WOW.  So I completed the book Sex At Dawn today.  I have to admit that I have been having loads of fun placing tiny tidbits from the book onto my facebook page.  Both men and women alike are taken aback by the information I am sharing.  I laugh when I consider:  It seems we’ve all been duped!

Sex At Dawn is a brilliantly written piece about the sexual history, and more importantly the sexual pre-history of us all.  Human beings have walked the planet for roughly 200,000 years.  So the book takes us farther than Darwin dared and smashed the fleeting theories and theorists of Evolutionary Psychology in the face.  HARD.

Funny story: I asked a few of my girlfriends about the span of pre-history – a simple question:  How long do you think human beings have been on the Earth.  I got four answers from the four women.  A.  2000 years  B.  4 million years  C. 50,000 years  D. I don’t know.  I guess that if someone had asked me the very same question about four weeks ago, I would have been wobbly in my response as well.  Hell, I did not know.  And boy did I not know what I did not know!

Authors of Sex At Dawn Ryan and Jetha

Well call me a know-er now, because sexy authors, Ryan and Jetha, put it down for me.  The book gives a visceral experience of the past that the heart can taste; not similar to the Flintstonization – as the writers call it – of the past where our minds configure pre-history with modern spin.  You know the good ole adages, car made of rock, feet as pedals, nuclear families, monogamy, pets and and 2.5 kids –  this read is not like that at all!  And no one can forget the Brontosaurs Burger!  Sure, you may feel you’re too sophisticated to have been mislead by these fruity images, I most certainly am, but not until I read this book did I know just how mislead.

What we have forgotten, albeit our bodies and spirits have not, is the fact that modern life is nothing like pre-historic life but modern bodies and behaviors are like pre-historic bodies and behaviors in many ways.  And what we need to explore is the idea that our current behaviors, attitudes and even bodily functions emerged in a much different time and place.  If we knew that place more intimately, we’d become instantly more self aware.  Social studies class and the clamor about Mesopotamia just didn’t cut it baby.  Not even the Garden of Eden, as fictitious as that sounds, can compare to reading the studies conducted by so many researchers, biased and non-biased, in this book.  Sex At Dawn is focused on the sexual connections, mores, and protocols we’ve created as humans throughout time.  And the truth will blow your mind.

My interest in reading the book came only after I had already cracked the code on foolishness befuddling modern couples and corrupting marriages today.  I had known that something wasn’t right.  How can we say that a 50% divorce rate is acceptable?  How can we continue to try the same things that haven’t worked for centuries?  How can we have Macs and Skype and iPhones and Wiki and so much access to know almost anything and not stop to even try to create one new solution for our failing relationships?  Tisk.  And with 33,000 religious choices, as Michael Baisden points out, why are there just three legal relationship choices… married, single, or married and cheating?  OK, let’s stratify to be fair.  Gay married to one.  Straight married to one.  Gay single.  Straight single.  Gay married to one and cheating, Straight married to one and cheating.  SIX.  My bad.

But it seems everywhere I turn, people are willing to endure it… just suffer through it. This is the way it has always been.  Well Sex At Dawn says, no the hell it has not.  The book took me to places where I cried to see the reflections and hints of the deepest me I had always imaged to be the truest me, like the chapter on feminine sexual energy.  When I read these words:  The sexual hunger of the female, and her capacity for copulation completely exceeds that of any male. To all intents and purposes, the human female is sexually insatiable..-Sherfy It reminds me of what I have known for a decade but could not express without a backlash from everyone in the room!

The chapters on feminine sexuality were so refreshing to me, but also somewhat aggravating.  To think that here in the states, the most important ‘therapy’ of the 19th century and into the 20th was doctors masturbating sexually frustrated women to orgasm;  phenomenal.  Hysteria, they called it!  I had heard this before but I thought it was further back in history… not so recent as 1920.  And it was a practice that had come from the 1400′s and had lasted 500 years!

Funny thing is, doctors did not even enjoy the ‘therapy’, which warranted the creation by Hamilton Beach of the first vibrators in 1920 which quickly became the top selling electrical appliance of that time!  Who knew?  Rich women herded themselves to these doctors as often as possible due to the sexually repressed situation they had created for themselves in post-antebellum America.

But the most amazing portion of the chapter on female sensuality – and the chapter turns into CHAPTERS of wild readings from Salem witch hunts, to clitoral acid solutions to stop masturbation, to the ‘discovery’ of the clitoris by a Austrian doctor who was soon thereafter locked up for life – was about women, we are the loudest participants in the sex act worldwide!

What does this mean?  It means that women have a ‘call’ during sex that far exceeds that of the male demonstration yet again that women enjoy sex to an extent Darwin would be embarrassed about, but since he married his cousin and was unable to have a legitimate sex life with her, I know where his troubles lie….  This feminine ‘call’ is universal and can be heard by anyone in close proximity when things are going well in bedrooms all around the world.  And this ‘call’ – science has deduced – actually has a specific pitch, purpose and proxy that will simply blow your mind (no pun).

Unbelievable.  Social Studies left out something so important as the purpose of the female mating ‘call’.  Hmmmm…

I don’t want to tell you too much, I want you to read the book.  I don’t want any questions from anyone who has not read the book.  They’d be futile.  That is just how miseducated we are… well, most.

Being an African American woman, I hesitated on reading the book.  My cousin who is a professor at  Wayne State University told me to read it months ago.  I declined stating that there are two white cherubs on the cover, and that I can’t stand reading the work of those who would denigrate and exclude Africa from the conversation.  SO BOY was I surprised that Africa is the majority of the book!  We re-learn, of course, that humans did not begin to emerge from Africa until about 70,000 years ago and we learn about the life and times and sex lives of the beautiful people of that day, even if through the remains of the inhabitants and the non-biased archaeological research!

Sex At Dawn isn’t some stupid rendition of ‘the heathens come marching in‘: those horny pygmy.  Now way.  The authors respect the culture of these pre-humans and even wager they were the most cooperative, sharing, sane and ethical people on the planet!  One chapter is called Women are From African, Men are from Africa!  - a play on words with Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars… giggle.  A major departure from the ways Africa has been aridly side casted in other books about pre-history.

Speaking of men, you all know I feel for today’s man who is unwilling to arise from the patriarchal views of the past 10,000 years and help as we inevitably rebirth feminine energy to compliment (not overrun) his highness.  The main issue men have with the idea of open love is the release of the identity of owning a woman.  For now, she has to be his and she has to be as virginal as possible to be considered the marrying type (I realize all men are not this way, hence my husband, who was fully aware that I was far from a virgin when we met and married at 21 and 25.  But you catch my drift.)

Men have been under a mild spell all their own. Sex At Dawn talks about the testicle size of men and how it is shrinking due to our current sexual arrangement which flows against nature.  I was surprised to find the testicle weight of various men of various cultures to be exhibited in the book!  WOW!  And to find that testicles of monogamous and polygamous male primates are ALWAYS lodged inside the body and are significantly smaller than their multi partnered, peace loving, colleagues (humans, and bonobos).  The penis was talked about at great length and so were pendulous breasts of women, all telling the story of a non-monogamous, non-polygamous past.

And of polygyny.  Many men of African decent will take Islamic views about Polygamy and superimpose them onto the whole of Africa and even into pre-historic Africa, 20,000 years before the first Islamic book was written!!  Sex At Dawn speculates that polygamy did not exist, like monogamy did not exist before 10,000 years ago – again making only 5% of human history!  Read it for yourself.  Or intuit it if you do not want to be persuaded by some weird and wiry text.  Ask your ancestors what was up at that time and keep rewinding baby… That is what I have done for so long before reading this book.

One scientific way to know if any species is naturally polygamous, the book explains, is to look at the size of the species.  In polygamous societies of Gorillas, for instance, the male is always twice the size of the female.  This is the case with all naturally polygamous creatures. Hands down.  The book addresses the factoids that help us address the unfounded notion that some present day Islamic African nations are polygamous, thus pre-historic African must have been polygamous as well.  Simply ridiculous.  I hadn’t fallen for it, but now I have proof.  I knew we were not a warring people.  And to think it all began with a choice toward agriculture…

Finally, the book is life altering because at last we get to look at the actual facts of pure saintly monogamy.  The facts are simple. Monogamy means the creature will have a desire to mate with one other, like the Gibbon, Goose, and some Bats, and if that other dies, the partners sex drive also dies.  That is the scientific version of monogamy.  The cultural version for Monogamy springs from the major three religions, and has had to be strictly enforced (by threat of death or stoning in the street or burned, or burying to the neck – well for women at least). STILL monogamy has not taken hold, only replaced by serial monogamy, cheating, lying, fantasizing, porn watching, and remaining legally unmarried yet hooked up with many – the baby daddy syndrome.

I know some believe that monogamy has to work somewhere in the world, right?  Americans are just fuck ups.  Especially African America who have an almost 70% divorce rate, which is lower than the divorce rate of American born again Christians, no doubt. NO.  The Australian divorce rate is 75%, the European countries are as high, the only places where life partnering seems to work is in areas where the men have worked out contracts to see other women like India, parts of Africa, and the like.  Or where both the men and women remain free to take lovers as the days of marriage pass like a blissful stream of consciousness… And there are so many places like such.  Sex At Dawn names so many such cultures it will make your head spin.

There are cultures still alive today where the women are orgasmic, no reports of rape or sexual illness, and no reports of molestation have been known.  Sex At Dawn points out several of these and the reading is just beautiful.  I imagined I was there, with these people who remember the ancient ways and still practice them, people who knew that sharing every aspect of life was quintessentially important to secure the group and make the group strong against any outside dissonance, even that of western culture.  Groups where it takes a village to raise a child, and it take s a village to love a woman or a man… I had written about these places without knowing for fact that they existed or not.  But now I know.  Now I grow.  again…

Thanks Sex At Dawn.  I truly love you.

PS:  Some say, “Kenya, do yo propose we go backward” they say “evolution signals progress, does it not?”  and I learned from this reading that evolution does not signal progress, it simply signals adaptation to shifting environments.  Progress is an entirely different animal.  Progress is a sacred human choice with divine insight as guide, where evolution is simply a natural bodily and behavioral adaptation to those choices.

May the force be with us.  Progress on the rise!

By: Kenya K Stevens

Feel free to look to the left and pick up Sex At Dawn here!

I welcome your thoughts!