Sex, Time, and Power

by Leonard Shlain

  Has any ethologist observed other animals engaging in proto-spanking or proto-bondage behavior? Is there a male of another species that appears to be turned on sexually by inflicting pain on a female? Any that experiences heightened sexual arousal from murdering a female with whom he is in the midst of having sex? Have any males of any species been observed masturbating while watching a female’s life snuffed out? Are any male mammals other than humans inclined to mate with females of species far removed from their own?

  The answer to these questions is a resounding no. The “beasts” do not practice bestiality. Numerous scientific studies have concluded that the male of the human species exhibits a robust capacity for variable sexual behavior, some of which could be considered extreme, some aberrant, and some even deviant.†

  What would have been the evolutionary benefit to our species of having the male prone to so many diversionary sexual strategies, none of which result in conception? If it is some sort of spandrel gone awry, what was the original impetus for the adaptation? Are these behaviors simply repressed male sexuality, as the Freudians hypothesize, or is there a component of genetic predisposition to them?

  I propose that it is the latter. The Red Queen escalated the male sex drive to such unnatural heights so that he would be willing to take enormous risks to satisfy his urges. To continue to advance the intelligence that the species was increasingly depending upon to survive and prosper, human females needed ever-greater quantities of bioavailable dietary iron (along with a whole slew of hard-to-make animal products). The male, in order to satisfy his sexual hunger, would have to assume new risks and learn new tricks if he was going to find a way to supply women with this most basic element for her and her babies.

  The males of nonhuman species appear willing to put their lives on the line for only extreme reasons. However, it is routine for them to answer aggressively the urgent hormonal directive that usurps control of their brain in the presence of an ovulating female. In general, however, dominance fights rarely result in the death of either combatant. Homo sapiens does not differ from the males of other species in this regard. But testing his mettle against potential sources of dietary meat that outweigh him by thousands of pounds and can trample, gore, slash, and bite him to death is a hazard to which other noncarnivorous males have opted not to subject themselves.

  Another behavior suggesting that Homo sapiens hunters kill more for sex than for food is that all other social nonprimate mammalian predators tend to eat their fallen prey on the spot. A feeding frenzy breaks out among them, and fighting often occurs over the more delectable parts. Rare is the social predator who would think of postponing eating or sharing its meat with a copredator, much less sharing it with a conspecific* that had not participated at all. The exception occurs when parents bring a portion of a kill back to feed immature young. A male fox will sometimes regurgitate his recently consumed “steak tartare” as an offering to his mate, a nursing vixen that was unable to join him on the hunt.†

  Consider, then, the typical aftermath of a Homo sapiens big-game kill. After having placed themselves in harm’s way, hunters laboriously strip the hides from their prey, butcher the animal, and carry the quartered remnants back to a base camp, leaving a trail of spoor that will inevitably attract predators and scavengers.

  Most remarkable of all: The purpose of this unprecedented display of restraint after a kill is to give their hard-earned meat away! Glynn Isaac, the anthropologist who first distinguished the uniqueness of human food-sharing, once remarked, “If you could interview a chimpanzee about the difference between humans and apes including the way we walk, the way we communicate, and our subsistence I think it might say, ‘You humans are very odd, when you get food instead of eating it promptly like any sensible ape, you haul it off and share it with others.’”19

  An extreme form of this behavior is what anthropologists call the “own-kill taboo.” Among many extant hunter-gatherer societies, a formidable stricture forbids a hunter from partaking of his kill until he has shared it with everyone else. Frightening myths and potent superstitions ensure that the primary hunter will be the last to eat, if he is allowed to eat at all.

  Chris Knight in Blood Relations recounts numerous examples collected by anthropologists from around the world in many different cultures. For example, the Yanomami hunters of the Amazon Basin do not eat the meat of game they have killed themselves, because they believe that if they do they will be deserted by the hawk spirit, which they need to succeed in their future quests.20 In the case of the Bororo of central Brazil, “A hunter never roasts the meat he has shot himself. Failure to observe this taboo…causes a vengeful animal spirit to send sickness and death to the hunter and all who eat its flesh.”21 Among the Juneno of North America, their language even has a special verb meaning “to get sick from eating one’s own killing.”22

  What a hunter gains from this combination of self-restraint and generosity is increased stature in the eyes of others. !Kung San tribespeople of the Kalahari, when asked why some men who were poor hunters could not convince a woman to marry, responded, “Women like meat.”23 Each incremental hunting success moves a man up a notch in the male-dominance hierarchy, and each ascending rung brings with it an increasing number of females willing to have sex with him. Kristen Hawkes calls this the “Show-Off Theory” of hunting.24

  Women of the Aché hunter-gatherer tribe who were interviewed by anthropologist Kim Hill preferred the best hunters for their extramarital affairs.25 And Hawkes tabulated that the Aché hunters with the most kills to their credit had the most children and that these children had higher survival rates because the other members of the tribe took better care of them than they did of orphans or the children of poor hunters. Anthropologists initially believed that Aché hunters were altruistic grubstakers provisioning mothers and their little ones with food high in iron, protein, and fat, but the reason Hawkes and her co-workers discovered was more self-promoting.

  Numerous anthropological studies confirm the connection between hunting skills and opportunities for sex. Landes reports of the Ojibwa of western Ontario:

  A married man who is too lazy to hunt can be supported by his wife for a time. But her tolerance will change to scorn, then to indifference, and finally she will desert him. A man who is unsuccessful on the hunt, and who goes with his wife to her parents’ wigwam, can expect to be rejected and left to die of starvation. In one case, the parents’ scorn was so great that they took their daughter in to feed and lodge her, but refused their son-in-law. Folk tales are concerned with the same theme.26

  In other tribes it is the same: Wives refuse sex to men who do not provide meat. Richard Lee, commenting on the customs of the !Kung San, writes, “If a man does not hunt, his wife will make pointed comments about his sexual prowess. And vice versa: if he is no good in bed, he cannot hunt.”27 Anthropologist Janet Siskind, who studied the Sharanhua people of the Peruvian Amazon Basin, summed up the relationship between iron and sex when she observed, “Put at its crudest, the special hunt symbolizes an economic structure in which meat is exchanged for sex.”28

  Primatologists in the field have noted that the cooperative hunting group most closely resembling a human hunting party is that of our nearest relative, the chimpanzee. Males use their hard-won meat from a fresh kill in a similar way. A chimpanzee male will sometimes share his precious meat with close kin or, on rare occasions, use it to obtain a social advantage. But he reveals his understanding that meat can further his opportunities for sex when he tears off a strip of his quarry’s muscle and gives it only to nonrelated females who just so happen to be exhibiting the florid signs of estrus. Jane Goodall saw these transactions as economic negotiations: “The female’s sexual swelling, in a way, serves as a sexual bargaining point.”29 The conclusion anthropologist Helen Fisher derived from this behavior was that only a few of the males had something all the females wanted (meat), and only a few of the females had something that all the males wanted (sex).*30

&n
bsp; All sexually reproducing species have intricate mechanisms to ensure the “survival of the fittest” genes. When females enter their rutting or breeding season, the males fight among themselves to see who will win the right to mate. For example, male elephant seals engage in fierce combat for the right to copulate with cows, but only 15 percent are dominant enough actually to pass their genes through to the next generation.

  When Gyna sapiens lost the signs of estrus, Natural Selection had to reprogram the male to ensure that superior male genes would continue to outnumber inferior male genes. Male competition is the great sieve that Natural Selection uses to cull inferior bits of genetic material from the gene pool. Gyna sapiens could take her time choosing the perfect male match for her. Infatuation, love, intimacy, and lifelong friendship would all enter the picture.

  The man who demonstrated his ability to bring meat home to a woman was the man who would have the most sexual opportunities, because women favored men who exhibited courage, skill, resourcefulness, and strength. They still do. Over time, meat would segue into resources that would, still later, transmute into property and money.

  Many contemporary Asian males believe that powdered rhinoceros horn and extract of tiger penis (used to flavor soup) are potent aphrodisiacs. Along with the phallic shape of the former and the obvious sexual connotations of the latter, their sympathetic magic stems from the fact that any man who could stalk and kill such exceedingly dangerous animals and return to tell the tale would be considered by all to be a great hunter.

  To prove beyond a doubt that he did what he claimed he did, he would have to provide evidence. Returning with a piece of rhino horn or a tiger’s penis would be his proof. He would have only to show his trophy to persuade a woman that he was strong, brave, and resourceful and, by extension, a man possessed of superior genes. She could, with assurance, conclude that he would be an excellent procurer of iron on the hoof. Today, men pay exorbitant sums to obtain small pieces of what they believe are rhino-horn or tiger-penis soup extract in the belief that consuming these substances will grace them with the original hunter’s courage and sexual stamina.

  Rare furs from animals extremely difficult and dangerous to locate, stalk, and kill also serve this function. Until recently, when such public display became politically incorrect, a man could advertise his skill as a reliable provider, secondhand, by purchasing for his consort, firsthand, an expensive, exotic fur coat for her to wear and all others to see.

  As a result of changes in Gyna sapiens’ reproduction cycle, Homo sapiens had to adjust by drastically altering his mating strategy. The most significant factor to emerge was his incredible craving for blood coupled with his willingness to postpone eating what he had just killed. Homo sapiens became the first of the predator line to kill for reasons primarily having to do with sex instead of hunger. What he could not know was that his quest was motivated in large part by a mote so small he could not see it—the tiny iron atom.

  Chapter 10

  Carnivory/Vegetarianism

  There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection is the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted.

  —Miss Manners’ Guide to

  Excruciatingly Correct Behavior1

  What sort of eaters humans have been has depended very largely on what kind of catchers they have been.

  —Jonathan Kingdon2

  For the human female, monogamy may have guaranteed protection, food, and even love…for a while. But the price may have been a gradual loss of economic independence and dependence on males from which she is still trying to recover.

  —Mary Batten3

  When philosophers proudly cite the distinguishing attributes that they propose set Homo sapiens above and apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, they usually overlook one that, on reflection, is very peculiar. The planet’s most relentless predator comes equipped with the animal world’s most finicky digestive tract.* The creature that gave new meaning to the “omni” in “omnivore” cannot absorb a whole host of key essential nutrients that other creatures routinely can. No other complex creature possesses so many striking alimentary lapses and quirks as are present in Homo and Gyna sapiens’ dietary regimen. Sapients, it would appear, chew to the taste of a different drumstick.

  Every species of large animal has, at one time or another, been butchered by a Homo sapiens somewhere. Entire species have filed two by two into the Ark of Oblivion, dispatched by human hunters who mindlessly engaged in their wholesale slaughter. No matter how quick, how agile, how massive, or how dangerous, each doomed animal was minced into minute pieces to disappear down the small black hole that exists between the tip of a Homo sapiens’ nose and his chin. In the wild, a small predator does not attack a large predator. Yet the heads and pelts of five-hundred-pound tigers and bears, along with ten-foot-long denizens of the deep, grace the dens of modern Homo sapiens. Considering that eagles rarely suffer from indigestion, cheetahs do not require antacids, and hyenas have not evolved discriminating tastes, it is a wonder that a mere human, possessed of such a delicate constitution, could wreak so much mayhem.

  Despite its craving for carnage, the world’s most efficient carnivore generally disdains eating raw meat. Humans, despite their voracious appetites, partake of daintier bites than any other meat-eater. We are the only predators to waste valuable energy slowly savoring the chewing of our dinner instead of bolting it down, as is the preference of all the others. For a diminutive biped capable of bringing a woolly mammoth thirty times his size to its knees, Homo sapiens has a ridiculously small mouth; the dullest, feeblest canines; puniest jaws; weakest chewing muscles; tiniest tongues; and thinnest-enameled, smallest teeth of any other serious meat-eater. Truly, a Homo sapiens’ eyes are much bigger than his stomach.

  The disparities between our culinary ambitions and the reality of our alimentary canal are so great that it would be worthwhile to investigate these nutritional oddities. Let us consider the possibility that Natural Selection may have played a role in advancing many of these eccentric and seemingly detrimental adaptations.

  When African Eve forced African Adam to enter into prolonged and tangled negotiations with her over the subject of intercourse, high-quality food became a key arbiter of sexual relations between men and women. The tasty zebra hock spattering juice on the spit began to set the parameters of the health and intelligence of individuals. Ultimately, diet reconfigured the shape and destiny of our species.

  Modern science’s continuing pronouncements concerning the long-term effects on our well-being of the various foodstuffs that we consume have warped our understanding of how we, in the industrialized world, came to eat the way we do. There can be no doubt that we dine in a manner today very different from our early ancestors. We are sedentary; they were not. We eat processed and fortified foods and have access to supplements, vitamin pills, and mineral capsules; they did not. We can store food for later consumption in refrigerators and supermarkets; they could not. We can pick and choose among seasonal foods all year long; they could not. We suffer primarily from chronic stress; they worried about acute stress. On average, we live long lives; on average, they lived short ones.

  So different are the conditions under which they ate, lived, and died from our current ones that we must adhere to a set of dietary blandishments deemed necessary to maintain health. Nearly everyone generally acknowledges that consuming less fat, meat, sugar, cholesterol, and milk (for adults), while at the same time increasing one’s intake of fruits, grains, and raw vegetables, constitutes a healthy dietary regimen. Had there been a National Nutritional Advisory Board to which the earliest members of our species could turn to for advice, it would have stood
nearly every one of these current recommendations on its head.

  Imagine that you are a member of a band of Homo sapiens stepping out in the Pleistocene morning 150,000 years ago. Much earlier, more archaic ancestors had radically changed the way they ate, but you will hurry the process along by your new way of hunting, sharing, eating, and making love. It was in the hominid line’s formative years of the Pleistocene that the overwhelming majority of the eccentric features of the human digestive tract became the template for everyone living today.

  All members of the band to which you belong stay focused on an endless, sometimes desperately fierce, sometimes ridiculously easy struggle to find and stuff into their mouths enough food over a long enough period to live to reproduce. For those adventuresome enough to advance into unknown territory, the search for nutrients of sufficient quantity and quality could occupy the heftiest proportion of each band member’s waking hours.* Since every other living thing also strives to attain its ideal daily caloric ration, the stage has been set for a never-ending conflict.

  Previously, a nutritional thunderbolt from out of the blue had struck our ancestors. This electrifying event immediately transformed the hominid line and would eventually jolt the entire course of evolution. Humans are beholden to their predecessor species, Homo erectus, for adding something so novel to their diet that subsequent hominids bootstrapped themselves into a singular category. And this revolutionary ingredient, present in abundance in contemporary human meals, rearranged the enzymatic priorities of the entire hominid digestive system. Not a single one of the other thirty million animal species alive on this planet had ever experimented with what would become a cultivated taste of the striding primate. The new item on the menu was fire.