There’s a tendency to believe that civilization is our greatest human accomplishment and to think that every advance we’ve made—whether scientific, medical, or otherwise—has made things better because it has fixed a problem. However, as Dr. Christopher Ryan argues in his new book Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress, this line of thinking may be all wrong.

As Ryan argues, every advancement we’ve made has brought with it a different set of problems, and sometimes those problems are more serious than the ones we were trying to fix in the first place. So in the process of attempting to make the world a better place, we may have inadvertently made it more dangerous.

Ryan’s book is broad and provides numerous examples to support his argument. He explores everything from climate change to tooth decay to mental health; however, the part of the book that interested me the most—as a sex researcher and educator—was how civilization has changed sex and reproduction.

I recently interviewed Ryan (who also happens to be co-author of Sex at Dawn) about his latest book and the subject of civilized sex in particular. In a two-part series, I’ll be sharing the highlights of our discussion.

The first excerpt from my conversation with Ryan appears below, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Lehmiller: Let me start with this question. How has civilization changed sex? Has it changed the way we think about sex? The way we have sex? What can you tell us about that?

Ryan: I think the first place to start would be how agricultural societies view relationships between men and women differently than pre-agricultural or non-agricultural societies do. One of the points that I make repeatedly in both Sex at Dawn and Civilized to Death is that women are thought to be equal to men in their stature, authority, independence, and autonomy in hunter-gatherer groups, whereas in agricultural societies, women are almost universally held to be very low stature compared to men. In fact, they're considered the property of men. This seems to be a result of the fact that property per se as a concept is really not understood or valued by hunter-gatherer groups. If someone hoards things for themselves, that's actually seen as a social taboo. Sharing and cooperation are the central organizing principles of a hunter-gatherer society.

When you don't have a sense of personal property, it becomes very difficult to think of other people as property. But with the shift to agriculture, for the first time people settled down and started growing food on the same land year after year. They started building permanent shelters, domesticating animals, and investing a lot of time and energy into these things, which led private property to become very important. As soon as that happened, men became very concerned with who was going to inherit this property that they'd spent their lives accumulating and tending to. And so at that point, as we argued in Sex At Dawn, paternity certainty became a very important principle in human endeavors. And that leads to men trying to control the reproductive behavior of women so that the lines of inheritance can be well-established and very clearly maintained. So the relationships between men and women changed radically along with every other human relationship with the advent of agriculture. And the repercussions are far ranging, certainly.

I often point to a line in the Old Testament: thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife. I used to think that this line was only about respecting our neighbors’ marriages. But if you read the full context of the line, it says, “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his ox, nor his house, nor his slaves, nor his ass” and all these other properties of the neighbor. The wife, in that context, is just another possession of the man. And we still see this where the father gives the bride to the husband, or in societies around the world where a woman who's been raped is considered to be without any value. She's no longer “pure.” And what does this purity mean? It means that the sperm from the chosen approved man is the only sperm that's ever been in this woman's body. So any children that come from her have to be from that man. There’s a sense of purity that's very much based upon the notion of property.

Lehmiller: In reading Civilized to Death, I noticed that you talked about human beings as this deeply, essentially sexual species. For millennia, however, we've been pressured into thinking that we're supposed to ignore, tame, and repress our sexuality. As a prime example of this, you talk about this guy John Harvey Kellogg, who is someone I talk about in my human sexuality classes. He was kind of a quack because he was this doctor who held the belief that masturbation was bad for you, and that sex was bad for you, too.

He actually developed the original cornflake thinking that it was a cure for masturbation because if you were eating bland foods, you wouldn't be sexually excited and therefore you'd be less likely to touch yourself and you wouldn’t want to have sex. Kellogg also advocated for circumcising boys who were masturbating without using any anesthetic because the pain would make them not want to do it anymore. He also suggested applying carbolic acid to the clitoris of girls who were masturbating to prevent that behavior as well.

Kellog is just one of many examples of medical authorities in our past who tried to tell us that we need to repress our sexuality and sexual impulses. Being told for so long that we're supposed to repress our sexuality, what kind of effects has that had on us sexually or otherwise?