“First comes love. Then comes marriage. Then Mr and Mrs with a baby in a carriage.” The sing-song playground taunt children mockingly belt out to one another is very telling in terms of the expectations society has of relationships. If you’re in a serious courtship then the natural progression is towards the nuclear family where husband and wife are supposed to only have eyes for each other.
That’s not because it is what is best for you, but the progression is driven by what is best for capitalist society, say Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, who have written a book said to be the most influential tome on why we copulate since Kinsey put pen to paper.
“Sex At Dawn” hardly hit the bookstores when it featured on The New York Times bestseller list and had rave reviews from Dan Savage, the newspaper’s sex-advice columnist who called it: “the single most important book about human sexuality since Alfred Kinsey unleashed Sexual Behavior in the Human Male on the American public in 1948".
In the book Ryan and his psychiatrist wife Jethá not only trash a lot of what Darwin had to say about sex, but posit that monogamy is in conflict with our very nature and that humans are libidinous, if not downright promiscuous.
“We are mistaken if we think that societies are meant to benefit us, and to make life wonderful. The way I look at societies is as a super-organism, it is a system that arises and follows its own norms and its own appetites and this could be in direct conflict with individuals in that society,” says Ryan, speaking to The Daily Maverick from the US. “Marriage is essentially an economic institution and the nuclear family is an economic institution. This is not about making us happy or satisfying our natural appetites.”
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