Jennifer Flores Professor: Josh ScottEnglish 00404/09/2018Female Promiscuity Christopher Ryan and Jetha Cacilda authors of the book “Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality” discuss how human society is entitled to a certain sexual behavior standard.
It suggests that once one looks at the evolutionary sexual behavior history, the belief collapses. The book says that the current sexual behavior only favors men, but it is a disadvantage to women. This came from the changes in social culture, which took place in the agricultural revolution.
The evidence of this comes from the human behavior similarities in their primate counterparts as well as the incongruence about the behavior people have currently and the history of ancestors on sexual behaviors. Females and males are created to be hypersexual therefore in this paper I will explain as why the current standard if sexual behavior to disgrace female promiscuity. Today, when women practice promiscuous behaviors, they get negative brandings such as sluts or whore. According to the website “Psychology Today” it is easy for men to be accused of imposing a double standard when it comes to female sexuality: Its fine for men to be sexually promiscuous, such sexual activity is often culturally encouraged and admired. However, “Psychology Today” also states that when women openly and aggressively express their sexuality like men, we as a society tend to view them as mentally ill, promiscuous, sinful or evil vixens. when men do the same behavior, they are given a more neutral or positive brand such as a player or a pimp. This makes it clear that the current sexuality standard is a disadvantage to women and favorable to the men. The latter standard does not base on a biological process or innate that shows that females are supposed to be chaster than males, but this standard is constructed by the society.
Sex at Dawn is an argument against people who think that the most appropriate arrangement of natural families is not monogamy. The authors try to convince the readers to be more open-minded about the non-monogamous arrangements of families. They suggest that the most important thing between couples is faithfulness. The authors argue that monogamy can only help in ensuring that their children are very well fathered. However, both partners will still be able to cheat on each other through sexual competition to increase their success in reproduction (Ryan and Jetha 12).
Most especially men will try to sleep with many different women to search for a woman who can help them to raise or increase their progeny. However, women cheat trying to get more men that are successful because they have less desirable partners. In the book “The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships” the author believes that most of the time traumatic experiences of childhood determine how people turn out romantically later in life.
Depending on childhood experiences people can become love addict or love avoidant. People that are love avoidant is because they had problems with their family and in the future, they find it hard to trust people and make connections with someone which can lead to sex addiction. Sex works at a different scale the evidence on this is stemmed from the hunter-gatherer societies and primates, they argue that our species came from the promiscuous groups where their members practiced non-exclusive sex with each other as a mechanism, bonding, and they collaborated to raise their progeny. There was no sexual competition rather, it only occurred inside the vagina where different sperms from different men fought each other. Therefore, this means that people can live in arrangements, which are non-monogamous experiencing less sex frustration and leaving the sexual competition for the cells.
When the boy and a girl meet the first thing a boy does is to assess the how health, youthful and fertile they are. However, when a girl meets a boy, the girl assesses the social status, wealth, the paternal investment and health, (Ryan & Jetha pp. 7). As long as the two meet the criteria of each other, the boy is able to form the bond. On the other hand, the girl is more sensitive to any escape the boy does and they are associated with paranoid behaviors such as jealous and more (Ryan and Jetha 7).
The girls are more concerned with seeking various resources and the male status whereas the male is only interested in what the female has to offer using her body. They suggest that this is dictated by the social structure of people and not the biology process. The human society has believed that they are superiors of all species, unique in their behaviors and nature and they tend to downgrade the animal life. Ryan and Jetha in their book suggest that there are a lot of similarities between human and animals by saying that human beings have the same ancestors as apes. They further assert that this can be seen on the similarities between the behaviors of apes and people. The authors look at the chimpanzees as cousins to human beings.
How can the standard of the sexual behavior of humans be set to a standard of being monogamous yet our cousins can have sex with different males and as many times as possible a day Ryan and Jetha 12). Sex in apes involves multiple males and multiple women who make everyone relaxed. The authors base on this point to try to convince the readers that if we are similar with chimpanzees it is also possible to have the same sexual behavior. They suggest that if only human beings can stop being overridden by social constructs they would have more advantages in sex. That evidence on this can be seen from how the human body was constructed. The testicles of males were left outside hanging outside, because of the temperatures outside that are cooler and that help in preserving the sperm cells, which are on standby, they are also accompanied by the penises that are the largest among the primates that exist and they also ejaculate very quickly (Ryan and Jetha 12 – 13).
All features that men have in nature simply mean that their nature is promiscuous. The females have breasts, which are attracting men though they have multiple purposes that include breastfeeding. In explaining this, the nature of human beings is associated with feelings that should be responded to very quickly and at any time in need. The modern social standards suggest that the attractive features of women should be signs of the reproductive values, which is not true because they are many parts which have nothing to do with reproduction such as the clitoris, the clitoris is a stimulation area of a woman that causes orgasms in women. This simply means that the pleasure of a woman should be favored first and not production because even the males favor pleasure first than reproductive. This book criticizes the modern social structure that favors men more than the women. It emphasizes more on equality between men and women. The authors do not agree that the men should be more advantaged than women should.
They use the above examples to show the reader that there is no much difference between the female and the male and whatever is done to a man should be done to a woman. According to the fieldwork I conducted 1 out 6 people I interviewed will considered to have a polygamous relationship. In this case is a woman that would consider to be polygamous in a future. Men in the other hand they said that they would not considered a polygamous relationship because they won’t feel a special bond that connects a husband and wife. The history of human beings has promiscuity. In 200,000 years that the Homo sapiens species have existed, monogamy was not an option Ryan and Jetha 9.
Until 10,000 years ago, when there was a transition from multiple pair copulations to a single pair copulation standard, this means that the sexual behaviors were just changed leaving the sexual behavior that was is in the ancestral history. Initially our ancestors used an insemination system that was similar to gorillas where men fought against each other to win female harems. However, this changed to where males gained access to all the female (Ryan and Jetha 10). The current standard brought a pair bonding, which was on a long-term process, which had two options of either one male choosing one female or having multiple female partners (Ryan and Jetha 11).
Most males prefer the multiple systems whereas the female prefers the one female standard, which is associated with many sexual conflicts and various moral judgments.The increase in the marriages collapsing and the high rates of divorce on the sexual dysfunction of women (Ryan and Jetha 2). They say that men do not like to be with one woman in their lives and the women are not interested in keeping on apologizing for that mistake.
The reason for the dysfunction in women is that the interests of a man and a woman are not compatible. In reality, man and woman keep on thinking that their conflicts are conflicting when they are actually interested in the same thingIn modern society women suffer prejudice of an assemble sexuality society. The society makes couples to think that there is a problem in their behaviors when there is no problem at all when they are just not compatible in sexual relationships.
The standards of the society end up giving men freedom in their sexual behaviors that is a disadvantage to women. However, in this current age of sexual liberation there is hope that the society will soon accept that the monogamous arrangement or style is not the right way of existence, which will also give freedom to women. Work citedDiamond, Stephen. “What Motivates Sexual Promiscuity.
” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 17 Nov. 2011, www.psychologytoday.com/us.
Goeke, Niklas. “The Truth Summary.” Four Minute Books, 23 May 2016, fourminutebooks.
com/the-truth-summary. Ryan, Christopher and Cacilda Jethá. Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. New York: Harper, 29 June 2010. Print.
