Female Supremacy Articles - Page 18

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Potts, an author of "Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Evolution of Human Sexuality," regards monogamy as “a struggle,” but one most people aspire to.

He doesn’t necessarily disagree with Schwartz that non-monogamy is growing in our culture, but says that monogamy will remain the ideal, something we’ll still try to accomplish, even if we only manage it later than we used to.

“I think the thing that is setting the scene in America [for more non-monogamy] is that the age of first marriage is rising but the age of puberty has fallen," Potts says. "In the 18th Century, girls menstruated at 18. Now it’s 12.”

That creates a very long interval during which our hormones are raging but we still have to get an education, mature, and figure out who we are and who we’d like to marry. As a result “people have sex before marriage and we, as a society, accept that.”

Under those conditions, there’s bound to be a lot of partner-switching and checking out who might be more fun in bed. So non-monogamy may indeed grow as Schwartz suggests.

Better parents now?

But, Potts argues, once we do marry, we tend to try to make those marriages work and we are probably better parents than we used to be because we’re more mature. We’ve gotten a lot of play time out of our systems. As a result, he says, “I do not know that we have any firm evidence that there is more extramarital sex now than 50 years ago.”