The Moon/Menses
Here is a fascinating theory posited by Leonard Schlain, from Time, Sex and Power
Leonard Schlain was a brilliant thinker, a brain surgeon, theorist, and goddess- worshipper, who discovered many cultural and behavioral theories by inventing them. His book, Time, Sex, and Power changed my life. Here’s a synopsis of his chapter about Female Evolutionary Development, called “The Moon/Menses”. There are also two wonderful youtube videos available to view, one from Time, Sex, and Power— LINK and the other from his book,
The Alphabet Vs. The Goddess— LINK
In medical school, Leonard Schlain learned that women have less iron than men, and was amazed to find that no one was exploring the WHY of this strange situation. Of all the mammals, only human women face iron-deficient anemia, debilitating menses, and loss of estrus. WHY?
Here is his hypothesis —Sometime, about 150,000 years ago, the leading cause of death in the female human becomes birth. This was caused by a narrowing of the pelvis due to the huge evolutionary shift in humans of standing upright. The pelvis has to stay narrow to prevent your being turned inside out during a stroll after a heavy lunch— a gravitational hazard that doesn’t pose a problem for any other animal.
Enlarged brains were incompatible evolutionary adaptations, which led to an evolutionary crisis (bottleneck), in which too many women were dying in childbirth. This led to an obstetrical dilemma, that causes human infants to be born extremely prematurely — the length of our pregnancies for complete fetal development should be 18 months.
Humans were positioned in the crosshairs of extinction— then came Mitochondrial Eve, and humans became “homo sapiens-sapiens” the doubly wise human. We squeezed through the bottleneck, internal and anatomical, of maternal mortality.
This created unique survival problems, which caused womyn to be forced to share childrearing and division of labor with men. Otherwise, the species would die. But, instead of going extinct, we’ve been re-molded into the most successful and disruptive animal on the planet. We braved blizzards, trudging north to inhabit tundra, and set forth in fragile boats to populate hostile southern deserts. We would then bring about the greatest mass extinction of large animals for millions of years.
But, why this big brain? What was it doing at the outset to offset the damage it created?
Sex and childrearing — 7500 generations later, we know that the woman emerged profoundly transformed. Man did not. This asymmetry created conditions for wild conflicts, misunderstandings, and cooperation opportunities. Men’s behavior evolved in response to women’s needs, (and still is under feminism), rearranging the tumblers of our genetic code. Males have spent the last 150,000 years trying to regain the power they so emphatically lost to women in this last evolutionary phase.
Women were forced, by their biology, to develop the unique and somewhat magical ability to arch over the present in order to connect the past to the future. Connecting sex, pregnancy, and childbirth led women to be able to refuse to mate if she so chose. This doesn’t happen with other animals. She alone, developed the ability, way before men, to think about TIME, and with it, to engage in Free Will.
Schlain proposes that it was as if Mother Nature decided to create an animal that could anticipate the future. So She began an experiment to teach an animal about Deep Time. He posits that 150,000 years ago, She began to install new circuitry, new hardware as it were. Deep Time is the ability to predict and methodically plan. It was used by hunters to ambush migrating herds, but first it was used by women, to control their pregnancies.
First, humans grew their hardware—their brains—into an outlandishly massive size. Then Nature had to identify a feature of her life that was a regularly-occurring dramatic event, and have her entrain her brain to that event— an inner, physiological timer with an outer, natural clock. External, cyclic bleeding synchronized with other females, and with the moon.
The moon was comforting, was obvious, seemed to follow us, stop when westop. The sun does this too, but there’s so much else to see in the daylight. Also, watching the sun, looking at the sun, could blind a person. The moon is alone in the night, and was watched by prehistoric people from their caves. The moon became their early religion.
Then she stopped all outward signs of estrus. It is only human females, of all the mammals, don’t know when they’re ovulating, AND they can choose to refuse sex some, or all of the time. Also, female humans bleed more, they lose more blood, than any other animal on the planet. They also coordinate their menses, synchronized with the moon. Even today when most humans of both sexes are really unaware of the moon, women living together bleed together. But the story of her release from the slavery of brute instinct prefaces the tale of how we came to be the way we are as modern humans.
And then, over the course of time, a few females would perceive a pattern. He believes that womens’ menstruation was the key to humans learning to measure time, to use it to catapult themselves into formidable hunters, then masters of the earth. But first, women would use this gift and pay the price, all to maneuver conceptually in the dimension of time, for the purpose of surviving. If they could anticipate their fertility, they could say no to sex.
Women could demand that sex take place on their terms. And this, Schlain posits, is why we have rape. This is why we have misogyny. The root of misogyny is men’s anger at women’s ability to refuse sex.
The female, not the male, underwent a huge transformation because SHE was dying in childbirth. SHE confronted an evolutionary crisis, not him. By wresting control over their sexual urges, Eve and her daughters exerted discipline over sex, and thus, contraception. She could choose— she had to, since it was she who died in childbirth.
Genesis had it all there, but in the wrong sequence. Not original SIN, but original CHOICE. He evolved cognitively because She had a mind of her own, an “ego-consciousness”. He had to respond because survival of the species was at stake.
“What does a woman want?” is a commonly asked question, posed by men, which generally means “How can I get her to have sex with me?” This is his question, still. Rape is never a primary mating strategy in mammals; it’s an oddity in the wild to force an unwilling female and would run counter to the tendency towards increased cooperation building in primates. But, her ability to say NO was balanced by her leaking of iron at alarming rates. Iron undergirds the structure of our intelligence.
Human menses is an evolutionary mystery. What purpose does it serve? An individual woman loses 40 quarts of blood in a lifetime! It’s truly an outrageous amount of loss. Iron also gets siphoned in pregnancy for fetal brain development, and in bleeding during delivery. Each pregnancy is followed by increase in blood loss with menses for the rest of her life.
Entraining a woman’s bleeding with the moon’s orbit taught humans how to tell time. Menses is, therefore, a necessary evolutionary trait. The ability to range into the future was so tremendous an asset that it was worth it (says the man who is not raped), but one sex bore the cost, and that was a detail that would shape all subsequent relations between the two sexes. The reason women bleed so copiously is so that humans could anticipate the future. Foresight is, he says, the most clever idea that ever landed on humanity.
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