-time bestseller in anthropology, with millions of copies sold to university students alone. Chagnon’s books and films have figured prominently in the education of several generations of anthropologists, most of whom accepted his claims to have demonstrated the inherent ferocity of our species.
But Chagnon’s research should be approached with caution, as he employs a host of dubious techniques."(316)
[Erger nog is dat dat soort mythevorming in onze samenleving zo gemakkelijk geloofd en verspreid wordt, dat studenten er zonder waarschuwing mee opgevoed en onderwezen worden. ]
"Well, don’t get carried away. While it is technically true that the average “height expectancy” of prehistoric men was about three feet, it’s a misleading sort of truth. Like overconfident declarations about the universality of marriage, poverty, and war, it’s the sort of assertion that sows confusion and results in a harvest of misleading data."(324)
"This height expectancy “truth” is no more absurd or misleading than what most people are led to believe about human life expectancy in prehistory."(325)
"No doubt, many prehistoric infants died from disease or harsh conditions, as do the infants of other primates, human foragers, and modern Mozambiqueans. But many anthropologists agree it’s likely that a large portion of infant mortality once attributed to starvation and disease probably resulted from infanticide. They argue that foraging societies limited the number of infants so they wouldn’t become a burden to the group or allow overly rapid population growth to strain food supplies. Horrific as it may be for us to contemplate, infanticide is anything but a rarity, even today. (...) Various surveys of contemporary pre-industrial societies conclude that anywhere from half to three-quarters of them practice some form of direct infanticide."(328-329)
"As mentioned in previous chapters, it’s clear that overall human health (including longevity) took a severe hit from agriculture.(...) In addition to the reduced nutritional value of the agricultural diet, the diseases deadliest to our species began their dreadful rampage when human populations turned to agriculture. Conditions were perfect: high-density population centers stewing in their own filth, domesticated animals in close proximity (adding their excrement, viruses, and parasites to the mix), and extended trade routes facilitating the movement of contagious pathogens from populations with immunity to vulnerable communities."(334)
"The dramatic increases in world population that paralleled agricultural development don’t indicate increased health, but increased fertility: more people living to reproduce, but lower quality of life for those who do."(336)
"If an infectious virus doesn’t get you, a stressed-out lifestyle and unhealthy diet probably will. Cortisol, the hormone your body releases when under stress, is the strongest immunosuppressant known. In other words, nothing weakens our defenses against disease quite like stress." [mijn nadruk] (338)
"If you want to live long, sleep more and eat less. To date, the only demonstrably effective method for prolonging mammalian life is severe caloric reduction." [mijn nadruk] (339)
"Journalist Louis Menand noted how science can fulfill a conservative, essentially political function by providing “an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are.”" [mijn nadruk] (343)
[Prachtige uitspraak.]
"Everybody has a story to tell. So does every body, and the story told by the human body is rated XXX."(346)
"Can we glean reliable information about the contours of ancient social life—even sexual behavior—from present-day human anatomy? Yes we can."(347)
"Looking at our modest body-size dimorphism, it’s a good bet that males haven’t been fighting much over females in the past few million years. As mentioned above, men’s bodies are from 10 to 20 percent bigger and heavier than women’s on average, a ratio that appears to have held steady for at least several million years.
Owen Lovejoy has long argued that this ratio is evidence of the ancient origins of monogamy."(349)
"The assertion that the same physical evidence correlates to promiscuity in chimps and bonobos but indicates mild polygyny or monogamy in humans shows just how shaky the standard model really is."(352)
"Why are scientists so reluctant to consider the implications of our two closest primate relatives displaying the same levels of body-size dimorphism we do? Could it be because neither is remotely monogamous?"(354)
[Uiteraard. ]
"Moderate body-size dimorphism isn’t the only anatomical suggestion of promiscuity in our species. The ratio of testicular volume to overall body mass can be used to read the degree of sperm competition in any given species. Jared Diamond considers the theory of testis size to be “one of the triumphs of modern physical anthropology.” Like most great ideas, the theory of testis size is simple: species that copulate more often need larger testes, and species in which several males routinely copulate with one ovulating female need even bigger testes." [mijn nadruk] (359)
"In bonobos, since everybody gets some sugar, the competition takes place on the level of the sperm cell, not at the level of the individual male. Still, although almost all bonobos are having sex, given the realities of biological reproduction, each baby bonobo still has only one biological father."(360)
"The importance of sperm competition has been debated in scientific conferences and academic journals for the past few decades as if it were a new discovery, but several centuries BCE, Aristotle and his predecessors noted that if a bitch copulated with two dogs during a single fertile period, she could produce a litter of pups fathered by one or both of them."(368)
"The scandalous implications of sperm competition run smack into the long-held view of sacrosanct female sexuality. It’s a vision Darwin cultivated in public consciousness, featuring coy females who surrender only to a carefully chosen mate who has proven himself worthy—and even then, she’s only doing it for England." [mijn nadruk] (370)
"Researchers have confirmed what porn producers already know: men tend to get turned on by images depicting an environment in which sperm competition is clearly at play (though few, we imagine, think of it in quite these terms). Images and videos showing one woman with multiple males are far more popular on the Internet and in commercial pornography than those depicting one male with multiple females."(373)
"As far as we know, there is no corresponding taste among women for erotica featuring multiple overweight middle-aged ladies with cheap tattoos, bad haircuts, and black socks having sex with one hot guy. Go figure."(374)
[Begint de auteur wat door te slaan?]
"It bears repeating that the human penis is the longest and thickest of any primate’s—in both absolute and relative terms. And despite all the bad press they get, men last far longer in the saddle than bonobos (fifteen seconds), chimps (seven seconds), or gorillas (sixty seconds), clocking in between four and seven minutes, on average."(378)
"The correlation between infrequent ejaculation and various health problems offers further evidence that present-day men are not using their reproductive equipment to its fullest potential."(383)
"... sexual monogamy permits fertility-reducing mutations to proliferate, causing testicular diminishments that would never have lasted among our nonmonogamous ancestors."(386)
"If our paradigm of prehistoric human sexuality is correct, in addition to environmental toxins and food additives, sexual monogamy may be a significant factor in the contemporary infertility crisis. Widespread monogamy may also help explain why, despite our promiscuous past, the testicles of contemporary Homo sapiens are smaller than those of chimps and bonobos and, as indicated by our excess sperm-production capacity, than those of our own ancestors. Sexual monogamy itself may be shrinking men’s balls."(386)
"These are dangerous waters we’re swimming in, dear reader, suggesting that culture, environment, and behavior can be reflected in anatomy—genital anatomy, at that. But any serious biologist or physician knows there are anatomical differences expressed racially. Despite the hair-trigger sensitivity of these issues, not to consider racial background in the diagnosis and treatment of disease would be unethical."(389)
"“Archaeology,” writes Bogucki, “is very much constrained by what the modern imagination allows in the range of human behavior.” So is evolutionary theory. Perhaps so many still conclude that sexual monogamy is characteristic of our species’ evolutionary past, despite the clear messages inscribed in every man’s body and appetites, because this is what they expect and hope to find there." [mijn nadruk] (393)
"Any marriage counselor will tell you the most common sex-related complaint women make about men is that they are too quick and too direct. Meanwhile, men’s most frequent sex-related gripe about women is that they take too damned long to get warmed up. After an orgasm, a woman may be anticipating a dozen more. A female body in motion tends to stay in motion. But men come and go. For them, the curtain falls quickly and the mind turns to unrelated matters."(394)
"With any other question we have about the origins of human behavior, we look to chimps and bonobos for important clues: language, tool use, political alliances, war, reconciliation, altruism…but when it comes to sex, we prudishly turn away from these models to the distantly related, antisocial, low-I.Q. but monogamous gibbon? Really?"(395)
Dan het bekende verhaal over hysterie, door artsen op te lossen door de vrouwen orgasmes te geven.
"The men who provided this lucrative therapy didn’t write about “orgasm” in the medical articles they published on hysteria and its treatment. Rather, they published serious, sober discussion of “vulvular massage” leading to “nervous paroxysm” that brought temporary relief to the patient. These were ideal patients, after all. They didn’t die or recover from their condition. They just kept returning, eager for more treatment sessions." [mijn nadruk] (399)
"The medical monopoly on providing socially acceptable extramarital orgasms to women was assured by a strict prohibition against women or girls masturbating themselves to orgasm. In 1850, the New Orleans Medical & Surgical Journal declared masturbation public enemy number one, warning: “Neither plague, nor war, nor smallpox, nor a crowd of similar evils, have resulted more disastrously for humanity than the habit of masturbation: it is the destroying element of civilized society.” Children and adults were warned that masturbation was not only sinful, but very dangerous—sure to result in severe health consequences, including blindness, infertility, and insanity. Besides, these authorities intoned, “normal” women had little sexual desire anyway." [mijn nadruk] (402)
[Ja, het zijn opschepperige huichelaars, die medische mannetjes. ]
"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." [mijn nadruk] (409)
"There’s a good reason the sound of a woman enjoying a sexual encounter entices a heterosexual man. Her “copulation call” is a potential invitation to come hither, thus provoking sperm competition."(413)
"Female copulatory vocalization is highly associated with promiscuous mating, but not with monogamy."(414)
"But is there anatomical evidence suggesting that women evolved to be highly sexual? No question."(418)
"Considering its almost total lack of muscle tissue, the female breast wields amazing power. Curvaceous women have leveraged this power to manipulate even the most accomplished, disciplined men for as long as anyone’s been around to notice. Empires have fallen, wills have been revised, millions of magazines and calendars sold, Super Bowl audiences scandalized…all in response to the mysterious force emanating from what are, after all, small bags of fat."(418)
[Vreemd, nu slaat hij echt door. Wat hebben borsten op zich met erotiek te maken? Al die aandacht van mannen ervoor lijkt me nogal cultureel bepaald.]
"Other researchers have found that men preferred women’s bodily smells near ovulation and that women tend to behave more provocatively in various ways when they’re likely to be fertile (they wear more jewelry and perfume, go out more, are more likely to hook up for casual sexual encounters, and are less likely to use condoms with new lovers)."(424)
[Waar blijft de kritiek op dat soort onderzoeken? ]
"So, a woman (and ultimately, her child) may benefit by “sampling many males” and letting her body decide whose sperm fertilizes her. Her body, in other words, might be better informed than her conscious mind."(429)
"So, in terms of reproduction, the “fitness” of our prehistoric male ancestors was not decided in the external social world, where conventional theories tell us men competed for mates in struggles for status and material wealth. Rather, paternity was determined in the inner world of the female reproductive tract where every woman is equipped with mechanisms for choosing among potential fathers at a cellular level."(430)
[Ook dat zegt weer dat monogamie niet natuurlijk is, maar promiscue gedrag wel.]
"The complexity of the human cervix suggests it evolved to filter the sperm of various males.(...) As with the complex penis and external testicles in the male, the elaborate filtering design of the human cervix points toward promiscuity in our ancestors."(431)
"In addition to enveloping eggs, a cervix that filters or favors sperm, and vaginal contractions that may expel the sperm of one man while boosting that of another, women’s orgasms provoke changes in vaginal acidity."(433)
"Recent research suggests women who do not use condoms are less likely to suffer from depression than either women who do use condoms or who are not sexually active."(434)
"The assertion that human beings are naturally monogamous is not just a lie; it’s a lie most Western societies insist we keep telling each other."(438)
"The human female’s sexual behavior is typically far more malleable than the male’s. Greater erotic plasticity leads most women to experience more variation in their sexuality than men typically do, and women’s sexual behavior is far more responsive to social pressure."(440)
"This disconnect between what these women experienced on a physical level and what they consciously registered is precisely what the theory of differential erotic plasticity predicts. It could well be that the price of women’s greater erotic flexibility is more difficulty in knowing—and, depending on what cultural restrictions may be involved, in accepting—what they’re feeling. This is worth keeping in mind when considering why so many women report lack of interest in sex or difficulties in reaching orgasm."(443)
"Once determined, male eroticism tends to retain its contours throughout life, like concrete that has set. Consequently, the theory of erotic plasticity predicts that paraphilias (abnormal sexual desires and behaviors) should be far more prevalent in men than in women who would presumably be more responsive to social pressures and find it easier to abandon previous turn-ons or ignore unseemly urges. Nearly every source of evidence supports this prediction. Most researchers and therapists agree that these unusual sexual hungers are almost exclusively seen in males, appear to be related to early imprinting, and are difficult, if not impossible, to alter once boyhood impressions have hardened into adult yearnings." [mijn nadruk] (452)
"Desire, particularly male desire, is notoriously unresponsive to religious dictate, legal retribution, family pressure, self-preservation, or common sense. It does respond to one thing, however: testosterone."(453)
"Countless studies confirm that testosterone and associated male sex hormones are at high tide from puberty to a man’s mid-twenties. Here we have another massive conflict between what society dictates and biology demands. With every voice in a young man’s body screaming for SEX NOW, many societies insist he ignore these incessant urgings and channel that energy into other pursuits, ranging from sports to homework to military adventure."(455)
"Well-intentioned websites and presentations rarely, if ever, mention gut-wrenching, identity-clouding sexual frustration as a possible cause of some of this destructive adolescent behavior. Despite the omnipresence of billboards and bus stops featuring semi-naked barely pubescent fashion models, significant parts of American society remain adamantly opposed to any suggestion that sexual activity may commence before the law allows."(456)
"If our distorted relationship with human sexuality is the source of much of this frustration, confusion, and ignorance, societies with less conflicted views should confirm the causal connection. Developmental neuropsychologist James Prescott found that bodily pleasure and violence seem to have an either/or relationship—the presence of one inhibits development of the other. In 1975, Prescott published a paper in which he argued that “certain sensory experiences during the formative periods of development will create a neuropsychological predisposition for either violence-seeking or pleasure-seeking behaviors later in life.”" [mijn nadruk] (458)
"After comparing these data with levels of violence within and between societies, Prescott concluded that in all but one of the cultures for which these data were available (forty-eight of forty-nine), “deprivation of body pleasure throughout life—but particularly during the formative periods of infancy, childhood, and adolescence—is very closely related to the amount of warfare and interpersonal violence.” Cultures that don’t interfere in the physical bonding between mother and child or prohibit the expression of adolescent sexuality show far lower levels of violence—both between individuals and between societies." [mijn nadruk] (459)
"The merciless campaign against masturbation was just one aspect of the West’s long struggle against the “sinful” yearnings within human sexuality."(461)
"Circumcision remains prevalent in the United States, though varying greatly by region, ranging from about 40 percent of newborns circumcised in western states to about twice that in the Northeast. This widespread procedure, rarely a medical necessity, has its roots in the anti-masturbation campaigns of Kellogg and his like-minded contemporaries."(463)
"The anti-masturbation measures quoted above were published in 1888, but more than eighty years were to pass before the American Medical Association declared, in 1972, “Masturbation is a normal part of adolescent sexual development and requires no medical management.” But still, the war continues. As recently as 1994, pediatrician Joycelyn Elders was forced from her post as Surgeon General of the United States for simply asserting that masturbation “is part of human sexuality.” The suffering caused by centuries of war on masturbation is beyond calculation. But this we know: all the suffering, every bit of it, was for nothing. Absolutely nothing." [mijn nadruk] (464)
"Why do men have such overwhelming hunger for variety in their sexual partners—not just at midlife, but always? (...) variety and change are the necessary spice of the sex life of the human male."(472-473)
[Waarom gaat het hier ineens de hele tijd over mannen en hun behoefte aan meerdere partners? Dat is in het algemeen toch al duidelijk voor vrouwen én mannen? Nu lijkt het ineens een rechtvaardiging van veel mannengedrag in de westerse samenleving en lijkt het helemaal aan te sluiten bij het 'standaard verhaal' waarbij vrouwen niet willen en mannen wel.]
"Earlier, we discussed how men’s testosterone levels recede over the years, but it’s not just the passing of time that brings these levels down: monogamy itself seems to drain away a man’s testosterone. Married men consistently show lower levels of the hormone than single men of the same age; fathers of young children, even less. Men who are particularly responsive to infants show declines of 30 percent or more right after their child is born. Married men having affairs, however, were found to have higher testosterone levels than those who weren’t. Additionally, most of the men having affairs have told researchers they were actually quite happy in their marriages, while only one-third of women having affairs felt that way."(475)
"For most men and many women, sexual monogamy leads inexorably to monotomy. It’s important to understand this process has nothing to do with the attractiveness of the long-term partner or the depth and sincerity of the love felt for him or her."(477)
"If it’s true that most men are constituted, by millions of years of evolution, to need occasional novel partners to maintain an active and vital sexuality throughout their lives, then what are we saying to men when we demand lifetime sexual monogamy? Must they choose between familial love and long-term sexual fulfillment?"(482)
"So now what? Having written this whole book about sex, we’d like to confusingly suggest that most of us take sex way too seriously: when it’s just sex, that’s all it is.(...) A reasonable relaxation of moralistic social codes making sexual satisfaction more easily available would also make it less problematic." [mijn nadruk] (488)
[Daar ben ik het erg mee eens. ]
"In terms of sexuality, history appears to be flowing back toward a hunter-gatherer casualness. If so, future generations may suffer fewer pathological manifestations of sexual frustration and unnecessarily fractured families."(488)
[Maar dit is vaag en speculatief. Alsof die 'casualness' van toen en nu hetzelfde is.]
"By insisting upon an ideal vision of marriage founded upon a lifetime of sexual fidelity to one person—a vision most of us eventually learn is highly unrealistic, we invite punishment upon ourselves, upon each other, and upon our children."(489)
"But she found that Americans and British couples seemed to be reading from an entirely different script. “An affair, even a one-night stand, means a marriage is over,” Druckerman observed. “I spoke to women who, on discovering that their husbands had cheated, immediately packed a bag and left, because ‘that’s what you do.’ Not because that’s what they wanted to do—they just thought that was the rule. They didn’t even seem to realize there were other options…. I mean, really, like they’re reading from a script!”"(490)
[Zou het zo simpel zijn? Mij lijkt dat er dan al andere dingen aan de hand zijn? ]
"One of the most important hopes we have for this book is to provoke the sorts of conversations that make it a bit easier for couples to make their way across this difficult emotional terrain together, with a deeper, less judgmental understanding of the ancient roots of these inconvenient feelings and a more informed, mature approach to dealing with them."(493)
"Like McElvaine, many relationship counselors seem both terrified by and ignorant of nonstandard marital relationships of any kind."(498)
"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."(500)