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

by Leonard Shlain
Viking Press, New York, 2003
420 pp., illus. 41 b/w. Trade, $25.95
ISBN: 0-67003-233-6.

Reviewed by Dene Grigar
Texas Woman’s University

dgrigar@twu.edu

When encountering a book concerning a subject like the anthropology of sexual attraction and social evolution published by a non-academic press and written by an author with no discernible training in the field, an educated reader knows to approach the ideas advanced in that book as interesting if fanciful. When the publisher in question is a large popular press with a vast marketing department and the author appears to be a charming and fascinating story-teller, then it is likely that some readers may allow themselves to be seduced by the flight of fancy and be taken on a wild goose chase––and end up the goose.

This is precisely the problem with Sex, Time, and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution by Leonard Shlain. A cursory search on the web reveals the extent of the damage such whimsy can wrought. From "Why Your Wife Won't Have Sex With You," to a delineation of the brain power of Biblical characters in "Time, Menses, Left Brain," to "promoting intimacy and other-centered sexuality" among a group called "Liberated Christians," this book doesn’t merely strike a chord with its readers; it verifies all of the preconceived notions of gender difference some readers could ever hope to come across for pushing their own political, social, and religious agendas.

Let us be clear: Sex, Time, and Power is not hard science. Nor is it anthropology. It is, instead, mythology. And because the narrative is highly engaging, it can be, on the surface, amusing mythology at that.

The book generated from a question the author had pondered when a young medical student––"Why do women menstruate?"––and has as its premise that women’s need for iron drove many if not all of "human cultural innovations" (xii), but particularly the knowledge of time, which ultimately resulted in the loss of her power. With this idea in mind, Shlain looks at such issues as incest, homosexuality, courting practices, marriage, and death, to name a few. Along the way he gives us dialogues with Adam, Eve, and members of their tribe; recountings of schemes made by campfires in 40,000 BC; and a worldview organized in a recognizable dualism (man, left-brained, sex-crazed; woman, right-brained, uses sex to get what she wants from man). He tells us in the Preface that the book is meant for "both generalists and specialists" and that he avoids the "standard academic practice of citing the pedigree of a particular idea" (xiii). Lucky thing, too, since some of his logic would never pass the review process of a reputable science journal or scientific board of an academic press.

This reviewer counted no less than 39 instances where faulty logic and gross generalizations were used to make a point.

Some of the most pernicious include the idea that early Homo Sapiens women "after a lifetime of lovemaking . . . would have spent hours discussing the sexual idiosyncrasies of their diverse male partners and comparing their experiences." He then comes to the conclusion that these women would have been responsible for promoting male circumcision as a way of delaying their lovers’ orgasms (93)––an interesting idea that flies in the face of circumcision rites performed by older men upon younger ones.

Another is his adopted view of the relations between genders that reduces men’s value to his ability to provide meat and women’s, to their ability to give sex (113). While some may look around at some today’s couples and agree with this assertion, this theory disregards man’s need to satisfy his own hunger and woman’s interest in her own orgasm that could have also shaped our social development. And hadn’t he claimed that circumcision came about because women wanted better sex?

But truly the most awful claims remain in his discussions about rape and pornography. In terms of the former, he asserts that "speech affords a woman the chance to determine in advance . . . whether her suitor has the predisposition or intention to harm her" (205). How many women who have been date-raped would agree that they could have known their suitors had darker intentions in mind by simply talking to these men? In the latter, he tells us that "pornography would disappear tomorrow if women were as eager to have sex and behaved sexually as indiscriminately as men" (352). From that standpoint, pornography is women’s fault. Rest assured, there are 35 more of these jewels in this tome, and these do not address the major problem with his chronology: that all of these innovations regarding sex, time, and power occurred in 40,000 BC, an idea that stands against the discoveries of birth goddess artifacts by Marija Gimbutas and others.

Anyone who seeks to end misogyny and who questions the inequities of power between the genders rates our attention. And as stated previously, when that person has a gift for story telling, we may not even mind wading through the mire of misinterpretation of data to hear out the teller. But in the end, the most discriminating of readers should realize that the stories told are simply that, stories. The problem lies in that they are presented as The Truth. This is the point where the stories cease to be amusing and become insidious, and we can say that the book is seriously flawed.