Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution

Written by Leonard Shlain

Narrated by Bob Souer

As in the bestselling The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Leonard Shlain's provocative new book promises to change the way listeners view themselves and where they came from.



Sex, Time, and Power offers a tantalizing answer to an age-old question: Why did big-brained Homo sapiens suddenly emerge some 150,000 years ago? The key, according to Shlain, is female sexuality. Drawing on an awesome breadth of research, he shows how, long ago, the narrowness of the newly bipedal human female's pelvis and the increasing size of infants' heads precipitated a crisis for the species. Natural selection allowed for the adaptation of the human female to this environmental stress by reconfiguring her hormonal cycles, entraining them with the periodicity of the moon. The results, however, did much more than ensure our existence; they imbued women with the concept of time, and gave them control over sex—a power that males sought to reclaim. And the possibility of achieving immortality through heirs drove men to construct patriarchal cultures that went on to dominate so much of human history.



From the nature of courtship to the evolution of language, Shlain's brilliant and wide-ranging exploration stimulates new thinking about very old matters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Jul 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781705239742

Leonard Shlain

Leonard Shlain was a bestselling author, inventor and surgeon. Admired among artists, scientists, philosophers, anthropologists and educators, Shlain authored three bestselling books: Art & Physics, Alphabet vs. The Goddess and Sex, Time, and Power. He delivered stunning visual presentations based upon his books in venues around the world including Harvard, The New York Museum of Modern Art, CERN, Los Alamos, The Florence Academy of Art and the European Council of Ministers. His fans include Al Gore, Norman Lear and singer Bjork. Shlain died in May 2009 at the age of 71 from brain cancer shortly after the completion of this book. His legacy continues with his children who helped bring this book to publication: Kimberly Brooks, artist and founding editor of the Arts and Science Section of the Huffington Post, Jordan Shlain, doctor and founder of Healthloop.com and Tiffany Shlain, filmmaker, founder of The Webby Awards and director of the Sundance documentary, Connected, about the ideas in Leonardo’s Brain, as well as Leonard Shlain’s final year. Visit www.leonardshlain.com.

Reviews for Sex, Time, and Power

[brian taylor · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

breathtaking and fantastic insights!
One of the most profound books I’ve ever read

[switchknitter · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Shlain's hypothesis is that early humans' dawning comprehension of time passing is what jump-started the Creative Explosion -- the Upper Paleolithic Revolution -- 40,000 years ago. That, along with women's ability to say no to sex and men's realization of paternity, fueled art and science and culture and everything else humanity has accomplished since. It's very interesting to read, and Shlain's ideas are worth considering.

I had one problem with this book: Too much poetic license. Shlain personifies evolution as Mother Nature and has her metaphorically "designing" humanity. This obscures the reasons why certain things, such as homo sapienns' sense of time, evolved. It can also be very annoying, especially in his waxing poetic about the insights of Unknown Adam and Unknown Eve. Yes, it fit a lot of ideas into a concise format, but it was too "cute".

Shlain ends with the hope the recent developments and acceleration of human development will lead to a metamorphosis in the species. It'd be nice if he was right. His section on the origins of misogyny and patriarchy would have been too depressed a note to end on. The optimism of the last chapter was a nice counterpoint.

Good book. Worth reading.