“Only with the relatively recent shift from off-the-land foraging to agriculture did our species veer away from cooperation and sharing, even sharing of mates, in small groups; hierarchy, sexual repression and violence may pass for the human normal nowadays, but it wasn’t always so.”
At Bookslut, a detailed discussion of the points made in the new anthropological/scientific polemic Sex At Dawn, a book that sounds like a must-read for anybody eager to slough off tired, old nuclear-Victorian-Reagan-era repression.
Which in San Francisco, where I live, means pretty much everybody.
(Funny moment at the bookstore recently: a woman asked, “Do you have sex at dawn?” referring, of course, to the new book but in my ignorance of said book I almost thought she was being literal. So I said, “No, only at dusk, after a hearty meal of spinach leaves and couscous,” which I didn’t really say but I wish I had. But on second thought I’m glad I didn’t.)
