Before we get to the hard-core, down and dirty blogging, it seems appropriate to introduce ourselves and at least try to make the case that it may not be a complete waste of your time to come check out this blog occasionally. So here are a couple of questions we imagine you might ask and our attempts to answer them. Feel free to ask any others that come to mind in the comments section and we’ll try to get to them in future posts.
-- Who are you and why should I care?
Good question. First off, I should tell you that the voice you’re hearing as you read this is masculine (deeply masculine – muy macho!). Most of these posts will be written by me, Christopher, as Cacilda and I tend to do a Penn & Teller routine wherein one of us does the talking, depending on the language being called for. When we’re dealing with an English-speaking audience, I play Penn (the loudmouth) and Cacilda does the silent bit. If we happen to be dealing with an audience that speaks Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish, or Catalan, I generally stand around looking embarrassed at my mono-linguistic limitations while Cacilda does the talking. When and if we ever have a chance to chat with tribal people in Mozambique, she’ll do the talking in XiRonga as well.
So you can be sure that anything you read here pertaining to Cacilda’s areas of expertise (psychiatry/medicine, Africa, Indian culture, a woman’s perspective, etc.) has been pre-approved by her, though it’ll generally be me doing the talking. And if you’ve got a question specifically for her, you can be sure that she’ll read it and respond herself (though I might assist a bit with the English).
As for why you should care, well, that’s a tough one. I guess the best reason I can give is that we’ve each spent almost a decade researching the origins of human sexuality, and we’ve come up with some novel notions of what comes naturally to human beings. In addition to this research, our model of human sexuality is based on a lot of multi-cultural experience. We’ve both spent large parts of our lives living in foreign cultures. I’ve lived and traveled extensively in Asia, Latin America, Europe and the concrete canyons of mid-town Manhattan. Cacilda’s ancestors emigrated to Mozambique from India and Persia. She was born in a Muslim/Hindu mixed family there and then fled the civil war in her early teens – sent to live with distant relatives in Portugal. Got that? An Indian kid born and raised in Africa who then studied in Portugal and now lives in Spain with an American guy. Makes Obama’s background look simple.
-- Why is this blog (and your book) called Lust in Paradise?
The model of human sexuality we’ve developed questions some of the central assumptions you’ll find in most Evolutionary Psychology – particularly the centrality and universality of what many anthropologists insist on calling marriage and the importance of sexual fidelity. At the center of these theories is the assumption that there’s a basic exchange fundamental to male/female relations: the female trades exclusive sex for access to the man’s resources: status, protection, meat, help with the kids, tickets to the Lakers game, etc.
We think that’s pretty much bunk. We’ve concluded that this isn’t really the way humans evolved; it’s just how many of us behave now, in societies characterized by particular economic and political conditions that make it very difficult for women to secure these things directly for themselves without trading on their sexuality. We’ll no-doubt outline our model in more detail in later posts, but that gives you the basic sense of where we’re coming from.
We’ll be talking about sexual practices in exotic spots around the world, the nature of sexual jealousy, how primates deal with sexuality and raising their young, and just about any aspect of human life in prehistory (politics, economics, diet, health, war, etc.).
The book is primarily about the origins of human sexuality in prehistory -- before agriculture and writing, in other words.
Welcome to the blog. Your questions, comments, and (civil) disagreement are most welcome.
