Nearly all of the reporting of Wednesday Martin’s new book on sex and infidelity, Untrue, has been tongue in cheek, treating it as a dramatic or tabloid-esque book and thus not taking it particularly seriously. But the book is not simply an interview or two with women who have had affairs or a personal memoir on what Martin thinks of monogamy. It purports to be a scientific case that women are naturally more non monogamous, and seeks to derive from that significant connections to feminist movements like MeToo. Using that ill conceived framework as a baseline, Martin positions monogamy as a central personal and political barrier to women’s happiness and liberation, aping feminist anthropology and politics throughout. Therefore this book deserves far more scrutiny than it has received and upon closer inspection it is riddled with false and misleading claims without which much of its central premise (evolutionary science with a feminist wrapping) collapses. Martin says her perspective was founded on and colored by the “new science” she explores and the fact that most of that argument is unfounded should color how you see the book too. This is not an attack on people who feel that only polyamory is right as the relationship they enter into, or the practice itself; this a response to Wednesday Martin’s book’s fatal flaws and how toxic her perspective may be, especially in light of how she sells it.

The full title with tagline of the book is “Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free.” Its lack of serious scrutiny may be because some assume that under the provocative cover it is simply invalidating old myths of men being naturally non monogamous (and not responsible for their actions) and it being women’s eternal struggle to rein them in. That seems to be how some press releases begin, and the most agreeable points in the book are about examples of women being treated far harsher than men for the same infidelity or men who try to excuse or ignore the pain they cause women because “evolution” (although she often lends credence to those ideas by proxy). If that were the whole book then this response would be unnecessary. But unfortunately Martin’s case and nearly all of her novel claims are more accurately about three things: faulty and obtuse claims that the “new science” “proves” women are naturally non monogamous, political and anthropological claims that open marriages are thus the biggest frontier in women’s sexuality, and insisting that non monogamy is the repressed solution to our society’s issues with sex and feminism. But if this book was intended to synthesize the findings of various fields and disciplines in order to build an accurate picture of the issue and the path forward, it has decisively failed on both counts.

Martin’s definition of “science” seems to shift throughout the book, from biology to primatology to anthropology, often connecting the dots simply by association. The biology is the most blatantly false collection of scientific claims. Much of it revolves around speculation about the function of genitals and sperm based on the book Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships, a book by Psychologist Christopher Ryan and Psychiatrist Cacilda Jethá. The book is cited repeatedly throughout Untrue and Martin recounts having dinner with the authors, even though it was savaged by many experts as stretching what little evidence it could find, blatantly misquoting experts, cherry picking research, misrepresenting the scientific consensus, and greatly overstating its case. That the authors had little personal expert experience and a strong editorial bias was acknowledged even by their defenders. Notably the book Sex at Dusk largely dismantles much of the case made in Sex at Dawn about natural non-monogamy, as well as any evolutionary case for female non monogamy as inherently more natural, although it is hardly alone. Even David Barash, psychologist and author of The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People, called Sex at Dawn “an intellectually myopic, ideologically driven, pseudo-scientific fraud.”

Sex at Dawn is significant for Martin and its citations show up repeatedly, even details like the shape of human genitals. Shaped as they are, “how could they be for anything but [non monogamy]?” Most discussions of evolution would at least remind you of the fact that many aspects of physiology can be inherited, from an appendix without clear function to eyes that work better surrounded by water than by air, so it doesn’t “prove” any essential nature. But the actual research goes much further than that. Expert on primate sexuality Alan F. Dixon says there is no credible evidence that the shape of the penis suggests anything like a history of human promiscuity, not to mention that Dawn’s genital claims rely on a flawed understanding of insemination. This was confirmed by AG Clark and A Civetta with their findings in Nature. Dixon suggests that human penile shape simply has to with the evolution of women’s hips and body shape and in context it fits with a history of monogamy. Martin also relies on the concept of sperm competition for her argument that our bodies are built for non monogamy, supposing that male testes suggest a history of multiple males mating with females like Bonobos or Chimps. Dixon makes it quite clear that that is not the case as humans have testes half the size of both primates. That is not half relative to their body mass, but half the actual size. Sex at Dawn claims that the size of human testes changed dramatically from the much larger Bonobo’s over the last 10,000 years, an extraordinarily unlikely claim they justify with totally misunderstood studies, such as one about a species of deer that changes testes size seasonally. Martin cites Dawn itself on sperm competition and also on the cervix, although there Dawn only cites a study by Dixon, who was writing about Macaques and did not consider it to apply to humans at all. Dixon actually responded to the book quite harshly, laughing at their claims about human physiology and refuting them, while saying their portrayal of early human relationships as largely non monogamous that Martin endorses was “nonsense.”

While Martin mentions that she is interested in showing that females have agency (which is largely separate from the advertised premise of Untrue of natural female non monogamy), there is a very clear conflict between conscious mate choice and these claims that only a woman’s genitals are evolved to make decisions. But these also form a core to how anyone would make the claim that women are “naturally” non monogamous or prone to infidelity, and with the actual scientific record she can’t substantiate that.

Even Martin’s preferred Primatologist Sarah Hrdy disagrees that sperm competition is the main concern here, that it would even be beneficial for females, or that it would lead to healthier children (a claim Martin makes repeatedly):

“[F]rom a female’s perspective, sperm competition is more probably an unfortunate consequence of polyandrous matings than something females were selected to promote. Competition inside her reproductive tract is scarcely the optimal arena for male-male competition, though once such competition gets going in males, females may have no choice but to make the best of it.” “Sperm competition represents another consequence of male-male competition potentially detrimental to female reproductive interests over the long run… Given that competitive sperm does not necessarily correlate with the most robust phenotypes and that fathers producing competitive sperm need not create advantageous conditions for infant survival, in species like primates where individuals are only long lived if they survive the only long-lived if they survive the very vulnerable infant and juvenile years, I would expect competitive sperm to fall rather far down the “list” of a mother’s criteria for an ideal mate. Certainly ejaculate quality does not necessarily correlate with other measures of survivorship or phenotypic success.”

The newest science and the field she relies on most heavily is primatology. Here the two closest species of primate to humans are Chimpanzees and Bonobos, followed by Gorillas. Gorillas are well known and acknowledged by Martin to have a structure of harems, with one male and a group of females with little infidelity on the female side as the genetic and physical record shows. Gorillas split off from humans about 7–8 million years ago to the chimpanzees six. Even Sex at Dawn suggests that humans began with something more akin to this behavior. Primate comparisons to humans often navigate between Gorillas as more distant and Chimps and Bonobos as more close. Here Martin clearly steers the conversations towards Bonobos only. This is most likely because Chimpanzees are the more “traditional” species, male dominated and largely characterized by male centric social formats, accompanied by frequent and brutal violence. Chimpanzees saw a quick overturn in study of their behavior in 1997 when a study suggested that half of the children over 5 years at a site were not from males in that social group, but it was retracted in 2001 as a mistake. The claim still made it into Sex at Dawn as exposing serious non monogamy in chimpanzees but was removed in the paperback edition after criticism. Chimpanzees live in strict hierarchies where all of the males compete with each other and control and often coerce the females. Martin gives this a very brief explanation, perhaps because the reader may consider both stories to be poor ways to learn about humans, but then tries to claim Bonobos as the much closer relative. Martin cites one study comparing muscle composition that suggested closer links between humans and Bonobos, but she omits many other studies of reproductive and gamete genes (more relevant to the subject at hand) that found Bonobos to be a weaker link than both Chimpanzees and Gorillas. And as Lynn Saxon explains in Sex at Dusk: “About one million years ago, i.e., 4 to 5 million years after the Pan/Homo split, when hominin species (our ancestors) had long moved far beyond this region, the bonobo ancestor then became isolated from other chimpanzees.” Scientists from the Max Planck Institute confirmed this, reporting that “once the ancestors of humans split from the ancestor of bonobos and chimps more than 4 million years ago, the common ancestor of bonobos and chimps retained this diversity until their population completely split into two groups 1 million years ago.” Bonobos don’t help very much in understanding Chimps, let alone humans, but Martin explicitly states that her understanding of the Bonobo human connection colored her view of everything else in Untrue.

Since the 1970s Primatologist Frans de Waal has famously promoted Bonobos as a species of free love and less hierarchy, in order to push back on the idea of primates as violent and harsh, although less well known is that he explicitly considered the pair bond and even the family as fundamental to human evolution and cooperation. He also wrote that it was common for people to exaggerate the Bonobo’s sex life and ignore that most contact is simply petting or fondling, copulation lasts around 13 seconds, sex in the wild is less frequent than zoos, and that copulation is often not erotic in its purpose. Martin is very clearly guilty of this with her rose tinted heavily eroticized depiction of the Bonobo. Sex for bonobos is often meant as a means of obtaining food to survive, a way for lower status females to defer or gain the support of higher status females (something not explored by Martin), a non erotic means of stress relief, or simply for affection. Lower ranking females are the most receptive as they have the greatest need to deter aggression and deal with the negative effects of lowly status. Martin still tries to use them as a model of women obtaining pleasure without male pressure, although economic and female on female pressures do in fact apply. It’s worth mentioning that not only are female bonobos responsible for all parental investment, but it’s their sons who inherit their status and receive nearly all of that investment to the point that mothers are regularly and closely involved in their male offspring obtaining mates, as female offspring typically end up leaving the social group as a selection pressure against incest. And Bonobos don’t show any form of pair bonding, a universal behavior in humans and quite relevant to the discussion.

What constitutes women being naturally non monogamous is always changing. The closer Martin gets to humans or practical science the more her argument ceases to be that females are non monogamous or pleasure driven-ly non-monogamous as such and instead that they respond to contextual incentives for their safety or offspring’s survival. But saying that women are “naturally non monogamous” is hugely different from saying that female primates sleep with aggressive males so that they consider themselves potential fathers of any children and so don’t commit infanticide. It’s akin to saying that women are naturally violent if females of a primate species respond to famine by killing another females offspring (a behavior observed in Bonobos). But even if she has to shift her arguments, she shifts back as soon as possible and her conclusions remain the same. Again, while some reviews seem to be more generous to Martin about this, her interviews, the book, and her statements on social media consistently say that “monogamy is much harder on women than men” and that women are naturally more non monogamous. Interestingly Sex at Dawn suggested the opposite, that women cheated for emotional reasons and men were subject to the Coolidge effect while it lamented women’s inability to understand the need of men to cheat. Martin and I both would roll our eyes at that claim, although Sex at Dawn tries to make the case for natural non monogamous men repeatedly and Martin does not have a strong position to criticize from when often making the mirroring case. Not acceptable at all is that Sex at Dawn also tries to argue that in the “natural state” all women are receptive to all men and that men will no longer “suffer” from rejection or being unable to get the sex they “need.” Besides being quite clear that infidelity is never about the offended party(ies) and implying that pleasure is easily enough reason to “step out,” Martin does not mirror this particular case but also does herself no favors by leaning so heavily on Dawn and calling it “game changing.” Nor does she ever call out Sex at Dawn for trying to justify part of its case by touting a study about racial differences in human bodies that repeats tired and racially biased pseudo-science.

Evolutionary biology is a popular subject, especially on some of the worst corners of the internet such as the Red Pill where cherry picked studies and misread or junk science is constantly pushed about the wild and capricious nature of women’s sexuality. Some of the same studies or reports that Martin uses feature there with uncomfortably close conclusions made about women. And while they may pay more attention to the Chimp while Martin prefers the Bonobo, the tiring deployment of evolutionary biology for politics and relationship advice isn’t becoming any less toxic. Martin’s animal argument is no more “new” than her later use of native tribes. It also brings to mind the old myth of the eponymous “Cuckoo” bird. The bird was thought to have some eggs in every nest that didn’t belong to its pair bonded male, who would then help raise them. In reality the birds actually act as a couple, sneaking into another pair’s nest and smashing one of their eggs on the ground to replace with their own. But I’ve yet to see anyone make the case that replacing infants in a nursery with your own is a natural behavior. The red pill also recently saw widely reported refutation of its foundational myth of the “alpha male” wolf, whereas in fact male wolves simply protect and invest in their mates and children. Evolutionary biology is much abused yet still deployed selectively as gospel and welding it like Martin does is simply toxic. Martin tries to distance herself somewhat by saying that women aren’t necessarily seeking the one “alpha male” (leaving open the idea of a changing “alpha”), but misogynists have made a range of claims with many lining up squarely with the idea of women as creatures with agency that they use only to cheat on their partners. If feminism always ends with non monogamy for them, so too with Martin. Her book often seems like its own version of a red pill, as she spares no opportunity feel superior to or more clever than women she speaks to who don’t want to cheat or consider it immoral.

While the Guardian interview with Martin gave her an uncritical platform to present her claims about evolution and cheating, their review by Kathryn Hughes of the book had a different tone:

“Those who have a nodding acquaintance with work on what evolutionary biologists call “female choice” will doubtless be worried that Martin has simply cherry-picked the examples that support her argument, while passing silently over all those thousands of studies that don’t show research subjects behaving in ways we’re used to: prudent egg-guarding females, and splashy seed-scattering males. One also wonders whether this material, invigorating though it is, quite counts as the “new science” that is trumpeted by the publicity. Some of this work, including that by the pioneering biologist Hrdy, dates back to the 1980s.”

And Amy Gray in Sydney Morning Herald pointed out other issues in her purportedly scientific methodology:

“On monogamy she quotes Hugo Schwyzer, who is more notable for his history as a failed columnist-academic who slept with countless female students and admitted to the attempted murder of his ex-girlfriend. Citing him on monogamy and women is akin to quoting Donald Trump on ethics. Likewise, quoting Jared Diamond on anthropology seems lazy or even thoughtless for an author who is a former anthropology student and should know how lowly he is thought of by experts in that field. If Martin can be exacting in locating primate experts at the top of their field, she could have applied the same standard here. Another section that argues against women’s presumed asexuality and sexual ignorance relies on the hoax that Victorian women were coaxed out of hysteria by the use of vibrators. There is no evidence for this, as admitted by Rachel Maines, who propagated the theory. Basic research by Martin could have uncovered this fact because to write a book decrying women’s portrayal as sexually ignorant only to present women as too sexually ignorant to masturbate does her argument no service.”

Martin is intent on portraying women as the modern incarnation of a perennial promiscuous figure, the product of evolution and early human societies, constrained by the yoke of the patriarchy to suppress their natural urge. In order to prove this she manipulates the science, plays with her sources, and makes blatantly untrue claims to tie everything together. And as we’ll see her anthropology and feminist claims are not significantly better. But what do the facts actually say about human sexuality? Not that much in many respects, which is partially the point. The actual science may suggest nothing more than that, in the words of sexuality scholar Emily Nagosi critiquing Sex at Dawn, “Human sexuality is unique for its variety, diversity, plasticity, and adaptability. Regardless of the sociosexual environment of our evolutionary forebears, we inherited a sexual response mechanism embedded in a brain that is equal parts moral and rational.” At the same time, on the basis of the evidence we have the history of human sexuality is hardly is one of monogamy being a sudden and ill conceived invention.

It can be draining to read Martin’s conflation of feminism and non monogamy and have to unpack the knotted picture she paints. At times it resembles an editorial published a number of years ago in New York Magazine by a man who said that after his wife pressured him into an open relationship that he did not particularly want and did not take advantage of, he “got feminism.” In his mind, he now understood feminism because he was was pushed into this without enthusiastic consent and to him this meant he was respecting his wife’s autonomy as a person. When he attempts to sound more academic in he in many ways resembles Martin’s casual arguments on the topic. While the story may have been a hoax, having no follow up and making the rounds of the red pill and alt right within days, one particularly good response came from Jezebel.

Clearly reserving judgement on its authenticity, the publication tears down his arguments and shuts down most of his claims to feminist authority quite handedly.

“That sounds nice, but feminism is not a zero-sum game. It doesn’t necessitate that women decide who they have sex with instead of their partners. Feminism preaches equality and egalitarianism; it leaves room for, and strongly suggests, a situation where partners decide together what their commitment means and what forms of individual sexual expression may take in the context of any relationship. Period.”

If only Martin’s book could be addressed so easily. But rather than a small misguided potentially fabricated editorial Untrue presents itself as a bundle of opportunistic and dubious claims that is harder to unpack, however it is no less pressing to do so.

In addition to Untrue’s claims of scientific authority, it claims to be exposing the new frontier of feminism. The book stakes out what seems to be a feminist case originally, that women are deserving of the same sexual autonomy and initiative that men have. Most observers would think this would revolve around the ideas that women can have their own fetishes, suggest acts they want to their partners, and not simply pick through the pages of Cosmo looking for every tip to please their man while he doesn’t do the same. With how serious and authoritative the book seems about its feminism, you would expect to hear a well fashioned feminist case building on countless authors, scholarship, and the movement as a whole ; potentially enough maybe make up for its messy “new science.” But the feminism is situated in the scientific claims of the book, this side of Martin’s work could be considered just as flawed. Since women are naturally non monogamous, science has proven that women need multiple partners and that becomes the end goal of any discussion of women’s sexuality. The book’s feminism is, besides the anecdotes, written into the explorations of “new science.”

Martin sometimes formulates this as a kind of futurism, that as women gain equality to men their natural and biological need for non monogamy or even cheating will bring us back to nature, back to “Sex at Dawn.” In this field of study that’s considered the “back to nature fallacy” and it’s not hard to see why. Men cheat currently around 21% of the time, with women cheating around 15%, although Martin happily notes that for women it is still a 40% increase over the last 30 years. It’s hard to look at our current state and claim that nature is reasserting itself, in a society of rising rates of depression and other mental illness, fractured gender relations, increased inequality, and other artificial and alienating aspects of our lives that would be no more familiar to a hunter gatherer than the 1950s. Selling non monogamy in this way, combined with the other justifications in the book, is no less toxic than those selling “raw water” as a solution. The book also falls quite short of its radical posture for anything beyond monogamy, as will become clear. But feminist futurism not being present is not surprising when Martin largely fails to complete a feminist analysis of past and indigenous cultures, instead providing a selective and seriously misleading anthropological argument.

Untrue borrows the old cliche of a white anthropologist constructing an elaborate case about humanity’s roots based on a few tribes in an exotic sounding place, giving them no chance to speak for themselves and talking over those familiar with them. She refers to a nomadic herding tribe in Namibia, the Himba, that believes in shared paternity and where because the men spend so much time away with the herds, many relationships are more open. Or more provocative and useful for Martin’s book: many children are not the husband’s (husbands also have girlfriends and other children when away). It’s worth noting that pastoralism is not “back to nature” as it emerged around the same time as farming or just afterwards, about ten thousand years ago. Martin seems to look at the tribe between two frames of reference, primates and her own privileged lifestyle. “Omoka children (children of an affair) and the high rate of extra-pair paternity among the Himba prove that Himba women are what Hrdy wants us to understand all primate females, including women, to be.” and “‘Unlike the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where cheating is an incredibly risky strategy if you’re married to someone with high status and high wealth, for Himba women it makes complete sense and insulates against risk,’ Scelza explained, making the importance of context dramatically clear and personal for me.” For her Black villagers practicing a post hunter gather form of production are seemingly a kind of “missing between humans and animals.”

As she says, the tribe serves to “prove” Martin’s arguments, although one could simply bring up the !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert, who are considered one of the best representations of hunter gatherer life. They practice lifelong monogamous marriage and while non monogamy is not unheard of it is uncommon. Same with the Currpaco of the Amazon. But even staying with her chosen tribe the reality isn’t quite what she had in mind:

“So why doesn’t every Himba woman of childbearing age have an omoka child? In her research, Scelza discovered something else. Reviewing her data, she realized there were no omoka children born to women in love matches. Of the seventy-nine women she interviewed who had chosen their own husbands, not a single one had an omoka child. Meanwhile, there were omoka children in nearly a quarter of arranged marriages.”

Even though there are nearly no children of affairs in Himba marriages that women could choose their partner, Martin still tries to insist that evolution not only pushes women to cheat, it favors the women who cheat as they may end up having more children. Her anthropologist source refuses to acknowledge that notion and doesn’t consider it to be a reasonable conclusion. Whether this is a behavioral eugenics (Martin seems so focused on what makes “the healthiest babies” that a guardian reviewer suggests she thinks “women who want monogamy are a tad selfish”) or a need to measure women by how many children they have, it’s unclear why Martin now tries to salvage a case study where (perhaps all) marriages by choice remain monogamous even in a society with semi-frequent non monogamy. But the real lesson may be that women can be unhappy in arranged marriages and even cheat with a partner they love, something that was well known even back in medieval Europe. And when Martin shoehorning that reality for these women into a story about how going back to nature means women will naturally cheat seems to give little credit to Himba women. Martin does pivot towards the end of this chapter to saying that these women are making “strategic decisions” for their children, but that still lies less in their actual stories than in speculation about evolutionary math and primate behavior and does not line up with how she sells her book.

Martin mentions in passing that many tribes don’t practice total monogamy but doesn’t go into detail. In Sex at Dusk Lynn Saxon quotes experts on a wide number of tribes casually cited as polyamorous pre modern utopias in Sex at Dawn and found that consistently the reality was not what it is implied in either book to be. The tribes showed a range of behaviors that hardly matched a picture of an idyllic or feminist pattern of non monogamy: women were seen as property often to be married at a young age, women were married off strategically, children without a certain father were often fatally neglected or killed, even if they believed in partial paternity it may be specifically prohibited, women obtained a second partner to punish infidelity, or sex was used a means of obtaining food to survive. Many tribes also have extremely restrictive attitudes about female pleasure in any form. One honestly misses the connection to feminism even in the tribes where non monogamy is widely practiced. Many of the tribes with the least monogamy were the most oppressive of women.The Canela tribe is well documented by William and Jean Crocker in their book, explaining that the tribe uses sex as a means of social control of both men and women, with women subject to non consensual sex by groups of men and childless women used as shared property of the men and women who refuse are punished with assault. Only their non monogamy is mentioned in passing in Sex at Dawn. Even more mundane scholarship goes omitted by Martin but is essential to the conversation. The vast majority of societies without monogamy throughout history are societies where men with power are able to functionally own multiple women, not some pre monogamous utopia for all people or genders. This kind of selective and misleading anthropology should have been exposed by reviewers or editors for both its inaccuracy and the attitude it shows on the part of Martin. People of color, whatever their form of society, aren’t easily used as rhetorical tools for white anthropologists because they shouldn’t be. Her previous book Primates of Park Avenue was about the rich, white, and well connected, so its many serious flaws and methodological issues were pointed out immediately. Here unfortunately it seems easier to get away with lazy and opportunistic portrayals of the tribes and early humans in Untrue, and they they continue on in the book to buttress an often misleading or warped argument about early societies.

There is certainly a messy history of analyzing the “free love” of people of color as early European explorers told stories of “liberal with sex” young native women eager to sample new men. Some admitted in private, like Captain Cook’s crew in Tahiti after firing on villages and then seeing women sent to the ship, that “notwithstanding all their civility I doubt not that it was more thro’ fear than love that they respected us so much.” Other stories were actually about destitute women who sold sex to sailors for survival after their homelands were subjugated, something seen in every port including European ones. Martin repeats the stories of Captain Cook’s crew about the sexually dramatic Tahitians and heavily implies post hunter gatherer groups like the Iroquois were “collective breeders” although while they were decisively collective they were largely monogamous with accepted pre marital sex and courtship. Her claims about “collective breeding,” which doesn’t match the physiological or anthropological evidence, is repeated in her press releases without much of any serious substantiation. There is at best the cherry picked and hardly “collective breeding” Himba, although if Martin intends to use them to prove monogamy is the marker of women’s equality then their arranged marriages, total sexual division of labor, dependence of women on men, and lack of male investment in children would only prove quite the opposite. Although she does complement gender equality Martin’s book seems to only want to learn from the existence of non monogamy of native people where she can find it, not being interested in the rest of their culture or collectivism if it is unrelated from that.

One component of evolutionary biology that makes a very lopsided appearance in Martin’s recount is parental investment, largely not discussed when it comes to evolution. It is maddening that the concept is basically absent in Martin’s analysis as it is the foundation of Feminist Biology. There are species in which parental care largely rests with the male, many species of fish for example. There are species in which is rests with the female, most of the species that Martin discusses. The sex that has to deal with the childcare may end up more monogamous as in Gorillas or more “crafty” as with Bonobos (to prevent infanticide). A total lack of parental investment by one sex is almost entirely the evolutionary driver of the other sex sourcing additional partners. especially when sperm competition is not a valid concern. There is a third option, which is when parental care and investment is largely equal, which often gives an advantage to monogamy. The clearest science that Martin can raise is based on observations of what could be most evolutionarily advantageous but she restricts this to the ones that line up with her conclusion but in species with little paternity confusion or males having second families on the side, monogamy provides such a high level of investment to children that it often maximizes the chance of children surviving to reproduce. Martin treats promiscuity across partners as the only evolutionary field, but for a species where parental investment needs to be maximized (especially one with children as dependent as humans), monogamy is how the investment of both parents can be maximized, rather than tiny contributions from different largely uninterested males (or females).

Martin extrapolates this to humans, saying Himba women who, for instance, need to treat a sick child may have to add a second man they can rely on to survive. The Himba are pastoralists where men contribute little to their children — they don’t even inheit their father’s property but their uncle’s — as part of a pattern of confused paternity not leading to greater investment overall. Is this example really relevant to modern society, in which we strive for male/female relationships marked by more equal investment and socioeconomic status as well feminist welfare states? Martin also quotes Sarah Hrdy, who writes about the multiple (usually two) fathers preferred to be involved in conception among the Ache of Paraguay. This excerpt is also misleading, as Hrdy continues to write: “Are husbands jealous? Among the Aché, men deny it, but then later beat their wives,” and then explains that any woman without a husband sees her children and herself often starve. To Martin, despite this scant evidence, both tribes are examples of “collective breeding” and are the feminist ideal that made us what we are today. In contrast, experts like Alan Dixon do not see any serious evidence that early humans were non monogamous on top of their collectivity. She also omits the more widely accepted theory: pair bonds and marriage between bands of humans enabled the larger social groupings that helped humans thrive, and (according to experts like Robin Dunbar) helped cause larger brains to evolve.

Martin never sees any need to equate sex equality or equal parental investment with monogamy even as she is only really able to identify forced marriages and extremely low investment as the most credible causes of the observed non monogamy. Martin never quite explores this question of parental investment in its full context because while she tries to dispel the myth that females always have their agency taken away from an Alpha, as often happens in Chimpanzees, she removes any agency of the males to behave differently on any scale. Males can’t choose or evolutionary select to be better parents due to a reduction in confusion for paternity, they just always invest the minimum and females scramble to make do. This really underlies the sense that the animal record is not helpful to humans, nor does it have the supposedly obvious feminist implications that Martin sees. Sarah Hrdy, the most prominent primatologist Martin refers to, also commented on this topic in her book, arguing that “Only under one particular type of breeding system, monogamy, do we routinely find anything approaching equality between the sexes in either size or rights of access to preferred resources.” The point is not to prescribe monogamy for all people or even to argue it is natural, people have every right to remain single their entire lives or enter into polyamorous relationships without having books called “Pure” or “Hitched” mocking them with faulty science and politics, but we have to dispel the false sense of genetic inevitability that Martin casts over her reader as largely fabricated. Unsurprisingly, she also states that rates of false paternity are in the range of 10% or more, which has been debunked (2%). This is just another aspect of how the book utilizes myths to convince the reader that we’re all just trying and failing to escape the tide of evolution and biology.

With all of this biological posturing and measuring Himba women by how many healthy children they have, one might also think of the nauseating interview where Senate candidate Todd Akin argued against legalizing abortion in the case of rape because if if a rape was “legitimate,” the body would “shut that whole thing down.” People were quick to point out that the rate of pregnancy was higher for sexual assaults (and that his statements were horrific), also showing both that casual reproduction arithmetic is a poor way to respond to something serious, and that casual deployments of faulty biology are a toxic blight on discourse. Rates of pregnancy are no more a relevant metric for understanding human issues than the fact that male chimpanzees frequently engage in sexual assault.

And for all the praise her preferred Bonobos receive as having their own form of “hookup culture,” where female bonobos have sex as a group when in heat alongside little observed male violence, it seems the violence in many ways has just shifted, including sexual assault. She writes (but doesn’t refer to again):

“Parish told me there was another, even darker side to female dominance among bonobos. Male bonobos are often reluctant in the face of female pursuit. So reluctant, in fact, that Parish says without reservation, ‘The situation of male-female sex sometimes looks coercive to me.’ That is, the females force males to have sex with them. This might seem impossible, but males get erections from anxiety, so it is easy enough, mechanically speaking, for females to force the males to mate with them. A female bonobo tends to be the initiator of sex. She does so by putting her arm around a male as if to say, ‘How about it?’ The males who appear coerced will try to shake the female off repeatedly. During sex, they may give distress vocalizations and try to escape. As Mike Bates told me, ‘It’s in your face. You can’t not notice it. They will pick out a male and just stay on him. A female will be all over a male so that he can’t get away from her solicitations. She’ll keep walking around with her arm around him, again and again. It’s well documented.’”

The book does focus on monogamy in sex more than on the nuclear family or indicting marriage, as it seems to largely envision a non monogamous affluent white lifestyle more than any intersectional dream of women’s liberation or the alternative families of gay liberation. More of the same with a cheat pass around Christmas, or a lover living in the second home. Martin fixates on the fact that female bonobos will engage in lesbian encounters (while downplaying the significance of rank inequality and resources), which is notable for the same reason that the fact that male bonobos will have sex with each other was: it ripped holes in immature attacks on homosexuality as a human perversion of god given nature (without presuming that anyone needed to hear that to tell if they were gay). Why now she seems to only focus on the former as a kind of proof that women are naturally more bisexual is strange. There also doesn’t seem to be as much of an interrogation of how sexism, men’s negative roles in relationships and families, and systemic disrespect for women may drive men’s infidelity more than holding back women’s. And where do trans people fit in? In fact, gender and biological essentialism come to mind constantly with this book. Feminism has largely dropped arguments about “essential nature,” with a lot of the scientific community squarely on its side, and Martin arguing that women are “naturally bisexual” and gendering discussions of fluidity in sexual orientation in this way does no favors to the LGBT community. She also casually dismisses feminist and LGBT criticism of the high class “skirt parties” that fascinate her. Where do Trans Women (and Trans Men) fit into this framework of “new science” telling women what their sexuality actually is? Martin has constructed her image of a woman with her biological and evolutionary need to be unfaithful, and men as a conspiracy to suppress that urge. There is no rational way to remove the gender binary and essentialism from her text. I think a conversation with trans activists about many of the physical and bodily differences that Martin relies on could show her that they are a lot less solid than she thinks.

There is a chapter on race as well. As a person of color I suppose I appreciate it’s inclusion. However, the majority of it has much less to do with Martin’s thesis of natural non monogamy and more to do with how different an intersectional feminism’s concerns actually are. It’s somewhat more traditional than most intersectional feminist discourse now but it is mainly interviews with Black women who talk about how the church, male focused models of the family, and the community prioritizing race over gender can be a huge struggle for Black women, with a mention of some black women who explored their fluidity in such a stifling atmosphere as they grew older. The interview format helps with the strong sense that it is by a white outsider looking in. It ends with a very constrained reading by Martin of the show Insecure and the discussion around it. Martin sees its presentation of infidelity in the first season as transformative because it happens as a toxic relationship is starting to improve somewhat, although she laments the emergent consequences of the responsible character’s actions. What may be telling is that the show’s more critical looks at women’s sexuality don’t receive any praise, like the scene in the second season where the male protagonist of color is pulled into a racist, humiliating, and surreal sexual experience by two affluent women. This would have been an ideal place to finally discuss how female power in all arenas still interacts with racism and carries over many concerns of male power, but it isn’t mentioned. In the words of Angelica Jade Bastién from Vulture, both situations in Insecure may in fact be part of how it aims to “chart the particulars of how quickly fantasies curdle when they’re met with reality,” the opposite point to the one Martin is making. The chapter could also have used more discussion of how Black women have been treated by white women when it comes to sex and stereotypes, many of which are more toxic and damaging than the one’s Martin is concerned about. There are other instances in the book where racism seems to dovetail with some of things that Martin praises and she discusses that, but they worryingly end with her deflecting some of the criticism. And as a person of color it can be unnerving to hear a white anthropologist say things like: “In neighborhoods where there are high rates of male incarceration, women may, in addition to starting their reproductive careers early as a hedge against uncertainty, have children with more than one man, because monogamy is not an option. In all these instances, men may not be present, and if they are, they may have no choice but to look the other way if they too want healthy kids who survive to reproduce.” There are no comparisons made between the coercion and control between high and low ranking female bonobos and stratification by race and class in women’s spaces or discourse.

Personally, I have to mention one more outlet of Martin’s conclusions. Martin refers to “cuckold” porn and fetishes not just as an odd form of evidence for her thesis, but bizarrely paints it in an overly positive light as though it were a feminist victory. On social media she calls them brave or “secure” enough to reject the idea that they “own” their wives. There are countless basic flaws of logic in this, and this is hardly the usual analysis of this phenomenon, but I first have to mention something that I feel must begin and end any discussions about this fetish. It has an overarching and unavoidable racism. Their content, their spaces, their narratives, all of it shows an inescapable and unavoidable racist gaze and deployment of hateful stereotypes to a disgusting degree. And as a man of color I simply cannot accept that fact not being made front and center and cannot accept someone opportunistically and inappropriately praising a fetish that is so want to do that. And it absolutely does affect those not involved. Being completely candid, I can’t describe the pain I have felt in the past scrolling through the internet and having to grit my teeth and try to ignore video titles like “Paki Monkey f*cks white girls,” “Sand-Nigger f*cks mans wife,” “Muslims take white girlfriend,” and other even more sick and demented ways in which some people’s sexual preferences are intimately tied up with dehumanizing me and making the wonderful sex positive world of people like Martin deeply painful and hurtful. Martin would not understand this but the last woman I happened to fall for had happened to be white and the feelings that a man of color has to deal with having his sexuality turned into a sick joke by the white imaginary are maddening and even traumatic. It is extremely hard for me to write this, not least because of the worry of having my name even slightly attached to something so disgusting. Martin certainly has the privilege of making her claims this and forcing people of color to debase themselves to correct her. And which minority in America receives the most of this bile is obvious. Martin mentions the racism in her book, but is not interested in exploring it deeper like she did with her false claims about human physiology, and then seems to quickly gloss over it. This reaches the point of incredibly moving to deflect much of the criticism by citing a writer who thinks the fetish is a means of expressing latent bisexuality in men. Putting aside the fact that by the metrics described it would only cover a small proportion of the fetish, similar racism is a problem in the gay community as well and deserves every bit as much criticism. She is quick to associate all negativity with monogamy but reserves no serious critical eye for this fetish. And she clearly does not see the need to mention the racism in interviews or articles where she praises it. This helps to show how how empty her feminist presentation actually is and how any claim of intersectionality is simply strategic.

But even if I bring myself to put aside the racism, sick ideology, and othering (and it’s colonialist roots) aside; Martin’s framing is no less inappropriate. These men have a fetish, perhaps from some form of trauma, pornography, or just something innate that made it more likely for them. But to say they are secure or enlightened is just absurd. No one would say a woman with a fetish for consensual non consent was “more secure,” or more enlightened. Some woman do have a fetish for being cheated on or abused, a subject probably more appropriate in a book that purports to be about women’s sexuality, and no one should say they’re more secure for letting their husband sleep with their best friend or be surprised if their obsession (and the accompanying toxic narrative) was distressing or sickening to other women. The fetish, from even just a casual glance, is inextricably obsessed with the myths and lies of toxic masculinity and nonsense scripts about women and sex. It revolves around a series of claims about women and sex that are made of layers of poison but hammered into the observer’s mind so it’s remarkable that Martin doesn’t attack it outright. And this fetish obviously can often be poison to men not interested in it, if not also to the fetishist themselves. An obsessed group that consume so much of the same media and pay for it (in a world of free pornography, those who pay money for subscriptions and downloads have a wildly outsized influence in determining content) means that any male user will have to scroll past this nonsense and see elements of it bleed into more regular fare, or see one of these men pretend to be a woman and write online about truly horrible things “she” does to get off on the response. And as porn is often considered one of the main forms of sex education in this country I’m concerned at the idea of videos pushing mindlessly toxic ideology about race, sex, and gender as well as bizarre and hateful one dimensional views of women’s sexuality, as narrative and imagined truth. I wouldn’t blame most men for their hostility to the fetish and acting like that they “don’t get it,” suggesting it doesn’t poison the air, or that those distressed by such toxicity are less secure or enlightened, is simply untrue. And for anyone who wants to disregard the racism or hand wave it away like Martin, I hope they can be secure enough to keep that to themselves. There’s also the obvious fact that feminism is constantly portrayed as a way of pushing this on men and when Martin raises it up like this and dresses it up in feminist language, she is absolutely not helping. Martin absolutely buries the fact in her book and omits it in interviews that these men are in fact not letting their wives sexuality run “free,” they are making their wife their personal porn star and exercising their control like a yo-yo. Most of the immediate feminist reactions to this fetish immediately recognize that. Paul Manafort even allegedly forced his wife to serve as an object in this way to fulfill his own sick racist fantasies, Roger Stone as well. Martin tries to have it both ways here, trying to say that the women involved have the real agency in these situations but the men are responsible for everything hateful or negative. It reads as unprofessional and opportunistic on her part.

What also becomes troubling about Martin’s perspective and how she sells her work publicly is that she is using the platform it gives to push monogamy as the root problem and open relationships as the solution, and herself as the prophet of deliverance. Low libido, losing some spark, less satisfaction from sex, every problem with a long term relationship is in the end caused by monogamy. In one interview she says she just wants people to admit monogamy is hard (and then goes on to claim quite a bit more than that), which ranges for different people but is something many people whatever their preferences would agree with. It remains true that polyamory carries just as many boundaries and tensions, rather than just releasing the flood walls into some “natural” total freedom and catharsis. But in Martin’s view women are just being held back by men from their natural state (revealed by “new science” she is not an expert on) and she’s doing the feminist thing by pushing non monogamy as the solution.

Recent surveys on the orgasm gap showed that fewer heterosexual women were having regular orgasms than heterosexual men. But lesbian women were having just as many, and gay men even more. And why is this? Because, as feminism has consistently said for decades, there are problems with sex, traditionally straight sex. Feminist arguments about sex are not just orbiting around non monogamy, as though having the same kind of sex with the same scripts with a different person was their taboo grand solution. Feminists have argued against what is now sometimes more commonly referred to as “porn sex,” sex that is always male directed and focused, male initiated, makes the man the giver of pleasure (and the extractor) and the woman the receiver, unnecessarily constructing this mentality of the man being the sole measure of the sex and the cause of problems based on how much he lives up to the script, instead arguing it much more clitoral than previously understood (Martin argues the clitoral orgasm implies multiple partners rather than anything being wrong with the sex itself), more dependent on what is sometimes relegated to “foreplay,” less virtual, needing a more positive and safe context, and so on. Far from simply burning out their capacity for their partner, couples are stuck in broken scripts of sex and it hurts their relationship and their sex life. In addition, solutions outside the bedroom like fair distributions of housework and childcare, more equal social and economic power, better communication, more equal emotional care, better sex education for all genders about all genders, and better medical care for women would all create a sea change in sexual satisfaction for women, and men as well, and studies bear much of that out directly.

Martin seems to rely on a different portrait of feminism and sex. She acts as though society is just dancing around the necessity of abolishing monogamy. Every other solution is just a distraction or worse, an effort by men to hold back women, even though evolution demands it! Somehow her very broad sweeps over history, biology, and various cultures (with a lot of oversights as we have seen) seem to have unlocked the answer to sex and what women’s autonomy actually means. But the simple fact is that the army of unsatisfied women desperate for cheat passes would, if we ignored her suggestions and implemented the both traditional feminist and the mundane radical feminist insights about how to improve sex, be much much smaller than she imagines.

Something that originally brought Martin to my attention and prompted this level of concern was this response of hers to an editor at Allure, Rosemary Donahue, tweeting her frustration with ads for pills for women’s libido saying that “low libido is now optional.” Donahue was disappointed at the oversimplification of women’s sexuality and wrote that “there’s potential trauma. depression. medication. an ad can’t address it all but it can do better.”

Martin entered the picture unsolicited and said that most importantly there’s the “root cause — long-term relationships are harder on female desire than on male desire. Women grow bored w sexual exclusivity more quickly than men do. Data show we need variety novelty adventure.”

This is one of the main problems with this book. Women are talked down to about their sexuality and one of the most relevant areas this manipulation happens is in discussions of “biology.” Martin is not eliminating myths just because she pushes aside the long refuted claims that men are naturally not monogamous (or morally culpable for their actions) and that women are not interested in sex. She is simply creating new myths, new loaded scientific claims, and derailing women’s real pain and actual struggles over sex and relationships in favor of her book’s taboo claims, just as opportunistic as those who misleadingly peddle drugs to women in pain. I know my sexuality has been shaped more by trauma than by the capricious and adulterous hand of biology. The editor in question also identifies as Queer, which may confuse Martin’s argument based as they are on her focus on straight couples, dynamics of male and female animals, and provocative stories of straight (sometimes) married women going to “all women sex parties.” Considering nearly every lesbian, bi, or pan friend I have has voiced their frustration with the idea that sex between women isn’t “real sex” and couldn’t be cheating, Martin’s gawking presentation of these all female sex parties for married straight women seems to be less helpful than she may think.

Martin’s book can also run into the same problem that Sex at Dawn had with the evolutionary biology obsession. As anthropologist Ryan Ellsworth explained, the book actually removed more female agency than it added “By downplaying, if not expunging, mate choice from the human female; or at least mate choice involving the use of their mental faculties. For the most part, Dawn simply posits the promiscuous tendencies and lack of choosiness in ancestral women…” “For example, female erotic plasticity is meant to show that women’s bodies, not their brains, know what they really want. Their physiological responses are genuine, revealing their true promiscuous nature, while their conscious brains are corrupted by modern society, preventing them from realizing this. Disconnect between physiological responses and verbal reports are also used by Ryan and Jethá to try to convince us that female relationship jealousy is another modern day phenomenon; that is, women, by nature, aren’t really jealous of their partners’ extra-pair dalliances — they only think they should be.” Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex lamented how “the woman is adapted to the needs of the egg rather than to her own requirements,” and neither Dawn nor Untrue actually serve to rectify this.

And derailing a discussion on more mundane concerns like depression and trauma into women’s supposedly natural need for more partners is somewhat of a theme of Martin’s perspective. Though those issues are still marginalized and under discussed, Martin is primarily concerned with simply raising the specter that men are holding back women’s polyamorous or unfaithful liberation. In her Guardian interview, she argues that the shift in national attitudes over the last fifty where now the vast majority (91%) of men and women believe that affairs are wrong but divorce is fine is not evidence of healthier attitudes about relationships and freeing partners in toxic or abusive marriages, but rather a conspiracy of men: “So at the precise moment science reveals women have the bigger “need” to be sexually adventurous, society clamps down on infidelity. And that, says Martin, is hugely significant. ‘The way we feel about women who refuse monogamy is an important metric for how we feel about equality.’” Both this misleading argument and the close of the interview also raise serious questions about how Martin is presenting polyamory, which she says it is a point she wants to make: “[Women who cheat] are challenging something very deep in society’s expectations of them — and perhaps their stance is the most radical female stance of all.” Martin consistently conflates polyamory and cheating, ignoring the well established standard in polyamory discussions that non consensual polyamory is wrong. She often patronizes women who feel guilt for cheating on their own partner or the other person’s spouse, never seriously entertaining that perhaps these women legitimately feel they caused harm or betrayal; just as she shows little interest in the wives of the husbands involved. Consent is hardly a concern of Martin’s perspective when it doesn’t suit her. In fact, men are naturally more monogamous in her eyes and so this is a struggle of ancient biology where only the polyamorous woman must win. The book can feature anecdotes of specific partners who did consent (largely men since the book has much less to say for lesbian or non binary couples), but that does not change this serious flaw in its focus. Her negative reaction to society accepting divorce is also strange, as one of the main points of consent in a relationship is is the ability and often necessity of ending it when mutual consent about its terms and boundaries ends. It also is one of the solutions to couples who don’t want to go with a lifelong relationship. Martin’s perspective generally conflicts with a lot of the consent discourse that is defining the MeToo era and treats it more as something to grab onto than a relevant cause. Her interviews and many of her statements also come dangerously close to trying to “trigger” men and with the biological essentialism and pictures of feminism she works with, I wouldn’t blame a man for feeling that way. I know I had a male friend who felt deeply upset by Martin’s arguments based on his own trauma in relationships and his struggles with biological essentialist arguments about men. Martin even struck up a conversation with an alt right journalist to send him her book, clearly baiting a response. This sounds less like trying to start a conversation about polyamory or inform people and more about opportunistically trying to provoke backlash. This may be because Martin wants immature or hard right attacks on her book so she can argue with irrationally conservative views and get attention, not actual scrutiny.

This repeated itself with an interview out of the UK where Martin suddenly suggests that men should give their wives “cheat passes” for the holidays, bringing up her scientific claims and heavily implying that it is feminist to do so. While one could originally blame an editor for the gendered nature of the articles title and suggestion, Martin put that to rest on twitter. After a UK tabloid reported it slightly differently, mocking the idea of wives giving their husbands cheat passes, Martin angrily responded that she didn’t suggest passes for men, but for “WOMEN.” She says that men have a “monogamy privilege” (illegal happy ending massages and prostitution) as it is and that monogamy is biologically harder for women so the passes should specifically go one way. Again, this confuses the observer as to why she is gendering discussions of polyamory, which usually only have this kind of bent to them in alt right hoaxes.

The flaws with this book have little to do with the legitimacy of Polyamory itself. Whether you personally do or do not feel it is authentic or the best choice for you to be polyamorous, I doubt any of the things that characterize this book made your decision for you. You most likely didn’t wait for a deeply flawed scientific case that it was “natural” for women, you probably didn’t have to construct a faulty feminist case that women had to be polyamorous or cheat to be liberated or equal to men, and you likely did not throw up your hands after any sexual dysfunction in your relationship and demand “cheat passes.” When shown Martin’s interviews, my polyamorous friends were scathing in their response. Martin hardly serves them, simply creating more noise and forming connections between polyamory and cheating they have always opposed. Some people who practice polyamory may feel an affinity for the book, but I would urge them to cut loose an advocate like this. Martin relies more on a sense of provocation, a heavy sense of painting its critics as nervous men afraid of her invented truth, than anything relevant to liberation for anyone.

Not every word of Martin’s book falls into these categories, the book builds a rapport with the reader by attacking old myths about men being more naturally non monogamous or that women are less sexual, although feminists had refuted these ideas long ago. But there is a clear sense that these marginal arguments are meant to give the rest of the book more credibility, putting an interview with a primate scientist about how bonobo females sometimes have a hook up as a group for safety alongside insistence that evolution says women don’t want monogamy justifies with debunked claims; a female sexologist’s research into how women have fetishes just like men alongside claims that women have to have adventures away from their partners to be satisfied. Some may defend the book because it does contain within it a defense of women having sexual autonomy an equal degree of independence that men have. But that is not what characterizes a book like this, those things have been explained and defended far better by others, and the book’s conceit rises to a unacceptable level when Martin tries to draw connections between MeToo and her “scientific” and political claims. It’s hard to present a species of primate that regularly rapes and physically abuses males and see anything but a example of “toxic female men” in nature, showing a focus hugely behind the times of today’s intersectional feminism. I believe the book is largely abusing women’s trust in fellow feminists to sell them a toxic bill of goods that falsely ties infidelity and loaded scientific claims to feminism.

If Martin’s fell back to simply making the point that context influences sex, the only case that seems relatively strong with this text, that point would be much harder to argue with but would largely make her book redundant. Nor would this be the book to read this year in that genre. Just recently we saw the release of “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism,” perhaps also a provocative title but in reality simply arguing that in the eastern bloc, especially where women had the greatest economic and social autonomy, ability to have careers, social services and childcare: you saw better sex education, popular media for couples on how to have sex (the “socialist kama sutra”), higher sexual satisfaction, and women’s autonomy. They also had fewer children, which in Martin’s analysis of the Himba means they are less evolutionarily successful. In the eyes of many feminists on the left, housework was still not decisively not dealt with, as women still had a “double shift” when they returned home to housework and childcare, with early trends of more collective approaches to housework ending with the second world war. With socialized house and care work, this would have been a society more similar to the older gender equal societies Martin mischaracterizes to make her arguments, as early socialist feminists argued consistently. Sex Under Socialism still provides a more modern and less speculative study of what improvements in sex are attainable through greater gender equality. This often came into conflict with the more sensational side of sex that Martin is locked into, from a review by Tribune:

In the 1950s, a new type of family was promulgated, where mutual love and partnership was said to cure sexual ailments. An importance was ascribed to women’s work outside the home, while the husband’s help in housework was considered to be a positive sexual stimulant, and even a form of foreplay. In the second half of the 1960s, however, an increased public discourse about sex was combined with the return of normative gender roles. After the Prague Spring was crushed, a ‘cool’, no-strings-attached sexuality came alongside an insistence that technique, rather than equality, was the key to sexual pleasure.

If you’re looking for something about what feminism can say about sex and the next frontier in equality, you could do worse than starting with Sex Under Socialism or one of the many others by feminists over the past few decades discussing how the Feminine Mystique and tight confrontational scripts of sex have held back women’s sexuality, pleasure, and equality. It is a serious and accurate contribution to the conversation that lives up to its image, something Untrue clearly is not. Wednesday Martin’s book has a largely invalid scientific case that doesn’t back up her claims in the book or in the press, its anthropology and history is so misleading, distorted, and even racist that it bears little resemblance to the facts, and the book performs a resolute feminist authority that is in reality an insult to feminist politics, scholarship, and the feminist tradition.

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Please share this piece anywhere the book is brought up or its false or seriously flawed claims are made.

This topic is outside my usual writing interest and between that and the personal issues I bring up in the piece, I hope it can remain both anonymous and the last time I have to discuss the topic.