Hello Readers.

Edit: I forgot to write some stuff so ill add it in later on.

A while ago my friend asked me what was up with that kind of an opening. I mean, it makes a blog entry look like a letter. Adding a formal touch to an otherwise informal and intimate encounter. Like adding niceties to a kind of mental copulation. How out of place can that get? Pardon the innuendo, its the influence of the kind of books I have been reading lately. "Sex, time and Power" by Leonard Shlain an"Why is Sex fun?" by Jared Diamond. And no, these are not Kamasutra spinoffs but serious (kinda) science books written by doctors and evolutionary biologists. So here goes a review, from memory.

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

Just as its title says, it traces the evolution of the female and related changes in human sexuality through the ages. With particular interest to how female sexuality relates to time and power. The book adopts a kind of narrative approach with reference to possible chracters in history like the "Unknown mother", or "African Eve" including the rather obvious "Adam and Eve" representing our historical ancestors who come have certain realisations about human sexuality which leads to the formation of human customs. Each chapter contains a kind of compare and contrast and/or correlation format according to it title like "Patriarchy/Misygony". The book starts with a young doctor in training realising that the acceptable iron levels for females are less than males when females are actually the ones likely to need iron due to regular loss of it.

I cannot remember alot of details but it another starting point is where humans have become bipedal and needed to evolve a larger, more complex brain to make up the lack of physical defences. This poses a problem for females as the size of the birth canal somehow cannot cope with this increase in head size leading to a large drop in human population until one mother "passes through the bottle neck" and actually gives birth to a large brained human child. Despite her survival, giving birth (or parturition if I recall by biology lessons in high school) is a great risk for women as it leads to massive blood loss among other things. Women start to make the connection between pregnancy and sex and acquire the ability to say no to sex by somehow overriding their natural brain circuitry.

This results in a power imbalance for males because rather than simply waiting for natural urges to take over the female, they actually have to earn sex. And apparently the way they are able to do this is by providing high quality nutrition and the ability to give a good orgasm. Apparently language evolves along the line,among other things, to help females gauge the capability of potential mates.

Edit:
One of the qualities which human males subsequently acquired was the tendency to look after their young. To provide food, defence and to pass on skills for survival. But before investing so much into children, the father actually had to make sure the child was really his. In lions the alpha male ensures this by killing off all the cubs when he takes over the pride. This has the dual function of sending the females back into estrus and ensuring that future cubs would be his. This strategy would not be appropriate for humans because there is way more parental investment in cubs, the large amount of time the child spends in the mothers womb and the amount of resources put into rearing it. Thus males came up with the idea of virginity. Thus if your mate is a virgin, every child she gives birth to would be yours so you would be providing purely for kid of your genetic heritage which maybe why cultures usually placed such a high premium on virgins.

There are some important bits of information that I'm not sure how they fit into the story but they are worth knowing. Animals typically cannot be conscious of time longer than possibly a day. However, it appears that human females (of Gyna Sapiens as Shlain calls them) began perceiving time due to the fact that they a) tend to coordinate their menses with the moon cycles and with other females in close proximity and b) it is an unmistakable sign that cannot be ignored. Thus the first big leap in time-consciousness was with the knowledge of a lunar month by women who saw the link between the full moon and regular bleeding. Another quality Gyna Sapiens evovled was cryptic ovulation where the exact moment of ovulation is hidden both from the male and the female. Resulting in perpetual heightened excitement of the male and recreational sex. Contrast this with other animals where sex is restricted to the period of a females estrus.

Hmm. Quite a mouthful. I think I would be better off rattling nuggets of information rather than trying to fit it into the plot. As such I highly recommend reading the book. I got my copy from the Regional Library at Jurong but it up to you to dig it up.

The problem lies here. Knowing all this doesn't make me any better with the girls. It makes me somewhat aloof and when I observe things happening I start looking at it from this evolutionary perspective and it kind of screws the whole thing up. Its so not as fun. Nonetheless it feels ok to be enlightened when everyone else is still knee-deep in the quagmire of ignorance. Chill, Ill give you are review of "Why is sex fun" some other day.

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