You're listening to a Stranger podcast, www.com.

If you're stuck in a relationship quandary, or if you're looking for sexual harmony,

while there's nothing you can't ask on the Savage Lovecast.

You know, every once in a while, you see a movie or you read a book or an article in a magazine or perhaps some advice in an advice column?

And you think, oh my God, I'm not crazy.

I've just had that experience reading a new book that I am ordering everyone who listens

to this show to go out and buy and read.

It's called Sex at Dawn, the Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher

Ryan and Kakilda Jethah.

I'm sure I miss pronouncing that.

It comes out this week from Harper,

and basically the book argues that everything we have been told about monogamy being natural

or human beings having evolved in monogamous pairs and the paramed.

Everything we've been told about the evolution of

human sexuality is wrong. I'm going to read just a little section from it. We are being misled and

misinformed by an unfounded yet constantly repeated mantra about the naturalness of wedded bliss,

female sexual reticence, and happily ever after sexual

monogamy, a narrative pitting man against woman in a tragic tango of unrealistic expectations,

snowballing frustration, and crushing disappointment. Living under this tyranny of two, as author

and media critic Laura Kipness puts it, we carry the weight of modern love's central anxiety,

namely the expectation that romance and sexual attraction

can last a lifetime of coupled togetherness

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