Sex at Dawn

Despite centuries of religious and scientific propoganda, the basic illusions underpinning the supposed “naturalness” of the conventional nuclear family are clearly exhausted. This collapse has left many of us isolated and unfulfilled. Blind insistence and well-intentioned inquisitions have failed to turn the tide, and show no signs of future success. Rather than endless War Between the Sexes, or rigid adherence to a notion of the human family that was never true to begin with, we need to seek peace with the truths of human sexuality. Maybe this means improvising new familial configurations. Perhaps it will require more community assistance for single mothers and their children. Or maybe it just means we must learn to adjust our expectations concerning sexual fidelity. But this we know: vehement denial, inflexible religious or legislative dictate, and medieval stoning rituals in the desert have all proved powerless against our prehistoric predilections.

In 1988, Roy Romer, then governor of Colorado, faced a feeding-frenzy of questions about his long-running extramarital affair that had become publicly known. Romer did what few public figures have dared. In the spirit of the Yucatan, he refused to accept the premise underlying the intrusive questions: that his extramarital relationship was a betrayal of his wife and family. Instead, he called an extraordinary press conference where he pointed out that his wife of forty-five years had known about and accepted the relationship all along. Romer confronted the tittering reporters with “life as it really happens.” “What is fidelity?” he asked the suddenly silent gaggle of reporters. “Fidelity is what kind of openness you have. What kind of trust you have, which is based on truth and openness. And so, in my own family, we’ve discussed that at some length and we’ve tried to arrive at an understanding of what our feelings are, what our needs are, and work it out with that kind of fidelity.”²¹

The Marriage of the Sun and the Moon

In a sky swarming with uncountable stars, clouds endlessly flowing, and planets wandering, always and forever there has been just one moon and one sun. To our ancestors, these two mysterious bodies reflected the female and the male essences. From Iceland to Tierra del Fuego, people attributed the Sun’s constancy and power to his masculinity; the Moon’s changeability, unspeakable beauty, and monthly cycles were signs of her femininity.

To human eyes turned toward the sky 100,000 years ago, they appeared identical in size, as they do to our eyes today. In a total solar eclipse, the disc of the moon fits so precisely over that of the sun that the naked eye can see solar flares leaping into space from behind.

But while they appear precisely the same size to terrestrial observers, scientists long ago determined that the true diameter of the sun is about four hundred times that of the moon. Yet incredibly, the sun’s distance from Earth is roughly four hundred times that of the moon’s, thus bringing

them into unlikely balance when viewed from the only planet

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with anyone around to notice.

Some will say, “Interesting coincidence.” Others will wonder whether there isn’t an extraordinary message contained in this celestial convergence of difference and similarity, intimacy and distance, rhythmic constancy and cyclical change. Like our distant ancestors, we watch the eternal dance of our sun and our moon, looking for clues to the nature of man and woman, masculine and feminine here at home.

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Luc Viatour/www.lucnix.be

*

Recall Beckerman’s description of mate-sharing in the Amazon: “You know that if you die, there’s some other man who has a residual obligation to care for at least one of your children. So looking the other way or even giving your blessing when your wife takes a lover is the only insurance you can buy.”

REFERENCES AND

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

Abbott, E. (1999). A History of Celibacy. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.

Abramson, P. R., and Pinkerton, S. D. (Eds.). (1995a). Sexual Nature Sexual Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

_ (1995b). With Pleasure: Thoughts on the Nature of

Human Sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press.

Acton, W. (1857/2008). The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Live Considered in their Physiological, Social, and Moral Relations. Charleston, SC: BiblioLife.

Adovasio, J. M., Soffer, O., and Page, J. (2007). The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory. New York: Smithsonian Books.