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From virtually the moment we're born,
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there's a story that's preached across
cultures and continents.
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It's a familiar fairy tale.
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[narrator] She was even more beautiful
than he had thought.
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That finding one true love is the key
to a fulfilled and happy life.
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I've been doing a lot of thinking,
and the thing is...
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-I love you.
-I love you.
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Ditto.
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As an adult, we're forced to reconcile
the messaging on monogamy
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with one simple fact.
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Humans are terrible at it.
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It's kept Jerry Springer on the air
for 25 years.
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[crowd booing]
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I've been sleeping with Eddie.
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-You cheated on me with her?
-I have your name tattooed on me!
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-Why would you sleep with him?
-How many girls did you take?
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In 2016, 2.2 million U.S. couples
got married,
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but over 800,000 called it quits.
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Our quest for and failure at monogamy
has caused so much pain and heartbreak.
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If it's so hard for humans
to be monogamous,
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why do most of us all around the world
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make it one of the most central goals
of our lives?
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[woman] I start asking myself,
"Is he right for me?"
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[reporter] Belgium's King Baudouin
married Doña Fabiola...
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I think I am a very lucky man.
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[reporter] A beautiful shot
of the new royal couple.
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[reporter] Wonderful.
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The Prince of Wales has admitted publicly
that he was unfaithful.
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I'm announcing my resignation.
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[reporters] The crime was to have
conceived a child with a married neighbor.
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Nelson Mandela... a broken marriage.
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I did not have sexual relations
with that woman.
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If you ask couples
why they chose monogamy,
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you'll hear one answer again and again.
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They fell in love.
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We met, in a candy store.
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1946.
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We went to college together.
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We were both in a relationship.
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And... we didn't cheat.
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You look so guilty
every time we talk about this.
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I am bad at talking about this.
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It's arranged marriage.
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Whatever they selected for me,
it was good.
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And I'm very happy with that.
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We had a study date one night
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and that study break
turned into anatomy, I guess.
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I never felt this way
about anybody before.
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I feel God has blessed us.
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We found true love.
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Of course we did. We're still here
70 years, what do you expect?
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25 years, I would have got out
on good behavior.
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I would like to think
that soulmates are real, but...
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She's my soulmate.
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Well, you're mine too.
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But monogamy and love
aren't the same thing.
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We are so psychotically welded
to this idea...
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that monogamy means love
and love means monogamy.
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In the absence of monogamy,
there is not love.
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Love is a feeling. Monogamy is a rule.
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You'll only have sex with this one person.
And most people live in a culture
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where they're expected at some point
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to make that rule a legal contract,
called marriage.
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In many countries,
breaking that rule is a crime.
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In the U.S., adultery is illegal
in at least 20 states,
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and although they're rarely enforced,
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punishments can range from a $10 fine
to three years in prison.
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If you are in a monogamous relationship
for 50 years
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and you fell down once, you cheated once,
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the whole relationship was a lie
and a failure.
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Most human beings have ambivalent impulses
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that it's nice to have someone
you can rely on
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but there's also the temptation
of novelty.
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Why would humans
all around the world invent a rule
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that's so difficult to follow
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and treat breaking it
as such an enormous betrayal?
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[narrator] Should a male have on his
clothing so much as a strand of hair
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from a female not his wife,
a serious crisis may result.
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For more than a century, there's been
a culturally accepted explanation.
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Sound check.
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One. One. One. One. One. One. One.
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The standard narrative
is the story that everybody knows. That men want to be free sexually and
spread their seed around the world
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and women want to be very exclusive
and particular and choose a provider,
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because they're vulnerable and
the children need to be taken care of.
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Women trade sexual fidelity to men
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in exchange for goods and services,
essentially.
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In this narrative,
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there's another reason why men
wouldn't want women to sleep around.
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If a baby comes out of a woman's body,
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there's no question but that she is
genetically related to that baby.
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The male has to take
the woman's word for it.
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Biologists have known
for a very long time that...
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men are far more inclined
to seek multiple sexual partners.
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And the reason for that
is really quite clear.
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[educator] Now in the first place,
remember that the male sperm cells
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are being produced all the time,
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while only one egg cell
is produced each month.
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There's very good, and I don't mean
ethically good, but very understandable
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evolutionary payoff
for males as being randy bastards.
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[inaudible]
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But there's one big issue
with that explanation
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of promiscuous, possessive men
and demure women.
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At lots of points in time, in places
in the world, people didn't follow it.
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Anatomically modern human beings
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have existed for at least 300,000 years.
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And for more than 90 percent of that time,
we lived as hunter-gatherers.
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Anthropologists refer to them
as fiercely egalitarian.
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There's no reason to think that
our ancestors shared everything
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except sexual partners.
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Of course, we can't go back
and interview our foraging ancestors,
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but we have the accounts
of explorers and Europeans
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who first developed
and saw these societies
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before they'd been
much touched by outsiders.
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And they are surprised and shocked
at the difference in sexual mores.
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There's a wonderful story that a Jesuit
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who lived with the Naskapi Indians
for some time, and he would ask,
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"If you let your wives
have this much freedom,
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how do you know that the child
she bears will belong to you?"
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And he recorded the answer
of the Indian:
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If a child is crying and the adult
nearest to that child picks it up,
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nobody says,
"Hey, hey. Your kid's crying."
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No, it's...
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there's a commonality to parenthood
among hunter-gatherers.
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One of those groups
are the Bari of Venezuela,
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where every man who sleeps
with a woman while she's pregnant
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is considered a father of the child
and helps provide for it.
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Now in our society,
that would probably not work very well.
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I'm not recommending it.
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But in that society,
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the child who had several fathers named
because she'd slept with several fathers
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actually had a much better chance
of surviving to adulthood
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because those men contributed.
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Did you ever think of going with somebody
else after you married me?
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What, are you crazy?
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We don't like to say we're open.
We like to say we're slightly ajar.
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Exactly.
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That's not good in my way.
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In our language, also, they say,
"Pati parmeshwar."
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That means "Husband is like God".
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-This is our culture.
-Our culture.
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We actually kind of met through
the non-monogamy "community".
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I define this relationship as
this is my cohabitating partner
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-and we call each other otters.
-Yeah.
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We are primary partners and
our other partners are secondary partners.
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I find it really fascinating.
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I think about it a lot, like if I could
ever do that, but I don't know if I could.
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I had a threesome with, like,
two friends of mine that I initiated.
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I decided that it would be cool
to experiment with multiple people
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with somebody I really loved
and cared about.
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The queer community is berated with
the idea that our relationships are lesser
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and that they're actually not up to par
in the hetero-normative standard.
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And all of that is bull.
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We shouldn't be surprised that some
cultures practice non-monogamy.
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Because in the animal world, true sexual
monogamy is virtually unheard of.
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The most romantic creature
might be the Diplozoon paradoxum,
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a parasitic tapeworm that literally fuses
together with its partner for life.
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But humans aren't tapeworms or apes,
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and our closest relatives in the animal
world are chimps and bonobos.
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[Christopher Ryan] We're closer related
to chimps and bonobos
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than the Indian elephant is
to the African elephant.
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[narrator] The close comparison exists
in bone and muscle structure,
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and in the capability of responding
to stimuli and solving problems.
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Clearly, chimps and bonobos
are anything but monogamous.
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Bonobos have sex at the drop of a hat.
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[song] I know... that I just met you...
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They have sex to say hello,
they have sex to say goodbye.
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They have sex when they're stressed out.
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For both male and female bonobos,
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that free love philosophy
makes evolutionary sense.
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The males get to spread their seed
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and the females get to take in the seed
of multiple males,
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which then compete against each other
to fertilize her egg.
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It's survival of the fittest, for sperm.
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There are aspects of bonobo anatomy
that seem adapted to promiscuity,
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and intriguingly, you can also find
a lot of them in humans,
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suggesting we may have evolved
to be non-monogamous, too.
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There's body dimorphism.
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In species that are more promiscuous,
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the males tend to be 15 to 25 percent
larger than the females.
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And in theory, if there are males
battling to impregnate women,
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testicles would be bigger and stronger.
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[Christopher Ryan] Human testicles are
intermediate between very large testicles
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in bonobos and chimpanzees, and very small
testicles in gorillas, for example.
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There's the human penis,
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tied for the biggest among all primates,
which has a unique shape.
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We have this much thicker penis
with the flared head.
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This shape creates a vacuum
in the female's reproductive tract
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that tends to pull any sperm already there
and pulls it down away from the ovum,
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thereby giving an advantage to the sperm
of the man who's having sex at the moment.
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There's also female copulatory
vocalization,
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a phenomenon so well-known and accepted,
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it's a standard feature
of movie sex scenes.
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[groaning and screaming]
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What we see is that female copulatory
vocalization is common
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among primates
that engage in sperm competition.
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Then there's the fact that humans
and bonobos have sex to bond.
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And not just to have children.
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Which might explain the way
we face each other during intercourse.
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You see humans and bonobos are the only
two that face each other while having sex.
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And why we have a lot more of it
than most mammals.
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So, clearly when people say
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so-and-so had sex like an animal,
they're getting it backwards.
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And there's now a lot of evidence that
monogamy is a more recent invention
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than most of us would expect.
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Around 12,000 years ago,
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when most humans stopped
being hunter-gatherers
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and figured out how to farm.
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You get a very overpowering concern
with property rights.
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As the Greeks put it, you don't want
a foreign seed introduced into your soil.
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For thousands of years, marriage was the
way to increase your family labor force.
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You made peace treaties,
business alliances...
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The more I've studied, the more I became
convinced that marriage was invented
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not to do with the individual
relationship with a man and a woman
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but to get in-laws.
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You know, and it's amusing because
today we see in-laws as the big threat
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to the solidarity
of the man and the woman.
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But that's what marriage was about.
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You look back at Anthony and Cleopatra,
that was not a love story at all.
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That was two people from the most
powerful empires in the world
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trying to figure out how they could get
together and rule both of those empires.
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The idea of marrying someone for love,
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Coontz says Western societies only started
doing that a few hundred years ago.
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As we made a transition to the idea that
marriage should be on the basis of love,
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it scared people.
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Defenders of traditional marriage said,
"Oh, my gosh.
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How will we get a woman to marry at all
if she says, 'Eww, I don't love him.'
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How will we stop people
from getting divorced?"
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So a new idea took hold.
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Men and women needed to find love
and marry
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because they were two parts of a whole.
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Men were aggressive and protective,
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women were nurturing and demure.
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They were opposites
who completed each other.
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The field of evolutionary biology
also developed around this time,
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pioneered by male scientists
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who used theories on sexual selection
to explain Victorian gender roles.
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As Charles Darwin wrote
in The Descent of Man:
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And it's possible his ideas
became so popular
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and survived so long
because it made sense to us
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in the societies we were living in.
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But if monogamy
is all a made-up construct,
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a way to enforce gender roles
and social order,
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how do we explain that visceral,
deep-rooted feeling we get
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when our loved ones stray?
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Tell me something.
Are you the jealous type?
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I feel like we don't really
deal too much with jealousy.
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I... I don't know why that is.
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-What it is...
-It's because we're sluts.
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-To be honest.
-I don't get, like, jealous like that.
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It's important to understand why you're
feeling jealous because jealousy is not--
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It's not a feeling, it's usually
rooted in some other sort of thing.
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It's not a descending guillotine.
It's like jealousy is an event.
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What's the best way
to deal with that event?
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Who were you really with? That little
blonde secretary from the office?
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I don't think you'll ever find any society
where there was no sexual jealousy,
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but we also have these other
kinds of impulses of generosity
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and of a sense that maybe
there are other parts of the person
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that are more important
than the sexual person.
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And these coexist and they battle
and I think they will always battle.
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I say monogam-ish to describe
my relationship with my husband.
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We've been together for 24 years, and
not monogamous for 20 of those years.
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And I've had people look at me and say,
"I could never do what you guys do
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because I value commitment too highly.
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All three of my marriages
were monogamous."
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This person was committed to monogamy,
not to any of the people they married,
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they were committed to monogamy.
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Non-monogamy is getting more
mainstream attention.
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-Define polyamorous.
-Without monogamy.
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-Polyamory...
-Polyamory...
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-Polyamorous.
-It's called polyamory.
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-Polyamorous people.
-Threeple.
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-Non-monogamous, okay?
-You couldn't be.
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A 2016 study found one in five Americans
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have been in a non-monogamous
relationship at some point.
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And in another survey, a third of
Americans said their ideal relationship
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would be non-monogamous.
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Monogamy as we know it
has been through many incarnations.
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It's been forced.
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It's been useful.
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It's been beautiful.
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It's been subverted.
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As human society evolves,
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so will human sexuality.
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As we enter what I think of
as uncharted territory,
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for the first time in human history,
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we're trying to develop relationships
that are not based on coercion.
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Coercion of women by their economic
and legal dependence,
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coercion of women by their bodies,
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coercion of men by the social
and economic structures.
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We're trying, I think, to find
maybe a new balance.
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Monogamy isn't natural.
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It means we have to recognize
that, because it's not natural,
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it's something that we're going to have
to work for if we want it.
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One of the things that I think makes
human beings particularly interesting,
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and maybe even unique in the animal world,
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is that we're capable of doing things
that are unnatural.
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Monogamy is like vegetarianism.
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You can choose to be a vegetarian
and that can be healthy.
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It can be ethical,
it can be a wonderful decision,
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but because you've chosen
to be a vegetarian
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doesn't mean
that bacon stops smelling good.
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If we're lucky,
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it's no longer about what kinds
of relationships we should have
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in the modern world.
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It's about designing the kinds
of relationships we want to have.
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Humans may not have evolved
to be sexually monogamous,