Dear Peter Hume,

You Sir, are an inspiration!
Could you please tell us a little
about yourself? Your background,
profession? And where does your
knowledge come from?

Peter Hume:
<Squeers
>Is it still monogamy, btw, when the faithful husband masturbates, or has sex with his wife, while imaging someone else?

Yes, on etymological grounds. The ‘-gamy’ refers to a marriage or fertilization.>

Well thank you for your pedanticism PH, however my question was plainly rhetorical and I'd already distinguished between sexual and social monogamy.

But I'm more interested, Foxy and Yabby, in what you make of my (and the book's, 'The Myth of Monogamy') heretical assertion that humans are by 'nature' raving sex pots?

"But given the amount of screwing around that goes on amongst married
people, we can safely assume that not all humans carry the monogamy
gene :)"

Good point, but many of these people may have stayed faithful, under other circumstances. If they had only married someone else for example.

Whether or not monogamy is natural, it nevertheless represents the ideal civilisational response in terms of maintaining social order, providing gender equality, ensuring child welfare, providing security and sexual fulfilment while inhibiting disease transmission.
In order to validate their relationships while seeking "marriage rights", even homosexuals pretend, for now, that they too hold on to the monogamous ideal.
As our civilisation devolves, so too will the ideal of monogamy be deconstructed, as we are already witnessing.
Homosexual "marriage" and Muslim immigration will accelerate this process.

"Ideal", proxy? Marriage is what's messing us all up:

<Men and women are dispensable carriers, respectively, of
seeds and eggs; programmed to mate and die, mate and die,
mate and die. One can see why “love” was invented by some
artist who found depressing the dull mechanics of our mindless
mission to be fruitful and multiply. Apparently, the first human societies were tribal-extended families. Then the pre-nuclear family was invented. The monotheistic religions from which we continue to suffer are fiercely grounded on the only fact that we can be certain of, Man plus Woman equals Baby. This, for many, IS the Natural Law. Inevitably,if unnaturally, natural lawyers thought up marriage and monogamy and then, faced with the actual nature of the male
and the female, they created numerous sexual taboos in order
to keep the population in line so that the senior partners in
the earthly firm could keep the rest of us busy building expensive
pyramids to the glory of the Great Lawyer in the Sky.(“It’s all in the vagina, dear”) Freud, noted, all those
fierce do’s and don’ts have created discontents, not to mention
asthma and date rape. In fact, everything that the Book
(from which comes Judaism, Christianity, Islam) has to say
about sex is wrong. Of course, practically everything the Book
has to say about everything else, including real estate, is wrong
too, but today’s lesson is sex.
The male’s function is to shoot semen as often as possible into
as many women (or attractive surrogates) as possible,
while the female’s function is to be shot briefly by a male in
order to fertilize an egg, which she will lay nine months later...>

So sayeth Gore Vidal

Dear Squeers,

I haven't read the book that you refer to.
However, I'm not sure that I buy into the
generalization that humans are by "nature"
raving sex pots.

I feel that our sexual responses
are not dictated by genes. Human sexual
behaviour and feelings are primarily learned
through the socialization process and generally
conform to the prevailing norms of the society
concerned. Ideas about what is sexually
appropriate or inappropriate, moral or immoral,
erotic or offensive, are purely social in origin.
Human sexual behaviour is highly flexible.

Dear Benk,

Staying faithful is a choice.

However as Oscar Wilde said, "I can resist
everything except temptation." (or words
to that effect). ;-)

Dear Proxy,

Research into the sexual practices of people
is very limited and unreliable. The greatest
obstacles is the difficulty of surveying a
representative, random sample of the population.
It's easy enough to discover how people will
vote or which brand of washing powder they use,
but it's much more difficult for researchers
to inquire in depth into the sex lives and
marriage/partnership choices, of complete
strangers. Understandably, many of those sampled
will refuse to respond. Since these people differ
in unknown but perhaps significant ways from those
who are willing to answer, the results of any survey
may be biased. In addition, many who do answer may
not always tell the truth. Therefore it would be
difficult to predict with any accuracy what the
future will be regarding monogamy/polygamy, same-sex,
or any other relationship in this country.

One thing's for sure - things are certainly different
today - from what they were certainly in my parent's
time, and I imagine that they will certainly be
different again in my children's time and beyond.
But in what way? Who knows? Only time will tell.