Here's the sixth and final part of my ill-fated interview with Mark Leviton. Thanks again, Mark, for such a well-prepared interview.
Leviton: Current European society seems to have many more public and accepted forms of non-traditional relationships. French Prime Ministers, the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy and many others appear at events with their wives and mistresses, who know each other. But maybe this is just the traditional exploitation of women, who have to go along with what their powerful spouses want. Some of the feminist critique - as with porn - is that even when the women appear to agree, they are being coerced by forces much greater.
Ryan: I would cite Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman by Majorie Shostak. She was researching her Ph.D. at Harvard and went to Botswana with the idea of studying women in the Kalahari "bushman" society, a hunter-gatherer society. She was having a hard time getting the women to talk about their sexual experiences, and then Marjorie met this one woman who really understood what she wanted to know, and told her everything. The thesis turned out to be about this one woman, Nisa. It's a beautiful book, a first-person account of all stages of life, falling in love, giving birth, aging parents, all the stuff we all go through, but in a completely alien (to us) environment. You can read all this exotic detail, and see that what really matters is the same for Nisa and you and me. It's a very intimate look at a woman's perspective in that world. And they talk about lovers, and Nisa says having one lover would never be enough because one makes you laugh, one brings you meat, another smells great. . .she has this sense of how each relationship fulfills a different part of her life. That's an example I'd point to of a woman who's obviously in tune with a non-monogamist approach to life.
Because the status of women is high in hunter-gatherer societies, to assume they are being dragged into this arrangement against their will is "Flintstonizing" it, projecting from our cultural viewpoint where women can be manipulated, because they don't have sufficient or equal access to resources without going through some man, whether it's a father or a husband. In hunter-gatherer societies, where the women provide more of the daily calories than the men do, it's very hard to manipulate a woman into doing something, because she doesn't need your approval, doesn't need you for food or financial security. Women tend to be very strong-willed in those societies.
Leviton: So you're looking at what seems intrinsic to ancient human development, but is that a reason to institute changes to our current organizing principles for relationships in 2011?
Ryan: I would certainly argue it's a good thing for women to have more control of their access to resources and sexuality now.
Outside of the Catholic Church, it's hard to see who'd really be against that.
Leviton: So our modern society favors men?
Ryan: There's an economic structure that victimizes men and women, and their children. It doesn't favor men quite in the way it did in Victorian times, when if a woman didn't get married she could basically chose between prostitution or death; there weren't many other options. Women couldn't work independently, or raise children on their own, because of the shame and social injunctions against that.
At this point men and women are victims of culturally-imposed monogamy, and it's very much an economic issue. To the extent we support women and children through social programs that provide education, medical care and whatever else is necessary, women's autonomy is increased, and you find more sexual freedom, in places like Denmark or Sweden for instance. Part of the reason there's a more relaxed attitude to alternative sexual practices in Scandanavia is that women aren't as tied into a brutal economic system where if a man doesn't help you, no one else will.
Leviton: Isn't monogamy providing any valuable control over behavior that would otherwise be destructive to civilization, to our best intentions? Does monogamy for instance have an effect on the incidence of incest or other exploitation?
Ryan: That's a good question. Let's take incest as an example. Monogamy probably promotes more sorts of destructive sexual behavior than it protects against. With incest there are natural genetic barriers that have been demonstrated repeatedly, with plenty of research on the subject (the Westermarck effect). But when you've got someone cut off from healthy expressions of sexuality, what happens is they often resort to helpless, disempowered people, who tend to be children. That's what we see in the Catholic Church, a classic example. I would argue incest and certain kinds of rape are the same sort of thing.
I was recently reading very compelling research showing that as pornography becomes free on the internet sexual abuse against women declines. They watch free porn, and don't need to get into these destructive kind of relationships.
Leviton: So you're not saying just because something is "natural" or "biological" it should be applied to our current situation. You are concerned with how well it works in the 21st century.
Ryan: You can't ignore elements in our design, our evolutionary design. Without getting into areas of "should" - we need to avoid "shoulds" - and whatever "natural means" (plastic is natural, inasmuch as it was created by animals) - the point we try to make in the book is not that you should do this or that, but that whatever decisions you make in life, they need to be informed by the truth. The truth is that this is the kind of animal we are, probably the most sexual creature on Earth. The ratio of sex acts per birth for our species is higher than any other, including bonobos. We have sex when the female is menstruating, when they are post-menopausal, we have anal and oral sex, we have hand-jobs - all these types of sex that can't possibly lead to pregnancy - so the notion that sex is about reproduction is ridiculous. Sex is 99.99% of the time not about reproduction, it's about relationship, pleasure, bonding. To ignore that and pretend it's all about having babies misses the point, and is navigating with your eyes closed. You'll keep running into things.
We are not saying in the book that people should or shouldn't be monogamous. When we look in the mirror we should see what kind of animal we really are, and not imagine some idealized pristine angelic being.
Leviton: So this encompasses lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, since sexuality doesn't have to be about reproduction.
Ryan: Right. Freud said civilization itself is the result of deflected and repressed sexual energy. Whether or not civilization is a net gain for our species is an open question, which is the subject of my next book. To the extent that our sexual energy is being re-directed, we need to understand that and use it creatively, and not destructively.
Leviton: You write a lot about bonobos, but even though we are equally close to chimpanzees you don't write as much about them. Why not?
Ryan: There's already a lot written about chimps. Jane Goodall and others have been provided so much information about chimp behavior. Bonobos are a more powerful argument for the points we are making in the book - especially in terms of their sexual behavior. Chimps also have very rambunctious sex lives, but they are also much more power-based, with very dominant and abusive males. You don't see a lot of that in hunter-gatherer societies. Since we are saying female autonomy is high there, those are much more like bonobo social groups.
Leviton: As you acknowledge, we have no witness testimonies from pre-history. So your argument about Hobbes being off-base is based on several pillars: the study of indigenous cultures, our nearest primate cousins, and human anatomy.
