Sex at Dawn

Nor do the females of our closest primate cousins offer much reason to believe the human female should be sexually reluctant due to purely biological concerns. Instead, primatologist Meredith Small has noted that female primates are highly attracted to novelty in mating. Unfamiliar males appear to attract females more than known males with any other characteristic a male might offer (high status, large size, coloration, frequent grooming, hairy chest, gold chains, pinky ring, whatever). Small writes, “The only consistent interest seen among the general primate population is an interest in novelty and variety.. In fact,” she reports, “the search for the unfamiliar is documented as a female preference more often than is any other characteristic our human eyes can

perceive.”¹⁶

Frans de Waal could have been referring to any of the previously mentioned Amazonian societies when he wrote that the male “has no idea which copulations may result in conception and which may not. Almost any [child] growing up in the group could be his.. If one had to design a social system in which fatherhood remained obscure, one could hardly do a better job than Mother Nature did with [this] society.”¹⁷ Though de Waal’s words are applicable to any of the many societies who engage in ritualized extra-pair sex, he was, in fact, writing of the bonobo, thus underscoring the sexual continuity linking the three most closely related apes: chimps, bonobos, and their conflicted human cousins.

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.

For starters, recall that the total number of monogamous primate species that live in large social groups is precisely zero—unless you insist on counting humans as the one and only example of such a beast. The few monogamous primates that do exist (out of hundreds of species) all live in the treetops. Primates aside, only 3 percent of mammals and one in ten thousand invertebrate species can be considered sexually monogamous. Adultery has been documented in every ostensibly monogamous human society ever studied, and is a leading cause of divorce all over the world today. But even in the latest editions of his classic book The Naked Ape, the same Desmond Morris who observed soccer players happily sharing their lovers still insists that “among humans sexual behavior occurs almost exclusively in a pair-bonded state,” and that “adultery reflects an imperfection in the pair-bonding mechanism.”¹⁸

That’s a major minor “imperfection.”

As we write these words, CNN reports that six adulterers are

being stoned to death in Iran. Before the hypocritical sinners

throw the first stones, the male adulterers will be buried up to

their waists. In a sickening gesture toward chivalry, the

women will be buried to their necks, presumably to bring a

quicker death to these women who dared consider their

bodies their own. Such brutal execution of sexual

transgressors is anything but an oddity, historically speaking.

“Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism each share a

fundamental concern over the punishment for a woman’s

sexual freedom,” says Eric Michael Johnson. “Whereas any

‘man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife [both]

the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death,’

(Leviticus 20:10) but any unmarried woman who has sexual

relations with an unmarried man shall be brought ‘to the door

of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her

19

with stones that she die’ (Deuteronomy 22:21).”

Yet even after centuries of such barbaric punishment, adultery persists everywhere, without exception. As Alfred Kinsey noted back in the 1950s, “Even in cultures which most rigorously attempt to control the female’s extramarital coitus, it is perfectly clear that such activity does occur, and in many instances it occurs with considerable regularity.”²⁰

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? Were monogamy an ancient, evolved trait characteristic of our species, as the standard narrative insists, these ubiquitous transgressions would be infrequent and such horrible enforcement unnecessary.

No creature needs to be threatened with death to act in accord with its own nature.

The Promise of Promiscuity