Sex, Time, and Power

by Leonard Shlain

  Some might wonder why a surgeon would dare to wander so far from his field of specialized expertise to enter the bramble-ridden thicket of human sexuality. The simple answer: It fascinates me, as, I suspect, it does you. And I believe I have some fresh insights to contribute to the subject.

  My direct experience with matters relating to physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, and psychology, essential to my training as a physician and surgeon, has served me well in researching this book. My knowledge of anthropology, primatology, evolutionary biology, and archeology is the result of my abiding interest in these fields. However, I must admit at the outset that I am not an expert in all the fields into which I delve.

  Sex, Time, and Power is intended for both generalists and specialists. Although it is based on scientific research and theories, I wish to keep to a minimum the standard academic practice of citing the pedigree of a particular idea by listing the numerous authorities who were involved in its lineage. I do not wish to diminish these innovators, but I also do not want the book to read too much like a textbook. I also will resist the temptation, whenever possible, to use arcane zoological names, or to cite daunting statistics.

  Space requirements imposed by the publishing world prevent me from presenting every alternative theory to the ones I propose. This does not necessarily mean that I am unaware or dismissive of other possibilities, but, in a bow to the wordsmith’s aesthetic, I will try to keep many supporting facts, counterarguments, and authoritative references caged in the footnotes and endnotes.

  One of the great pleasures I derive from writing is conjuring metaphors that can translate complex physiological and evolutionary processes into rich images, increasing an idea’s accessibility for the nonspecialist reader. A key metaphor that I will employ throughout this work is to treat the process of natural selection as if it behaved like an intelligent entity with forethought and purpose. Exercising a writer’s prerogative to use poetic license, I will use the terms “Mother Nature,” “Natural Selection,” and “the Red Queen” interchangeably.*

  My use of these terms, however, should not be misconstrued. I am not imputing purposeful design to a supernatural entity. Natural selection is a natural process. The origin of species does not need a deus ex machina* to explain how it works.

  Darwin’s ideas have been put to the rigors of scientific examination for a century and a half, and although there still remain many intriguing questions, overall he has provided scientists with a powerful predictive tool. Whether or not a supernatural entity first set in motion evolution’s ingenious processes of natural selection based on random mutations of genes interacting with environmental changes is a religious question better left to each reader to answer.

  While on the subject of disclaimers, let me neutralize the contentious nature-versus-nurture debate at the outset. There is no gene-controlled inheritable trait that cannot be altered by the environment. Similarly, the genetic makeup of the organism can overcome the influence of the environment. Each factor can affect and alter the other. Humans enter the world as a work-in-progress. In some cases, the culture or environment into which a person is born more strongly determines his or her responses to the vagaries of life, and sometimes responses are more influenced by the genes he or she has inherited. Nature/nurture is not an either/or duality but, rather, represents a both/and type of complementarity.

  I assume that the reader is reasonably familiar with the essence of Darwin’s ideas, but there are two notions I feel compelled to differentiate at the outset. After Darwin electrified the intellectual world in 1859 with his theory of evolution based on natural selection, he refined it further in 1871 by emphasizing the importance of sexual selection. For, as Darwin realized, it was simply not enough that an organism survived both the rigors of competition and the hardships imposed by its environment (natural selection), it also had to reproduce successfully (sexual selection). Mate selection became a critical factor in accounting for how sexually reproducing organisms came to be the way they were. Males competed among themselves to see who won the right to mate with females. And females, by picking and choosing among myriad suitors, exerted an enormous influence on which male traits advanced in the genome. Males, therefore, tended to be what females wanted them to be. Natural Selection is about survival, and Sexual Selection concerns reproduction. I will use the term “Natural Selection” as the generic process moving evolution along, even when there may be elements of sexual selection combined within it.

  Another caveat: Because the story I intend to tell unfolds in a linear, sequential narrative, it might appear that I am proposing that first one thing occurred and then that caused another to occur, with cause and effect clanking along in a prescribed sequence. This is not the case. The process of Natural Selection is a to-and-fro, give-and-take, nonlinear whorl. Ongoing, simultaneous feedback loops between local environments and individuals are the driving force compelling species to alter their shape, behavior, and metabolism. This ever-changing, continuous ebb and flow creates a fluid dynamic that linear narrative can never adequately convey.

  Because I will be writing at length about matters relating to sex, birth, and death as well as the love between a man and a woman and between parents and children, I feel I should share something of my personal background in addition to my professional qualifications.

  I was born in Detroit, Michigan, the youngest of four children, to first-generation Russian immigrants. My father was an extremely hardworking man who brought with him a distinctly Old World view of the place of men and women in society. My mother was gentle and loving, and laughed easily. Their relationship was a typical patriarchal one. They both taught me many valuable lessons worth emulating, and some that I have striven not to repeat. They remained married for sixty-five years and lived into their nineties.

  I made the usual teenager and young-adult explorations into parties and dating, then, at twenty-seven, I married, after a tempestuous and passionate four-year courtship in which each of us experienced the dramatic highs and lows of young love. Following a stint in the army in France and a surgical residency in New York, we settled in northern California, where I finished my surgical training. During this time, we had three children one right after another: a daughter, Kimberly, a son, Jordan, and then another daughter, Tiffany.

  After seventeen years of marriage, my wife and I divorced in the same manner as we had courted. I remained single for an equal number of years, during which time I had the opportunity to participate in the “dance” a second time around, but this time as an older, marginally wiser, but more observant “dancer.”

  I have often contemplated the nature of the persistent longing present in the majority of the hearts of both men and women. Persons of each sex, no matter how old, seem to strive to find their respective soul mates. Four years ago, I found mine. Ina and I married, each for the second time.

  A judge and a surgeon—some combination. When we cook together, I, in the manner of my professional training, place my hand palm-up without looking away from the slicing and the dicing and bark, “Tomato!” Ina laughingly intones, “Motion overruled.” We see ourselves engaged in a grand adventure. We have set out to illustrate that a man and a woman can love each other and mesh both our needs and identities in such a way that the sum of us together is greater than each half alone.

  I think of my life as resembling an onion. Each layer symbolizes one of the many roles that I have assumed. Son, brother, lover, husband, teacher, student, father, doctor, writer, surgeon, scholar, and lecturer constitute the main ones. The role I would place at the very core of the onion is the one I have cherished the most: that of a father.

  I have known the delicious delight of carrying a freshly bathed, flannel-encased, sweet-smelling, sleepy toddler to his or her bed. I have run alongside three different bicycles each recently divested of training wheels and then…let go, to cringe in anxious anticipation of whether I had judged the moment of my release correctly. And that was just the beginning of a whole se
ries of wincing withdrawals.

  The military issues campaign ribbons to personnel who have served in various wars and skirmishes to wear on their chests so that comrades-in-arms can instantly identify each other. I recommend that similar insignia should be displayed by all parents who have survived the harrowing teenage years so that they, too, can acknowledge each other’s experience. Happy to say, our unit made it through the guerrilla warfare of those years. Those who had been temporarily missing in action are now all present and accounted for. I have lived long enough to watch proudly as my children have grown into high-spirited, accomplished, interesting people.

  My children are adults now, forming their own families. Listening to them tell me about their loves and courtships has afforded me the opportunity to observe how this man-woman thing works once again, but in a different generation. The fight for love and glory, it seems, is still the same old story.

  And now, let me tell you of my qualifications to write about death. At the age of thirty-seven, I was diagnosed as having a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I underwent extensive surgery, followed by many months of health-debilitating radiation treatments. The experience shook me to my very core and changed me as a human being. As Samuel Johnson astutely remarked, the prospect of hanging clears a man’s mind wonderfully. I spent many dark, sleepless hours contemplating the meaning of life and the consequences of death—particularly mine.

  After over a year of treatments and their inevitable complications, I recovered sufficiently to resume my surgical career. I began to receive many referrals for surgery of patients in the same dire straits that I had recently passed through. I suspect doctors believed that their patients would relate better to a surgeon who had just endured what they must now suffer.

  Treatment for cancer, unfortunately, often fails—more so twenty-five years ago than at present. Many times, after I had developed a close connection with a patient, circumstances demanded that I abandon my mission as a healer and assume the role of Charon, the mythical boatman who ferried souls across the River Styx to the other side. My own personal experience and intimate contact with dying patients led me to explore many of the issues I will raise in this book.

  All writing, despite authors’ best efforts to conceal themselves behind the scrim of objectivity, contains intimations of the autobiographical. Although somewhat unorthodox, I have briefly outlined my personal history so that you, the reader, may know something of the perspective I bring to this work.

  I have chosen artwork and other illustrations to accompany my narrative. Please see art credits.

  Above my writing desk hangs a quote from Franz Kafka urging writers to create books that “can be wielded like a pickax to shatter the frozen sea within the reader’s mind.” If a book didn’t change the way the reader thought about the world, then Kafka deemed it not worth writing. I have taken Kafka’s words as my credo. May this book set your mental ice floes grinding against each other.

  A well-worn metaphor draws the analogy between an author finishing a book and a woman birthing a newborn. Observing my odd cube-shaped “child” in the form of a neat stack of freshly printed pages sleeping peacefully on my desk this fine morning, I can sense how the Old Testament’s Jochebed, the mother of Moses, must have felt.

  The moment has arrived to tear my baby from my protective embrace and place it in its basket, preparatory to setting it adrift down the river. Like Jochebed, I, too, fervently hope that the result of my labor will become entangled in the bulrushes and find a hospitable home among accepting strangers.

  Enjoy.

  Leonard Shlain, 2002

  Mill Valley, California

  Acknowledgments

  Sprinkled among these pages is the distilled, accumulated wisdom of the many people who supported my efforts in writing this book. I sought out some for their exquisitely refined specialized knowledge. I valued others for their critical and curious open-minded opinions. I passed around manuscript pages liberally throughout the multiple stages of this project.

  I wish to thank Michael Corballis, Elisabet Sahtouris, Chris Knight, Malcolm Potts, Robert Sapolsky, Linda Clever, Jerry Lowenstein, Michan Afsari, John Locke, Diane Baker, Larry Garlington, Elizabeth Snyder, Don Campbell, Tom Gage, Joan DePaoli, Gary Hunter, Gail Weber, Carl Levinson, Martha Steel, Ralph Wallerstein, Cora Stryker, Ken Bush, Ricki Pollycove, Jeffrey Aron, Sharon Ferret, Mark Cohen, Colleen O’Connor, Wen-I Chang, Evelyn Resh, Garth Petal, Toni Brayer, Barry Gurdin, China Galland, Hal Nash, Barbara Roether, Phil Hockenberger, Vladimir Dinets, Jody Widelitz, Michael and Lynn Braverman, Yoel and Eva Haller, Jack and Pat Futuran, Marty Carr, and Sheldon Levin.

  Several readers tackled the task with particular gusto, engaging me in long discussions that helped me refine my ideas immeasurably. To Ernst Simon, David Tresan, Irwin Gootnik, Sam Gray, Michael Trupp, and David Nelson, a tip of my hat to you all.

  When the book was in its jig-saw-puzzle stage and the pieces were lying about the floor, I sought editorial advice from Barbara Szerlip, a superb wordsmith who helped me organize and edit the early phase of the manuscript. At a later stage, Woodeene Bricker-Koenig gave the entire manuscript a thorough going-over, adding and subtracting here and there with her very deft touch. The suggestions of my friend Bill Henkin were, as always, right on the mark.

  I wish to especially thank both my son, Jordan Shlain, and my son-in-law Ken Goldberg for their excellent edits. Thanks also to my daughters, Tiffany and Kimberly, for their support. I offer my heartfelt thanks to my wife, Ina Gyemant, for her many thoughtful suggestions—especially when she reined in some of my more exuberant expressiveness on the many occasions during this four-year magnificent obsession that I showed undeniable evidence that I was getting carried away.

  I appreciate the efforts of Judy Snyder and Robby Gyemant, who typed some of the revisions, and of Aaron Baker, who assisted in organizing the bibliography and footnotes. Matt Hunter performed fancy legwork in securing permissions for the images. I drew upon the artistic expertise of Mark Reynolds, Robert Fox, and Matt Hunter to create the graphics. Lynn and Mara Fritz, thank you for providing me with your wonderful country retreat in which I did some of my best writing.

  My masterful agent and old friend Robert Stricker skillfully guided the book through the steep narrows of the New York publishing world. Paul Slovak, my superb editor at Viking with whom I developed a wonderfully rewarding working relationship, did a yeoman’s job of shaping the manuscript once it hit his desk. Kate Griggs and her very thorough copyediting associates Terry Zaroff-Evans and Don Homolka attempted to ensure that every “tittle” in the book was correctly “jotted.” I wish to wax effusive over the great design team at Viking—Jaye Zimet, Erin Benach, and Michelle Ishay—who turned my ordinary-looking stack of typed paper sheets into a beautifully bound book with a compelling cover. And thanks to everyone whose ear I bent so insistently over the years. You were an invaluable sounding board that helped me shape and hone this complex project from its inception as a foggy idea to its completion as the finished work you now hold in your hand.

  Contents

  Preface: Iron/Sex

  Acknowledgments

  Part I Iron, Sex, and Women

  1 Unknown Mother/African Eve

  2 Big Brain/Narrow Pelvis

  3 Red Blood/White Milk

  4 Plant Iron/Meat Iron

  5 Gyna Sapiens/Gyna All-the-Others

  6 Periods/Perils

  7 Her Climax/His Climax

  8 Grandmothers/Circumcision

  Part II Iron, Sex, and Men

  9 Prey/Predator

  10 Carnivory/Vegetarianism

  11 Menarche/Mustaches

  12 Premenstrual Tension/Masturbatory Tension

  Part III Sex and Time

  13 Moon/Menses

  14 Woo/I Do

  15 Anima/Animus

  16 Gay/Lesbian

  17 Same Sex/Hermaphrodite

  Part IV Death and Paternity

  18 Mortality/Angst

  19
Superstition/Laughter

  20 Father/Mother

  21 Incest/Dowries

  22 Wife/Husband

  Part V Men and Women

  23 Misogyny/Patriarchy

  24 Unknown Mother/African Eve/Modern Woman

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  Sex, Time, and Power

  During the medieval period, when Christian mysticism uncomfortably yoked ancient beliefs and a newer religion, a strange myth captured the imagination of the people of Europe. At the heart of the Quest for the Holy Grail lay an unanswered question. Several centuries had passed since this magic chalice had disappeared after receiving the blood of Jesus’ wound as he hung transfixed upon the cross. The land was sorely desolate, and the people believed that only an unblemished knight could recover the Grail and solve the riddle that would lift the curse. This blessed act for which the devout ardently prayed would make the wasteland bloom with life again. According to the myth, Parsifal, a knight of King Arthur’s Round Table, embarked on a hero’s journey and after many adventures at last arrived at the gates of the Grail Castle.

  Upon entering a great hall, Parsifal saw a procession of young men and maidens holding aloft a spear dripping with blood. Behind them, other youths carried the long-sought-for, sacred Grail, which to Parsifal’s astonishment was also brimming with the red liquid. The Fisher King, the Grail’s guardian, sat anguished on his throne, trying unsuccessfully to stanch the mysterious wounds in his genitals that bled day and night. When they saw the holy knight, the music ceased and all assembled in the castle stood frozen as if holding their breath. The silence was complete. Each waited for Parsifal to ask the simple question that would lift the curse that both harried their king and devastated the land. But Parsifal was so awestruck that he forgot to ask the obvious question: “This bleeding from the cup, what purpose does it serve?”