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

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.