Site uses cookies to provide basic functionality.

OK
Search Quotes tags
Query
Tags
Author
1 2 ▲ ▼
Link Quote Stars Tags Author
565745d As attentive readers may have noted, the standard narrative of heterosexual interaction boils down to prostitution: a woman exchanges her sexual services for access to resources. Maybe mythic resonance explains part of the huge box-office appeal of a film like Pretty Woman, where Richard Gere's character trades access to his wealth in exchange for what Julia Roberts's character has to offer (she plays a hooker with a heart of gold, if you m.. Christopher Ryan
caa3707 We have good news and bad news. The good news is that the dismal vision of human sexuality reflected in the standard narrative is mistaken. Men have not evolved to be deceitful cads, nor have millions of years shaped women into lying, two-timing gold-diggers. But the bad news is that the amoral agencies of evolution have created in us a species with a secret it just can't keep. Homo sapiens evolved to be shamelessly, undeniably, inescapably.. Christopher Ryan
f0ef17e Men don't care what's on TV. They only care what else is on TV. JERRY SEINFELD Christopher Ryan
a5424ad Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being "in love" which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away... --Louis de Bernieres, Correlli's Mandolin There" Christopher Ryan
5da9b9f No animal spends more of its allotted time on Earth fussing over sex than Homo sapiens--not even the famously libidinous bonobo. Although we and the bonobo both average well into the hundreds, if not thousands, of acts of intercourse per birth--way ahead of any other primate--their "acts" are far briefer than ours. Pair-bonded "monogamous" animals are almost always hyposexual, having sex as the Vatican recommends: infrequently, quietly, and.. Christopher Ryan
89740ef If I had had to choose my place of birth, I would have chosen a state in which everyone knew everyone else, so that neither the obscure tactics of vice nor the modesty of virtue could have escaped public scrutiny and judgment. JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality" (1754)" Christopher Ryan
51d509c Once our ancestors began cultivating land for food, they were running on a wheel, but never fast enough. More land provides more food. And more food means more children born and fed. More children provide more help on the farm and more soldiers. But this population growth creates demand for more land, which can be won and held only through conquest and war. Put another way, the shift to agriculture was accelerated by the seemingly irrefutab.. Christopher Ryan
e655960 It's important to keep in mind that when viewed against the full scale of our species' existence, ten thousand years is but a brief moment. Even if we ignore the roughly two million years since the emergence of our Homo lineage, in which our direct ancestors lived in small foraging social groups, anatomically modern humans are estimated to have existed as long as 200,000 years.* With the earliest evidence of agriculture dating to about 8000.. Christopher Ryan
f80e0f2 When James Larrick and his colleagues studied the still relatively isolated Waorani Indians of Ecuador, they found no evidence of hypertension, heart disease, or cancer. No anemia or common cold. No internal parasites. No sign of previous exposure to polio, pneumonia, smallpox, chicken pox, typhus, typhoid, syphilis, tuberculosis, malaria, or serum hepatitis.16 This is not as surprising as it may seem, given that almost all these diseases e.. Christopher Ryan
8efa0db The Hamilton Beach Company of Racine, Wisconsin, patented the first home-use vibrator in 1902, thereby making it just the fifth electrical appliance approved for domestic use. Christopher Ryan
4c220a8 Institutionalized sharing of resources and sexuality spreads and minimizes risk, assures food won't be wasted in a world without refrigeration, eliminates the effects of male infertility, promotes the genetic health of individuals, and assures a more secure social environment for children and adults alike. Far from utopian romanticism, foragers insist on egalitarianism because it works on the most practical levels. Christopher Ryan
5abe5ed Recognized as a way to build and maintain a network of mutually beneficial relationships, nonreproductive sex no longer requires special explanations. Homosexuality, for example, becomes far less confusing, in that it is, as E. O. Wilson has written, "above all a form of bonding...consistent with the greater part of heterosexual behavior as a device that cements relationships." Christopher Ryan
581248b A natural family." Perhaps this easy acceptance between adults and unrelated children, the diffuse nurturing found in societies where children refer to all men as father and all women as mother, societies small and isolated enough to safely assume the kindness of strangers, where overlapping sexual relationships leave genetic paternity unknowable and of little consequence...perhaps this is the "natural" family structure of our species." Christopher Ryan
e976150 If a species has cojones grandes, you can bet that males have frequent ejaculations with females who sleep around. Where the females save it for Mr. Right, the males have smaller testes, relative to their overall body mass. The correlation of slutty females with big balled males appears to apply not only to humans and other primates, but to many mammals, as well as to birds, butterflies, reptiles, and fish. Christopher Ryan
fbb0093 In gorillas' winner-take-all approach to mating, males compete to see who gets all the booty, as it were. So, although an adult silverback gorilla weighs in at around four hundred pounds, his penis is just over an inch long, at full mast, and his testicles are the size of kidney beans, though you'd have trouble finding them, as they're safely tucked up inside his body. A one-hundred-pound bonobo has a penis three times as long as the gorill.. Christopher Ryan
8d99a4c In the following pages, we'll explain how seismic cultural shifts that began about ten thousand years ago rendered the true story of human sexuality so subversive and threatening that for centuries it has been silenced by religious authorities, pathologized by physicians, studiously ignored by scientists, and covered up by moralizing therapists. Christopher Ryan
d6e3b81 Indications of spermatic firepower are evident in the differences between a man's first spurts and his last. A human ejaculation typically consists of anywhere from three to nine spurts. Researchers who somehow managed to capture "split ejaculates" for analysis found that the first spurts contain chemicals that protect against various kinds of chemical attack. What sort of chemical attack? Aside from leucocytes and antigens present in a wom.. Christopher Ryan
9d1af92 The sexually insatiable woman," declared a terrified Donald Symons, "is to be found primarily, if not exclusively, in the ideology of feminism, the hopes of boys, and the fears of men."10 Perhaps, but Marvin Harris offers a different take, writing, "Like all dominant groups, men seek to promote an image of their subordinate's nature that contributes to the preservation of the status quo. For thousands of years, males have seen women not as .. Christopher Ryan
3f1f097 Researchers have confirmed what porn producers already know: men tend to get turned on by images depicting an environment in which sperm competition is clearly at play (though few, we imagine, think of it in quite these terms). Images and videos showing one woman with multiple males are far more popular on the Internet and in commercial pornography than those depicting one male with multiple females.14 A quick peek at the online offerings a.. Christopher Ryan
d74aee6 We theorize that as a consequence of competition for paternity, human males evolved uniquely configured penises that function to displace semen from the vagina left by other males, Christopher Ryan
2274603 The anachronistic presumption that women have always bartered their sexual favors to individual men in return for help with child care, food, protection, and the rest of it collapses upon contact with the many societies where women feel no need to negotiate such deals. Rather than a plausible explanation for how we got to be the way we are, the standard narrative is exposed as contemporary moralistic bias packaged to look like science and t.. Christopher Ryan
5b567d3 Still, the frequent absence of happiness is what keeps us pursuing it, and thus makes us productive."10 This is a curious notion of productivity--at once overtly political and yet presented innocently enough, as if there were only one possible meaning of "productivity." This perspective on life incorporates the Protestant work ethic (that "productivity" is what makes an animal "effective") and echoes the Old Testament notion that life must .. Christopher Ryan
0a4fd7d How has the incessant, grinding campaign of socio-scientific insistence upon the naturalness of sexual monogamy combined with a couple thousand years of fire and brimstone failed to rid even the priests, preachers, politicians, and professors of their prohibited desires? To see ourselves as we are, we must begin by acknowledging that of all Earth's creatures, none is as urgently, creatively, and constantly sexual as Homo sapiens. Christopher Ryan
6a52f0d We are enriched not by what we possess, but by what we can do without. IMMANUEL KANT Christopher Ryan
e91f207 community ownership doesn't work in large-scale societies where people operate in anonymity. In The Power of Scale, anthropologist John Bodley wrote: "The size of human societies and cultures matters because larger societies will naturally have more concentrated social power. Larger societies will be less democratic than smaller societies, and they will have an unequal distribution of risks and rewards."9 Right, because the bigger the socie.. Christopher Ryan
d378815 Fear is certainly natural, and like any other kind of insecurity, jealousy is an expression of fear. But whether or not someone else's sex life provokes fear depends on how sex is defined in a given society, relationship, and individual's personality. Christopher Ryan
8dfc5dc Forget what you've heard about human beings having descended from the apes. We didn't descend from apes. We are apes. Christopher Ryan
9eea241 Baby, I love you like a lion loves his kill." Surely, a less romantic description of marriage has never been written." Christopher Ryan
a84df39 Las pruebas --tanto fisicas como circunstanciales-- apuntan a una prehistoria humana en la que nuestros antepasados hacian muchisimo mas el amor que la guerra. Christopher Ryan
fe7ec9d As a medical doctor, Kellogg claimed the moral authority to instruct parents on the proper sexual education of their children. If you're unfamiliar with the writings of Kellogg and others like him, their gloating disdain for basic human eroticism is chilling and unmistakable. In his best-selling Plain Facts for Old and Young (written on his sexless honeymoon in 1888), Kellogg offered parents guidance for dealing with their sons' natural ero.. Christopher Ryan
1973f07 Researchers have found that men with lower levels of testosterone are more than four times as likely to suffer from clinical depression, fatal heart attacks, and cancer when compared to other men their age with higher testosterone levels. They are also more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, and have a far greater risk of dying prematurely from any cause (ranging from 88 to 250 percent higher, depending on th.. Christopher Ryan
5630330 I told him that it was not honorable for a woman to love any one else except her husband, and that this evil being among them, he himself was not sure that his son, who was there present, was his son. He replied, 'Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children; but we all love all the children of our tribe.'"5" Christopher Ryan
14950af Having no coercive power, leaders are simply those who are followed--individuals who have earned the respect of their companions. Such "leaders" do not--cannot--demand anyone's obedience." Christopher Ryan
2ceaa1a the deepest function of myth, which is to lend narrative order to apparently disconnected bits of information, Christopher Ryan
5d11cf8 A fire is never sated by any amount of logs, nor the ocean by rivers that flow into it; death cannot be sated by all the creatures in the world, nor a fair-eyed woman by any amount of men. THE KAMA SUTRA Christopher Ryan
ece954b Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, coined the term meme to refer to a unit of information that can spread through a community via learning or imitation the way a favored gene is replicated through reproduction. Just Christopher Ryan
cd79953 There's no denying that we're a species with a sweet tooth for sex. Christopher Ryan
833e77f An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted. ARTHUR MILLER Christopher Ryan
5812c57 In 1276, Peter of Spain was elected Pope John XXI, but he died just nine months later when the ceiling of his library suspiciously collapsed on him as he slept. Christopher Ryan
91a7ded Poverty is a social status. Christopher Ryan
ace1c11 The four million Minangkabau living in West Sumatra consider themselves to be a matriarchal society. "While we in the West glorify male dominance and competition," Sanday says, "the Minangkabau glorify their mythical Queen Mother and cooperation." She reports that "males and females relate more like partners for the common good than like competitors ruled by egocentric self-interest," and that as with bonobo social groups, women's prestige .. Christopher Ryan
d4b8c2f What isn't debatable is that conventional marriage is a full-blown disaster for millions of men, women, and children right now. Conventional till-death-(or infidelity, or boredom)-do-us-part marriage is a failure. Emotionally, economically, psychologically, and sexually, it just doesn't work over the long term for too many couples. Christopher Ryan
32e924c Does all this frivolous sex make our species sound "animalistic"? It shouldn't. The animal world is full of species that have sex only during widely spaced intervals when the female is ovulating. Only two species can do it week in and week out for nonreproductive reasons: one human, the other very humanlike. Sex for pleasure with various partners is therefore more "human" than animal. Strictly reproductive, once-in-a-blue-moon sex is more ".. Christopher Ryan
fd99bc3 humans had less need for oversized muscles for fighting but evolved larger, more powerful testicles and, in the case of humans, a much more interesting penis. Christopher Ryan
1 2 ▲ ▼