Heart of gold Quotes by Christopher Ryan

“Marriage," "mating," and "love" are socially constructed phenomena that have little or no transferable meaning outside any given culture. The examples we've noted of rampant ritualized group sex, mate-swapping, unrestrained casual affairs, and socially sanctioned sequential sex were all reported in cultures that anthropologists insist are monogamous simply because they've determined that something they call "marriage" takes place there. No…

— Christopher Ryan

“As attentive readers may have noted, the standard narrative of heterosexual interaction boils down to prostitution: a woman exchanges her sexual services for access to resources. Maybe mythic resonance explains part of the huge box-office appeal of a film like Pretty Woman, where Richard Gere's character trades access to his wealth in exchange for what Julia Roberts's character has to…

— Christopher Ryan

“When James Larrick and his colleagues studied the still relatively isolated Waorani Indians of Ecuador, they found no evidence of hypertension, heart disease, or cancer. No anemia or common cold. No internal parasites. No sign of previous exposure to polio, pneumonia, smallpox, chicken pox, typhus, typhoid, syphilis, tuberculosis, malaria, or serum hepatitis.16 This is not as surprising as it may…

— Christopher Ryan

“The sexually insatiable woman,” declared a terrified Donald Symons, “is to be found primarily, if not exclusively, in the ideology of feminism, the hopes of boys, and the fears of men.”10 Perhaps, but Marvin Harris offers a different take, writing, “Like all dominant groups, men seek to promote an image of their subordinate’s nature that contributes to the preservation of…

— Christopher Ryan

“[Man] has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights, the one ecstasy that stands first and foremost in the heart of every individual of his race…sexual intercourse! It is as if a lost and perishing person in a roasting desert should be told by a rescuer he might choose and have…

— Christopher Ryan

“If I had had to choose my place of birth, I would have chosen a state in which everyone knew everyone else, so that neither the obscure tactics of vice nor the modesty of virtue could have escaped public scrutiny and judgment. JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” (1754)”

— Christopher Ryan

“Still, the frequent absence of happiness is what keeps us pursuing it, and thus makes us productive.”10 This is a curious notion of productivity—at once overtly political and yet presented innocently enough, as if there were only one possible meaning of “productivity.” This perspective on life incorporates the Protestant work ethic (that “productivity” is what makes an animal “effective”) and…

— Christopher Ryan