Waste Books

Join us this month as we discuss Chris Ryan and Cacilda Jethá's nonfiction book about prehistoric human sexuality, Sex at Dawn! Overview If you're looking for a comfortable read, you're likely not going to find it here. The authors of this book pull no punches as they undertake a big task: undermining what they call the "standard narrative of human sexuality," which they see as potentially very harmful to humans given how we likely evolved and behaved for hundreds of thousands of years.  We are all familiar with the standard narrative, having been raised in a culture that saturates our existence with love songs, rom-coms, and countless other forms of propaganda that seem to insist that the fundamental condition of human sexuality is heartbreak. Under the standard narrative, we must always be on guard for the two-timing dude or the gold-digging lady, arguably a microcosm of a larger scarcity culture. Indeed, the authors trace our issues back to what seems to be the root of many of our problems: the agricul