monogafesto

MY RELATIONSHIP TO, AND UNDERSTANDING OF, MONOGAMY
(and i may have no idea what i'm talking about)
Historically, monogamy arose soon after the idea of private property, not long after the agricultural revolution (about 10,000 years ago, less than 5% of human history...perhaps a good deal less). Males wanted their possessions to go to their sons, so they needed to know which sons were theirs. Presto...monogamy! In the great non-surprise of history, every single marriage-based society has had a distinctly more permissive attitude toward male extramarital sex. If monogamy were natural, WHY would there be punishments (up to and including death, and always harsher on women) for those who trangress? Why would a seventh commandment even exist?
Scientific studies ever-increasingly conclude that pre-agricultural humans had multiple sexual partners, men and women equally.
In my own sexual life, i've never fucked around.
I was once proud of that.
Even within my own youthful "life partner" dreams, i perceived the foolishness inherent in two ideas: the notion that there is only one "right one", and the notion of being "completed" by your beloved. Your spirit has to be whole BEFORE you can be good for someone else. As i grew, i was forced to accept the logic that if my love genuinely loves another, she will be MORE of a person, not less. She will be happier, and have more experience and wisdom to offer both me and the human race.
The stages of falling in love are a rush (if they weren't, we'd have no babies). But all those feelings, including the sustained bliss that follows the whirlwinds of attraction and infatuation, are dictated by hormones. In the grip of hormones, it can feel natural to desire no one but your shipoopi (or not). But in the big picture, our physiology is only equipped to sustain these rushes with one person for about the time it takes a child to be born. Years of monogamy will steadily lower a man's testosterone, making him more susceptible to depression, cancer, heart attack, and dementia. The effect on women is as yet undocumented.
I'm not anti-romantic. Far from it. My deep caring for all people makes me more capable of loving a woman intensely and profoundly. Put another way, i might be the man least able to use a woman as just some receptacle for my desires. Anonymous sex is more painful to me than no sex at all (but only barely, ever so barely). I'm open to love in any way it finds me, even something that looks traditional. In the early stages of mutual wooing, i find myself inclined to shut down other romantic potentialities. Whether that's leftover social conditioning or something less noxious, i'm not yet sure.
All of this, however, leaves my life in a bit of a sexual netherworld. I don't fit in at the altar or the orgy. On top of everything else, i don't want STDs, yet loathe condoms (i'm not just being whiny...people who use condoms are more prone to depression than people who don't). I'm generally content to offer monogamy to a new lover, but that's a ticking bomb set to go off when human nature (hers and mine) kicks in. Most women still want monogamy, because it's all they've been taught, and because men still control almost all the world's resources. Women are tied to the Cinderella paradigm because their economic survival depends on it, especially if they want to (or have to) raise a child. But if you were to set all women loose in a world free of poverty, where they knew that any child they birthed would always be cared for, they would lose interest in monogamy within a generation or so.
And in that world, men would get more sex.
So who's keeping monogamy alive?
Are they dead yet?

(for more on the science behind this: http://nakedmeadow.blogspot.com/2012/02/sex-at-dawn.html)