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

There are so many things wrong with this book it's hard to know where to begin.I suppose I should admit that the first part of the book was interesting and offered some promising questions. This makes up perhaps the first 10 or so chapters of the book. After this, however, the book is taken in an unimaginative, uninteresting, tedious, inaccurate, distorted, and pretentious direction that was very infuriating to wade through and which showed the author's bias in monogamy, gender stereotypes, and biologic essentialism.The book begins by producing a few premises which will be misused later in the book. These are that women developed a sense of time before men due to their menstruation and its connection with the lunar cycle and that this sense of time was produced to allow women to control their sexuality as a response to the high mortality of pregnancy. Menstruation, however, produces a dependence upon men for meat due to the iron loss associated with it. This experience of time then leads men to become better hunters with foresight, produces language as a way for men and women to negotiate mating terms, and produces a sense of mortality and paternity which is what eventually leads men to produce religion, art, and systems that control the sexuality of women.I am willing to give Shlain all of these except for paternity which he does not convincingly show could have been an obvious intellectual realization nor a necessary one in hunter-gatherer societies.Now on to the problems with the way he uses all this.1. He does not seem to clarify what epoch of time he is describing nor seems to care.At the beginning of the book it is clear that he is attempting to imagine the birth of the homo sapiens species and developments that would have happened in the period before civilization, however, as the book goes on, it becomes exceedingly unclear if he is still attempting to describe something that occurred in prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribes or in early agricultural society. He takes a lot of things for granted such as the idea that private property exists and that territory is strictly delineated; something that doesn't seem to make much sense in the context of nomadic, communal hunter-gatherer tribes but does make sense in the context of settled agricultural society. This is not to mention how often he cites biblical and mythologic texts (from agricultural societies) to demonstrate his points. Something that seems somewhat inappropriate for a text on prehistoric cultures.2. He does not clarify how much of this is cultural versus a biologic development nor seems to careFollowing from the last objection, it also becomes increasingly unclear whether he is attempting to describe cultural and behavioral changes that shaped the development of human society or biological changes in the structure of the human brain that necessarily produced these changes in society. The case for the latter is, in any case, exceedingly weak. Nevertheless, if he is attempting to say that these are biologic changes then things get even worse because that would mean that Shlain is attempting to naturalize certain cultural institutions but this is never made entirely clear.3. He does not address bisexualityThe entire book is extremely binary in its discussion of sexuality. There are heterosexuals and homosexuals for all but one sentence and no significant discussion is given of bisexuality or what could have caused it, what it means, and so on and so forth. This objection is but a manifestation of the next objection.4. He appears to have no understanding of the complexity of gender, sex, and sexual orientation and the way in which it has developed historically.In the chapter on homosexuality, he describes the tolerance of homosexuality in ancient greece. This is but one example of many in which he naturalizes modern conceptions of sexuality and foists on the past as if it were unproblematic. Shlain has an extremely simplistic and shallow notion of gender such that he seems to collapse gender, sexual orientation, and biologic sex into one concept most of the time and explains homosexuality as essentially men having a feminine spirit and vice versa with enough wiggle room to say that some gay men have slightly less feminine anima than others allowing for the masculine/feminine duality in gay relations. In any case, modern sexual notions cannot be responsibly applied to the past. Modern heterosexuality and homosexuality as well as modern gay and straight identities are relatively recent concepts. In the past, there was what we would call homosexual behavior but there were no "gays" or "straights." Sexuality did not so much exist as desire and desire was not necessarily tied to a specific biologic sex or gender position. This is why Greek pederasty cannot simply be labelled as "gay." Greek pederasty was something that many Greeks did at one point in their lives in which it was socially acceptable to do so after which they usually got married and fathered children. So were they "gay," "straight," "bisexual," or what exactly? These categories are too simplistic to describe historical sexual behavior and simply show the modern desire towards strict categorization. Shlain, however, believes that gender, sex, and orientation are unproblematically the same thing and that they have always been, this colors his entire text for he often makes assumptions about what women want and are and what men want and are that are congruous with what the dominant culture says and thus shows that, in the end, Shlain is extremely conservative and his entire project serves to help prop up both gender stereotypes and monogamy.5. He naturalizes monogamy without good reasonThis leads us to the fact that he, once again, unproblematically assumes that humanity became monogamous as if no other possible option was available and clarifies nothing about when this would have happened. It does not make much sense for this to have happened pre-civilization since nomadic hunting groups would have hunted communally, shared meat with all members of the tribe and taken care of all progeny of the tribe together. In this communal relation, there exists no good reason to produce monogamy which, in fact, makes offspring more vulnerable by tying their protection to only two people instead of to an entire tribe. He does not explain this at all nor even considers this objection.6. He fails to take into account the birth of agriculture and what effect this would have had on sexual relationsThroughout the book, whether he is referring to a time before or after agriculture kept cropping up in mind as it would have a tremendous influence on social and sexual relations. He does not even mention agriculture except perhaps in one or two sentences in the book. It seems to be an irrelevant development to him despite the fact that many of the developments he described could only have happened in agriculture and not in hunter-gatherer societies. This dilemma is not addressed at all. The institutions of monogamy, private property, and inheritance are all concepts that are not necessary and generally absent (or in severely altered form) in hunter-gatherer societies. Once you have settled agricultural society, however, you can have wealth, class, and private property at which point secure paternity becomes more important and hence monogamy.7.PaternityThis leads me to the problem with paternity. Shlain seems to think that the idea of paternity is some unproblematic conceptual idea but it is not. Whereas a woman carries the baby and gives birth thus making obvious the idea that the baby has a single mother (at least more obvious than with men), with men, there is nothing that implies that paternity need be singular. To his credit, Shlain does mention one of the cultures where paternity is believed to be shared and multiple but he does not address the implicit critique of his idea. In any case, there is really no need to believe in singular paternity and to attempt to control paternity until private property and thus inheritance exist as institutions and this comes into place with agriculture and is not necessary at all in hunter-gatherer society.Sex, Time, and Power thus functions the conservative goal of producing a sort of mythology of the birth of monogamy in a bunch of pseudo-scientific garble. The beginning produces a few interesting questions which are then taken into directions that do not follow which simply show the author's biases and naivety. As for the style, the book is repetitive as well as overly flowerly and pretentious and could probably cut about 100 pages without losing anything.

I heard Dr. Shlain on NPR discussing this book. Over the next month, I kept wondering about his theories and eventually bought the book. I wasn't disappointed. The heavy hitting ideas come early and then, like some have noted, it fizzles into random speculation. For example, Chapter 17's Theory of Eights was interesting but not as powerful as the earlier theories.It was frustrating because I felt he could have expanded his later material into more interesting chapters if he had talked with more anthropologists. For example, Chapter 20 briefly mentions Neanderthals "large, big-boned homid cousins" ... "vanished. No one knows with certainty why." and then plunges into a "this child looks like me" theory. Given his theories from Chapter 2, I expected some mention of the Neaderthal's brain size -- equal or greater tban the modern average human. I would have been more interested in his thoughts about the differences between moderns and Neaderthals and speculations about their extinction/interbreeding than I was in the thoughts of his fictitious Cro-Magnon man.Also troubling was the lack of discussion of Polygamy when he mentioned age differences in Chapter 7. In polygamous cultures in Africa many first marriages have exactly that same age difference, with young men's first marriages being to older widowed woman. That would be a good reason for the age difference of libidos to exist, yet he seems unaware of it and shows a monogamy bias throughout.Regardless, his main theories seem rooted in cultural materialism logic, the book's real strength. (What were the material needs that evolving women had and still have?) Also, there are many interesting facts from his medical training and ample research to support all facts presented. His weaknesses, however, were lack of anthropological training, bias towards his own lifestyle and cultural norms, and a willingness to explain EVERYTHING in one book. Overall more of a fun book than a serious evolution text but worth buying because he offers a different perspective to the evolution puzzle.

Poor book

An excellent and informative read. I read this book in two days. I just could not put it down. I highly recommend this book.

Heard the author interviewed, bought the book. I am very interested in women's past, present and future role in the world

really makes sense of the world and explains how it came to be

Scientically astute author takes aim at something vital.One of the more significant subject which is unfortunately ignored.Thoroughly enjoyed the book. It engaged my curiosity.White knight speaks up.Let's see who gets it