A review by violetpretty5
Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution by Leonard Shlain

3.0

This book aimed to explore the question "what could possibly be the evolutionary advantage to women losing significant amounts of blood/iron each month". As he tends to do, Shlain was able to hypothesize an answer incorporating seemingly disparate facets (in this case, including fatherhood, existentialism, and the linear perception of time). His arguments are always interesting and at least somewhat substantiated, but this book felt like it was built on less solid ground than The Alphabet vs. the Goddess. For instance, Chapter 21 consisted almost entirely of hypothetical conversations between people 40,000 years ago discussing their ideas about genetics and lineages -- it was hard for me to fathom even 75% of these ideas becoming apparent in one generation. In short, Shlain brings up interesting ideas, but it is not always clear to me how original all of the thinking is, how realistic all of the thinking is, and where all the loose ends go.