SEX, TIME, & POWER: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution

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. (Aug.)