I was reluctant to read Sex at Dusk: Lifting the Shiny Wrapping from Sex at Dawn, the book purposing to debunk Sex at Dawn. I thought it would be a biased, traditionalist dismissal of the original, full of "happily ever after" love rhetoric, and idealization of marriage. I was pleasantly surprised to find out this was not the case.
Sex at Dawn posits that sex was a common in prehistoric human societies, and this was greatly due to the "voracious" female sex drive. It is an important book for popularizing the notion that sex was, more or less, free during the evolutionary period of humanity. Its theory, though, is based on the erroneous hypothesis of a great female sex drive, which is a proposition that cannot stand scientific scrutiny.
Lynn Saxxon, in Sex at Dusk, is all too happy to mercilessly attack the idea that women would give away sex for free - or cheap, for that matter - and she backs up her attack with a laborious research and solid scientific evidence. While Ryan and Jetha proudly assert that women are "sluts", i.e. happy to engage in sex just for the pleasure of it, Saxxon takes up the cudgels for women, to unashamedly contend that "Our female ancestors have not been sluts but they have been whores", i.e. they exchanged sex for resources.
The main point of contention between the two books is marriage and the pair bond. Although Saxxon, as is the standard case in mainstream evolutionary psychology, does not make a good job distinguishing between the two, she highlights their ubiquity in human societies, and focuses on the psychological adaptations to accommodate the pair bond in humans - particularly in women. On the other hand, Ryan and Jetha insist on the psychological adaptations for sexual variety - which are also ubiquitous.
So was it marriage, "mild polygyny", plus sexual infidelity, the human model, or was it "free for all" sex?
In a sense, Saxxon's, and generally the conservative evolutionary psychologists' task is more difficult: while Ryan and Jetha only need to prove that a "free sex" society is a possibility, the standard narrative needs to prove that it is impossible. The latter does have evidence from societies in the last 10000 years in its arsenal, however it is still technically not sound to extrapolate to pre-agriculture hunter-gatherers, and conclude that the case about marriage had been then as it was to be later.
Saxxon, although adamant that women exchange sex for resources, seems to have a very difficult time grasping the notion that this exchange can take a collective form, which is what Ryan and Jetha support. Her difficulty is not personal. It is a crucial element, very revealing in our attempt to sort things out. It is a loud echo of the female sexual strategy. If examined separately from the male, the maximization of the female reproductive strategy is indeed what Saxxon identifies: polygyny. Why would they mate with an "inferior" man, if they could share a genetically and socially superior one? The problem is that this arrangement, polygyny, is a disaster for men: most are left without a sexual outlet. The ideal system for them would be free sex, without even the obligation to provide.
So, if we are to suppose a state of relative balance between the sexes, which would have come about if the external conditions were stable for a long period in prehistory, it is highly unlikely that it would be only in favor of the one sex. A collective management of resources, both material and sex, turns out to be the most efficient for the circumstances prehistoric hunter-gatherers found themselves in.
If the collective management of the (female) sexual resource was indeed the case, as Sex at Dawn supports, and this was done despite the female sexual preference for only the top males, it must have been accomplished against the liking of females. Therefore, instead of an inexistent "voracious" female sex drive being the reason for such a system, the catalyst towards it, as is unwittingly identified in Sex at Dusk, would be compulsion. Males would have had to exercise the advantages nature bestowed on them, both intellectual and physical, in order to have females comply to what was ultimately to the species benefit, the aforementioned collective management of sex.
Evolutionary psychology is still a highly controversial field. There is still much speculation, and since its subject is so complicated, arguments can be found for either side. Ryan and Jetha, reluctant to acknowledge women's dark side, summoned a politically correct but scientifically wrong female sexuality to their aid. It is not by chance that Sex at Dawn is currently the #1 book in Popular Psychology of Sexuality. Ironically, it is the dominant narrative, that it purposes to oppose, if in politics and not in evolutionary psychology. It sells the mainstream political idea "give more power to women, and sex will flow down to men". There are scores of women that are enjoying a privileged life selling a variation of that lie in their personal life. It is therefore revitalizing to see a book like Sex at Dusk, which makes it clear that the War of the Sexes is unpacifiable. It trashes the argument that women can be counted on to help solve the male sexual problem. In her last chapter, Saxxon fully unleashes her (and generally, the female's) enmity against men's sexual strategy. It is made quite clear that misandry is the standard female disposition against the average male, in stark contrast with men's general deference to women.
An example of Saxxon's disposition against male sexuality is revealing. One can imagine her, her gray hair bound in a tight bun, and her heavy, dark dress meticulously ironed, explaining to a sexless, enraged, sexually frustrated 17 year old boy, that "A sexless period for adolescent and young adult males is far from unnatural and is also found in other species, including chimpanzees and bonobos." Isn't that a relief? That's what science is about, finding solutions to human problems.
The problem about misandry is not that it creates bad feelings. It is a problem of scientific validity. Considering males to be naturally inferior to females raises the issue "why not all be female"? If there was a better way to be, evolution would have made us all be that. During the evolutionary era, there was equality between men and women, though its dimensions are in truth vastly different from the current pollitically correct feminist perception of it, as "inexchangeability". Considering the female sex to be the absolute arbitrator of sexual matters, of the most crucial biological resource, doesn't add up to a plausible natural equillibrium for our species.
Saxxon is sincere in that, if ever a free sex society was, or is to be, this would be a result of men asserting their own sexual strategy, over that of women. "Free sex?", say women. "Only over our bodies." Literally. Her book is useful, not as an objective account of human sexuality, but as a subjective one, from the point of view of women - and of the conservative manifestation of the system. It does refute quite some inaccuracies and overstated propositions in Sex at Dawn, but in its relentless hate against masculinity, ultimately makes one reappreciate Sex at Dawn's unreallistic but good-willed attempt at a conciliation, its "giving men a break".
For completeness, also check out my review of Sex at Dawn, Slaying the Vampire but getting bit.
KyfhoMyoba 7y ago
You have to keep in mind that this alleged high sex drive for women (ancient or current) only manifests itself in the presence of the top genetic 2% of males, i.e., the alphas.
scythe999 7y ago
Hypergamy is one of women's intrinsic instincts. "Sex at Dawn" became popular because deluded low-SMV men want to believe that the natural state is bombshells offering them their pussies for free. In prehistoric days the women were gravitating towards the tribe's alpha who had no qualms with smashing the skull of any beta who dared eye up his women.
xxxbeardl 7y ago
what you said here makes a lot more sense than the sex at dawn argument, regardless of how ''feel-good'' it was.
now a question for you: what to do w/ this information? how can we use it to better our situation?
again, thx for writing this up
adam-l Endorsed Contributor 7y ago
I am mostly fascinated about the possibility of a collective sexual strategy for men. TRP currently focuses on individual tactics. As I see it, individual tactics help individual men manage in the sexual landscape, which is great.
Those of us interested about changing the game, as opposesed to winning it, are at the level of still trying to discuss and understand the fundamentals. Since we are quite far from defining the sexual landscape in society, we might as well make clear what our victory would be about if we did.
Those said, the view on sexuality that I present does make for concrete tactical decisions. One is to thouroughly reject marriage, even 1.0. Another is to endorse prostitution, both as a social institution to provide for men's needs, and as a personal tactic towards value-effective sexual gratification. A third would be a collective approach to Game - a notion which is not much discussed in here, but I think it is crucial. (Women attracted to your "tribe" as a whole, and you as an "alpha" in that tribe.)
Demonspawn 7y ago
Unfortunately, there isn't a collective strategy for men, because the system is broken.
What is a sexual strategy? It's an optimization of the inherent resources for sex trade that men and women engage in. Why is this broken? Because women's suffrage allows women to take men's resources (taxes) via government without offering sex in return.
What has the result been? Women are takers rather than payers to government. Government has become a system of redistribution of men's money to women's interests. There is no way for men to change that game as long as women control suffrage (56% of the vote).
Revolt, Expat, or Turtle. Those are your only options. Until one of those three are taken, your only option is to maximize individual gains.
TheReformist94 7y ago
Women are as polygamous as men,but in a hypergamic manner. Now that contraception is available. They do have voracious sex drive or they wouldn't all be racking up notches of 40/50 on average. There's lots of girls on tinder who have harems of alphas. If they were so suited for monogamy the majority of relationships wouldn't mess up. Note that they tend to mess up mostly because of the female as they always want to hop back on the CC. Divorce rate is 85℅ women. If women didn't like casual sex,we wudnt have hookup culture. Watch the bored glazed look on a woman trapped in an LTR
playingwithfyre 7y ago
This is addressed in the rational male with scientific evidence, to the notion that testosterone is what drives sexual libedo. And wouldn't you know it, men have 12 times the amount of testosterone. That's why women's drives are cyclical.
TheReformist94 7y ago
yeh this is what i thought for about 2 years since swallowing the pill, but im starting to think that its clearly something else that is driving the female sex drive that is not testosterone. we may have 12-17 times more testosterone, but for women its psychological and i think its a different mechanism altogether.
They still fuck alot of guys, fuck multiple men at once without wanting to commit, and also, especially wih FWBs, its quite common that they want to fuck 3 times a day, 5 days a week, even with all the testosterone I have, i just dont want to drain my balls15 times a week.
Red_August 7y ago
Be careful trying to make women the same as men. They are not, especially when it comes to sex. There is absolutely no comparison in terms of sexual appetite. I understand that in the presence of an alpha, a woman will wet herself and push her limits but even that doesn't compare to men. If you remove women from the equation - such as with gay men - you find yourself in a world where 43% of gay men have had over 500 partners. 28% have had over 1,000 partners. There is absolutely no comparison. Lesbian numbers pale in comparison. Women have an evolutionarily built-in selection filter which dampens the process even with today's sluts.
When you could only maybe have up to a handful of children in your lifetime, and when each one of those pregnancies could kill you, only the smart women who chose wisely passed on her genes. The strategy is different for men as they could in theory have 1,000s of children.
[deleted] 7y ago
If Saxxton is right, then why is the penis designed as a shovel to shovel out other males sperm?
[deleted]
RD5 7y ago
Powerful info, mind sharing where you got the numbers on gay partner counts? Genuinely curious.
Japes25 7y ago
Woman - "We have the same sex drive as men, you don't know what you're talking about." Men - "Have you ever been so horny you tried to masturbait while driving?" Woman - "....."
TheReformist94 7y ago
i see what you are saying, but even by alpha mens standards, the notches an average woman achieves is still high. women would have 500 partners if they couldnt get caught for it and engage in all the gangbangs theyd like. How many cocks do you think pornstars go through? 500.
One girl i spoke to said " i just get bored with the same guy". if they didnt want to do it, they wouldnt do it. if they didnt have a large appetite for variety, they wouldnt fuck 60 guys. 60 women is a lot for a man. even an alpha.
adam-l Endorsed Contributor 7y ago
Women fuck +1, +2, +3 SVM. Men fuck below.
TheReformist94 7y ago
If there was supply of 500 cocks at +3 SMV they would. 5 a week in 2years
dr_warlock 7y ago
Anti-Slut defense today is just a ghost of patriarchy past and due to the prevalence of photo and communication technology.
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The ideas of strict monogamy and marriage, though lenient today, still linger and frame the SMP where women feel they must circumvent this labrinth of social and technological surveillance that affect her image. Pre-agriculture, there was no marriage, contracts of monogamy (they developed BECAUSE of agriculture). If a person isnt physically present when sexual innuendo and activity takes place between individuals, you will never know it occurred, thus doesnt affect her image.
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Prehistoric women didn't care about sex in 'public', in the bushes, or being passed around. There were no sexual taboos. Sexual taboos are not natural, they were intentionally designed by the patriarchy (rule by fathers), using religion as its right hand man, to create the Pussy Cartel for the father's daughter.
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The reason the ghost of patriarchy past still lingers is because corporations find the delusion profitable for men to believe in ever lasting love and slave away, especially in marriage. Truth, freedom, and peace are not very profitable.
redartist 7y ago
I disagree on the "never know" part. Many (most?) children born resemble the father by design, so there is a way to know, not foolproof of course but if your children look like the ugliest motherfucker in the tribe you know what happened.
Take a look at John Kasich's daughters. You know they are his daughters at a brief glance, such ugliness is telling. It's as if his face was photoshopped on a girl's body.
adam-l Endorsed Contributor 7y ago
In prehistory most sex was in fact inbreeding, between second cousins, cousins, paternal brothers, or even fathers and daughters. So in a sense, each child did have "many" fathers in the tribe, since it resembled them genetically.
james-watson 7y ago
Uh...doc?
You seriously need to read up on the biology of the sexes, and how primates (including humans) have evolved a whole host of behaviors to deal with paternity confidence. Why would a male allow a train of his bros to fuck his female if it compromises his reproductive chances?
Mate guarding evolved, and is quite real. Women weren't having orgies with everyone invited, because men didn't want to share their women. Men would rather kill each other than share their women. This is how K selection evolved.
dr_warlock 7y ago
I said women didn't care about being passed around prehisotrically. There wasn't ASD. I didn't say that it was common practice.
james-watson 7y ago
Women can't care about being passed around, because they are helpless property. If men decide to pass them around, they get passed around. If men decide that their sexuality must be guarded, it will be guarded.
Men decide. And their decisions have consequences. Pass around the women? Great, you get r-selected Africa. Guard them? K-selected civilization.
It's as simple as that.
adam-l Endorsed Contributor 7y ago
This is the old-school evopsych orthodoxy. Nowadays, even conservative evolutionary psychologists are catching up. The modern understanding is that paternal behaviour is much less about paternal investment and much more a flirting behaviour.
I discuss this issue in my previous posts, Free sex and probabilistic reproduction vs mate selection and Family, Marriage, Paternity: Update your fundamentals.
The idea is to see sex from a selfish gene perspective, instead of a selfish individual, which is a common mistake in evopsych. There are two important variables around sex: not only reproduction, but aggression as well. Schematically, a "selfish gene" in a population would not allow them to waste the resources killing eachother, when sharing is more efficient for its interests.
Fundamentally, the reason that comon access to females is more efficient for humans than polygyny, is the same as the reason the elites let us plebes have monogamy, a while back. Note that monogamy, in a sense, is the elites "sharing" women with the plebes. In harrems vs monogamy, clearly, monogamy, as a means to give sexual access to plebes, was more efficient, it let them have a stake in society, and give a shit about it.
If you go down to the prehistoric tribes of 50-150 individuals, a degree of sharing women accomplishes the same, against polygyny and sexual exclusion.
james-watson 7y ago
Your post goes into great length describing what amounts to the well understood r-selected tribe, such as the ones from Papua New Guinea. This is a matriarchal system seen in indigenous areas, where r-selected strategies still reign supreme. The only reason they exist is because K-selected societies have allowed them to exist.
So yes, such groups of 50-150 people existed 20,000 years ago, where women were passed around and men had zero paternal investment. They were utterly wiped out by K-selected, monogamous tribes which went on to build civilization.
Women have no agency, no power and zero ability to select their mates in the wild. Groups of men will take women as their property, and distribute them however they wish. The most successful men distributed women equally, in a 1:1 monogamous pairing. These men went on to annihilate their enemies and build civilization, and ushered in the era of K-selected human societies.
So once again, why do do we care about what an eradicated tribe of hominids did prior to civilization? How is that in any way relevant, other than the fact that they were eviscerated by their monogamous competitors? Sure, there were societies where men sat around, did not mate guard and did not invest in their offspring. They were wiped out. They will never return, because the men who work on building F-22 raptors and ICBMs will always out compete them.
idlepete 7y ago
I agree. One of my problems with Sex at Dawn was that it failed to take hypergamy into account when it described the obligatory sex with low value men that would have been necessary to make the strategy work. The book had other problems too. I thought all the evidence presented was interesting but obviously pointed to us being the adaptable ape able to practice monogamy or polygyny depending on conditions. Ryan makes the dualistic mistake. He just dismisses the idea of mixed strategies outright and says it has to be one or the other. Well I don't buy that we all had one uniform method of sexual organisation for 3 million fucking years and that nobody in all that time ever once figured out how paternity worked.
I agree with the parallel you draw between the trickle-down bullshit of economic and social liberalism which seem to have advanced hand in hand the last few decades too. You're not the first on here to call that out.
WhiteTrashKiller 7y ago
If you are speaking of the ancient world and sex there are variables that do not compute with todays modern society.
The availability of sex was more due to lack of stimulus than the Alpha dynamic. Surviving was tough, but the day to day activities and the tine requirements were less. Just think of commuting and how much time it wastes out of your day. The moral code and religious pressures were not developed for quite some time so Hypergamy was probably more apparent. Hypergamy wasn't corraled or should I say shoved into the shadows until Religion decided being a whore didn't look good. This was designed to control populations. Religion through its control afforded those men that were otherwise unable to acquire sex that chance to have a partner. Think of how society and human kinds great population expansion would have gone if only Alphas reproduced. We wouldn't have all the drone worker bees carrying the civilizations load, sowing the land and evolving our way of life. We would have remained small groups that interbred and would have died off long ago.
Don't get me wrong, just because a non alpha has a child doesn't mean he will end up a beta as well. Genetics are a funny thing, so religions goal did kind of work. The main goal was to increase the population. Now unfortunately we are still increasing our numbers, with no natural predator in sight and a lack of resources on the horizon. Those that shouldn't be reproducing are at higher levels than ever before, due to safety nets put on place by thise wishing to steer control one way or the other.
Now for TRP and not being nice, think of it as a fitness test. If you can't take someone sniping you from behind a keyboard in make believe land and breaking your frame, how im the hell are you gonna make it out in society when you have to deal with real men..........
xxxbeardl 7y ago
thank you for this. i will read it now.
ReddittFeist 7y ago
"based on the erroneous hypothesis of a great female sex drive"
Ummmm . This is one of the most erroneous statements I've ever seen.