Sex, Time, and Power

by Leonard Shlain

  As the men grappled with Adam’s novel bride-barter proposal, they never contemplated exchanging their sons. Given the importance of hunting and defense to ancestral bands, this idea would have been out of the question.

  “Must a girl always be traded to another band?” asked a man who had his eye on one of the pretty young females who was nearly of bleeding age.

  “Well, not always. Sometimes we can bond a young woman with a young man within our own band, as long as we know that they do not closely share any of the same essence.”

  “Who will decide which women will be exchanged?” another queried.

  “We will leave that to the elder males, for whom the passions of lust have cooled. They already know how to make alliances for hunting rights and how to trade for goods. We know that barter is the safest and most peaceful way to obtain ochre, ivory, and seashells from strangers, so why not women? We will entrust them to trade with the elder males of other bands for females as well as goods. They will do what is best for our band as a whole.”

  A glint, not from the fire, shone in Adam’s eye. “All of us here would probably agree that the thing we want the most in life is regular sexual access to a young woman who cannot refuse us, right? If there were a way we could have this without shedding blood among ourselves and at the same time ensure that we would have strong, healthy children of our own, then why would we not exchange our young women?”

  It was at this moment in history that a man began to conceive of a woman as a commodity. By moving her into the category of objects that could be traded, men began an invidious trend that would sour relations between the sexes far into the future. Adam could not have foreseen just how thoroughly the custom of fathers’ giving daughters away would become embedded in subsequent human cultures. He could not have imagined that, forty thousand years later, a father would still exercise his right to “give” his daughter away to the groom of a stranger’s family at a wedding ceremony.

  In virtually all cultures in the world there is an unspoken assumption that something of value must be traded to obtain a woman for marriage. Originally, men had to pay a bride-price to a woman’s family to convince them to part with their daughter. As patriarchy became the norm and women became devalued, this tradition reversed, and at present it is the bride’s family that must add value to the marriage transaction in the form of a dowry.

  Adam continued: “But before we can initiate the first exchange of daughters, we will have to convince the other bands of its value. We will have to learn to trust each other. It isn’t going to be easy. There may be seasons in which they do not have an equal number of daughters to exchange with us.”

  “Then we will be cheated!” cried one man.

  “No,” said Adam. “In some seasons we may have to give them more women than we receive. But the next season, when they have more girls than we do, we will have to trust them to turn over those women. Over many seasons, I believe, it will all be fair. Should the situation become too unbalanced, we can always offer something of value in exchange for their women.”

  Thus, one of the earliest and most important balance-of-trade issues in history concerned sex. With the active barter of their young women, Homo sapiens shaded into Homo economicus. What Adam could not have known was that his band’s willingness to exchange their most precious possession with a group of strangers would form the foundation upon which all future civilizations would rest.

  Mutual trust among strangers had to begin somewhere. In general, social predators, the class of hunting animals to which Homo sapiens belongs, behave with territorial hostility toward strange conspecifics. The exchange of women would begin only after men understood the implications of paternity. Bride barter would be the only solution that they would have to eventually arrive at that could mute men’s naturally lustful tendencies.

  Bride barter demands an extraordinary degree of faith in the integrity of strangers. Wars between peoples have seemingly occurred constantly throughout history, but the majority of people have based their interactions with neighboring communities on mutual trust. The custom of fathers’ trading unmarried daughters with fathers they may barely know continues to be a common practice throughout the world.

  Many of the men were shaking their heads at the inconceivable idea of trusting hunters from another band. “I am not sure,” one finally said. “You are asking us to cooperate with hunters we don’t even know.”

  Adam could see that the men were having a difficult time grasping this complex issue. He crouched as he patiently explained the far-reaching ramifications of his ideas. “Don’t you see, once we establish a working relationship with another band by exchanging our women with them, we will no longer want to fight with them. They will have our daughters. And they will no longer want to fight with us because we have their daughters. What would be the point? If we fight and capture their women, all that will happen is that we will be bringing our own daughters home.”

  The last speaker began to take Adam’s side. “Suppose, after we have exchanged women, we propose to them that our two groups form an alliance? There is strength in numbers. That would be a good thing.”

  Adam smiled, pleased that the men were beginning to understand the benefits of bride barter. “We would not really be strangers to each other anymore. When our daughters have children, there will be young ones who share our essence once removed who live in another band. Naturally, the exchanged women will long to visit their mothers and their fathers. They will insist on more and more peaceful contacts between our two peoples.”

  “But those children will not wear the same clothes or put the same designs on their bodies,” objected one man. “They will not be of our band.”

  “No, not of our band, but we will be connected nonetheless. I can see a time when many bands will be linked together by our children and our children’s children. Men, I tell you, things are going to be very different. If we need help from a band that hunts over that mountain and we have some of their children’s children living with us because we have exchanged women, those warriors are bound by blood to help us.”

  Now Adam became really animated. “In fact, I can envision a time when bands we don’t even know about now will be linked to us through our children’s children’s children! Imagine what it would be like if all the bands got together.” He stood up and expansively spread his arms wide to create a better picture for the men around him. “Once a year we could organize a great meeting of all the clans, and we could have contests to see who among us is the fastest and who can throw a spear the most accurately. And we could dance, feast, and exchange valuable information with each other around one huge bonfire!

  “We could also look over the women we would be getting, and our elders could make shrewd bargains so that we will get the best women for ourselves. Ah, what wonderful things will happen to us when we give our daughters away!”

  The first major trade in something of immense value was bride barter. Repugnant as it is to modern sensibilities, commerce between strangers received an important boost when men began trading their young women. It ultimately fostered friendship, understanding, and the critical exchange of skills, goods, and knowledge.*

  Many nonhuman primate societies have social arrangements that resemble the human mating system in this regard, but theirs are instinctual, not planned. Young females leave their natal group and establish themselves in a strange troop. Natural selection programmed this behavior to prevent inbreeding. (There are also many primate species in which the young males must leave their natal group to find another troop. There are no species of nonhuman primates in which both sons and daughters remain within the same community.)

  Primate social groups easily absorb strange females from other communities. Strange males have a more difficult time and must first prove their worth by patrolling the perimeter of their adopted troop, a most dangerous position. After a time, they begin to challenge other males and, by testing their mettle, aspire to become the alpha male through com
petition and alliances. Despite all this moving about among nonhuman primates, the presence of new females or males from a neighboring troop does not reduce the hostility that each troop’s males display toward males of another when two groups confront each other in the forest.†Only by comprehending the concepts of birth, death, and paternity did the males of the human species begin to overcome this hobbling but natural enmity.‡

  The prospect of receiving a fresh supply of nubile women from other bands pleased the men and compensated them, somewhat, for the idea that they would have to trade away their own daughters.

  But they still had questions. “Suppose, as you suggest, the men of another tribe are willing to offer us their young women in exchange for ours. How shall we distribute these girls among ourselves?”

  “You may not like my answer, I fear,” Adam replied. “Few among us would possess these girls. We must pledge them to marry our young sons.”

  “What?! First we give away our young women, and now you say we do not get anything in return! This is a very bad idea. I say we do not agree,” one of the older men said, beginning to get truculent.

  “Wait, wait,” Adam cautioned. “We will gain as a band even if we don’t gain as individuals. The mating of our sons with another band’s daughters will produce healthy hunters who will replenish our ranks. If the young couple has daughters, they will have a better chance to survive to reach an age when they will give birth to another generation of hunters.

  “But there are other benefits for us, too. This new way of living will eliminate a lot of fighting among ourselves over women.” Adam smiled to himself. Bride barter, as strange a concept as there ever was, would actually solve a host of irksome problems.

  A short man who had not spoken now stood up and, lowering his voice conspiratorially, began to address the others about another benefit of bride barter that Adam had not mentioned. “We all know how wily women are. They always seem to be a step ahead of us. We are stronger, but they can easily outsmart us, especially when the matter concerns relations between us. If we give away their daughters to strangers, we will reduce their power.”

  One of the men next to him furrowed his brow in puzzlement. “Huh? What do you mean?”

  The new convert to Adam’s idea continued: “Although a man is stronger than a woman, two women can mob one man in a fight and the women may actually win because they are two against one. By separating a woman from her closest ally, her daughter, we will diminish women’s collective power. You see, a woman becomes isolated and less powerful when her daughters leave home to live far away. Of course, she still will have her son to protect her and look out for her interests. But he is a man and he owes loyalty to both the other men and his father.

  “On the other hand, the girl who comes to live with us will be severely handicapped. Her husband has remained on familiar ground, but she will be bereft of friends and family. I predict that she will be very submissive in order to gain acceptance into her new family. We will encourage her to be meek because it will serve our interests. In time, she will teach her daughters to defer to men.

  “To reinforce her submission, we will make each new wife live at the hearth of her husband’s mother. Generally, mothers are possessive toward their sons. The new wife will be in competition for her husband’s loyalty. This rivalry will serve our purposes well because the new wife must learn to live with not one, but two new people. She will soon discover just how hard that can be. We men have learned to employ the principle of ‘divide and conquer’ when hunting. Why should we not use it on our women to reduce the power they hold over us?

  “We will tell the women that we have to exchange their daughters for the good of the band. But among ourselves, we will know that this arrangement will give us a major advantage. Once we make such an important set of rules, women will begin to believe that it is our natural right to make the rules by which they live. By asserting control over such a vital issue as the future of their daughters, we demonstrate to the women who is boss. We will begin to convince them that they never really had any rights in the first place.”

  The new speaker sat back down and the others mulled over what he had said. Another man raised a question, redirecting the conversation back to Adam.

  “But will the mothers of the girls let us go through with the exchanges? Why would a mother permit us to give her daughter, whom she loves, to a strange man in a faraway tribe?”

  “That will always pose a problem,” Adam admitted, “but the women will consent for the following reasons. Mothers want to protect their daughters from pain. They love their daughters and realize that a nubile young woman living in the same quarters as their randy old husband might tempt him beyond the limits of his control. A woman does not want her husband to impregnate her child. Putting the welfare of her daughters before her own, a mother will want them to have healthy babies more than she wants them to stay near. She will be willing to give up her daughters precisely because she loves them so much.”

  Remember that, at the outset of these new living arrangements, men did not possess the degree of self-mastery they would acquire much later. It would require thousands of years of acculturation before men could begin to gain control over an urge as overpowering as their sex drive. The ineradicable incidence of incest in our society today is a vestige of a much greater problem that most likely would have plagued an ancestral community.

  Adam went on: “Also, once daughters begin to exhibit signs of womanhood, some mothers become anxious that their daughters are becoming more attractive or more desirable than they are. A few may actually be relieved to have their daughters leave the family quarters.

  “But the final reason the mothers will let their daughters go is that they want grandchildren. The women understand, better than men, that they will increase their chances for healthy grandchildren if they let us trade their daughters with other bands. I believe they will accede to these new arrangements.”

  “I have had enough,” cried one man. “Grandmothers, fathers, wives, husbands, sons, and daughters—who can keep track of all these new relatives? Adam, you have raised many troubling issues tonight. I, for one, am going to turn in.”

  There was a general agreement among the men on this last sentiment. The fire had turned to glowing embers, and the men slowly stood up and began drifting away. Adam’s pronouncement regarding his exciting but extremely thought-provoking concept of paternity had put each of them into a strange mood: a combination of elation, reflection, anxiety, and concern.

  All of the issues raised in the above discourse took thousands of years to resolve. But of one thing there can be no doubt—the third major insight, the one concerning paternity, like the two major ones preceding it, profoundly affected relations between men and women.

  Three major insights—about time, death, and paternity—led humans to form stable families.

  Chapter 22

  Wife/Husband

  I will not allow either boyfriend or husband

  To approach me in an erect condition

  And I will live at home without any sexual activity

  Wearing my best makeup and my most seductive dresses

  To inflame my husband’s ardor.

  —Oath that Lysistrata makes her followers repeat as they stage a sex strike against the men, in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata

  Males are a breeding experiment run by females—a proving ground from which females cull winninggenes.

  —John Hartung1

  Love, and the lack of it, change the brain forever.

  —Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon2

  The band’s women sat alongside the stream washing hides and weaving grass mats. While they were engaged in lively banter about the issues that interested them most, a radiantly healthy young woman named Eve brought the group’s conversation to a halt by announcing:

  “I think Adam finally figured it out.”

  “What do you mean?” one of the women asked as the others turned in her direction
and quieted.

  “Well, for weeks now, I have purposely let Abel run past Adam. Each time, Adam barely looked at the boy. I was beginning to despair. The big lug can be so dense! Yesterday, however, when he was in one of those black moods he gets into lately, Abel was making a ruckus. Suddenly, he started looking at Abel very long and hard, as if something was happening inside his head. I saw the precise moment when he finally got it! You should have seen the expression on his face!” Eve threw her head back and laughed with delight.

  “Tell us how he looked,” one of the other women gleefully cried.

  “Well, it was as if he had been hit squarely between the eyes with a bison hipbone.”

  “What did he do next?” the same woman asked.

  “After the initial shock wore off, he began to pace back and forth, all the while looking at Abel and then looking at me and then back to Abel. It was clear he finally realized that he was Abel’s father. He then turned on his heel and disappeared into the woods.”

  “What did he do after that?” asked one of the women.

  “After a while, he came back and just kept staring at Abel.”

  “Didn’t he say anything?”

  Eve shrugged. “Nothing. He seemed quite agitated. I kept expecting him to say something, because he looked as if he would explode if he didn’t, but he appeared to be completely tongue-tied. He understood, though. I know he did.”

  “Well, it’s about time!” an older woman exclaimed. “We women have known for many seasons that each of our children comes from a particular man. Getting these dolts to make the connection, however, has been almost impossible. Men are so thickheaded!”

  “What do you think will happen now that Adam knows?” another woman asked.