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...
Fear is certainly natural, and like any other kind of insecurity, jealousy is an expression of fear. But whether or not someone else’s sex life provokes fear depends on how sex is defined in a given s...
Forget what you’ve heard about human beings having descended from the apes. We didn’t descend from apes. We are apes.
An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted. ARTHUR MILLER
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, an...
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...
Community ownership doesn’t work in large-scale societies where people operate in anonymity. In The Power of Scale, anthropologist John Bodley wrote: The size of human societies and cultures matters b...
In gorillas’ winner-take-all approach to mating, males compete to see who gets all the booty, as it were. So, although an adult silverback gorilla weighs in at around four hundred pounds, his penis is...
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...
As attentive readers may have noted, the standard narrative of heterosexual interaction boils down to prostitution: a woman exchanges her sexual services for access to resources. Maybe mythic resonanc...
A fire is never sated by any amount of logs, nor the ocean by rivers that flow into it; death cannot be sated by all the creatures in the world, nor a fair-eyed woman by any amount of men. THE KAMA SU...
We theorize that as a consequence of competition for paternity, human males evolved uniquely configured penises that function to displace semen from the vagina left by other males,
The Hamilton Beach Company of Racine, Wisconsin, patented the first home-use vibrator in 1902, thereby making it just the fifth electrical appliance approved for domestic use.
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 e...
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 t...
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...
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...
This is the moment too many couples struggle in vain to avoid or ignore—even to the point of choosing bitter divorce and fractured family over the daunting task of confronting the sky together, with a...
In 1276, Peter of Spain was elected Pope John XXI, but he died just nine months later when the ceiling of his library suspiciously collapsed on him as he slept.
Humans had less need for oversized muscles for fighting but evolved larger, more powerful testicles and, in the case of humans, a much more interesting penis.