Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships

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The APA was the only major organization of health professionals to see no ethical problem with the torture program.

Can we stop acting as if not dying is an option? Listen carefully, and you'll hear people say things like, "If I die, I want it to be painless." If? There is no "if" about it. Women take longer to orgasm and can have sex longer to maximize potential partners for a successful impregnation. Interestingly, when asked to describe their arousal, the majority of the women in the study played it down. Further proof that our society encourages women to be less sexual and that the expectationis for them to be prudish.My wife and I have been married for more than 10 years, but recently our sex drives have gone in different directions. My desire to have sex with her is increasing, but this is not reciprocated. She has said we can have sex only at the weekend, but that it should not be planned as she prefers spontaneity. Given that we have two children with lots of hobbies and activities, as well as our own interests, the opportunities for even planned sex are limited . I find myself getting tense at the thought of no intimacy and it can feel quite stressful as the weekend progresses. Any suggestion that we could do it on a weekday is immediately rejected. I love my wife deeply and find her even more attractive than when we met. But this situation is very difficult and I am not prepared to have an unsatisfying sex life for ever . Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. But this narrative is collapsing. Here, renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, while debunking almost everything we "know" about sex, offer a bold alternative explanation. Ryan and Jethá's central contention is that human beings evolved in egalitarian groups that shared food, child care, and, often, sexual partners. Weaving together convergent, frequently overlooked evidence from anthropology, archaeology, primatology, anatomy, and psychosexuality, the authors show how far from human nature monogamy really is. With intelligence, humor, and wonder, Ryan and Jethá show how our promiscuous past haunts our struggles over monogamy, sexual orientation, and family dynamics. Human beings everywhere and in every era have confronted the same familiar, intimate situations in surprisingly different ways. The authors expose the ancient roots of human sexuality while pointing toward a more optimistic future illuminated by our innate capacities for love, cooperation, and generosity.--From publisher description

We can't know someone's inner nature and intentions based solely upon the content of their outbursts. I was fascinated by thefindings about the evolution of our bodies to have sex a lot and with different partners, as it completely contradicts the evidence found in Why Is Sex Fun, which point to our bodies evolving for monogamy, not against it. The only way tomake sure was to get a woman to stay with him, which ended up in public scrutiny of women who had sex with different partners, violence against women and, of course, marriage. Lesson 2: Women want sex just as much as men, but they are conditioned to play it down.The switch from our ancestors’ sexual “sharing is caring” mentality in their hunter-gatherer-tribes occurred once we started to settle down and farm our own food. Niklas Göke is an author and writer whose work has attracted tens of millions of readers to date. He is also the founder and CEO of Four Minute Books, a collection of over 1,000 free book summaries teaching readers 3 valuable lessons in just 4 minutes each. Have you ever considered that you are most likely to read books whose message you already agree with? For example, The 4-Hour Workweekwas right what I wanted to hear, and I’m assuming that’s a big part of the reason why I read it in the first place.

Because of men’s high testosterone levels and their (especially today) often competitive behavior around women, the message we receive in public and the media is that women are prudes and less hungry for sex. Interesting? Yes. Weird? Hell yeah. But interesting nonetheless. Especially because there’s also scientific research to show our bodies have evolved for monogamy. Those who had more land, or a bigger farm, were more prosperous. The tendency to try and own as much as possible brought out greed and jealousy in humans.

Loving a single person more than anyone else is possible, but that doesn’t align your sex drive to only be aroused by that person. Similarly, just because an affair is exciting, that doesn’t make it true love. Sadly, we’ve gotten to a point where a lot of women comply. Lesson 3: Our bodies are made forsexual competition. Love for your spouse, no matter how profound and sincere, will probably not eliminate your innate yearning for erotic novelty. I do not agree with the message of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t learn from it. However, in spite of it mainly promoting polygamy, it also makes some amends. The book does say we must not confuse sex and love, since they are 2 distinct things. Before we’d just eat whatever we find, and thus naturally have a high variety of foods and nutrients. But once we started mass producing the same few things, we took a toll on our health.

Simultaneously to the creation of marriage and the family,the notion arose that women’s libido is lower than men’s. People want to know if their attraction for people other than their partner is a flaw in their wiring. Christopher Ryan caused a whole lot of trouble with this one in 2010, but he also got a lot of people to think. Sentence-Summary: Sex at Dawnchallenges conventional views on sex by diving deep into our ancestors’ sexual history and the rise of monogamy, thus prompting us to rethink our understanding of what sex and relationships should really feel and be like.Women’s sexuality seems to be more fluid, however, as they were aroused by a much bigger variety of images, for example even monkeys having sex.