Behind Closed Doors: Hunter Gatherers Were the Most Sex Positive People Ever

Most people somewhat versed in human sexuality know how sex has been for humans throughout the last hundred (or if you're extra ambitious, thousands) of years. Marriage was often a trade of property - women for cows or land, for example, and female sexuality was, by and large, put down to ensure that paternity could be proven. Even during more lenient times, sex and marriage - or sex and romantic companionship - were considered to be morally mutually exclusive.

But this is only been the way humans do things throughout the window of civilization; in fact, monogamy and fidelity have only been around for the last 10,000 years. That only seems like a long time until you consider that homo sapiens have been populating the earth for 200,000 - and our ancestors have been around for the last 6 million. Christopher Ryan (the author of Sex at Dawn) was recently on the Cracked Podcast to discuss how, exactly, people boned in the hunter-gatherer society that makes up roughly 99 percent of human history. And let me tell you - life was not nearly as drab for these folks as we've been led to believe it was. 

Sex and shared property

Imagine for me, if you will, a tribal community where everything is shared. Shared land, shared food, shared resources, and shared support. It's a time when children are raised by everyone in these small communities, when no property was passed down, and when hunters and gatherers provided food for all. Paternity was not an issue - there were no nuclear families, no money to pass down, and no existing ritual of marriage (though love, of course, still existed). Most women slept with many men for fun, as the connection between sex and babies was still a hazy concept. Men had sex with many of the women in their tribe for the same reason. This massive cultural shift in the way we understand and treat procreation meant something huge: Women were considered equal to men in a way that has not existed since the rise of civilization. And what's more? Women were generally considered to be the more sexual of the two genders. 

I'm sorry, I had to. 

In fact, it wasn't until the establishment of private property (largely thanks to the agricultural revolution) that communities larger than tribes arose and established more permanent settlements. Suddenly, whose children belong to which men mattered. Fathers suddenly needed to ensure that they weren't providing for another man's kids, and how could he do that if his lover was sleeping with other men before the advent of birth control? He couldn't. So it became paramount that she only slept with him. Enter: Marriage, monogamy. Punishment for women who strayed sexually from their husbands.

The core of control 

It's difficult to tell your equal what to do and who to do it with - and so at this point, modern untruths about female sexuality began to emerge: that women don't like sex as much as men, that it's not natural for them to want multiple or varied partners, that phallocentric sex proved that women weren't meant to experience as much pleasure as their male counterparts. In the end, both genders lost. We'd moved so far away from the sexuality that made up the bulk of our history that repression ran rampant - you couldn't have sex the way you wanted when you wanted, provided everyone was on board. There were rules and regulations, power and oppression constructs, the limitations of living in a society that would not help you care for your child. As Ryan mentions in the podcast, even Freud said that civilization was a direct result of blocked sexual energy.

And in some ways, for society, that's been a good thing. In other ways, it's absolutely not. Sex is a huge part of being human, and reimagining it as something bad or dirty outside a certain list of prereqs made it so very serious. But is it? Our ancestors would likely not think so. 

See, the thing about the sex-positive nature of our ancestors gave both men and women something crucial: Autonomy over their own bodies and lives. I am in a monogamous relationship that I love, but I sometimes lament that I am so conditioned to believe that what my partner would do with his body in his free time without my permission would feel like such a betrayal; it is so much unnecessary potential pain, so much unneeded anxiety. It's hard not to wonder if we'd feel that way if our relationships were alive and well 50,000 years ago. 

It's not to say that monogamy is bad, or that every single one of our ancestors were involved in daily orgies with the entire tribe - and it's also not to say that all women would understand the full potency of their sex drives if they lived in an environment that allowed them to - but the takeaway is clear. Despite our world's views on sex now, polyamory and open relationships aren't "deviant," and women are not at all sexual gatekeepers, inherently submissive, or less inclined to experience pleasure (and orgasm) during sex. Not everyone needs to be monogamous, and not everyone needs to be open.

In short, we've really fucked shit up.   

Check out the full episode here.