Did women's blood lead to men's blood lust?(Sex, Time and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution)(Book Review)

Sex, Time and Power: Haw Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution by Leonard Shlain. Viking, New York 2003. 420 pp. $25.95 ISBN 0-670-03233-6.

WOMEN'S MENSTRUAL PERIODS, which were timed to lunar phases, gave them the concept of time, thus the ability to conceive of the future, hence the ability to plan ahead. They passed this on to men to make them better hunters, because women needed the iron found in red meat. Eventually, at some time in the Paleolithic, women figured out the connection between sex and pregnancy, which they communicated to men. When men realized the children were theirs, they invented patriarchy and subjugated women. Thus, everything from weapons to calendars to misogyny came from menstruation and its drain on women's iron. This, in a nutshell, is the thesis of Leonard Shlain's latest book, Sex, Time, and Power.

In his earlier book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess (which I reviewed here in Vol.7 No.2) Shlain, chief of laparoscopic surgery at California Medical Center in San Francisco, asserted that the use of the alphabet-specifically a system of writing based on letters symbolizing sounds, as opposed to an alphabet where characters stood for words--shifted civilization from an image-based, right brained, woman-centered society, to a word-based, left brain, nasty patriarchy. The most egregious fault of that rather silly book was that its author ignored disconfirming evidence. If the hieroglyphic writing of Egypt and the pictographic writing of China indicated woman-oriented cultures, how is it that in ancient Egypt's nearly 3,000year history there was only one native female pharaoh, Hatshepsut, who had to invent a special myth that the gods had chosen her to be ruler and who also had to wear a fake beard in public? Why also was traditional Chinese culture--the same culture that gave us foot binding--so patriarchal and misogynistic? Shlain essentially glossed over these problems (along with many others).

Fortunately, Sex, Time and Power is considerably less egregious in its faults than The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. Its main fault, I think, lies in soaring assumptions based on a paucity of evidence. The basic thesis is that menstruation had two effects on the women of our species: It enabled them to choose when they would have sex, and it made them iron deficient. In our near relatives, the chimpanzees, sex is simple and predictable. Females go into estrus (heat) when they are fertile and crave sex. Males become interested in any female in heat, and all males in a troop copulate with her, one after another, in order of dominance. The sex is nothing that would inspire a poem (or, for that matter, even keep a porno flick going). The male "displays" (rears up on his hind legs in a dominant gesture), the female "presents" (puts her head down and raises her rear in a gesture of submission) and the two copulate for about two minutes.…