Sex, Time, and Power
How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution
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4.6 • 8 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
If Shlain is right, the G spot is even more powerful than we thought, driving human evolution toward free will and an awareness of time. The author even introduces a new taxonomy: Gyna sapiens, the real power in the prehistoric household. Shlain, a California surgeon, picks up on a question left unanswered in his well-received The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. Why, he asks, is global society "shot through with misogyny and patriarchy"? He also wants to know why human females menstruate. His surprising answer is that monthly menses was an evolutionary trait that gave humans a powerful survival tool, the ability to anticipate the future, but at a cost to women, severe blood iron loss. By the time Shlain is through exploring this simple premise, he has found little in human evolution that menstruation isn't responsible for. He argues that the risks associated with childbirth led to women's veto power on sex, which compelled men to become hunter-gatherers to scare up iron-rich meat to bargain for sexual favors. Language evolved so that men and women could negotiate the terms of sex. With an awareness of time, men became aware of their mortality, which led to the development of families so that men could have a degree of immortality through paternity. Patriarchy, Shlain writes, arose out of a need to control women's sexuality, so that man could "relieve his intolerable itch on terms favorable to his sex," and reproductive rights, to assure man "his place in posterity." Shlain's fanciful book is not exactly science, but it is intelligent, well written and well intentioned.
