Sex, Time, and Power

How Women's Sexuality Shaped Evolution

By Leonard Shlain

Why did the big-brained Homo sapiens suddenly emerge some 150,000 years ago? In this provocative new book, Leonard Shlain, author of the bestselling Art & Physics and The Alphabet Versus The Goddess, argues that profound alterations in female sexuality hold the key to this mystery.

Long ago, due to the narrowness of her bipedal pelvis and the increasing size of her infants' heads, the human female began to experience high childbirth death rates, precipitating a crisis for the species. Women, facing the grave threat of dying during childbirth, needed to grasp the link between sex and painful labor nine months later. But, first, they had to learn how to to maneuver in the dimensions of the future.

Natural selection adapted her to this unique environmental stress by drastically reconfiguring her hormonal cycles. Her estrus (heat) disappeared and women acquired a menses (accompanied by heavy bleeding and painful cramps, and began to experience orgasms), mysteriously entrained with the periodicity of the moon. Women formulated the concept of a month, which in turn allowed them to make the connection between sex and pregnancy. Upon learning the majestic secret of time, these ancestral females then gained the power to refuse sex when they were ovulating. men were forced to confront women who possessed a mind of their own.

Women taught men about time, and men used this knowledge to become the planet's most fearsome predator. Unfortunately, they also discovered that they were mortal. Men then invented religions to soften the certainty of death. Subsequently, they belatedly grasped the function of sex. the possibility of achieving a kind of immortality through heirs drove men to construct patriarchal cultures whose purpose was to control women's reproductive choices. 

Leonard Shlain explores how these archaic insights about sex, time, and power dramatically altered all subsequent human culture, from the nature of courtship to the origin of marriage to the evolution of language, creating the conditions for two people to love each other more deeply and longer than any other animal. Sex, Time, and Power is a compelling book that challenges accepted views of human sexuality and is sure to stimulate new thinking about old matters.

--Publisher, Viking (2003)

Another compelling, scholarly, and thought-provoking contribution by someone who thinks outside the box. Leonard Shlain's Sex, Time, and Power brings a stimulating new perspective to the question of what it means to be human.

--Donald Johnson, author of Lucy: The Beginning of Mankind

Beautifully written and rich in ideas, this boldly speculative work has considerable explanatory power regarding the sweet mysteries of love and life.

--Ann Druyan, coauthor with Carl Sagan of Cosmos, Contact, and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Sex, Time, and Power is a fascinating account that ranges over the entire history of evolution in an effort to explain the mystery of human sexuality. If Shlain sometimes goes too far in the right direction--toward sociobiology--he always stretches your mind so radically it will never return to its original shape.

--Sam Keen, author of Fire in the Belly

Sometimes incendiary, often hilarious, always, profound, Shlain offers a masterpiece of ideas, and with it, a unique contribution to our understanding of gender and history, sexuality, and evolution.

--Jean Houston, Ph.D., author of Jump Time and A Passion for the Possible

Here is another masterful work by Leonard Shlain. the book is filled with marvelous lore extending back to the origin of our species, and with astute observations on intimate behavior.

--Richard Selzer, author of Mortal Lessons

Sex, Time, and Power

How Women's Sexuality Shaped Evolution

By Leonard Shlain

Contents

Contact: Yen Cheong, Senior Publicist, 212-366-2275 / yen.cheong@us.penguingroup.com

Leonard Shlain -- Surgeon, Author, Educator, Inventor, Speaker -- has received many distinctions and awards both as a surgeon and educator.  He began his writing career in the late 1970's contributing articles to magazines and newspapers including the Los Angeles Times.

In addition to being an author, Shlain is also Chief of Laparoscopic Surgery at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco and Associate Professor of Surgery at UCSF.  He was a pioneer in the field of video-assisted laparoscopic surgery and presently holds five patents for surgical devices. His Art & Physics is presently used as a textbook in many universities, high schools, and art academies.

In this more recent book,  Sex, Time, and Power, Shlain offers carefully reasoned, and certain to be controversial discussions on such subjects as menstruation, orgasm, puberty, circumcision, male aggression, menopause, baldness, left-handedness, the evolution of language, homosexuality, and the origin of marriage. Written in a lively and accessible style, Sex, Time, and Power is certain to generate heated debate in the media and among readers interested in human evolution and the history of sexuality.