Women Have Call

​I govern the Athenians; my wife governs me.

— Themistocles (Archon of Athens from 493 to 471 BCE)

Call is likely the strongest force on planet Earth. Women unleash and emanate its strength.

The most accessible way to understand the force of a woman might be through the nexus of power in human physiology, psychology, motivation, and growth: sexual energy. A woman turns this power on through Call.

To the extent that the human species has become the dominant life form, and to the degree that male desire for sexual access to women has significantly fueled the pursuit of power, we see male desire manifest as power achieved by fame, fortune, and military conquest. Looked at differently, the cliché that behind every great man is a great woman reveals that female power to light up others is a primary driver of innovation and progress throughout history. The female power to light up others is Call.

Call is hard-wired into the basic biology of our species by evolution, and nature displays its power everywhere. In the animal world, Call can provoke males of nearly every sexually reproducing species to fight—sometimes to the death or exile—over females. They’ve evolved physical features—cumbersome antlers in deer, bright and heavy plumage in birds such as the peacock—that give them access to females while making them vulnerable to predators.

In our near cousins, gorillas, the ovulation of a female—her Call—sends a signal drawing the male to her across 200 miles. In Jane Goodall’s Gombe chimps, the community was harmonious until the death of the dominant female, who had mated with every eligible male. On her demise, the group split into two factions, one eventually annihilated by the other. I’ve always wondered why no one looked more closely at this phenomenon.

Human female ovulation is more obscure than in other mammals, giving women a choice of when to be sexually active. But fertility in women is not completely hidden. Behaviors change as rising estrogen increases flirting and facial flushing, alters scent, and may even shift body shape. Research has found that lap dancers earned 81% more tips when ovulating compared to when they were menstruating. Whether we are conscious of it or not, whether we want it or not, cyclic changes make a woman more attractive. The power of Call is simply a fact of life.

More than 75% of communication is nonverbal. Psychiatrist Thomas Lewis and his colleagues dubbed this capacity for sharing deeper emotional states beyond language a nervous system connection called “limbic resonance.” This is how Call operates. It is perhaps the most powerful limbic signal of all.

Estrus signaling is generally involuntary, but a woman can learn how to activate Call at any time, at any age. Call can be summoned and directed at will. In a 2021 survey study of 2,000 women, we discovered that those with a consistent meditation practice had higher Call regardless of age. We also found that most women agreed that women had more sexual power than men.

If sex is equated to power, why would a subordinate and oppressed group so readily express that women hold more sexual power than men?

Camille Paglia, the visionary feminist who came hurling truisms and fire, urges every woman to:

​“Think of herself as a warrior at every moment… [To] act like human beings who have a sense of their own dignity.”

How does that dignity walk in the world? Dignity greets everything—internal and external phenomena—with an approving, radiant openness. It meets confusion and suffering in ourselves and others with a natural and visceral instinct for drawing in the emotional smog, transforming it, and returning it as love.

The dignity of woman elevates our sex impulse to the high creativity of an artist. It empowers a woman’s much-needed contribution to a world dense with anger, pollution, and greed; a world in need of a conversion to love. A world in need of knowing clearly that sex can and should be practiced for clarifying, crystallizing, and healing. It’s the intimacy craved by a starving world.

A part of our inherent dignity is to understand sex as a practice of attention strengthening—as a meditation. To make love is to give your entire attention, your essential being, over to another. In that attention, the other basks in what they experience as love. It is the attention of a lover; it is the attention of a mother. It is one limbic system meeting another and becoming something greater than the two.

The transcendent power of sex is cheapened as a weapon in the war of the sexes. But in the Age of Eros, we call upon women to activate the volition that is the birthright of one who admits their power. We would harness the forces, make them our own, design them according to deeper truths, and wield them as only the rightful owner—a woman—can.

When a woman learns how to operate the power of this system, to unleash the love at the heart of Call, others respond positively and without question.

The power of Call, when a woman stands firmly within it, resets the nervous systems of those around her. And what else, if not the ability to move those around you, is the definition of power?

Call is likely the strongest force on the planet.

Women move the world by being fully who they are.

Women hold true power.

There are a few hints of how the transformative power of Call works buried in our history.

In Ephesus, Turkey, there is a scattered ruin of a once-magnificent temple built in the first century. Footprints etched in the marble walkways show travelers the way up the dusty hill. They walk in the footsteps of warriors who entered the sacred city of prostitutes on their way home from war.

In any war, a large percentage of the able-bodied men would have been sent to fight. Bringing them back home without healing would have meant societal destruction–– it’s hard to break the habit of violence once it’s unleashed. Inside the temple, the women fucked the war out of the warriors and washed away the horrors they’d experienced, preparing them to return peacefully to their wives and families. In this way, the holy women of Ephesus used love to keep society from falling apart; they kept the detritus of violence from taking root at home. Love, as in the willingness to find a way to transformanother’s suffering into joy, was their tool of choice.

I am not suggesting the path of a woman is to fuck or be fucked by men who’ve gone to war in order to bring peace to the world. Though the bonobos, a closer cousin to us than chimpanzees, have, in fact, arrived at that solution.

What I am suggesting is that hidden in this forgotten history of woman is our path to full agency and co-creation. Finding that agency within ourselves depends on the ability to burn through the layers of shame around sexual energy and loosen our grip onidentification with fragility. It’s the difference between acquiescing to what we receive and actively drawing in and loving what comes our way; the difference between transactional encounters and those emerging from the forces of deep and true desire, claimed, owned, acknowledged, and approved of.

The same way meditation is not only about watching the breath, stepping into our power and learning the art of making love is not only about the act of sex.

But we begin here for two important reasons:

​One, we leverage the natural ability of the female to draw inward, in biological terms, to pull sperm into her uterus as the body convulses to deliver it to a viable egg.

​Second, sexual energy is a human being’s most powerful and pervasive energy. Ignored and mistreated, it leads to frustration, obsession, resentment, and hatred. Unleashed in woman, it becomes passion, an erotic force that claims power, and is so full of desire it can save the planet. Sexuality is the gift because it is our natural means of expressing love.

Women are the manifestation of every creative force in nature and that generative power is the strongest on the planet. This is the hope and resilience I see.

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Excerpt from The Age of Eros book: