IS ADULTERY A NATURAL HUMAN CONDITION?

The question is: Does a new book, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, written by an anthropologist, Christopher Ryan , and other evidence by valid researchers get Clinton and many others completely off the hook? After all the Europeans don't even bat an eye when their politicians/royalty consort with their courtesans and mistresses and the French validate it - De Gaulle's mistress marched along his wife in his funeral procession.

It was Bill Clinton who first got Christopher Ryan thinking about monogamy. As a doctoral student in psychology in the late 1990s, he kept wondering: "How is it that the most powerful man in the world is getting publicly humiliated for having a casual sexual relationship with someone?" And it wasn't just Clinton, of course. Again and again, leaders were putting themselves in a position where "they could lose everything" for the sake of an affair. Ryan devoted his dissertation to an examination of the roots of human sexual behavior and suggests, in a new book co-written with his wife, psychiatrist Cacilda Jetha, that we re-evaluate the idea that monogamy comes naturally to men and women – and look at whether it should even be something we require of our spouses. In Sex at Dawn, to be published this summer by HarperCollins, Ryan and Jetha point to anthropological and biological evidence that humans are designed to seek variety in sexual experiences. The myth, says Ryan, who writes a blog at PsychologyToday.com, is that "you should be completely happy, completely fulfilled with one partner for 50 years. But that's not the design of the human organism. "In fact," he says from their home in Spain, "the human organism is designed for the exact opposite of that."

"Adultery has been documented in every human culture studied," Ryan and Jetha write in the book. If monogamy is such a natural state, the authors ask, why are so many people driven to cheat? Ryan and Jetha trace many modern ideas about matrimony and monogamy back to Darwin and a Victorian understanding of sexuality. To support their theory that the story is much more complex, they examine early human cultures and those of remote tribes that don't place a high value on monogamy. Some people believed babies could receive genetic material from multiple fathers, so women were encouraged to have sex with men who could pass on different positive characteristics. Ryan's hope is that the book will prompt readers to question their beliefs about monogamy, though he knows many will be incredulous at the suggestion that adultery comes naturally. The authors are actually in favor of matrimony – especially, Ryan says, when "it provides an emotionally and economically stable environment for a kid to grow up in." The problem, as he sees it, comes when an expectation of absolute fidelity is placed on marriage. "There's a lot of suffering – and what I would say is unnecessary suffering – between couples who have unnecessary expectations of what life is going to be like," he says.

I personally believe that Americans may be a bit behind other cultures in their white knight views about marriage and that it probably is an unnatural state that is difficult to maintain for 30 - 40+ years. It is actually programmed into a man's DNA to spread his DNA to as many as possible to preserve the gene pool and the alpha dominant men are really driven to do so. That is a proven fact and we are the only primates that don't generally live that way - not counting certain cultures. Monogamy within a culture can actually result in more birth/genetic defects over the centuries. Looks like even big Al Gore has found a new love interest - who would have thought he would ever leave Tipper?? Maybe she just got painfully bored with his Inconvenient truth BS! I wonder if his new love is ecologically green enough and has a small enough carbon footprint for him??

Original article:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/nation/stories/DN-sexuality_02nat.ART.State.Edition2.29c8c1f.html