A review by kimchifairy
Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Cacilda Jetha, Christopher Ryan

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.