Sex, Time and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution

I don’t know how many of you have read it or heard of it, this book changed my life. All books change my life but some so much more than the others. Leonard Shlain was one of the few authors I ever wanted to write to, sadly he had passed by the time I read his book.

Also, do keep in mind I am a novice in the subject so all what might be known or controversial to you was quite thought provoking for me.

There is a lot that’s been written about evolution, this one stands out. There are hypothesis here that instinctively connect to the woman in me. It sounds like this is only way it could have happened. Ignore the fact that I am sounding like a ‘cult’ member because the book has references and corroborations up the wazoo - and the keep in mind Shlain was a surgeon who became a scholar.

Again, a few things that won’t leave my mind:

Do read the preface, else it can sound like a white, privileged male tutoring the world.

His interested piqued when as an ER doctor he looked at the difference between the haemoglobin levels in men and women and said, huh…That was the trigger to his second life as a scholar. Why do women need less and more importantly why does the female human lose so much of it every month if evolution’s main job is to make every process better? Blood is life, why is it okay for us to lose?

Did ‘no means no’ start an imbalance in the male female equation that the men are still trying to balance? The larger brains of the babies made pregnancy very dangerous, so when the women connected sex to be the cause of pregnancy, they decided to choose whom and when to have sex? In most mammals, female do not live much longer after their child-bearing years, so why do women live way past menopause. So much of the human child’s growth happens after child-birth, a village was needed?

Are we one fo few species to have sex for pleasure? Why, and is it really true that men need it more. Or is it another myth perpetuated by patriarchy, is there an evolutionary need? We all ate meat, vegetarianism is relatively new. So the man who got the most red meat (to satisfy the need of Iron to balance the loss of blood) was the most desirable? Of course we are afraid to die! Isn’t the million things we do to keep ourselves busy so we don’t think of death. We want to leave a legacy behind (I have never heard a woman say it till date), monuments, names etc. So was that the need of the male to insist taking on the father’s name, cause there is never a doubt who the mother is? Is that why the artificial contract of marriage exists, instead of the village raising the child?

The book left me with more questions than answers and I really enjoyed his take on the available research.

Have started to read more, and with the books I chose I see many corroborations to the actions that are driven by the fear of being really gone. Maria Papova's "Figuring" is one of the many that come to mind as I reread this book.

Read it!