“Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex lamented how “the woman is adapted to the needs of the egg rather than to her own requirements”. We did not then understand how males too are adapted to the needs of their gametes rather than their own requirements. Men can more easily feel rewarded for serving the needs of their sperm; rewarded time and time again for every successful ejaculation. The ‘natural’ downside for men and males in general is competition with other males, injury, possible exclusion from any mating opportunities, more illness than females, and shorter lifespans.”

“The authors’ other argument is for the supposed social-bonding role of sex but how many ancestral males would choose to ‘socially-bond’ with a middle-aged or post-menopausal female when there are younger alternatives screaming out for ‘social-bonding’ elsewhere – young females who, according to Ryan and Jethá, were not letting their minds get in the way of all that ‘social bonding’. Back in the real world, as we have seen, the extensive human social networks are enabled by pair bonds, and our extra-marital sex is mostly about females acquiring meat or other resources and occasionally about men bonding by ‘sharing’ women for their own interests with little if any concern for female choice or female well-being.”

“We are told that modern couples aren’t as flexible as the Melanesians and many of the societies surveyed earlier. Now that readers have more details, perhaps we have some insight into this lack of ‘flexibility’. Perhaps modern people don’t like the whole package that comes with such male dominance and control? Perhaps, looking at the Melanesians, modern Western women don’t think men should be able to buy, pimp out, and discard young women that way?”

“Again they mention the Siriono who, they say, rarely if ever lack for sexual partners and where sex anxiety seems to be remarkably low. Recall that the Siriono live in small inbreeding groups under one roof and in a constant state of hunger, which makes food anxiety their main experience. Men use food to get sex, women are subservient, marriage is monogamous or polygynous, and women receive the blame for all adultery which is hidden as much as possible. A man alone with a woman in the forest may throw her to the ground and have sex with her without so much as a word. Sex is generally a violent and rapid affair, and while kissing is unknown, biting occurs.How would it feel to live in such a world, Ryan and Jethá ask. Hungry, probably, and not that great for women.”

“They tell us that women make loud noises during sex “from the Lower East Side to the upper reaches of the Amazon”, overlooking the fact that as far as the Amazonian tribes are concerned, signs of female sexual enjoyment are sometimes discouraged and the existence of the female orgasm is often not even recognized. In all of these tribes where we have had the information, female sexual pleasure is either a non-issue, discouraged, or sex is as private and as quiet as possible.”

“Ryan and Jethá propose that our ancestors, at least from 200,000 years ago, were living in a world of plenty where the resources of food and sex were in abundance but were choosing to stay hungry. After a couple of hundred thousand years of this ‘Eden’ we apparently forgot who we were, got our appetites back, and before we knew it we were drowning under babies we no longer chose to dispose of at birth.”

“For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue how, for example, if Orlando was a woman, did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man’s love of power.”