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m_mathildebergeron's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
4.0
I've read that some of the conclusions drawn in the book are less than thoroughly scientific, but it's still a great way to open your mind and question societal structures around sex and sexuality. Well-written and occasionally funny, too.
blairsatellite's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
funny
informative
medium-paced
4.0
lyzz's review against another edition
funny
hopeful
informative
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
sgreenleaf's review against another edition
4.0
A mostly insightful, well researched, and thoughtful book that sort of falls apart at the end. After dismantling the cliches we tell ourselves in order to keep the status quo this book sort of buys into all those cliches in the final chapter. The rest is pretty interesting!
pineapple_morgan's review against another edition
2.0
A very cisheteronormative look into the relationship between human sexuality, social sexual norms, and (the advent of) monogamy. I feel I gave this book simultaneously too much and not enough credit; for a book about sexuality, there is nary a whisper of LGBT+ identities and existence except for a single sentence about halfway through and a few off-hand mentions that did not dive into the ways lgbt+ lives and loves also refute the evolutionary psychology-flavored notions of the nuclear family and (cisgendered, heterosexual) monogamy that this book's entire thesis is based on. I spent so much of this book asking where are all the gay people? It caused no small amount of frustration for me and as such takes up the bulk of this review. The authors also dip into some good old-fashioned gender/bioessentialism, but thankfully most examples are only noted in order to be refuted later in the book. Outside of this, there's no denying it was a very engaging read, full of interesting anecdotes, science and scientific history, and eyebrow-raising at unhealthy societal norms then and now. Of course, over the course of reading this review I have done a bit more digging and it turns out a lot of the supposed science in this book is tenuous at best, which just adds to the frustration and lowered my initial score of 3 stars down to 2. Thanks, but I'll stick to books like The Ethical Slut or Polysecure for all my non-monogamous nonfiction needs.
mayaber's review against another edition
3.5
read this book for class and lowkey learned a lot. super interesting if u wanna know more about social constructs around monogyny and female sexuality
kimchifairy's review against another edition
Engaging, thought-provoking if a bit intellectually suspect. The criticism of heteronormative, mononormative societies is not unreasonable: the mirror-image assertion that it's just 'natural' for humans to be nonmonogamous, since some human societies are, and so are bonobos, is a bit silly. I suppose it's mainly a disciplinary issue (there are some very jarring, often socially conservative canards, like the repeated assertion of the Victorian 'repressive hypothesis' as fact): the authors seem allergic to saying simply that human sexual, romantic and familial behaviour are subject to all kinds of complex socio-historical construction, and that if we want to understand them better, maybe the answers lie in those processes of construction, and not in the precise shapes and configurations of our genitals.