Sexual Relationships
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Talk on Human Polyamory

Here is yet another great interview with Christopher Ryan, author of "Sex at Dawn: How we mate, why we stray, and what it means for modern relationships."

There are so many interesting points he makes in his work (not just THIS video) that all throw a wrench most of how we think relationships work.

- Most competition was between sperm, not between men. Basically all the men had tons of sex, as did all the women.

- There was no sense of ownership. Especially not of each other. This included children, who were essentially as free as adults. Including free to leave the tribe altogether.

- They were "fiercely egalitarian". That is, they didn't just naturally cooperate with one another on equal terms, they would actively resist and not tolerate attemps to hoarde resources or exercise control or power over one another.

- Women provided most of the tribe's calories. There was no need or even basis for a woman to choose a "richer" man, because resources were shared through the entire group. This idea is therefore fabricated and not a fundamental drive.

- Speaking of fabrications, every one of the previous points throws a wrench in the endless use of "Alpha Male" on this site. Most natural selection was between sperm rather than men, men had lots of sex and therefore no need to really compete for it, there was no ownership of resources, there wasn't really sexual exclusivity, and any attemps to exert power/superiority or hoarde resources was met with swift correction.

- The mere fact that we can be attracted to other people besides our partner is major evidence of our polyamorous past, and that monogamy is a personal choice, not a biological fact. Biologically monogamous creatures are only able to see the attractiveness in their partners, and some even die when their partners do. This criteria is easily blown in humans the moment someone in a relationship still finds Brad Pitt or Scarlett Johansson attractive.

- "Love and sex are like wine and cheese. Each perfectly fine on its own, but also great in combination." The idea that just because your partner finds someone else attractive, does not mean they find you any less attractive.

These are all great, optimistic points about human nature that can really help us out in modern, monogamous-or-otherwise, relationships and struggles.

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Most Helpful Guy

  • "Most competition was between sperm, not between men. Basically all the men had tons of sex, as did all the women."
    -We know for a fact that while 80% of women reproduced only 40% of men did ergo men did not have a lot of sex, in fact it shows that less then half of men, pre-civilization (and by extention monogamy) reproduced. www.psychologytoday.com/.../why-men-gave-polygamy

    "There was no sense of ownership. Especially not of each other. This included children, who were essentially as free as adults. Including free to leave the tribe altogether."
    - I don't think ownership is really a factor and as for children, we are investment parents ie we dictate what a child does and learns in order to increase their probability of survival. This is why the most advanced societies/civilizations have all been monogamous.
    "- Women provided most of the tribe's calories. There was no need or even basis for a woman to choose a "richer" man, because resources were shared through the entire group. This idea is therefore fabricated and not a fundamental drive."
    - Males where hunters and protectors, we required the fat content of animals to fuel our brains which was the domain of men not women. When a woman became pregnant she was inable to provide anything and when society came to be, that is once we became agrarian, what little she was able to gather was not enough hence males taking over through agriculture due to greater physical strength allowing them to produce more food. In short, this is actually true, we have ample evidence that shows this to be true and it can be seen in multiple mamalian species both of the simian variety and others.

    "- The mere fact that we can be attracted to other people besides our partner is major evidence of our polyamorous past, and that monogamy is a personal choice, not a biological fact. Biologically monogamous creatures are only able to see the attractiveness in their partners, and some even die when their partners do. This criteria is easily blown in humans the moment someone in a relationship still finds Brad Pitt or Scarlett Johansson attractive."
    -This is fallacious as one, we would absolutely need to find multiple people attractive in order to find a mate just like every species does otherwise if that one single individual does not reciprocate we would die. Two it presupposes that the monogamous people only function based upon attraction rather then the best strategy to survive and ensure the survival of the offspring. If this was the case we would be endlessly reproducing,

    • rather then investing in a small number of children. Yet we can see, throught the very fact that we exist and how advanced our society is, that investment parenting is a better strategy then endless reproduction, quality provded superior to quantity. Basicly from what I have read and heard from him explaining his book, he has cherry picked his data relying on a small number of groups who happen to have a different approach (almost all of which are small tribes where the death toll through violence is high thus making dependency on a single individual highly dangerous as far as terms of survival) while ignoring the fact that every major civilization naturally gravitated to monogamy on its own ie a socio-cultural convergent evoloution, if you will. This is a strong indicator of its importance. Further more, its based upon the notion that natural is better which is itself illogical, we can see the advantages of monogamy as literally everything in our society is evidence of it.

    • Furthermore it again ignores investment parenting, the idea of males as providors etc. The fact is that pregnancy leaves a woman vulnerable for a long duration of time since gestation is nine months, the pregnancy itself is dangerous, then the fact that currently we don't even consider some one a full adult until they are 18 and the skull doesn't even completely fuse together until age of 25 the same time where the human brain reaches its full maturity. This is a very long time and a very long time of dependency. This is why men where the protectors and providors (even chris ryan inadvertently admits this in his book when he acknowledges that the family in many of these small tribes take care of the child in the place of the husband (who as previously stated would likely end up dead in battel, 90% of deaths would be from violence in hunter gatherer groups)) This is also why monogamy became so integral, it allowed for maximum resources going to the woman and for the man it ensured that

    • reproduction. Again, their is a reason it arose in every major (and dominant) civilization through out the world independent of eachother and why only small tribes that never advanced beyond hunter gather still function in the "polyamourus" capacity.

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Most Helpful Girl

  • This was really interesting! Nice one

    • Thanks! You are the only girl to have responded thus far. I'm a little surprised, because I thought girls would have been the main ones having a big issue with it. But it's the guys that seem to have a major problem with it. On here they fairly argumentative, which is good. Normally, I have guys telling me "No! There was always an alpha male that killed the betas and got all the ladies! You have to be an asshole to be worth anything!" This has actually been the thought process of many mass-shooters before they went on their killing spree, like Elliot Rodger.

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  • A few things this article kinda leaves out in i personaly do think is worth mentioning
    1. People had lots of sex becuase lots of the children die, Darwinism in its prime
    2. People has also lots of sex becuase those where depressing where you would fear for your life all the time, sex was a stress reliever and would numb this (they basically where all sex addicts)
    3. Children where as free as adults becuase they where treaded as adults as very early Children of age 7-8 already helped hunting and gathering (they grew up faster then now)
    4. People wouldn't get much older then 30 years during those times, meaning early death, meaning they have lots less sex then the avarage now
    5. actractiveness is based on how much thier body says about chance of survival for thier offspring (wider hips easier time giving birth, bigger breasts more production of milk)
    6. And i find this one very important that wasn't inculded, Times change
    It does explain why we can be intrested in partners besides the one we are with right now, However this is not a reason to cheat.
    THis is however a great excuse to have one night stands

    As final word, loved the artical very intresting
    holy you read all my stuff o. o
    well uhm... hump along :P

    • Good arguments. I'll address each one, at least as they relate to Ryan's work and what I know of Hunter-Gatherers. 1. Oh definitely. But we still had far more sex than once every 9 months, and often not in ways that can procreate at all. 2. This is part of what Ryan is saying, though H-G life is not quite as horrific and brutish as people make it out to be. But lots of sex kept people chill and reduced physical male competition. 3. Definitely. I think it is more accurate to say children had all the same freedoms. You should read about children in hunter-gatherer tribes. 4. Kind of. Look back at #1. A life expectancy at birth would be around 30, yes. But infant mortality rates pull that number down. People didn't quite as old quite as often as they do now, but they say older folks are more common than expected. Basically as a hunter-gatherer, you have a decent chance of living to retirement age, but instead of retiring, you would just die. Basically, a 30-year average with a wide curve

    • 5. Yes, there is a lot of attraction that is based on survival chance of offspring, amongst other features. Especially as you say with the hips. However, large breasts do not produce any extra milk, and with the downward facing nose of humans, babies can still get milk from a flat chest. What they say is more likely is that when humans walked upright, the sexual swelling of the rear that is also associated with wider hips started to become more mimicked in the front with breasts. This will freak a lot of women out, but yeah, mammary glands are all that is necessary, the fat isn't. 6. This was never intended to be an excuse to cheat. Sexual exclusiveness is a promise you make to someone else, and breaking that promise is a grave betrayal. His whole point is to understand that attraction to others out side our relationship is natural and we shouldn't act like it isn't, or that it is an abomination. That is, no need to divorce your partner because they find someone else sexy.

    • Now, if anything, one night stands with strangers would arguably be LESS natural, not that that is inherently a bad thing, but that we shouldn't expect it to be easy or comfortable. Hunter-gatherers would have lots of sex with people they know very, very well and have known for a long time. Closer than some of the best married couples in the modern world. Having a one-night stand involves largely breaking through reluctance towards strangers. It's kinda like how shyness would have been a non-issue as a hunter-gatherer, because everyone pretty much knew each other already, anyway. At least you knew everyone in your tribe. But in the modern, developed world, we are constantly bombarded with complete strangers, which is an experience a H-G would have rarely, if ever, experienced. A more accurate argument would be that you sleep with most of the girls within your circle of friends, and they slept with most of the guys in that group, too.

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  • No sense of ownership? You do understand that slavery was prevalent in most cultures and that he who horded the most stuff was usually designated as the leader or king. We have never truly lived in a "egalitarian" society. We didn't even understand the idea of the common people making decisions until Greece and even then the scales were heavily sided for males with high social standing and richest families.
    I really don't understand why he says the "alpha male" is a myth. It really isn't, men competed for women all the time (take Troy for instance) and no one shared anything they didn't absolutely have to. We live in a fairly nice and sharing world compared to then.

    • You might find this an interesting read:

      www.psychologytoday.com/.../how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways

    • Also, it sounds like you are talking about the first several millennia of living with the new structures agriculture created, which were truly dystopian. We lived almost exclusively as hunter-gatherers for about 200,000 years up until only about 5-10 thousand years ago when we started to settle down into bigger groups that had the capability of having "rich" and "poor".

    • Just want to point out that there is a very old civilization in the America's that existed for no less then 1000 years without war or armies, had cities, farming, math, culture etc.. and did trade with other cultures thousands of miles away. Watched a documentary about it a while back, can't recall the name but just wanted to point out that most of history is simply unknown and that claiming agriculture made things distopian isn;t nesisarily true. There are also stone runes, temples, roads, calendars etc.. all over the earth no younger then 13 000 - 80 000 years old, the older ones even the stones have mostly crumbled to dust. The point being people have been living in cities and farming for many many thousands of years longer then we have previously thought and what that ancient life was like we simply don't know.

  • This was a great book. I have been a polyamorist for 7 years now and reading this really helped me see that I'm not the crazy one after all.

    • Yeah, I thought it was a really good book, at the very least thought-provoking. I am not polyamorous myself. I'm mostly excited in the sorts of things it bebunks, like - Homosexuality is "unnatural" and serves no purpose - Sex exists solely for reproductive purposes. Non-reproductive sex is animalistic or otherwise "gross" - That sex is primarily an act of a man "taking something" from a woman - The idea that the minority of men ("alpha males") have any value to society. - The idea of expecting that men should provide for women, protect women, compete with each other for women, while women are supposed to do jack but make babies and choose the "best provider" - The idea that someone is "more of a man" for being a masculine psychopath than a "weak" empathizer. "He may be evil, but at least he isn't weak" as Tywin Lannister put it on Game of Thrones. Compare Hitler to the original Buddha, and remember that Hitler demonstrates much more "alpha" characteristics.

  • This doesn't seem to take in the death rate or the age people lived too or sti's etc

    • People were most likely to die of more intensive diseases which, of course, lowered their lifespan without modern medicine. However, because of this, STI's wouldn't have been a big deal. Not only could better immune systems stave them off, but having genital warts isn't a big issue when you are dying of an infection. Regardless, recent studies have suggested a much higher life expectancy than we previously thought.

    • I think humanity will have to eventually start genetic engineering as we have stop evolving thanks to modern medicine. There is no more natural selection and we are now passing on genetic weakness and deformities as never before.

    • Apparently we are still evolving rather quickly on the scale of things, but very, very slowly compared to our lifetimes. There have been a few notable changes. For one, we are taller than our ancestors were, it could be debatable whether or not this is genetic. Our testes have also shrunk, likely due to monogamy. And we have evolved out of lactose-intolerance. Normally, humans stop being able to process lactose after weaning. But there were genetic deformities that caused some people to NOT become lactose-intolerant, which was of notable benefit in milk-drinking societies like the west. This WAS a genetic thing, and only happened within the last 5-10 thousand years. But for the most part, yeah, we don't have quite as much selection as we used to, thanks to medical advances. You sound like you are suggesting we just let people die who aren't up to our genetic standards, though.

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  • I'd just like to point some things out.

    1) Monogamy exists all throughout the animal kingdom:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monogamy_in_animals

    2) His idea that children were seen as free adults makes no sense, given how not even bonobos, the horniest animal of all time, are like that. 18 years is a LONG time for a creature our size to mature, and there's a reason it takes that long:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4HGfagANiQ

    it takes us that long to mature because that's how long it takes our minds to fully mature, and for our parents to teach us all we need to know.

    3) If what he says were true, then explain why nearly every culture around the world has a concept of marriage, and believes that sex outside marriage is a taboo.

    4) I remember two guys each independently submitted takes explaining why monogamy is indeed part of our nature. They both basically said that for men, monogamy ensures that the children the woman bears will be his. For women, monogamy ensures that her children will have a reliable mountain of muscle to feed and protect them.

    • Ah, I found on of those takes I mentioned: www.girlsaskguys.com/.../a9763-why-humans-have-evolved-to-prefer-monogamy

      Also, just to emphasis how stupid his idea of children being considered adults is, let's perform a thought experiment. Let's take someone and just plop them into the wilds of Africa, with only the clothes they're wearing as items to call their own (if even that), and with no hope of ever reaching human civilization again. Just like how it was for early humans. Now, do you seriously think the chances of survival are anywhere near as good for a child as they are for an adult?

    • 1. Of course it does! But we have little evidence that monogamy was how humans have always lived. Remember that modern humans have been around for 200,000 years, while agriculture, and thus ownership and resource hoarding, has been around for 5,000 to 10,000 years. That's 5% of our time on Earth at most. 2. Yeah, I have some doubts about this one myself. But the idea has been features a few times on Psych today and others. Definitely more free, but I question the levels they talk about. 3 and 4 both only matter if women are prevented from accessing resources, and paternity certainty is a major issue. This also comes down to ownership of children. When the community, rather than two individuals, raise children, it doesn't matter whose children those were. When women were providing the most consistent source of food, there is little need to find a specific man who would provide these, especially because it wasn't one man, but multiple men doing the hunting.

    • When you are moving around too much to accumulate food, there is an African saying "the best place to store extra food is in a friend's stomach." There is no way to horde food when you are moving all the time. And therefore there isn't a single person who has most of the food. From there, the idea of seeking out the person with the most food becomes nonsensical.

      The reasons for monogamy you posted are indeed legit, and are the reasons monogamy evolves in many species. But for humans, it is more of a social contract and choice, rather than a biological fact.

      Also, I recommend watching the video. There is also another video where he goes into much greater detail into the evidence. https://tinyurl.com/p9v9wsj

      But his full depth is in his book, "Sex at Dawn".

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  • Great take.
    I'd love to be in a poly relationship some day

    • That would be interesting. To be clear, I'm advocating anything with this. Mostly, I'm excited about the sorts of things this information debunks. Personally, I'm not sure we are in a good position to be polymorous these days. One day in the future, perhaps. But it would be interesting to be in a close relationship with several people in one household.

    • I'm only comfortable having one woman in the household. Polygamy is outside my comfort zone. Polyamory however is fine since it is just about having fun.

  • I call BS I'm a one man woman

    • And that's cool, dude. I definitely am as well. This isn't an attempt to convert anyone or anything. Rather, it's a better way of viewing the nature of human sexuality.

  • He makes a big deal about how there are "high number" of sex acts to births for human beings. Thats because of birth control, not evolution!

    He mistakenly claims that animals with external testicles have "sperm competition", that is true of ALL animals that reproduce sexually.

    His ENTIRE argument about the perfect "hunter gatherer" society is about how women were "liberated" and "didn't need men" Stopped right there. It is NOTHING BUT FEMINIST PROPAGANDA!

    • High sex acts per birth has been the norm long before birth control. Most animals have a fairly short period where they have sex, and it is only in ways that can reproduce, at times during the female period that can reproduce. Humans everywhere have sex all year around and lots of times in ways that cannot possibly reproduce. We thought that blowjobs, handjobs, homosexuality, and such were all human inventions, but we find them all the time in bonobos, indicating that it goes much farther back.

    • For sperm competition, It isn't just the existance sperm competition. It is the EMPHASIS on sperm competition. WHen there are few men who have men there, each doesn't need much sperm. When a lot of men have been there, there is an evolutionary advantage to producing more than your competitors. Furthermore, the flared head and thrusting action sucks existing semen out, a feature not necessary if, again, other men haven't been there. Then, when a woman has an orgasm, her uterus tries to match its pH with the pH of the incoming semen, in an effort to favor an orgasm-causing man's semen over others. The fact that females have orgasms, much less multiple intense ones, says something about the female libido.

    • Finally, we KNOW how hunter-gatherers behave. We KNOW how bonobos behave. This isn't making up some bullshit behavior of some theoretical being. "how women were "liberated" and "didn't need men"" *are. Hunter-gatherer societies are still around. This is where many of the observations come from. There are also a lot of documents from European explorers who discovered nomadic native American and African tribes. One of the first things that seems to spring up when these groups settle from agriculture is they begin to wage war with one another for limited land and resources in their immediate surroundings, since they can't just pack up and leave like they did before.

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  • "They were "fiercely egalitarian"

    In one sense yes, they judged each other on merit and did not allow other distinctions. But merit was a big deal. A guy with merit, usually success in hunting or war, was a chick magnet. The personality which would have such success is not so very different from the 'alpha male' idea. Only instead of just getting the position by sheer attitude you had to show what you could do.

    Also women gathering most of the calories is misleading. The burden of defending choice territory from intruders fell on the men. Women aren't going to gather anything if another tribe runs them off.

    • This still sounds like post-agricultural humans, as hunter-gatherers were primarily nomadic and so didn't have a specific plot of land to defend. While there were likely many skirmishes between tribes if one decided to show hostility towards other tribes, there wasn't the sort of territorialism you would see shortly after we settled down on static plots of land. And if you are looking at chimps as a comparison to a war-like, territorial nature of humanity where males form a protective shell around the females, you should also take into account bonobos. With bonobos, females are very tightly knit. When two groups of bonobos meet, the males are on edge and excitable, but the females group together to keep males from becoming violent. They then meet with the other group of females and initiate basically and inter-tribal sex party to reduce tensions. When this sort of thing doesn't work, the females actually join the males in retaliation against the other group.

    • I would argue that humans were somewhere in between chimps and bonobos, and the debate is about which parts we got from chimps and which parts we got from bonobos. But there is one clue in a gene associated with empathy and bonding that exists in Humans and Bonobos, but is not present or rendered useless in Chimpanzees, who demonstrate more of the violent, competitive, and territorial traits amongst the big three. But yes, fierce egalitarianism is one of the more consistently reported traits from records of nomadic groups, such as nomadic Native American tribes, Amazonian tribes, and others that were observed by European explorers.

    • " One of humanity's two closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, are anything but egalitarian, forming themselves into hierarchies that are often dominated by an alpha male. So great is the contrast with human hunter-gatherers that it is widely argued by palaeoanthropologists that resistance to being dominated was a key factor driving the evolutionary emergence of human consciousness, language, kinship and social organization." - "Hierarchy in the forest" (2001) Cambridge University "hunter-gatherers don't have permanent leaders; instead, the person taking the initiative at any one time depends on the task being performed." Same reference.

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