Sex, Time, and Power

by Leonard Shlain

  Homo sapiens is the only father among the millions of species that reproduce sexually who cares enough to arrange marriages for his daughters and to teach his sons how to throw a baseball. That ancestral man wanted heirs because he feared death more than he loved children is evidenced in anthropological studies of diverse present cultures. There exist many examples in which a father shows minimal or no affection for his children. His inexplicable neglect exists alongside his paranoid concern regarding the paternity of “his” children.

  The shadows began to lengthen, and some of the women started to stir. “Before we return to camp,” Eve said, “I have one last thing I want to share. It’s something I have observed since Adam figured out that Abel is his son. Now that he knows this, he will want us to have more children together. He will be especially concerned that I might have a child with another man: Then I might not devote enough time to his child. And he’s right. Infants take a lot of work, and we all know that we have to spend more time with the new ones that come along.

  “But Adam will fear that I might prefer the child of another man over his son. Now, I’m not sure he has thought this completely through yet, but, believe me, he will. He is smart enough to figure it out eventually, and he will not want to be snared into providing for some other man’s child. This is the main reason he will want me to be faithful to him, and why he will sacrifice his freedom so that I won’t want someone else’s baby.

  “I’m not interested in having any other man’s children, but Adam doesn’t know that, and I’m not going to tell him. I’m just going to let him think that there is always the possibility that I might be interested in someone else. That way, I can be sure he will take extra-special care of both me and little Abel, as well as any additional children we might have together.”

  “Isn’t that a little, well, devious?” asked one of the women.

  Eve smiled enigmatically. “Men are stronger than we are. We must use the control we have over their desire for both pleasure and heirs in such a way that we achieve equality. Remember, our ability to refuse a man’s advances is the source of our power, and it is for his own good. Entwining a man’s legs with little children will soften him. A man will gradually learn over time the joy that comes from loving his children—and their mothers.”

  Over the years, as the male’s investment of time and effort in his children increased, so, too, did his concern for the welfare of their mother. Men began to realize that if their mates died their young children would not likely survive. Increasingly, men came to understand that their fate and that of their future heirs, both born and unborn, were intertwined with their wives. Increasingly, the man pledged what was his to her. His successes were her successes; her travails or illnesses affected him as if they were happening to him. Knowledge of paternity markedly diminished men’s innate selfishness. Men ceased thinking only of themselves, and began to assume a greater responsibility in ensuring the welfare of their mates.

  The same thinking process shaped his relationship to his children. What he accumulated in his life, whether it was skill, knowledge, or goods, he wanted to share with them. He bequeathed these things first to his wife and then to their children when he passed on. He learned that he must protect his little ones, even if it involved risking life and limb, because if his children died then a part of him and his claim on the future died, too. He thrilled at their successes as if they were his and anguished over their failures. In short, the destiny of his children gradually came to hold his heart hostage. Fathers, like mothers before them, realized the truth in the saying, “A parent can only be as happy as his or her unhappiest child.” More than compensating for his concern, a father learned, somewhat to his own surprise, that the multitextured relationship he could develop with his son or daughter could exceed in complexity the relationship he had formed with their mother.

  A father watching his growing family swell in size and number experienced pride in his manhood. Besides hunting, men had a new reason for living…and loving. With few exceptions, men eagerly longed to pair up with a woman and participate in the magnificent adventure called “creating a family.” A man’s stature among the entire band grew as he submitted proof positive of his potency. Other men treated him with respect when they saw that he could keep a woman happy enough not to stray.

  A man’s fear of death began to ease as he watched his children grow. He learned the secret that mothers have always known: Despite the finality of his own inevitable demise, a piece of him would live on. Increasingly, he was disposed to develop a closer relationship with the mother of his children. This benefited his children, for, as an old proverb goes, “The greatest gift a man can give his children is to love their mother.”

  As a couple incrementally built a shared history of significant events, those that were uplifting as well as those that seared the soul, they constructed an edifice, stone by stone, that became stronger with age and better able to weather future turmoil. The mental and emotional boundaries that separated them began to blur with the scouring of age. The two members of a couple began to speak the same thoughts at identical moments, as if their minds were functioning as a single unit. The constant proximity of their two souls began to meld into each other until the two were as one.

  As each came to know the other better, a man gradually realized that intimacy enabled him to become a better man, a more nurturing father, and a more complete human being. His love for his wife awakened in him his dormant feminine side, and this new awareness made him a more balanced person. This, in turn, encouraged him to be a more loving husband. And all these changes occurring in the male psyche benefited his mate. The changes in his character as a result of intimacy with a woman more profoundly altered him than her. The three psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon put it succinctly: “Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.”4

  Before men gained the crushing knowledge of death’s inevitability and grasped the mechanism of paternity, Homo sapiens were just male mammals belonging to the order of primates in the family of apes and the species of hominids. After these two insights reconfigured their psyches, men rose above their taxonomic classification to become husbands and fathers.

  Men and Women

  Part V

  A little boy begins life loving his mother. Why, then, are virtually all societies steeped in misogyny and patriarchy?

  Chapter 23

  Misogyny/Patriarchy

  …a central paradox of the human condition is that our species possesses the capacity to carry out sexual inequality to its greatest known extremes.

  —Sarah Blaffer Hrdy1

  No woman is completely free unless she has control over her own reproductive system.

  —Margaret Sanger2

  I never yet touched a fig leaf that didn’t turn into a price tag.

  —Saul Bellow3

  Adam and Eve must now sit down with each other and work out the details of their new mutual child-rearing life together. As they try to mesh their conflicting everyday needs and wants, they will become painfully aware of how much their two agendas vary. Complicating matters will also be the very different ways the two of them think about things. But they will succeed through persistence, because, at last, they also both realize that each of them needs the other for reasons beyond sex, death, and DNA—to satisfy longing, to love deeply, and to enjoy each other’s companionship. As in all negotiations, they will eventually settle their differences through compromise. The framework that the first couple finally hammers out will serve as the template for the man-woman relationships of the most successful subsequent human cultures. Let us leave the first couple’s initially prickly but heartfelt “relationship” discussion so that we may review where we have been.

  My aim has been to focus attention on a series of elements that I believe have been either overlooked or not given their proper due in the telling of the evolutionary story of our young species. The untangling of the cat’s cradle of factors that i
nitiates the emergence of a new species must, by the very complexity of the task, remain in the realm of speculation. Nevertheless, I hope that my endeavor has added to the readers’ understanding of relations between the sexes and has predisposed them to conceive of human mating behaviors in a new way.

  The key factor shaping human sexual relations was the fallout that occurred following Gyna sapiens’ acquisition of Free Will. Her ability to choose a course of action different from the commands of her potent sex hormones was the result of genetic mutations. The impetus for the installation of Original Choice in her genome was Natural Selection’s imperative to grant women veto power over impregnation. This became necessary because birth carried with it—for the first time in any complex animal—the mordant threat of maternal death. She evolved cognitively more quickly than he did, because the sword of Damocles* hung over her sex, not his.

  To acquire the resolve necessary to refuse sex when she was ovulating, this one breakaway female primate had to undergo a major overhaul in the design of her brain coincident with a gear-grinding resetting of the major timers within her reproductive system. A perplexed Homo sapiens discovered to his chagrin that he had to respond to the challenge she posed to him or lose the opportunity to pass on his genes.

  Compounding his problem were changes simultaneously occurring in his genome, particularly his increased eagerness to have sex with a woman, any woman, all the time. The psychosexual emergency precipitated by this dissonance of desire between the sexes set the stage for a battle, the tocsin sounds of which have reverberated down through all the generations ever since African Eve proudly held up her firstborn for all the other members of her pressed band to behold.

  Obscured by her flamboyant reproductive changes, Gyna sapiens’ internal milieu began to exhibit a puzzling inability to retain iron atoms. Leaking from multiple avenues throughout her fertile life, the metal’s loss imperiled her health and destiny. The homeostatic warning light on the gauge tracking her serum-hemoglobin levels blinked ominously during the time she was gestating, birthing, or breast-feeding her baby. Some other species also manifest a male-female hemoglobin disparity, but they do not have to answer to a greedy, demanding brain that appropriates up to over one-fourth of all the hemoglobin’s precious oxygen cargo. Another factor adding to her potential peril: The breast-fed infants of other mammals do not have iron-hungry brains that more than double in size during the first year of life.

  This, then, was the crux of the problem: By exercising the power to postpone sex, women gained a significant advantage over men; men, however, unburdened of child-rearing could more easily obtain the essential item, iron (along with a raft of other precious, hard-to-obtain foodstuffs), that women and their babies needed. For the first time among the animals, Mother Nature required that the members of the two sexes enter into complicated negotiations in order to agree mutually on the terms and conditions under which they would engage in consensual sex.

  Men enthusiastically increased their interest in the hunting life to acquire the nuptial gift most desired by ancestral women—meat. Diets rich in animal products rapidly shrank their primate vegetarian-designed gut, releasing more oxygen to build out multistoried, elaborately gabled brains. The discovery of cooking facilitated the absorption of difficult-to-digest plant and animal foods (which further accelerated the process), but also burned enzymatic digestive bridges, making it difficult for this one primate to revert to subsisting on a diet of raw plant foods.

  Hoping to impress women, men set out on their quest for ever-larger and more dangerous quarry. Hindering them in their endeavor was their unprepossessing appearance. Large prey would likely not even have bothered to raise their snouts upon picking up the scent of this newest predator on the block. Natural Selection would call upon Gyna sapiens to come to his assistance and properly arm him.

  Gyna sapiens underwent a major overhaul of the key features of her reproductive life cycle, the purpose of which was to give her access to the wonder weapon, foresight. Upon acquiring the key that would open the gates leading to the future, she used the information to make the connection first between sex and pregnancy, then between sex and possible death during labor, and finally between sex and a lifelong commitment to her child’s welfare. She was shaken, apprehensive, and changed as a result of these three purely mental extensions. Nevertheless, unselfishly, she used her newfound knowledge to gird the loins of her man with the invisible shield that would ensure his success first on the savanna and later in the snows and dunes of more inhospitable climes. Returning triumphant from his forays, he provisioned her with the iron-rich meat she needed to maintain her health and raise smart, vigorous babies.

  Mother Nature captured Gyna sapiens’ attention by aligning her menses with the moon, allowing this one creature to grasp the meaning of a month and discover the advantages of maneuvering in deeptime. This single evolutionary advance increased the opportunities open to the human species more than any other. A major insight occurring to sapients as a result of breaking through to the future was the realization that, among the many diseases that harried them, the only one that carried a 100 percent mortality rate was life. Everyone, no matter how young, strong, or ebullient, was doomed to die.

  This epiphany more deeply haunted men than it did women and initiated a sea-change in consciousness second only to the connection a woman had previously made between sex and pregnancy. The awareness of a future death changed the outlook, demeanor, and aspirations of the human species, separating individuals further from their relatives on life’s extensively branching tree, both close and distant. Increasingly complex rituals, beliefs, and customs emerged that were attempts to soften the blow.

  Soon after these discoveries, the facility to think ahead led to the third transformative insight. A man finally discovered his role in the sex-birth process and realized he fathered specific children. This knowledge alleviated some, but not all, of his limited-life anxiety. Awareness of paternity spawned in him an intense interest in the fate of his offspring, never witnessed in the males of any other species. For the first time, a male wanted to keep track of the exact whereabouts and fortunes of his genetic legacy. He hoped to live on through the memory of his children, and he committed himself to being involved in their upbringing.

  A powerful emotion, hitherto never experienced to the same degree by the males of any other species, also moved him. Sustainable over an extended period of time, love greatly aided his comity with both his offspring and the mother who bore them. His burning desire to know his children required establishing an entirely novel relationship with their mother. And so men needed the routing equipment installed in their nervous system that could lead them easily to the kingdom of love. These cables and modules had to coexist alongside others that sounded the clarion call to arms or the frenetic cries of the hunt. Men had to be killers and lovers simultaneously—a merging of opposites that has never completely been successful.

  Men eventually concluded that the only way they could be confident that a man’s “begats” were his and his alone was to plot together to restructure societies’ sexual relationships. To accomplish their long-term goals, men set out to achieve the impossible—control women’s sexuality and reproductive abilities. Severely hampering their efforts was their own need to gain a semblance of control over their sexual urges.

  These three insights concerning birth, death, and paternity, all of which are intimately bound to sex and indirectly connected to iron metabolism, molded every culture in the world into its present shape. Women were at a significant disadvantage if they tried to resist these male impositions, because they were weaker physically, and their babies’ enormous needs required that they constantly seek male support. Despite these evident drawbacks, women were not entirely without resources. Many a woman was able to influence men by subtler means and could, not infrequently, wrap a husky man around her dainty little finger. Still the evidence remains undeniable: Men have craftily sought ways to blunt the power of women’s
Original Choice.

  Our species is 150,000 years old. In the last ten thousand years, we have experienced a series of technological revolutions that have markedly affected the relationship between men and women. Yet all of us are walking around with a nervous system designed to work optimally within a small band of hunter-gatherers. The substantial creation of wealth and the social upheaval attendant upon the rise of first agriculture, then industrialization, and most recently technology, tend to obscure this important fact.

  The most critical legacy of those bygone times was a sharp division of labor between men and women—a necessary condition for the survival of the individual and the progression of the generations. Then, abruptly, the key three insights ignited synapses within the recently enlarged brains of Gyna and Homo sapiens. Throwing the switch that illuminated these three lightbulbs one after the other triggered a massive reconfiguration of society. Many of the sexist biases and social institutions that persist in the world came into being as a result. The two most pervasive that affect relations between men and women are misogyny and patriarchy.