Boy, where would Evolutionary Psychology and its more deterministic uncle Sociobiology be without the sexual revolution?

All that seed-spreading. All that “natural promiscuity” among men. All that “natural reticence” (coughRule Number Onecough) in women.

What do you suppose it would have looked like if it had been proposed not in 1975 but in, say, 1875. That was at the height… but also near the end… of the 3,000-year-old male-chastity and semen-conservation movement when Kellogg’s corn flakes and Graham’s flour and crackers were sold over the counter as it were to promote what was then the very, very popular idea of sexual and seminal “continence” in men. What if it had been proposed in India today, where Ayurvedic medical theory still holds that semen is a vital essence, even single drops of which are expended only at a man’s peril?

What if it had been proposed by the ancient Greek athletes, warriors, philosopher, and physicians?

What if it had been proposed in the U.S. or England as recently as 1957?!?!?

I’m… pretty sure you’d hear all manner of research “proving” that instead of profligately screwing anything that moved and then moving on you’d hear earnest, intent, and scrupulously collated research papers “proving” that men value marriage as a way to insure the products of their “investments” of precious-bodily fluids were kept safe and healthy until they reached their own reproductive years. I’m sure you’d hear “just so” stories about how harem-owning Sultans and polygamist Mormons did their level best to sequester and impregnate their myriad wives as conservatively as possible in order to protect their own health. I’m also pretty sure Satoshi Kanazawa would still be implying that Russian women are whores, but based instead on suppositions about their “evolutionary” desire to ruthlessly and promiscuously extract as much semen as possible from as many men as possible.

In other words there still might be such a thing as evolutionary psychology but I’m pretty sure that when it came to research human sexual behavior it would look almost completely different than it does today.

For one thing I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be so single-mindedly obsessed with proving that sexual attitudes that are scarcely more than a century old… and possibly less than 35 years old!... have been the sexual status quo since time out of mind.

Which, I might add, the highly-contingent timing of evolutionary psychology and sociology don’t undermine the concept that components of behavior are shaped by selective pressure. Such behavior is clearly demonstrable in animals and even plants. And it’s very hard to imagine human behaviors, even sexual ones, weren’t similarly shaped.

It does however tend to undermine many of their most often-repeated, and lurid, popular, and bias-confirming hypotheses about gender.