Sex, Time, and Power by Leonard Shlain

Author:Leonard Shlain
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2003-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,

Men were deceivers ever,

One foot in sea, and one on shore,

To one thing constant never.

Though female mendacity poses a similar risk to a male, the stakes of male deceit are much higher. Many a woman has rued the day she met a particularly artful liar. Women needed to become expert at reading between the lines. If a woman garbled the transmission of an unworthy beau, and granted permission for his emission to swim northward in her, she opened herself to a raft of future problems that had no simple solutions. Unlike the offspring of the several million other sexually reproducing species, Gyna sapiens’ children are forever. Anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer societies have documented that single mothers fare far less well than mothers who have mates.26 The same holds true for their children. Any astute observer perusing the daily newspapers can draw a similar conclusion.

More common than outright deceit, a man will often greatly exaggerate his virtues and accomplishments in an effort to impress. This is not unique to humans. Virtually all male animals engage in such puffery. Males want the females upon whom they are temporarily fixated to see them as larger than they really are when they go acourting.*

Gyna sapiens had to learn how to see through a Homo sapiens’ inevitable braggadocio in order to assess accurately his fitness as a possible partner. (Surely there are a few genuinely shy and modest men, but it is a rare man who could keep a straight face and claim that he had never stretched the truth when trying to inflate a woman’s opinion of him.)

Despite its drawbacks, speech was a godsend to the female gender. A woman could evaluate both the content and the tenor of a man’s message from a safe distance and decide over time whether she wanted to have sex with him. Since birth-control measures most likely would have been ineffectual or nonexistent at the dawn of our species, she knew her decision was unfairly freighted—grave consequences for her and minimal price for him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.