Sex, Time and Power
Subtitle: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution
Publisher: Viking Adult
Published: August 14, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 448
ISBN-13: 9780670032334
Subjects: Social Science; Women's Studies - General; Sex Roles (Sociological Aspects); Science; Sociology; Social evolution; Sexual attraction; Human Sexuality; Life Sciences - Evolution - Human; Psychology & Psychiatry / Human Sexuality; Human evolution; Mate selection; Sex (Biology)
First sentence: She died an agonizingly slow and painful death.
Description: "Long ago, due to the narrowness of her bipedal pelvis and the increasing size of her infants' heads, the human female began to experience high childbirth death rates, precipitating a crisis for the species. Natural selection adapted her to this unique environmental stress by drastically reconfiguring her hormonal cycles. Her estrus disappeared and menses mysteriously entrained with the periodicity of the moon. Women formulated the concept of a month, which in turn allowed them to make the connection between sex and pregnancy. Upon learning the majestic secret of time, these ancestral females then gained the power to refuse sex when they were ovulating. Men were forced to confront women who possessed a mind of their own." "Women taught men about time, and men used this knowledge to become the planet's most fearsome predator. Unfortunately, they also discovered that they were mortal. Men then invented religions to soften the certainty of death. Subsequently, they belatedly grasped the functions of sex. The possibility of achieving a kind of immortality through heirs drove men to construct patriarchal cultures whose purpose was to control women's reproductive choices." "Leonard Shlain explores how these archaic insights about sex, time, and power dramatically altered all subsequent human culture, from the nature of courtship to the origin of marriage to the evolution of language, creating the conditions for two people to love each other more deeply and longer than any other animal. Sex, Time, and Power is a compelling book that challenges accepted views of human sexuality and is sure to stimulate new thinking about old matters."--Jacket.