The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture

Often shaky but also open-minded. When he has a photo of Trash, a New York drag king, to point out why Trash isn’t in the least estranged from human prehistory… that’s the flavour of the book. It’s full of pieces of evidence that embarrass archaeologists and are left in the basement of museums.

He is anti-biological determinism (sociobiology), and instead sees the work of culture – hence ‘culture’ in the title. For instance, we chose our loss of hair, and were never ‘naked apes’, for loss of hair went hand in hand with our ornamenting ourselves (see the drag king).

He has a theory on everything… overmuch for 300 pages, so it's a book bursting at the seams and can seem in-brief. Whether his ideas are outdated I can’t show more say. I find his foundations sound, because I go along with his stress on culture. I’m sure exciting things have happened since this book. One thing I know of – he has Bruce Bagemihl’s early work in his bibliography, but makes statements disproved by publication of Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, a book often relevant to his themes. show less

Enlightened, ground-breaking, woth re-reading.

9/8/22