Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution
Leonard Shlain
Language: English
Pages: 464
ISBN: 0142004677
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
As in the bestselling The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Leonard Shlain’s provocative new book promises to change the way readers view themselves and where they came from.
Sex, Time, and Power offers a tantalizing answer to an age-old question: Why did big-brained Homo sapiens suddenly emerge some 150,000 years ago? The key, according to Shlain, is female sexuality. Drawing on an awesome breadth of research, he shows how, long ago, the narrowness of the newly bipedal human female’s pelvis and the increasing size of infants’ heads precipitated a crisis for the species. Natural selection allowed for the adaptation of the human female to this environmental stress by reconfiguring her hormonal cycles, entraining them with the periodicity of the moon. The results, however, did much more than ensure our existence; they imbued women with the concept of time, and gave them control over sex—a power that males sought to reclaim. And the possibility of achieving immortality through heirs drove men to construct patriarchal cultures that went on to dominate so much of human history.
From the nature of courtship to the evolution of language, Shlain’s brilliant and wide-ranging exploration stimulates new thinking about very old matters.
adept at controlling extraneous factors in his if = then predicting machine, and Mother Nature rewarded his accuracy with kernels of knowledge about how the world worked. Thus, the storehouse of communal wisdom steadily enlarged. Communication between individuals further enhanced the stockpiling of valuable information in an ectoplasmic silo called culture. Any member of a tribe, having learned a useful fact, could place his or her contribution in the invisible tower by exhaling a few controlled
care have drastically reduced infant mortality. Changes in the structure of modern societies, economics, and food distribution, combined with advances in nutrition, have markedly reduced a woman’s dependence on a man to supplement her diet with iron, vitamins, essential amino acids, and essential fatty acids. Recent discoveries in reproductive physiology and gene therapy stagger the imagination and challenge bioethicists with their realities and possibilities. And medical advances continue to
now have a much greater selection of males, other males would finally get a chance to discover what all the hoopla was about, and, in general, the entire troop would be happier and more content. By menstruating in sororal harmony, ancestral Gyna sapiens broke the back of the system that rewarded the strongest, fiercest, males with a sexual monopoly. In short, synchronized menses enhances female equality.* Underscoring this last statement: Female ring-tailed lemurs, one of the few nonhuman
not only meat and/or resources for this particular tryst, but also the promise of meat and/or resources far into the future. A woman often held out the possibility of sexual exclusivity if a suitor complied. Considering how difficult it was for many men to keep finding a willing sexual partner, this idea had a strong appeal. She also wanted him to help her raise the children that often resulted from their sexual union. She desired aid, love, protection, and companionship for her and her brood
man committed himself by uttering those two simple words, “I do,” he learned—often the hard way, as other men over many thousands of years had—that all hell would break loose if he backslid. As the eighteenth-century English playwright William Congreve warned, “Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned, nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorned.” (The issue of jealous husbands will be given equal treatment in a later chapter.) Another advantage speech afforded a woman was the ability to compare