San Francisco – Journalists and bloggers are warmly invited to a very special press evening with New York Times best-selling author Christopher Ryan (author, with Calcida Jethá, of Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality).

Ryan is making a rare San Francisco visit from his home in Spain. (He is booked on November 9th at SupperClub to headline a panel discussion about “modern love” as well as a frisky post-party — details for that event below.) In this convivial meet-and-greet, hosted by Center for Sex & Culture director and Good Vibrations Staff Sexologist Carol Queen, Ryan will speak to members of the press about his ground-breaking, award-winning book, which invites readers to re-imagine human evolution and sexuality.

A “renegade researcher” not beholden to the received wisdom of academic social science, his work is intelligent, witty, and provocative. The thesis of Sex At Dawn — that humans evolved to naturally use sexuality in a social fashion, like our nearest primate relatives, and that monogamy is far from our species’ default setting — is engagingly laid out, with earliest human development, Darwin’s Victorian-era bias, the discovery of frisky apes called bonobos, and the fate of contemporary human marriage only some of the stops along the this delightful literary and scientific wild ride that reconceptualizes many cultural assumptions.

Ryan is hosted by the Center for Sex & Culture (with the kind support of Good Vibrations) at their new space at 1349 Mission in San Francisco. Meet him on November 7 from 6:30-8:30pm; please RSVP to [email protected] so refreshments available will be adequate to the number of people who attend.

About Sex At Dawn:

A New York Times bestseller in both hardcover and paperback.
One of NPR’s Favorite Books of 2010.
Winner of the 2011 SSTAR Consumer Book Award (Society for Sex Therapy & Research). A Best Book of 2010 (Audible.com).

“The single most important book about human sexuality since Alfred Kinsey unleashed Sexual Behavior in the Human Male on the American public in 1948.” — Dan Savage

“Funny, witty, and light . . . the book is a scandal in the best sense, one that will have you reading the best parts aloud and reassessing your ideas about humanity’s basic urges well after the book is done.” — Newsweek

On an almost daily basis we are inundated with stories about the collapse of the latest celebrity marriage—and infidelity is almost always the cause of the break up. Is it even possible for two people to stay together happily over an extended period of time? Since Darwin’s day, we’ve been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. But it doesn’t, and never has.

Mainstream science—as well as religious and cultural institutions—has long maintained that men and women evolved in nuclear families where a man’s possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman’s fertility and fidelity. But this narrative is collapsing. Fewer and fewer couples are getting married and divorce rates keep climbing while adultery and flagging libido drag down even seemingly solid marriages.

In SEX AT DAWN, renegade researchers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá debunk almost everything we “think we know” about sex.

Ryan and Jethá show how our promiscuous past haunts our current struggles regarding monogamy, sexual orientation, and family dynamics. Some of the themes they explore include:

• why long-term fidelity can be so difficult for so many;
• why sexual passion tends to fade even as love deepens;
• why many middle-aged men risk everything for an affair;
• why homosexuality persists in the face of standard evolutionary logic; and
• what the human body reveals about the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality

Ryan and Jethá show that our ancestors lived in egalitarian groups that shared food, child care, and often, sexual partners. Weaving together convergent, often overlooked evidence from anthropology, archeology, primatology, anatomy, and psychosexuality, the authors show how far from human nature sexual monogamy really is. They expose the ancient roots of human sexuality while pointing toward a more optimistic future illuminated by our innate capacities for love, cooperation, and generosity.

In the tradition of the best historical and scientific writing, SEX AT DAWN unapologetically upends unwarranted assumptions and unfounded conclusions while offering a revolutionary understanding of why we live and love as we do. A controversial, idea-driven book that challenges everything you know about sex, marriage, family, and society.