#95 Christopher Ryan - Love, Lust, and Evolution

Christopher Ryan is an American author, psychologist, and speaker best known for his groundbreaking work in the field of human sexuality and evolutionary psychology. He is the author of “Sex at Dawn”, a book that challenges conventional perspectives on human sexual evolution and monogamy, arguing that early human societies were more likely characterized by a non-monogamous, communal mating structure. In this episode, we talk about exactly that: love, sex, jealousy, monogamy VS polygamy, and even chimps and bonobos.

00:00:00 00:02:07 Are We Not Wired For Monogamy?
 00:07:28 Reframing Jealousy
 00:10:38 What Does It Mean When They Say “I Love You?”
 00:15:26 Loving Women Too Much and What They Really Want
 00:21:00 Alpha and Beta Men
 00:25:23 Chimp Empire
 00:32:41 Watching Mass Violence and Gore Films
 00:40:13 The US’ Control Over Sexual Pleasure and the War on Masturbation
 00:49:50 Chris’ Best “Non-Sex Performance” AVN Award
 00:54:02 Men and Women in Monogamy and Non-Monogamy
 01:08:43 Biggest Misunderstandings Debunked
 01:16:41 Listening to Your Body
 01:20:00 Carl Jung VS Jordan Peterson
 01:23:47 Where to Find Chris

Reframing Jealousy

A lot of people think that if they let their partner be attracted to other people and express this openly, they might lose them. This couldn’t be further from the truth. For Chris, you might lose them anyway, so it’s best to start with the reality that nobody can control anybody else; if your partner wants to leave you, they’re going to leave you unless you’ve got them in a cage in the basement. Beyond that, there’s no way that you can control another human being’s decisions. There’s always a risk that your partner’s going to leave you, so what are you then going to do? Is it safer, smarter, and more ethical to acknowledge the reality of your partner’s consciousness, autonomy, and biological reality and start from that, or is it a smarter strategy to just pretend that none of this is happening and ignore the problem?

Chimp Empire

In Chimp Empire, Chris explains the many errors in the show. The show declares that chimps are our closest primate ancestors, but they are definitely not! Although chimps and bonobos are our closest primate relatives and are equidistant from humans, chimps are violent and aggressive while bonobos are just chill—they don’t hurt or abuse other beings. They are highly sexualized but are not trying to control each other’s behaviors. This agenda promotes a vision of human behavior that the roots of human violence lie millions of years in our revolutionary past.

The Biggest Misunderstanding Between Men and Women

Chris notes the “sweaty t-shirt study” by Claus Wedekind wherein a woman meets a man, she could go on to list down their positive qualities only to say in the end that they “don’t smell right”. A man would rarely ever say that. According to Wedekind, women have a sense of smell much more acute than men’s and it makes sense for them to become more attuned to smells than men are. But why? The conventional view is that when women get pregnant, they need to be careful of the food they eat, but what about all the time? This is tied into mate selection and his hypothesis was that maybe women pick up information about men’s immune systems from their smell. 

Links and Resources

Substack

Website

Meta-Description

“Sex at Dawn” author, psychologist, and speaker Chris Ryan debunks myths about men and women, as well as overcoming jealousy and the miseducation on humans and our closest primate relatives.

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