The Evolutionary Perspective of psychology is one I found to be quite interesting, and related to the topic of a recent book I read, called “Sex at Dawn.” The evolutionary perspective concentrates on the biological foundations for the ubiquitous mental characteristics that all humans have in common.
The author, Christopher Ryan, claimed we see the many tensions that we do see today between men and women because we have aberrated from how humans evolved sexually. See, before 10000 B.C.E. all humans were hunter-gatherers, who lived in small roaming tribes. Every hunter-gatherer had a task of which provided for the simple needs of the tribe, such as hunting, gathering, cooking, or child care. The tribe was extremely harmonious machine; they shared every single thing they possessed, while everyone depended on each other for vitality.
Humans lived like this for hundreds of thousands of years, and therefore evolved to be highly cooperative and community-oriented people, of which we still are. And so, committing to singular sexual partners just didn’t make sense. Sexual freedom was omnipresent(and well taken advantage of) principle among the egalitarian hunter-gatherer people. Having a child of unknown paternity was standard and didn’t really matter. Children were raised by the community, and may have considered all the men of the tribe his/her father.
When agriculture was perfected to the point of which growing food was sustainable, the culture changed rapidly into one of which a system of property and monogamy was implemented, which ran directly counter to the system of sexuality and the way it evolved in the hundreds of years prior.
Today, we can still see the repercussions of this rapid culture shift. Relative to the time it takes for major evolutionary changes, the 12000 or so years since the beginning of history hasn’t been enough for the human libido to change much at all. The author claimed, many of the problems we see in relationships ,as well as those between men and women, today are because of these unresolved and unaddressed issues of sexual unbalance and misunderstanding. Issues of spousal fidelity, homosexuality, and prostitution to name a few, flare greatly in society because of these contradictory morals we have developed. Our ancestors back then had no sense of sexual control, because they didn’t need it or want it.
In my own opinion, I believe there is a great amount of hurt feelings and misguided rage due to this confusion among people today regarding the intentions and motivations of the opposite gender. There is no common source of information on this topic available to adolescents, or information on how to deal successfully with the issues commonly presented by the opposite gender. Which I feel is a crying shame.
Ryan, Christopher, and Cacilda Jethá. <i>Sex at dawn: the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality</i>. New York: Harper, 2010. Print.