Leonard Shlain - Sex, Time, and Power: How Womens Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution

Praise for Sex, Time, and Power:
How Womens Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution

Leonard Shlain is obsessed with sex, but not in a tawdry way: Hes obsessed with finding some answers regarding our species unique take on sex and, moreover, sexism.... His new book will forever affect your notions about sex, time, and power, and you might just look at your mate with eyes opened wider.... Shlain fuses ideas and facts from a wide array of disciplines to create a coherent, convincing, and captivating narrative.

San Francisco Chronicle

Shlain makes a case for concentrating on women and their need for the mineral iron as the key to understanding our past.... The female lust for meat, he suggests, is responsible for the evolution of much of human behavior, including intimate relations between men and women, foresight and puzzle solving, complex social interactions, different psychological moods between men and women, and any number of human traits that we now see in the best and worst of us.

Tbe New York Times

Drawing on medicine and other fields, Shlain creates an intriguing scenario for how modem humans suddenly appeared in East Africa 150,000 years ago, then fanned out to dominate the earth. In his view; the human female was the first to push the species into a sudden evolutionary spurt beyond our immediate ancestor, a somewhat duller biped known as Homo erectus.... Shlain suggests that males have never quite forgiven the other sex for wrecking the party.

Utne Reader

Shlain makes brilliant use of his medical expertise in his highly original and intellectually stimulating inquiry into human sexuality and its role in the shaping of civilization that he launched so boldly in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess.... Here he takes an evolutionary approach to solving the conundrums of misogyny and patriarchy; guiding his curious, perhaps skeptical, certainly riveted readers through well-grounded and intriguing speculations about the purpose of such seemingly impractical, even dangerous traits as bipedalism, menstruation, the perils of childbirth, and the helplessness of infants.... Lucid and compelling, Shlain asks startling and crucial questions about human nature and presents truly imaginative and mind-stretching answers.

Booklist

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.... Intelligent, well-written, and well-intentioned.

Publishers Weekly

Beautifully written and rich in ideas, this boldly speculative work has considerable explanatory power regarding the sweet mysteries of love and life.

Ann Druyan, coauthor with Carl Sagan of Cosmos, Contact, and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Here is another masterful work by Leonard Shlain. The book is filled with marvelous lore extending back to the origin of our species, and with astute observations on intimate behavior.

Richard Selzer

Sex, Time, and Power provides insight into previously unexplained differences between the sexes. Enchanting and provocative, it is a must-read for those interested in the evolution of the behavior pattern between men and women.

Richard Lannon, coauthor of A General Theory of Love

Leonard Shlain takes a giant leap forward for human understanding and awareness. Sex, Time, and Power is the most evocative book of the decade. It dances where other authors never even dare to hear the music. A standing ovation for this work of vision, courage, and creativity.

Don Campbell, author of The Mozart Effect

PENGUIN BOOKS

SEX, TIME, AND POWER

Leonard Shlain is the author of Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light; The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image; Sex, Time, and Power: How Womens Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution; and Leonardos Brain: Understanding Da Vincis Creative Genius. He wrote for many publications and lectured widely. Shlain was chief of laparoscopic surgery at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, and was an associate professor of surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. He lived and wrote in Mill Valley, California, where he died in 2009.

Look for the Penguin Readers Guide in the back of this book.
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PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2003

Published in Penguin Books 2004

Copyright 2003 by Leonard Shlain

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Illustration credits appear on .

Ebook ISBN 9781101200391 (ebook)

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Shlain, Leonard.

Sex, time, and power: how womens sexuality shaped human evolution / Leonard Shlain.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 9780670032334 (hardcover)

ISBN 9780142004678 (paperback)

1. Sexual attraction. 2. Mate selection. 3. Human evolution. 4. Social evolution. 5. Sex (Biology). 6. Evolution (Biology). I. Title.

HQ23.S45 2003

306.7dc21 2002041186

Version_2

To my wife Ina, my daughter Kimberly, my son Jordan, and my daughter Tiffanyfour very inspiring people who have inspired me.

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.

Donald Symons

Error is the inevitable by-product of daring.

Stephen Jay Gould

J uxtaposing the words iron and sex 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 a relationship, 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.