One last biological legacy of woman to man deserves more gratitude than it seems to have received. At primate level, the male penis is an unimpressive organ. So far from terrorizing any female, the average King Kong can only provoke sympathy for his meagre endowment in relation to this vast bulk. Man, however, developed something disproportionately large in this line, and can truly afford to feel himself lord of creation in the penile particular. And he owes it to woman. Quite simply, when femina aspiring to be erecta hoisted herself on to her hind legs and walked, the angle of the vagina swung forward and down, and the vagina itself moved deeper into the body. The male penis then echoed the vagina’s steady progress, following the same evolutionary principle as the giraffe’s neck: it grew in order to get to something it could not otherwise reach.16 This need also dictated the uniquely human experimentation with frontal sex. The future of the species demanded that man gained entry somehow. But the ease with which most couples move between frontal and rear-entry positions during intercourse is a constant reminder of the impact of woman’s evolutionary biology.
The biology of woman in fact holds the key to the story of the human race. The triumph of evolution occurred in the female body, in one critical development that secured the future of the species. This was the biological shift from primate oestrus, when the female comes on heat, to full human menstruation. Although generally unsung, indeed unmentioned, female monthly menstruation was the evolutionary adaptation that preserved the human species from extinction and ensured its survival and success.
For female oestrus in the higher primates is a highly inefficient mechanism. The great female primates, chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans, come on heat rarely, and produce one infant every five or six years. This puts the whole species dangerously at risk of extinction, and the great apes today survive only in small numbers and in the most favourable environments. With twelve chances of conceiving in every year, instead of one every five years, the human female has a reproductive capacity sixty times higher than that of her primate sisters. Menstruation, not hunting, was the great evolutionary leap forward. It was through a female adaptation, not a male one, that ‘man’ throve, multiplied and conquered the globe.
And female menstruation was not merely a physical phenomenon like eating or defecation. Recent commentators have argued that women’s so-called curse operated to cure not only man’s shortage of offspring, but also his primeval mental darkness. In their pioneering work on menstruation, The Wise Wound, Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrave stress the connection made in primitive societies between the lunar and menstrual cycles, suggesting that woman first awakened in humankind the capacity to recognize abstracts, to make connections and to think symbolically. For Elise Boulding, these mental functions arise from an earlier stage in which women taught men the principles of number, calendar organization and counting: ‘Every woman had a “body calendar” – her monthly menstrual cycle. She would be the first to notice the relationship between her own body cycle and the lunar cycle.’17 Other female authorities have expressed their amusement at the naïvety of one professor, the celebrated Jacob Bronowski, who on the TV series ‘The Ascent of Man’ solemnly described a prehistoric reindeer bone with thirty-one scratches on it as ‘obviously a record of the lunar month’. Commenting on ‘The Ascent of You Know Who’, Vonda McIntyre demurred: ‘Do tell. A thirty-one-day lunar month? I think it a good deal more likely that the bone was a record of a woman’s menstrual cycle.’18
Objectively this carefully notated silent witness of an irretrievably lost transaction could have been either of these; or both; or neither. But in the routine, unconscious denial of women’s actions, experiences, rhythms, even of their ability to count, the possibility that it could have been a woman’s record of her own intimate personal life was not even considered.
No attention at all, in fact, has been given to the implication for women when light and infrequent oestrus gave way to full menstruation, with bleeding in varying but substantial amounts for one week in every four. What did early woman do? Did she simply squat on a pile of leaves and leak? This is uncomfortably close to the passive female fire-watcher of the Man the Hunter myth – and it is out of the question that the tribal food-gatherers, so vital to survival, could have been out of action for twenty-five per cent of their time. But if the women moved around at all, an unchecked menstrual flow would have resulted in badly chapped and painful inner thighs, especially in colder or windy weather, with the added risk of infection in hot climates. Skin scabbing so caused would hardly have had a chance to heal before the menstrual flow was on again.
A number of indicators point to the solution. In the wild, female monkeys are observed to bunch up pads of leaves to wipe off oestrus spotting. From still-surviving Stone Age cultures it is recorded that the women weave or fashion clothes, slings for their babies, and rough bags to carry what they scavenge or garner. The first women must have devised menstrual slings or belts, with some kind of pad to absorb the heaviest flow. Even today both Maori and Eskimo women contrive pads of a fine soft moss, while Indonesian women make tampon-type balls of a soft vegetable fibre. The Azimba women of Central Africa use the same fibre as pads, which are held in place by an oval sling of soft goatskin fastened to a belt of twisted thong.19 It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the women capable of bringing the infant human race forward into the future could also have found the way to deal efficiently with their own bodies.
But one thing is certain: that any such object, along with other examples of early woman’s technology, would not have survived. Even if it had, would it have been deemed worthy of attention? Wide-ranging consideration at every level from academic investigation to wild surmise has been devoted to all aspects of the life of early man. But no attention in either scholarly or popular work has been given to what anthropologist Donald Johanson, discoverer of the early female hominid ‘Lucy’, dismissed as ‘the oestrus argument’ – that is, the importance of the female’s biological shift to menstruation. As Johanson explained, ‘I don’t believe anything I can’t measure, and I’ve never seen an oestrus fossil.’20 Well, he wouldn’t, would he?
Like Johanson, generations of male commentators have blinded themselves both to the facts and the significant implications of the evolution of early woman. They have insisted instead on rewriting primitive woman as no more than a sexual vehicle for man. ‘They were fatted for marriage, were these Stone Age squaws,’ wrote H. G. Wells. ‘The females were the protected slaves of the old male, the master of all the women’ – a wistful Wellsian fantasy of women on tap.21 For Robert Ardrey, menstruation only evolved as a bonanza for the boys. When a female primate came on heat, burbled Ardrey, she ‘hit the sexual jackpot’, providing ‘fun for all . . . and for herself a maximum of male attention.’22 But oestrus episodes are brief and infrequent – there had to be something more to bring the hunter home from the hill. Accordingly, the first woman learned to convert primate heat into menstruation. This made her sexually available and receptive to man all the year round, as a reward for her share of his kill, in history’s first known example of the time-honoured convention of quim pro quo.
The ‘fun for all’ theory of women’s early sexual evolution also accounts for the physical arrangement of the modern woman’s body. When Man the Hunter began to walk upright, he naturally wanted frontal sex. As Desmond ‘Naked Ape’ Morris so engagingly explains, woman obliged this desire ‘to make sex sexier’ by growing breasts. Realizing that her ‘pair of fleshy hemispherical buttocks’ were now quite passé as a means of attracting men’s attention, she ‘had to do something to make the frontal region more stimulating’.23 Any connection between the increase in woman’s breast size