Sex at Dawn

Openly expressed jealousy, for the Mosuo, is considered aggressive in its implied intrusion upon the sacred autonomy of another person, and is thus met with ridicule and shame.

Worldwide, pornography is reported to rake in anywhere from fifty-seven billion to a hundred billion dollars annually. In the United States, it generates more revenue than CBS, NBC, and ABC combined and more than all professional football, baseball, and basketball franchises.

Asking whether our species is naturally peaceful or warlike, generous or possessive, free-loving or jealous, is like asking whether H2O is naturally a solid, liquid, or gas

Technology, Entertainment, Design

Though surprised by what his team found, Berns found comfort in it. “It’s reassuring,” he said. “In some ways, it says that we’re wired to cooperate with each other.”

Those who proclaim that greed is simply part of human nature too often leave context unmentioned. Yes, greed is part of human nature. But so is shame. And so is generosity (and not just toward genetic relatives).

The necessary facts wouldn’t be revealed for many decades.
But now we have them. Scientists have learned to read ancient bones and teeth, to carbon-date the ash of Pleistocene fires, to trace the drift of the mitochondrial DNA of our ancestors.
And
the
information
they’ve
uncovered
resoundingly refutes the vision of prehistory Hobbes and Malthus conjured and Darwin swallowed whole.

Why is it so easy to believe that a mother’s love isn’t a zero-sum proposition, but that sexual love is a finite resource? Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins asks the pertinent question with characteristic elegance: “Is it so very obvious that you can’t love more than one person? We seem to manage it with parental love (parents are reproached if they don’t at least pretend to love all their children equally), love of books, of food, of wine (love of Château Margaux does not preclude love of a fine Hock, and we don’t feel unfaithful to the red when we dally with the white), love of composers, poets, holiday beaches, friends …
why is erotic love the one exception that everybody instantly acknowledges without even thinking about it?”14

is jealousy natural? It depends. 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 society, relationship, and individual’s personality.

We’d like to suggest an alternative title for this song: “When a Man Becomes Pathologically Obsessed and Sacrifices All Self-Respect and Dignity by Making a Complete Ass of Himself (and Losing the Woman Anyway Because Really, Who Wants a Boyfriend Who Sleeps Out in the Rain Because Someone Told Him To?).”