Sex, Time and Power

When Leonard Shlain finished his last fascinating book about the interplay between word and image - The Alphabet and the Goddess - he tells us that he did not feel that he had got to the bottom of a question he was posing, namely why global society was shot through with misogyny and patriarchy. In this tour de force of a book he pursues this question back into the evolutionary mists. His starting point is the crisis brought about by the narrowness of the pelvis in relation to the increasing size of infants' heads, leading to a high mortality rate in childbirth. In response to this, Shlain hypothesises, woman's hormonal cycles were reconfigured, and for some mysterious reason the menses entrained with the cycle of the moon. Moreover, the human female is the only primate to lose a significant amount of blood in the process.

This brings Shlain to his next connection, the fact that loss of blood (forty quarts in the average woman's lifetime) entails a significant loss of iron that in turn may have led to a craving for meat, which the male can supply through successful hunting expeditions. Here we have the beginnings of a potential trade-off, argues Shlain, between the provision of sex in exchange for meat. The qualities of courage, strength, stamina and resourcefulness are those required for hunting that also became central features of male initiation.

Time is the next element of the story and title. Uniquely, the menstrual cycle of gyna sapiens is almost exactly the 29.5 days of the lunar month. Furthermore, the human gestation period amounts to 265.8 days compared with 265.77 for nine lunar months. Our languages tell a similar tale with the same roots for menses, month, moon and measurement. Shlain sums up the first part of his argument by observing that 'features such as harmonised menses, loss of estrus, cryptic ovulation, lunar synchrony, year-round receptivity, early menopause, the need for delivery assistance, fulsome orgasms, dramatic periods and iron loss, are far, far away from the standard boilerplate designs of non-human females'. This leads him to a Natural Selection assertion that 'the reason women bleed so copiously every month is so that humans could anticipate the future'. There are clearly several steps missing in the argument here, which is susceptible to the charge of the post hoc, propter hoc fallacy. There is no doubt that the ability to understand time - seeing beyond the next month - confers a significant adaptive advantage, and that this is related to the menses, but the connection with heavy bleeding is not logically a necessary condition.

In his next chapter, Shlain boldly argues that the sudden development of language is related to the need to communicate and negotiate about sex. More importantly, though, woman evidently realised the connection between sex and pregnancy, which, when taken with the high risk of death in childbirth, means that the woman effectively risks her life by engaging in sex. This is bound to give rise to forethought and reflection, leading her to demand from the man a commitment corresponding to her own.

Shlain's next major theme is emergence of the awareness of one's own death and its implications for the development of religion. He pictures the great general Xerxes reviewing his army of one million troops near the ruins of Troy and ruefully reflecting 'how pitifully short is human life - for of all these thousands of men not one will be alive in a hundred years'. Terror of death gave a spur to art and culture and, for Shlain, also created the superstition or self-delusion that death is not the final end of human consciousness. Here he shows a large lacuna in his reading when he asserts that 'in all of recorded history no living mortal has returned to tell those who remained among the living exactly what happens on the other side'. However, he is right that men do have an urge to do something by which they will be remembered.

This ambition brings in the next crucial part of Shlain's argument, men's realisation of paternity and its implications, using what he calls their new 'if = then tool. He comments: 'the structure of human society and its dramatic divergence from the mating and parental-investment strategies of every other of the three million sexually reproducing species has come about largely as a result of men's recognition of the paramount importance to them of paternity' (italics in original). But men did not leave it at that. Shlain imaginatively reconstructs the kind of conversations that contemporary men and women might have had about their relationships. He supposes that the realisation of paternity first led them to consider using women as commodities to be exchanged - think of the dowry system which is in some senses a barter-bride deal. The same men did not consider exchanging their sons in the same way. It is interesting to discover that men originally had to pay a bride-price, but that the tradition reversed as women became devalued. Women, for their part, insisted on monogamy and help with bringing up children.

Bringing this all together, Shlain concludes that 'the institution of patriarchy came into existence because men needed, first, to control women's sexuality and, second, to control women's reproductive rights. A man's control of the former ensured that he could relieve his intolerable itch on terms favourable to his sex; control of the second assured him his place in posterity' (italics in original). Given Shlain's detailed analysis in the book, this conclusion and answer to his original question is not unreasonable. Besides the main thrust of the book, there are many interlocking sub-themes such as the strange complementarity between pornography and cosmetics, the relationship between circumcision and orgasm, the anima/animus balance and the requirement for both ruthlessness in the hunt and compassion in human relationships.

Whatever the status of his arguments (and it is hard for non-specialists to evaluate them all) Shlain is nothing if not stimulating. Readers are sure to have their ideas about sexuality and evolution shaken up. The range of material and sources is very impressive and the book is written in a style that engages the reader both analytically and imaginatively. One wonders what unanswered question will give rise to Shlain's next study. I for one will look forward to it.