Sex, Time, and Power How Women's Sexuality Changed the Course of Human Evolution

by Shlain, Leonard

• ISBN13: 9780670032334
• ISBN10: 0670032336
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-08-18
• Publisher: Viking Adult

Summary

No clear and compelling explanation currently exists for the sudden emergence of big-brained Homo sapiens 150,000 years ago. Here, Leonard Shlain proposes an original thesis that argues that profound changes in female sexuality hold the key to this mystery. According to Shlain, bipedalism, narrow pelvises, and enormous fetal heads precipitated a crisis for our species. Mothers faced a grave death threat in childbirth. To compensate, women lost estrus and its urgency to copulate, but gained veto power over sex. Drastic reconfiguration of their reproductive cycle, particularly the new feature of heavy menses, allowed women to discover the dimension of time and with it the insight that sex caused pregnancy. Men used foresight to become the planet's most dangerous predator but they suffered terror when they learned they were doomed to die. Inventing religions and afterlives to ameliorate the knowledge of death, men then learned the part they played in impregnation. The concept of paternity drove men to create patriarchal cultures designed to control women's reproductive choice. But the insights, first discovered by women, also created the conditions for two people to love each other more deeply and longer than any other animal. Throughout Sex, Time, and Power, Shlain offers carefully reasoned and certain to be controversial discussions on subjects such as menses, orgasm, masturbation, menopause, circumcision, male aggression, the evolution of language, homosexuality, and the origin of marriage. Written in a lively and accessible style, Sex, Time, and Poweris certain to generate heated debate in the media and among readers interested in human evolution and the history of sexuality.

Author Biography

Leonard Shlain's earlier books were both national bestsellers. Translated into many languages, they are used as source books in universities and art schools around the world. Dr. Shlain is Chief of Laparoscopic Surgery at California Pacific Medical Center.

Table of Contents

Preface: Iron/Sex	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. xix
Iron, Sex, and Women
Unknown Mother/African Eve	p. 3
Big Brain/Narrow Pelvis	p. 11
Red Blood/White Milk	p. 23
Plant Iron/Meat Iron	p. 39
Gyna Sapiens/Gyna All-the-Others	p. 45
Periods/Perils	p. 57
Her Climax/His Climax	p. 69
Grandmothers/Circumcision	p. 85
Iron, Sex, and Men
Prey/Predator	p. 101
Carnivory/Vegetarianism	p. 117
Menarche/Mustaches	p. 137
Premenstrual Tension/Masturbatory Tension	p. 149
Sex and Time
Moon/Menses	p. 165
Woo/I Do	p. 187
Anima/Animus	p. 209
Gay/Lesbian	p. 227
Same Sex/Hermaphrodite	p. 241
Death and Paternity
Mortality/Angst	p. 261
Superstition/Laughter	p. 275
Father/Mother	p. 289
Incest/Dowries	p. 307
Wife/Husband	p. 321
Men and Women
Misogyny/Patriarchy	p. 335
Unknown Mother/African Eve/Modern Woman	p. 351
Epilogue	p. 367
Notes	p. 371
Bibliography	p. 387
Illustration Credits	p. 403
Index	p. 405
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Preface There is a female human nature and a male human nature, and these natures are extraordinarily different....Men and women differ in their sexual natures because throughout the immensely long hunting and gathering phase of human evolutionary history the sexual desires and dispositions that were adaptive for either sex were for the other tickets to reproductive oblivion. oDonald Symons1 Error is the inevitable by-product of daring. oStephen Jay Gould2 Iron/Sex Juxtaposing the words iironi and isexi creates an odd couple. The two rarely have occasion to appear together in the same sentence, much less find themselves standing side by side with so little editorial support. In the following pages, I will propose that the first word fundamentally influenced economic matters between men and women and, as a result, profoundly affected the politics of the second word. Along the way, I will present a scenario for how the kaleidoscopic, maddening, exciting, enchanting, and baffling man-woman dance, more commonly referred to as ia relationship,i evolved. This book arose out of a question I posed to a professor when I was a second-year medical student, making rounds on patients in a large ward. Although the incident occurred over forty years ago, I had never really forgotten or accepted his answer. The sophomore year of medical school represents a major transition for students. They leave the cadavers of the freshman year behind and begin having contact with respiring, perspiring patients. On this particular day, we were being taught how to interpret laboratory results. Shifting from bedside to bedside, our knot of students listened intently to the professor. Every patient admitted to the ward, he explained, had three basic laboratory tests: a chemistry-26 panel, a urinalysis, and a complete blood count (CBC). The first measured the concentration of twenty-six constituents floating about within the patientis bloodstream. The amount of a patientis circulating sodium or potassium, for example, provided a snapshot of the health of various internal organs, such as the heart and kidneys. The measurement of every one of the twenty-six constituents was like having a miniature finger figuratively take the pulse of some very important cellular function, which in turn reflected on the state of one or more of the bodyis organs. The lab reported each value on a slip that was placed in the patientis chart. Neatly aligned, parallel to the patientis results, was a column stating the expected normal ranges for each particular variable. What caught my eye that morning was the list of normals. Of the twenty-six numbers on the chem panel, none distinguished between the values for a man and a woman. And why should there be any? After all, sex has nothing to do with the way a lung or a stomach goes about its business, so I would not have expected any variation between the sexes. The same held true for the normal values reported on the urinalysis. The CBC, however, was distinctly different in this regard. A complete blood count measures several different parameters of the red and white cells circulating within the bodyis miles of vascular tunnels. Although the white-cell numbers were the same for the two sexes, I noticed that the red-cell normals for men and women were surprisingly askew. I thought that was very strange. A red cellis chief function is to pick up oxygen in the lungs, transport it through the blood vessels, and deliver it to every organ in the body. For all complex creatures, oxygen is the staff of life. Deprive them of this most precious element and they will rapidly die of asphyxiation. Yet a man normally has a 15 percent higher concentration of circulating red cells than a healthy woman has. I puzzled over this discrepancy (even after taking into account that, generally, a woman is smaller in stature and has le