Since Darwin's day, we've been told that monogamy comes naturally to us, but what Dr. Christopher Ryan says in this interview just might change everything you thought you knew about sex. Dr. Ryan is a renowned psychologist and author of The New York Times best seller “Sex At Dawn,” and he’s on a mission to debunk the common misconceptions about monogamy and expose the ancient roots of human sexuality, and what it really means for modern relationships. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We get emails from people every day, beautiful emails from people, monogamous and not monogamous, who find the information empowering.
So I can't give any specific advice, I'm afraid, other than to not be misled by a false view of what human sexual nature is.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Dr. Oz, here I'm with Lisa in our studio in New York City.
We're joined by Chris Ryan, who's got a PhD, but what he's writing about is absolutely flabbergasting, independent of whether he had a PhD or not.
I am fascinated by this book.
It's called Sex at Dawn.
Co-author with, is it Cecilda Jetta?
Did I pronounce that correct, Christopher?
Cecilda, yes.
Cecilda.
Cecilda Jetta.
What a beautiful name, spelled beautifully as well.
But Chris is joining us today, and we're going to be talking to him about this broad theme of the historical roots of human sexuality.
And Chris, I got to say, there's so many fascinating elements to your book, and I congratulate you about it.
But just to give everyone a little bit of background on you, I received your BA in English and American Literature, and then went on to get a PhD in Psychology.
And you have spent a good part of your adult life outside the country doing pretty interesting things in unexpected places, including gutting salmon in Alaska, teaching English to prostitutes in Bangkok, a self-defense program for land reform and activists in Mexico.
I mean, you've pretty much done everything, including working in New York City's Diamond District.
So I'm just curious, what got you interested in writing this book at this time?
Yeah, that's a good question.
I was casting about for a PhD thesis that wasn't too depressing or difficult, and since I'm not very disciplined, I guess sexuality was about my only option, just because I was naturally fascinated.
And basically what happened was that I got into reading the literature of evolutionary psychology, and initially I was converted.
But the deeper I dug, the more I saw that the vision of sexuality and human sexual evolution presented in the sort of mainstream scientific narrative really is a Victorian projection based largely on Darwin's presuppositions about female sexuality.
So that opened up the root to this book for me.
So let's talk a little bit about some of those Darwinian thoughts.
And one of the most important ones, and it's so fundamental, we see anyway in Western civilization, is sexual monogamy.
Why is long-term sexual monogamy so difficult for couples?
And as you explain this, I'd love if you could take us back to some of the work you've done, looking at what other societies do with regard to this.
Yeah, the reason long-term sexual monogamy is so difficult for human beings is that it runs directly counter to our evolved appetites.
So I often say monogamy is like vegetarianism.
You know, it can be a healthy decision.
It can be an ethical decision.
It can be a very wise decision for many people.
But just because someone decides to be a vegetarian doesn't mean that bacon stops smelling good.
Right?
Because your body responds to the smell of meat, because there are hundreds of thousands of years of our ancestors sitting by a fire where meat was cooking, and so you can't override these natural tendencies without some sort of conflict developing.
So, that's the reason that long-term monogamy is difficult, because we're evolved to seek out novelty in our sexual partners.
And this is the argument we present in Sex at Dawn.
Well, the book provides a revolutionary new spin on the foundations of human sexuality.
And we put a lot of the blame on the development of an agriculturally based society.
Now, I have argued on this program that when we began to become agriculturally Yeah, essentially what we're doing is restating...
Some of the theories that were prominent in the 19th century, Engels and Louis Henry Morgan were two famous thinkers in the 19th century who followed this line of reasoning, which is that with the advent of agriculture, the concept of private property entered human consciousness in a big way.
Before agriculture, our ancestors really had no reason to worry about property.
Because they didn't have any.
They were nomadic, moving around.
They didn't carry a lot of stuff with them.
Whatever they did carry, they shared because it was an easier way to organize social life in a nomadic society.
But when agriculture entered the picture, suddenly people accumulated property, houses, livestock, and so on.
And because it was a paternalistic society, We know that the men wanted to leave their property to their sons.
So paternity certainty became a very big issue at this point, and the only way to assure paternity is to control your woman's sexual life.
So this is where we argue that the male obsession with controlling female sexuality entered the picture.
The conventional view is that it's simply part of human nature.
But we found that the evidence strongly suggests that it's much more a reaction to the economic conditions that came about 10,000 years ago.
What about the female's obsession with controlling the male's monogamy?
That's not explained by the property.
Yeah, well, we would say that that's, again, a reaction to an economic situation.
You know, if you look at the Old Testament where it says, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife.
If you read that in context, it goes on to say, Nor his house, nor his servants, nor his livestock.
So the wife is a piece of property that you're not supposed to covet, that belongs to your neighbor.
It's not really so much about sexual jealousy as it is about property rights.
Now, from the female perspective, what you see is that women are put into a position, starting with these early agricultural societies, in which their only access to the necessities of life is through men, either through their father or through their husbands.
So, the woman's obsession with monogamy and security is a completely logical response to being put in this position where her only access to what she needs for her own survival and the survival of her children comes through a man.
What you find is that in societies, both hunter-gatherer societies and modern societies like Scandinavian countries, for example, where women have direct access to power and status and wealth, where they don't need men for that, you find a much greater relaxation in these sorts of obsessions about monogamy.
Let's walk through this a little bit because you actually do quote information from societies that are not agricultural that have still been identified on the planet.
What is female sexuality like in these years?
Again, I'm fascinated by the way you go through this and start to challenge some of our fundamental beliefs about monogamy.
Yeah, well, we surveyed a number of societies that disprove or are extreme exceptions to this idea that men and women are naturally monogamous sexually.
Some of the societies that are most interesting are in the Amazon basin.
They have a concept known to anthropologists as partible paternity, which is that they believe that the fetus is composed of accumulated semen.
And so when a woman, as all women do, wants to have the healthiest, happiest, smartest baby possible, possible, she makes sure that she has facts with the best hunter and the smartest guy and the funniest guy and the healthiest guy and the best looking guy so she'll get some of the essence of each of those guys into this baby.
And then when the child is born, several different men will all come forward and acknowledge their fatherhood of this child.
So, you know, there's a perfect example of a society where obviously long-term sexual monogamy is not a major concern.
Another society from another part of the world that's completely different is the Mosul of China, who have a very interesting situation where there is no sex-based marriage at all.
Everyone is free to have as many sexual relationships as they choose.
And the paternal responsibility for children falls to the brothers of the mother.
So when a woman has a child, the men who are responsible for that child, along with the mother, are her brothers.
The biological father, who may or may not be known, is a non-issue.
He's not part of the family and has no responsibility at all.
It's amazing that we have such varied, but still within their culture, accepted ways of going through this.
And by the way, Cecilia is your wife, correct?
Yes.
I forget to ask, how does this affect your own personal relationships, writing about this?
Well, we probably get invited to fewer cocktail parties.
Yeah.
But that's okay.
We didn't enjoy them anyway.
It has no effect on our marriage because she and I had both arrived at these insights independently before we even met.
So that's not a problem.
But yeah, you know, it definitely, you can see that it makes some people uncomfortable.
They don't really want to talk about these issues.
But, you know, it's like everything else in life.
It opens some doors and closes others.
We have lots more questions to get to.
But first, let's take a quick break.
So why, can I just, I mean, just to ask the question, why bother getting married? - Are you worried?
Well, why did we bother getting married?
Why would you at all, even societally, if it's sort of more of a group sport, why pair off in an exclusive relationship?
If you're not going to have exclusivity sexually, why would you want exclusivity in any area of your life?
Well, because sexuality is one thing, and love is another thing, and who you choose to live with is not necessarily related to The sexual rules.
There are reasons to be married other than just for sex, right?
I mean, there are many reasons to be married for hospital visitation and inheritance and, you know, having the right to live in the same country.
Yeah, the only thing I see, though, is that the biggest reason people stop being married is for sex.
And invariably, just in my own very limited personal experience, every friend of mine, couple of mine, who've had an open relationship where, you know, they love each other, they're living together, they're happily married, and they have an open relationship, somebody falls in love with somebody else, and then they no longer want to live together and share everything and have an open relationship.
They want a closed relationship with somebody else.
Because falling in love happens sometimes when you have sex with people.
It certainly does, and it happens sometimes, you know, in traditional marriages, as we see, with the divorce rates going out of control.
I tend to think, I agree with Dan Savitt when he says that acknowledging the nature of our sexuality is, in essence, a very conservative point of view, because Greater amount of tolerance, flexibility, and compassion related to our sex lives will preserve far more marriages than it will destroy.
And if you think about it, if simply acknowledging the truth about one's sexuality is enough to destroy a marriage, that wasn't much of a marriage to begin with, was it?
Just to support this a bit more, Chris, I'd love if you could talk a little bit about the medical information that you tease out in the book.
This is in the middle section of the book where you start talking a little bit about how the semen of males are actually not all created equal.
Some semen, the last ejaculate is actually defensive semen that are there to prevent other potential entrants from having their sperm.
Survival to fitness is not at the basis of the human but of the individual's sperm.
So the first ejaculate has the fastest sperm in it.
If you could sort of walk us through that and then a little bit about orgasms and how this might explain why the female orgasm takes significantly longer than the male.
Yeah, there's a great deal of information that supports the idea that our ancestors evolved in an environment characterized by sperm competition.
Sperm competition is when more than one male is having sex with a female within one ovulatory cycle.
The fact that Human beings have external testicles, the size of our testicles, the design of the penis, and so on, all support this notion of sperm competition.
There's a lot of information from comparative genital anatomy between the different primates that makes this very clear.
The way that the sperm competition shows up in humans particularly is the As you mentioned, the first spurt of semen appears to be making the vaginal environment friendlier for the sperm, more tolerable for the sperm.
And the last spurt seems to be protective against Sperm that might come after.
There are chemical correlates within a man's semen that indicate that there's sperm competition going on.
What's very interesting about this alpha male notion that we assume that Many scientists assume that the alpha male, like Brad Pitt, is the best possible mate for all women.
But what actually happens is that some men's immune system is a better match for other women's immune systems.
So Brad Pitt might be the best-looking, richest alpha male in the room, but his immune system might be a very poor match for a woman.
So she would find his smell to be unattractive.
And we all know that women have a much stronger sense of smell than men do, and often you'll hear women talking about the way men smell in terms of their attractiveness, and this isn't something we hear men talking about very much.
Anyway, we go through a lot of stuff in the book showing how women are picking up, through their sense of smell, important information about men's immune systems.
How much choice was actually involved for a woman in this pre-historical culture because I would imagine it would be sort of a rape culture because women are much weaker than any given man and unless you have another man to protect you, pretty much you can be sexually abused by any male that wanders down the path.
Well, that's one way of looking at it that may be true, and we don't really know, but there's a lot of evidence that argues against that.
First, the status of women in hunter-gatherer societies tends to be much higher than it is in agricultural societies.
Women are not seen as property.
Women have high status.
Women bring in most of the calories that people eat.
Women basically keep hunter-gatherer societies alive.
The men go out hunting and occasionally catch something, but meat does not form a very large percentage of the diet in terms of total calories.
So women have a lot of status, a lot of political power, And you find in, what's very interesting is looking at primates, you look at the two closest primates to human beings are chimpanzees and bonobos.
And they're equidistant from us genetically.
Doctor, let me give you one second.
I'm going to take a quick break because we've got a ton more to discuss.
And this bonobo story is absolutely fascinating.
And I'm going to spend a little bit of time on it.
You know, we were talking about orgasms.
We were about to, and he said, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
But I want to go back.
We want to get back to the orgasms.
Let's hear about the bonobos first, because actually it's interesting.
The chimps, which is where we get so much of our story from, may not be the best species to look at.
Dr. Ryan, please explain.
Right.
Chimps and bonobos are equidistant from humans.
And so anytime you read or you hear that chimps are our closest relative, that's false.
And it's also false when some people argue that bonobos are our closest relative.
They're exactly equidistant from us.
And we're much closer to them than they are to any other primate.
Chimps and bonobos are more closely related to humans than they are to gorillas or orangutans or anything else.
In fact, Jared Diamond described us as the third chimpanzee.
We're basically three subspecies of chimpanzees.
But what's interesting is that the chimps are...
As most people know, they can be pretty brutal.
They're very Machiavellian.
It's a male-dominated species where there's rape and infanticide and war and murder and all the nasty stuff that we associate with human beings.
But bonobos, our other closest relative, is a female-dominated society.
Even though the males are about 20% larger than the females, as with humans and chimps, The females rule bonobo society, and I mention this in the context of whether or not there was rape in prehistoric human societies.
I suspect that these societies were much more like bonobo societies because, as I mentioned earlier, females had a lot of status and provided most of the food for the community.
And we don't see in anthropological reports and first contact from Western travelers and so on, we don't see a lot of brutality in these societies.
We see a relatively gentle society, respectful of individual rights.
And what happens in bonobos is if a male gets out of line and starts harassing a female, all the other females will attack that male and put him in his place.
And the end result is that the males tend to relax, and they have lots of sex, and there has never been in captivity or in the wild an observed case of a bonobo killing another, raping another.
There's no war, no infanticide between bonobo groups.
It certainly shows that it's quite possible, even though the males are bigger than females in our species, it's quite likely that you find many societies in which that doesn't translate into any sort of abuse of women.
Back to the orgasm.
My line of questioning, Dr. Ryan, was we just finished discussing how the basic function of sperm would support the thought that there was an expectation anyway, that there might be multiple encounters that would lead to other sperm being in place.
And you point out the anatomical differences that would also support that theory.
Orgasm is the other major argument you make in sex at dawn for why our conventional thoughts about monogamous sex may be incorrect.
Yeah, well, everyone knows that famous scene in When Harry Met Sally, right?
When Meg Ryan fakes the orgasm in the deli.
Yeah.
What scientists call that is female copulatory vocalization.
And every time I speak publicly, I ask the audience to raise their hand if they've ever heard a heterosexual couple having sex.
And of course, everybody raises their hand.
And then I say, okay, now lower your hand if the woman was making less noise than the man.
And of course, everyone has their hand up because the women make more noise than the men, which doesn't really make sense if you assume that women are demure and low libido and not really interested in sex.
But our species, like other species of primates, the females tend to make a lot of noise when they're having sex.
And it turns out that the species in which the females make noise are the most promiscuous species.
So that's one indication.
And as far as orgasm, the fact that women and other females of promiscuous primates are capable of multiple orgasm also reinforces this notion of multiple sexual partners.
The fact that male orgasms tend to be very quick and that males tend to lose all interest immediately thereafter Whereas the female orgasm takes longer, and even after one or two, women often want to continue and have more and more.
Also suggests that we didn't evolve in monogamous couples, because if we had, we were evolving in a way to drive each other crazy, which in nature doesn't tend to work that way.
We talk a lot on the show about the importance of relationships and being in social support with each other.
I'd love to have a little bit of a serious discussion now about how these views affect monogamous relationships.
How can we reconcile these insights?
You already hinted at the fact that it might make us more tolerant of a biologic drive that some have.
That leads to probably more marital strife than just by anything else except maybe money in America.
Now that you have the wisdom that you've garnered writing Sex at Dawn, how would you advise couples that are in monogamous relationships who may or may not have had infidelities about how they can use these views to improve their relationship?
Well, you know, Casilda and I made a conscious decision When we were speaking to publishers about this book to avoid any sort of prescriptive information at all because, as you know, relationships are so complicated and, you know, every person is a world and two people together are a universe and it's constantly changing.
So we don't give advice other than very general sort of stuff which would be, you know, Knowledge is empowering.
I'm a strong believer in that, and the truth shall set us free, as Martin Luther King said, and many others.
So I think any relationship that's going to stand the test of time and be enriching for both partners has to be based upon knowledge and truth, and with those things come compassion and understanding.
You know, especially if a couple want to be together over the long haul, they're going to go through a lot of changes.
They're going to have a lot of periods in their lives where their libidos are going to be out of sync.
And I think it's important to find ways to accommodate each other and find ways to make space for each other to find happiness within the relationship, if possible.
We're going to do that in different ways.
I've met polyamorous couples who are very happy and find that way of living to be strengthening.
I found monogamous couples.
We get emails from people every day, beautiful emails from people, monogamous and not monogamous, who find the information empowering.
So I can't give any specific advice, I'm afraid, other than to not be misled by a false view of what human sexual nature is.
It's fair enough, and I'm respectful of the reality of how complex relationships are and difficult to give advice.
How about one more concrete question?
You titled the book Sex at Dawn, and we talk at the show frequently about the importance of having sex.
Is dawn the best time to have sex?
Why the title?
The Dawn of Men.
Yes, exactly.
Let's probe into the timing issues, though.
Do you have any evolutionary biologicals advice on what time of the day might be best for us to have sex?
Well, to be honest with you, I think the best thing to do at dawn is to sleep.
I don't want to get up for anything at dawn.
But I think I'm a big fan of siesta sex myself.
Siesta sex?
Yeah, but that's because you live in Barcelona.
We don't get siestas here in New York.
That's true.
You'd be having sex at the office, which probably isn't a good idea.
Well, not if you're trying to live in a monogamous relationship.
And also, you have some wonderful factors in the book.
I've heard one before, but I think it's fascinating for the audience to hear.
Explain the roots of the word testify.
Right.
Well, this is in dispute, but one of the explanations for the word testify is that it comes from the same root as testicle, and it's related to the fact that, I believe it was ancient Greece, men...
We held each other's testicles as a greeting and as a way of...
Swearing an oath.
So you swear on your testicles that you're not lying.
Talk a little bit about the neurochemistry of love.
This is another area where we're getting a lot of scientific marriage to the evolutionary background that you bring to this thought as well.
We are clearly held together with chemical handcuffs for the first five, six, seven years of life.
And that tends to slip away after a while.
Did you have a chance to look into that as you were doing your research for Sex at Dawn?
Well, you know, I'm not a big believer in that idea of, I guess you're referring to Helen Fisher's idea of the neurochemistry of love holding couples together while the baby is growing the first few years of vulnerability.
I'm not convinced by that.
I think that infatuation can last anywhere from a couple of weeks to six or seven years.
I don't see the evidence as strongly as she does there.
And I think that it's important to look at how different societies define romantic love.
One of the things we try to do in the book is show how different What we think is natural, what feels natural to us, isn't necessarily natural at all.
That culture is very, very strong in programming us and making us believe in normal as a very powerful concept.
So in our society, we tend to accentuate a very juvenile, infantile even, way of looking at love.
We talk about the song, When a Man Loves a Woman.
As an example, everyone thinks of that as a great love song, but if you listen to the words, it says, you know, he'll turn his back on his best friend, he'll spend his last dime, and he'll sleep out in the rain if she tells him to.
You know, that doesn't sound like love.
That sounds like some sort of sick obsession to me.
And...
You know, and the other example we give in the book is Every Breath You Take, Sting's song, which is another, you know, great love song on all the charts and everything.
But again, it's a song about obsession.
It's not a creepy stalker song.
Exactly, exactly.
Even Sting said, I didn't intend that to be a love song, but for some reason everybody thinks it is.
So it tells you something about our vision of love in Western society.
And, you know, what do we call each other?
Baby.
Baby.
Always baby.
Why are we calling each other baby?
That's very strange to me.
So, you know, I think it's very important that we look at love within a cultural context before we simply assume that the way we feel love and experience it is natural.
Chris Ryan, thank you so much for really stimulating us.
