Sex, Time, and Power

by Leonard Shlain

  To their frustration and dismay, men discovered that fighting among themselves to see who would win mating rights was no longer enough. Size and superior strength were no longer enough. Unlike other, nonhuman males, they couldn’t just warble a great song or grow the most impressive antlers. Men frantically searched for a way to melt women’s new sexual reticence.

  Concerned perhaps that She had overshot the mark, Mother Nature sprang to his rescue. In an unkind move, She plagued Gyna sapiens with a persistent drain of iron. Men seized upon this opportunity. A man discovered that presenting a woman with the gift of meat substantially decreased her resistance to his sexual overtures. Soon, however, even the meat-for-sex exchange was not enough. As women became more self-aware, they raised the bar. Women who had grasped the enormity of pregnancy and the lifelong commitment of child-rearing also noted with keen interest how pliant a man became when his member was stiff.

  Women began to demand not only meat and/or resources for this particular tryst, but also the promise of meat and/or resources far into the future. A woman often held out the possibility of sexual exclusivity if a suitor complied. Considering how difficult it was for many men to keep finding a willing sexual partner, this idea had a strong appeal. She also wanted him to help her raise the children that often resulted from their sexual union. She desired aid, love, protection, and companionship for her and her brood alone. In short, she wanted a commitment from him to offset her own.

  Increasingly, deciding whom she would choose for a long-term mate became ever more complicated. No longer could she judge a man on mere physical traits. The females of prior species were content to mate with the biggest, strongest, fiercest, cleverest, most dominant males. In general, women remained attracted to these traits. But in the human line, a woman added many new ones to the list—wit, kindness, loyalty, honesty, steadfastness, courage, intelligence, poise, resourcefulness, generosity, leadership, ambition, and compatibility. In other species, hard-wired courtship and sexual behaviors do not allow females the ability to assess these qualities before being mounted.*Gyna sapiens had to conduct this vetting process while trying to delay having sex with a panting, overeager male. Through many generations of trial and error, a woman learned that her needs would best be met if she accurately gauged a man’s character before she committed herself. Human females desperately needed an alternative method, never used before by the females of any other species, to judge the character of a courting male.

  Meanwhile, Homo sapiens’ frustration level mounted. His stratospherically high levels of testosterone whispered to him urgently, “Close the deal already!” But, unlike the males of other species, he found that this remained a daunting task. He was confronted with increasingly choosy females who were deflecting his sexual overtures, artfully delaying the consummate moment the better to get to know him. The female kept him at arm’s length until she had taken the measure of his character. During this time, his ardor would increase to the point where he could barely stand it any longer. It was clear to him that he required a vastly more sophisticated persuasion technique than chest thumping. A man desperately needed an alternative method, never used before by the males of any other species, to convince a female to have sex with him.

  And so these two very different agendas converged. Men and women both sought an improved process by which they could relate to each other. If males could not figure out a way to convince females to consent to intercourse, the species might become extinct. If a female could not figure out a way to judge a male’s character while postponing intercourse, she and her future children might die, and the species might become extinct. Perhaps the notion of extinction is hyperbole, but one can say with conviction that no large animal that reproduces sexually muddles the process of procreation as much as humans do. Each sex metaphorically turned to the Red Queen, beseeching her to improvise a new adaptation that would help them out of their seemingly insurmountable mutual quandary. The Red Queen delivered a lulu. Her brilliant solution was speech.

  Males of other mammalian species commonly signal their initial sexual intention by either grabbing hold of a female’s behind or sniffing her vulva. Once Gyna sapiens gained the veto power over sex, a Homo sapiens trying this approach would likely find himself summarily kneed in the groin. Gifted with language, a man could initiate a conversation with a strange woman from a safe distance, well outside the perimeter of her personal space.

  Some nervous young man tentatively approaching a young woman who had caught his eye most likely stammered the first grammatically correct sentence ever uttered by our species. It was probably an ancestral version of, “Saaay, you look familiar. Haven’t we met somewhere before?” Thus was born, on a Pleistocene summer evening, the “opening line.”*

  A man learned that speech was the well-oiled vehicle he needed to convince a woman, over time, that she should be his. Suave, macho, witty, genteel, charming, intellectual, and rebel-without-a-cause are conversational styles rehearsed by teenage boys in the privacy of their bathrooms, before a mirror, preparatory to trying out these routines in front of a genuine prospect. Perfecting just the right slouch while arching one eyebrow is often deemed as important as inflecting certain words in these fledgling Romeo routines. I suspect that young males practiced similar stratagems eons ago.

  It would not have been lost on such a clever creature as Homo sapiens that a man who was short and homely but could make a woman laugh was more likely to be a successful wooer than a strong, silent type. We are talking about success at sex here, the subject closest to a man’s heart and testicles. Acutely aware of the stakes involved, other men surreptitiously eavesdropped and began to mimic the styles that appeared to work in accomplishing what seemed to many shy men so intimidating a task. Convinced that they must market their virtues, most men believe they have to talk rapidly and volubly to interest a new woman, not unlike a salesman trying to get his foot in the door.

  A male’s spoken style and substance proved repeatedly to be a most felicitous key in the art of romance. Men, for the most part, fall in love with their eyes; women, with their ears. Men often do not pay much attention to what a woman says; they are more impressed—some would say blinded—by her appearance. Conversely, the words a man utters to a woman win her heart more often than the way he looks. The ability of speech to facilitate mating began to supersede in importance the language of hunting, the motherese of nurturing, the strategies of social chess, or the give and take of economics.

  Speech became the premier sexual lubricant. Humans communicate with each other more often, and over a longer period of time, before they first have consensual sex than any other animal. Many couples vocalize during sex, and, most certainly, they must converse with each other afterward if either of them wishes to repeat the performance. Speech is an integral aspect of courting and a key component to successful mating. Ultimately, a man must be skilled in the art of wooing if he hopes to pass along his genes.

  What was true then is still true today. Men, on average, speak about two thousand words in the course of a day; women, on average, speak around seven thousand.25 During courtship, however, this ratio reverses. On a first “date” (or whatever each culture calls the beginning of a new relationship), usually a man does most of the talking and a woman does most of the listening. Given the almost universal male disposition to compete for a female’s attention, it would be reasonable to assume that this male penchant for verbosity upon meeting a new woman has been around since the Pleistocene’s Big Bang of human speech exploded.

  In short, language evolved primarily because men and women had to negotiate sex. Women needed a means to assess whether they would sayYes! Men, having acquired from the female the gift concerning foresight, began to think in the long term. A man needed to assess whether a woman was more or less likely to bear only his children. Along the way, speech became the “language” of love.

  Wordplay greatly enhanced the richness of interaction between the sexes. It transmuted raw desire into artis
try, creating poetry, literature, haunting love songs, and purple love letters. The sweet murmurings passing back and forth between lovers oblivious to the rest of the world represent a special language, quite distinct from speech’s more quotidian functions.

  Speech became a critical factor ensuring a man’s genetic success. Though triumphal hunting remained important in mate selection, men who were the most convincing talkers increased their chances of leaving offspring. It mattered little that a man could yak endlessly with the other men about hunting. Nor did it matter that he could out-pious the shaman when praying to the gods, or if he was the only one who could commune with the beasts. If he couldn’t get it right when talking with a woman so that she agreed to let him enter her, he was finished genetically. (This assumes that men had not yet structured society to strip women of their power of Original Choice.)

  In the game of “Genomic Musical Chairs,” smooth-talking DNA made it to the next generation and inept-talking DNA did not. Any male who could not successfully position his sperm to be next to an ovum when the music stopped was eliminated. No chair for him. Agility with words rapidly surpassed looks, strength, display dances, courting calls, and fighting ability to become the most surefire means by which a man could ensure that half his chromosomes would be present and accounted for at the reveille roll call of the next generation. (The relative newness of our species, however, means there will be women who continue to prefer good providers over smooth talkers.)

  The evolution of speech also had a major impact on a woman’s sexual strategy—both positively and negatively.

  On the positive side, speech offered a divining rod with which she could more accurately locate the deepest wellspring from which a man’s character courses. From all the male persiflage headed her way, she had to weed out the fast talkers and the sweet talkers from the truth talkers. She needed to evaluate: Was he interested in her just for the sex? Did the character of this man blah-blahing before her possess the staying power to see her through five children, two miscarriages, illness, and wrinkles? Or was he the sort who would abandon her and their brood for younger, greener pastures? Often, a woman had to endure a seemingly endless procession of male encounters. Through many of them, she tried valiantly to appear interested in what the new man was saying, all the while inwardly struggling not to succumb to the MEGO* phenomenon, while she waited for the One.

  Then there was that tricky moment when she informed him, usually with a steely resolve in her voice that he had hitherto failed to notice, that from this moment on he must forgo his freewheeling ways and pledge himself to her. Often, a man perceived this as an ultimatum. He balked at what was a major wrench in his genetic agenda of spreading his sperm among as many different women as possible in the shortest period of time. She had to overcome his resistance to a foreign idea that most men believed to be quite onerous and unreasonable. Withholding speech, curiously, became a woman’s most effective stratagem in this tug-of-war. (It goes without comment that she would have already withheld sex.) Once a man committed himself by uttering those two simple words, “I do,” he learned—often the hard way, as other men over many thousands of years had—that all hell would break loose if he backslid. As the eighteenth-century English playwright William Congreve warned, “Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned, nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorned.” (The issue of jealous husbands will be given equal treatment in a later chapter.)

  Another advantage speech afforded a woman was the ability to compare her judgment of a man with those of other women who knew him. By minutely rehashing a man’s every mannerism and statement from the previous night’s encounter, a woman could count on the advice of her friends to reach a consensus opinion as to his true worth. She could even discuss her male relationships with women who had never met the suitor in question. Women friends can give a woman advice based solely on the descriptions provided to them by the woman seeking their counsel. Using the analytic features of human language to evaluate which male is likely to be the best mate is a skill beyond the ken of other female creatures. Men, in contrast, infrequently avail themselves of this potent function of language.

  On the negative side, speech greatly increased the chances that a clever prevaricator might deceive a woman as to his true intentions. Shakespeare warned women in Much Ado About Nothing:

  Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,

  Men were deceivers ever,

  One foot in sea, and one on shore,

  To one thing constant never.

  Though female mendacity poses a similar risk to a male, the stakes of male deceit are much higher. Many a woman has rued the day she met a particularly artful liar. Women needed to become expert at reading between the lines. If a woman garbled the transmission of an unworthy beau, and granted permission for his emission to swim northward in her, she opened herself to a raft of future problems that had no simple solutions. Unlike the offspring of the several million other sexually reproducing species, Gyna sapiens’ children are forever. Anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer societies have documented that single mothers fare far less well than mothers who have mates.26 The same holds true for their children. Any astute observer perusing the daily newspapers can draw a similar conclusion.

  More common than outright deceit, a man will often greatly exaggerate his virtues and accomplishments in an effort to impress. This is not unique to humans. Virtually all male animals engage in such puffery. Males want the females upon whom they are temporarily fixated to see them as larger than they really are when they go acourting.*

  Gyna sapiens had to learn how to see through a Homo sapiens’ inevitable braggadocio in order to assess accurately his fitness as a possible partner. (Surely there are a few genuinely shy and modest men, but it is a rare man who could keep a straight face and claim that he had never stretched the truth when trying to inflate a woman’s opinion of him.)

  Despite its drawbacks, speech was a godsend to the female gender. A woman could evaluate both the content and the tenor of a man’s message from a safe distance and decide over time whether she wanted to have sex with him. Since birth-control measures most likely would have been ineffectual or nonexistent at the dawn of our species, she knew her decision was unfairly freighted—grave consequences for her and minimal price for him.

  Lest the reader gasp at my audacity for proposing that we began to talk primarily to woo, consider the following. A main reason that males of a wide variety of species initiate communication of any kind is to attract females and entice them to mate. The chirps, howls, bellows, crickets, and whistle clicks of innumerable birds, wolves, lions, insects, and dolphins are principally to convince a discriminating female to choose them. The frog thrumming out his pond’s most resonant basso profundo “ribbet,” and the bird with the most extensive song repertoire, have the greatest opportunity to mate and subsequently deposit the highest number of offspring into the next generation. Among many diverse species, a good rap is the key to DNA longevity.

  Another common reason that a male decides to make a sound of any kind is to alert any other males in the vicinity that he is in charge—or, if he isn’t, that he wants to put the resident boss on notice that a challenger awaits him. Maintaining or achieving dominance or protecting or acquiring territory is another common reason males communicate. And what, may we ask, accounts for a male’s eagerness to engage in pitched battle? Simply put: A male seeks to maintain or attain a high standing because exalted positions in the pecking order or holding territory is the decisive means by which he can secure access to females.

  A corroborating bit of evidence bolstering my thesis is the recent finding of linguist Tecumseh Fitch. He discovered that the male red deer, an animal previously thought to be mute, is capable of producing a prodigious low-pitched roar when his mating season arrives. A fascinating video capturing the stag’s vocalization reveals that, just before beginning his love serenade, the red deer’s larynx descends deep into his throat, allowing him to emit a bass mating call that co
uld compare favorably to the sound emanating from an audiophile’s high-tech sub-woofer.

  Adding an exclamation point to the red deer’s swain song, his penis comes thrusting out of its sheath in synchrony with the descent of his larynx. In a coordinated pistoning movement, he vocalizes and thrusts simultaneously, one structure moving down and up as the other moves out and in.27 I would predict that, could such measurements be recorded in an aroused human male engaged in murmuring sweet nothings into the ear of a female, a similar, nearly undetectable thrusting occurs synchronously, keeping time with the bobbing of his Adam’s apple.

  Although the impetus to begin talking was similar for each sex, men and women evolved speech for different reasons. Because the two sexes’ hormonal systems, brain organizations, and sexual agendas are so different, the gulf between them has proved difficult to bridge. Despite the incredible suppleness of human speech, men and women continue to be confounded by the words and behavior of the opposite sex.

  Novelist Margaret Atwood asked women what was their greatest fear concerning men. The most common reply: A man might kill them. When she asked men to confide to her their greatest fear concerning women, the most common response: A woman might laugh at them. The vast disparity between these two anxieties forms the Great Divide inhibiting understanding between the sexes. The potential of dying at the hand of a man is, for women, unfortunately very real. Speech affords a woman the chance to determine in advance (assuming she has time to make this judgment) whether her suitor has the predisposition or intention to harm her. There appears to be no complementary advantage of speech that might prevent a man from making an utter fool of himself in the presence of a woman.