Sex, Time, and Power
Page 45
7.
Washburn, 1960, pp. 60–75; Rosenberg and Trevathan, 1996, pp. 161–68.
Chapter 2: Big Brain/Narrow Pelvis
1.
Ellison, 2001, p. 22.
2.
Bowlby, 1972.
3.
Furuichi, 1987, pp. 309–18.
4.
Jolly, 1999, p. 155.
5.
Avers, 1974.
6.
Trevathan, 1987, pp. 72–88.
Chapter 3: Red Blood/White Milk
1.
Quoted in Ardrey, 1976, p. 75.
2.
Zuckerman, 1932, p. 98.
3.
Angier, 1999, p. 117.
4.
Dunbar, 1996, p. 3.
5.
Labrecque, Eason, and Marcoux, 2001, pp. 1753–54; Myers-Helfgott and Helfgott, 1999, pp. 305–25.
6.
Hrdy, 1999, p. 434.
7.
Trevathan, 1987, pp. 104–6.
8.
Angier, 1999, p. 248.
9.
Jacobs, Butler, and Blanche, 1965.
10.
Strassman, 1998, pp. 167–84.
11.
Strassman, 1996, pp. 181–220.
12.
Norwitz, Schust, and Fisher, 2001, pp. 1400–1408.
13.
Hrdy, 1999, p. 7.
Chapter 4: Plant Iron/Meat Iron
1.
Daly and Wilson, 1978, p. 321.
2.
Grahn, 1993, p. 132.
3.
Crawford and Marsh, 1989, p. 88.
4.
Aiello and Wheeler, 1995, pp. 199–221; Leonard and Robertson, 1994, pp. 77–88.
Chapter 5:Gyna Sapiens/Gyna All-the-Others
1.
Morgan, 1972, p. 92.
2.
Comfort, 1967.
3.
Zahavi and Zahavi, 1997.
4.
Profet, 1993, p. 352.
5.
Diamond, 1997, p. 71; Alexander and Noonan, 1979, pp. 436–53; Alexander, 1990.
6.
Buss, 1994, p. 187.
7.
Burley, 1977, pp. 3476–79.
8.
Hrdy, 1999, p. 34.
9.
Daly and Wilson, 1988.
10.
Symons, 1979.
11.
Benshoof and Thornhill, 1979, pp. 95–106.
12.
Morris, 1967, p. 65.
13.
McClintock, 1971, pp. 244–45.
14.
Batten, 1992, p. 117.
15.
Wrangham, 2001, p. 140.
16.
Dunbar, 1988.
17.
Turke, 1984, pp. 33–44.
18.
Jolly, 1999, p. 1.
19.
Knight, 1991, p. 215.
Chapter 6: Periods/Perils
1.
Delaney, Lupton, and Toth, 1979, p. 1.
2.
Profet, 1993, p. 336.
3.
Grahn, 1993, p. 52.
4.
March, 1980, pp. 125–27.
5.
Diamond, 1997, p. 122.
6.
Konner, 2002, p. 104.
7.
Countinho, 1999, p. 97.
8.
Ibid., p. 60.
9.
Grahn, 1993, p. 98.
10.
Loebenstein, trans., 1983, p. 8.
11.
Pliny, 1963, chapter 23.
12.
Dunbar, Knight, and Power, eds., 1999, p. 98.
13.
Nicholson, 1995, pp. 779–84.
14.
Profet, 1993, pp. 335–85.
15.
Strassman, 1996, pp. 181–220.
16.
Dalton, 1964.
17.
Delaney, Lupton, and Toth, 1979, p. 19.
Chapter 7: Her Climax/His Climax
1.
Quoted in Symons, 1979, p. 219.
2.
Twain, 1938, p. 43.
3.
Sagan and Druyan, 1992, p. 335.
4.
Konner, 2002, p. 293.
5.
Sherfey, 1966, pp. 88–92.
6.
Baker and Bellis, 1993, pp. 861–85.
7.
Konner, 2002, p. 293.
8.
Bermant, 1976, pp. 76–103.
9.
Quoted in Symons, 1979, p. 208.
10.
Masters and Johnson, 1966.
11.
Hines, 2001, pp. 359–62.
12.
Angier, 1999, p. 63.
13.
Bodger, 2000, p. 227.
Chapter 8: Grandmothers/Circumcision
1.
Quoted in Fisher, 1992, p. 308.
2.
Spock, 1989, p. 43.
3.
Quoted in Fisher, 1999, p. 204.
4.
Sherman, 1998, pp. 759–61.
5.
Hawkes, 1997, pp. 551–77.
6.
Angier, 1999, p. 250.
7.
Gardiner, 1949, pp. 1433–37.
8.
Manniche, 1987, p. 8.
9.
Wilson, 1997, pp. 7–8.
10.
Modern perceptions of circumcision’s origins are a confusing mix of myth, religion, and science, so it would be helpful to review their place in history. At present, circumcision is associated with the demands of a stern Old Testament patriarchal god.
The ancient Hebrews declared that it was one of the four (and only four) conditions of the covenant between Yahweh and His Chosen People. In this ancient contract that begins with a conversation between Abraham and Yahweh, God demands that Abraham (1) foreswear fealty to any other god except Yahweh and (2), to demonstrate his resolve, sacrifice the last several millimeters of the loose skin covering his and all subsequent converts’ penises. (The latter must rank among the strangest requests made by a god of his followers in history.) In exchange for these commands, Yahweh promises Abraham that (3) he will become the leader of a great and generously populated nation and (4) his new nomadic nation will finally have a homeland to call its own (Genesis 17:1–21). Because of the centrality of this covenant to their religion, Jews consider the practice of circumcision essential to their identity.
After the death and resurrection of Jesus, Paul faced the daunting task of converting the inhabitants of the Roman Empire to Christianity. He had the political acumen to recognize that a major stumbling block in his mission was the onerous Biblical requirement that each new convert must undergo circumcision. A skilled negotiator, Paul realized that circumcision was a real deal killer and he simply dispensed with it. Paul replaced a potentially hazardous surgical procedure with the much more palatable requirement that a convert simply declare that he believed in Christ.
A few centuries later, Muhammad faced the same conundrum as Paul had, but was proselytizing to a vastly different audience. Instead of the literate, sophisticated inhabitants of cosmopolitan Roman centers, the Prophet needed to convince a desert-hardened constituency of the need to adhere to a new strict set of rules markedly at variance from what had passed for religion before his received revelation from the angel Gabriel in A.D. 610. To promote literacy among the illiterate and to keep his converts focused on the gravity of a sacred written text, Muhammad maintained a close connection to the Old Testament in order to link his teachings with ancient scripture. A central tenet of his new religion was the lineage connecting Arabs to Abraham through his son Ishmael. Circumcision was therefore imperative, and its practice remains unquestioned among Muslims. Lost among the precepts of the world’s three Western religions is that circumcision long antedated the Old Testament, as evidenced by the Saqqara mural, and most likely was a rit
ual performed in prehistoric times.
The cosmologies of hunter-gatherers contain a plethora of spirits. Supernatural genders can be masculine, feminine, or hermaphroditic. In general, if a tribe exalts the spoils of the hunt, the spirits tend to be more virile than fertile. If the fruits of gathering are the main staple of the tribe’s diet, then feminine spirits tend to be more influential. With the advent of agriculture, a major shift occurred in every culture. The power previously invested among multiple spirits became concentrated in one all-powerful mother deity known as the Earth Goddess. She had a different name in virtually every society studied, but no one has yet identified a major ancient culture in which both the men and women failed to venerate this omnipotent Creatrix. The Earth Goddess presided over life, death, and the fertility of animals and crops.
In many early agricultural societies, it was the custom to crown a vigorous young male specimen king for a season, during which time he was encouraged to mate with many healthy, beautiful young women. At the end of his yearlong reign, he was sacrificed on orders of the high priestesses of the Goddess and his blood was sown into the freshly turned soil so that his vitality would ensure the fertility of the season’s plantings (Frazer, 1960, pp. 559–88). (Many feminist writers question the veracity of these accounts, claiming that patriarchal religious leaders, attempting to discredit the Goddess in the eyes of the people, spread these stories that were tantamount to propaganda.)
In many goddess religions of old, men not uncommonly voluntarily castrated themselves to serve Her. As late as the fifth century Roman Empire, Augustine decried the contemporary practice among men who mutilated themselves in the name of Cybele, the reigning Roman mother goddess (Augustine, 1972, p. 286).
If a priestess or a priest of the Goddess could convince men to submit to such extreme sacrifices, surely those in charge of the welfare of the tribe could manage to institute the mild (in comparison) practice of male circumcision. Perhaps the following speculative scenario can explain the reasons behind its adoption by the Hebrews.
When the Hebrews began their Reformation of the Egyptian religion, they set out to reject all aspects of Egyptian ways. Their spare religion would embrace an invisible god—no images, no goddesses—and a sacred alphabetic text. They so thoroughly rejected the Egyptian obsession with mummies, pyramids, and the Land of the Dead that the Hebrews initiated the only world religion whose founding document, the Torah, makes no mention of an afterlife.
Yet it is rare for a people rebelling against a parent culture (or a child rebelling against a parent) not to carry over some traditions from the preceding society. The Buddha fulminated against Hindu religious practices, yet he incorporated the Hindu idea of reincarnation, making it central to his new doctrine, destined to become Buddhism. After breaking with the Jewish religion that spawned it, Christianity maintained its connection to the Old Testament, and Islam continued to venerate the Kaaba, the black stone monolith in Mecca left over from the pre-Muslim worship.
Therefore, it would not be surprising that the Israelites might have retained the Egyptian practice of circumcising males. To expunge any idea that this practice was originally the directive of the Goddess, the early Israelites claimed that a stern male deity now decreed it, not the formerly powerful female deity.
Among the many ancient civilizations inclined to honor feminine values, Egyptians held goddesses in the highest esteem, especially in the earlier years of their exceedingly long history. Isis, Maat, Hathor, Nepthys, and many others were venerated with the same degree of fervor as were male deities. The Egyptians’ oldest creation myth posited that two goddesses, without the assistance of any god, created the world (Larrington, 1992, pp. 24–25). Egyptians practiced matrilineal inheritance customs, and women exerted considerable influence at all levels of society. They often wielded major political power and controlled financial resources. As acknowledged in surrounding ancient cultures and in their own historical accounts, Egyptians were also experts in the art of love.
The name of the drug belladonna means “beautiful woman” in Italian. Cleopatra was the first woman in history that we know of to use the drug to dilate the pupils of her eyes. Egyptian women understood that a man is more sexually attracted at an unconscious level to a wide-eyed female than he is to one whose pupils are of normal diameter. I conjecture that the women in a culture this sophisticated, having discovered so subtle a secret of sensuality, would most likely have discerned circumcision’s elusive benefits. The Israelites carried the practice over into their new religion and three thousand years later it remains firmly embedded in modern culture.
11.
Maimonides, 1956, pt. 3, ch. 49.
12.
Fisher, 1999, p. 171.
13.
Sherfey, 1966, p. 87.
14.
Richards, 1999, pp. 308–14, 508.
15.
Konner, 2002, pp. 102–5.
16.
Quoted in Fisher, 1999, p. 182.
Chapter 9: Prey/Predator
1.
Sahlins, 1960, p. 82.
2.
Schreiner, 1978, p. 176.
3.
Leakey and Lewin, 1978, p. 105.
4.
Stanford, 1999, p. 151.
5.
Wrangham and Peterson, 1996.
6.
Quoted in Donald, 1991, p. 104.
7.
Quoted in Johanson and Edey, 1981, p. 309.
8.
Quoted in Morgan, 1990, p. 41.
9.
Laporte and Zihlman, 1983, pp. 96–110.
10.
Wheeler, 1994, pp. 339–50.
11.
Tattersall, 1998, p. 117.
12.
Hardy, 1960, p. 642.
13.
Daly and Wilson, 1978, p. 337.
14.
Stanford, 1999, pp. 40, 70.
15.
Donald, 1991, p. 111.
16.
Symons, 1979, pp. 158–62.
17.
Ridley, 1993, p. 228.
18.
Sagan and Druyan, 1992.
19.
Quoted in Leakey and Lewin, 1992, p. 181.
20.
Hanbury-Tenison, 1982, p. 95.
21.
Zerries, 1968, p. 272.
22.
Harrington, 1933, p. 179.
23.
Biesele, 1993, p. 84.
24.
Hawkes, 1991, pp. 29–54.
25.
Stanford, 1999, p. 157.
26.
Landes, 1938, p. 131.
27.
Lee, 1988, p. 266.
28.
Siskind, 1973, p. 103.
29.
Goodall, 1986, p. 484.
30.
Fisher, 1982.
31.
Richards, 1987, pp. 166–67.
Chapter 10: Carnivory/Vegetarianism
1.
Quoted in Pinker, 1997, p. 197.
2.
Kingdon, 1993, p. 124.
3.
Batten, 1992, p. 158.
4.
Milton, 1984, pp. 249–79; Stahl, 1984, pp. 151–68.
5.
Fisher, 1992, p. 147.
6.
Corballis, 1991, p. 135.
7.
Wrangham, 2001, pp. 123–43.
8.
Rodwell-Wilton, 1985, p. 93.
9.
Ibid.
10.
Calloway and Kunzer, 1982, p. 356.
11.
Morgan, 1972, p. 174.
12.
Crawford and Marsh, 1989.
13.
Crawford and Crawford, 1972, p. 17.
14.
Ridley, 1999, p. 169.
15.
Ibid., p. 170.
16.
Ibid., p. 89.
17.
Speth, 1987, pp. 13–29.
18.
19.
Bruner et al., 1996, pp. 992–96.
20.
Brabin, 1999, pp. 690–91.
Chapter 11: Menarche/Mustaches
1.
Quoted in Symons, 1979, p. 96.
2.
Low, 2000, p. 83.
3.
Symons, 1979, p. 253.
4.
Grahn, 1993, p. 35.
5.
Weinstock, 1947.
6.
Goodall, 1986, p. 443.
7.
Money and Eberhardt, 1972.
8.
Martin and Bumpass, 1989, pp. 37–51.
9.
Bogin, 1988.
10.
Herodotus, 1954, p. 121.
11.
Marshall, 1971, pp. 103–62.
12.
Bettelheim, 1954.
13.
MacLean, 1990.
14.
Sowell, 1999, p. 861.
15.
Schiffer, 1998, p. 69.
16.
Thatcher, Walken, and Guidice, 1987, pp. 1100–33.
17.
Damasio, 1994; LeDoux, 1998; Coolidge and Wynn, 2002.
Chapter 12: Premenstrual Tension/Masturbatory Tension
1.
Ridley, 1993, p. 133.
2.
Small, 1995, p. 61.
3.
Gross, 1975, pp. 526–49.
4.
Rosenblum, 1976.
5.
Hrdy, 1999, p. 221.
6.
New York Times, June 24, 1999, p. A20.
7.
Sagan and Druyen, 1992, p. 229.
8.
Hill and Wenzel, 1981.
9.
Benedek and Rubinstein, 1939, pp. 245–70, 461–85.
10.
Dalton, 1964; Dalton, 1969, pp. 242–47.
11.
Markee, 1940, pp. 221–308.
12.
Dalton, 1964, 1969, 1975.