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  Woman

  An Intimate Geography

  Natalie Angier

  * * *

  ANCHOR BOOKS

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York

  * * *

  Natalie Angier

  WOMAN

  Natalie Angier writes about biology for The New York Times, where she has won a Pulitzer Prize, the American Association for the Advancement of Science journalism award, and other honors. The author of two previous books, The Beauty of the Beastly and Natural Obsessions, she lives with her family in Takoma Park, Maryland.

  * * *

  BOOKS BY NATALIE ANGIER

  Natural Obsessions: Striving to Unlock

  the Deepest Secrets of the Cancer Cell

  The Beauty of the Beastly:

  New Views of the Nature of Life

  Woman: An Intimate Geography

  * * *

  First Anchor Books Edition, March 2000

  Copyright © 1999 by Natalie Angier

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of

  Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random

  House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the

  United States by Houghton Mifflin in 1999. This edition published by arrangement

  with Houghton Mifflin.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of

  Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Angier, Natalie.

  Woman : an intimate geography / Natalie Angier—1st Anchor Books ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1999.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-385-49841-1 (pbk.)

  1. Women—Physiology. 2. Women—Psychology.

  3. Sex differences. I. Title.

  QP38.A54 2000

  612.6'2—dc21 99-047764

  www.anchorbooks.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  20 19 18 17 16 15

  * * *

  FOR KATHERINE IDA

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION: Into the Light • [>]

  1. UNSCRAMBLING THE EGG:

  It Begins with One Perfect Solar Cell • [>]

  2. THE MOSAIC IMAGINATION:

  Understanding the "Female" Chromosome • [>]

  3. DEFAULT LINE:

  Is the Female Body a Passive Construct? • [>]

  4. THE WELL-TEMPERED CLAVIER:

  On the Evolution of the Clitoris • [>]

  5. SUCKERS AND HORNS:

  The Prodigal Uterus • [>]

  6. MASS HYSTERIA:

  Losing the Uterus • [>]

  7. CIRCULAR REASONINGS:

  The Story of the Breast • [>]

  8. HOLY WATER:

  Breast Milk • [>]

  9. A GRAY AND YELLOW BASKET:

  The Bounteous Ovary • [>]

  10. GREASING THE WHEELS:

  A Brief History of Hormones • [>]

  11. VENUS IN FURS:

  Estrogen and Desire • [>]

  12. MINDFUL MENOPAUSE:

  Can We Live Without Estrogen? • [>]

  13. THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE NOTORIETY:

  Mothers, Grandmothers, and Other Great

  Dames • [>]

  14. WOLF WHISTLES AND HYENA SMILES:

  Testosterone and Women • [>]

  15. SPIKING THE PUNCH:

  In Defense of Female Aggression • [>]

  16. CHEAP MEAT:

  Learning to Make a Muscle • [>]

  17. LABOR OF LOVE:

  The Chemistry of Human Bondage • [>]

  18. OF HOGGAMUS AND HOGWASH:

  Putting Evolutionary Psychology on the

  Couch • [>]

  19. A SKEPTIC IN PARADISE:

  A Call for Revolutionary Psychology • [>]

  References • [>]

  Acknowledgments • [>]

  Index • [>]

  * * *

  INTRODUCTION

  INTO THE LIGHT

  THIS BOOK IS a celebration of the female body—its anatomy, its chemistry, its evolution, and its laughter. It is a personal book, my attempt to find a way to think about the biology of being female without falling into the sludge of biological determinism. It is a book about things that we traditionally associate with the image of woman—the womb, the egg, the breast, the blood, the almighty clitoris—and things that we don't—movement, strength, aggression, and fury.

  It is a book about rapture, a rapture grounded firmly in the flesh, the beauties of the body. The female body deserves Dionysian respect, and to make my case I summon the spirits and cranks that I know and love best. I call on science and medicine, to sketch a working map of the parts that we call female and to describe their underlying dynamism. I turn to Darwin and evolutionary theory, to thrash out the origins of our intimate geography—why our bodies look and behave as they do, why they look rounded and smooth, but act ragged and rough. I cull from history, art, and literature, seeking insight into how a particular body part or body whim has been phrased over time. I pick and choose, discriminately and impulsively, from the spectacular advances in our understanding of genetics, the brain, hormones, and development, to offer possible scripts for our urges and actions. I toss out ideas and theories—about the origins of the breast, the purpose of orgasm, the blistering love that we have for our mothers, the reason that women need and spurn each other with almost equal zeal. Some of the theories are woolier than others. Some theories I offer up because I stumbled on them in the course of research and found them fascinating, dazzling—like Kristen Hawkes's proposal that grandmothers gave birth to the human race simply by refusing to die when their ovaries did. Other theories I pitch for their contrariety, their power to buck the party line of woman's "nature," while still others I throw out like rice at a bride, for luck, cheer, hope, and anarchy.

  Admittedly, a Dionysian state of body is not easily won, for the female body has been abominably regarded over the centuries. It has been made too much of or utterly ignored. It has been conceived of as the second sex, the first draft, the faulty sex, the default sex, the consolation prize, the succubus, the male interruptus. We are lewd, prim, bestial, ethereal. We have borne more illegitimate metaphors than we have unwanted embryos.

  But, women, we know how much of this is trash: very pretty, very elaborate, almost flattering in its ferocity, but still, in the end, trash. We may love men and we may live with men, but some of them have said stupendously inaccurate things about us, our bodies, and our psyches. Take the example of the myth of the inner sanctum. Men look at our bodies and they can't readily see our external genitals; our handy chamois triangle, that natural leaf of pubis ficus, obscures the contours of the vulva. At the same time men hunger to breach the portal of fur and the outer pleats, to reach the even more concealed internal genitalia, the sacred nave of the vagina. No wonder, then, that woman becomes conflated with interiority. Men want what they cannot see, and so they assume we relish, perhaps smugly, the moatness of ourselves. Woman the bowl, the urn, the cave, the musky jungle. We are the dark mysterium! We are hidden folds and primal wisdom and always, always the womb, bearing life, releasing life, and then sucking it back in again, into those moist, chthonic plaits. "Male sexuality, then, returning to this primal source, drinks at the spring of being and enters the murky region, where up is down and death is life, of mythology," John Updike has written.

  But, sisters, are we cups and bottles, vessels and boxes? Are we orb-weaving spiders crouched in the web of our wombs, or blind spid
ers living in the underground of our furtiveness? Are we so interior and occult? Hecate, no! No more or less than men. True, men have penises that appear to externalize them, to give them thrust and parry in the world beyond their bodies, but the sensations their penises bring them, like those the clitoris brings us, are splendidly, internally, globally felt; do not even the toes feel orgasm, whatever the sex of the toes' owner may be? Men have external testes, while women's ovaries are tucked inside, not far below the line of the hipbones. But both organs release their products and exert their endocrinological and reproductive effects internally. Men live in their heads, as we do, trapped in the fable of the universal mind.

  At the same time, neither we nor men have a good sense of what our interior bodies are doing from one moment to the next, of the work performed by liver, heart, hormones, neurons. Yet the possession of all this powerful, covert organic activity in no way imposes on any of us, male or female, an aura of mystique. I have pancreas: I am Enigma.

  Even during pregnancy, the event that perhaps epitomizes the notion of woman as a subterranean sorceress, the mother is often not in tune with her great endarkened magic. I recall sitting in the thickness of my third trimester and feeling my baby fidget within me practically nonstop. But I had no idea whether she was kicking with her foot, jabbing with her elbow, or butting her head against the amniotic trampoline, let alone whether she was blissful, anxious, or bored. Before undergoing amniocentesis, I was convinced that my intuition—feminine? maternal? reptilian?—had figured out the fetus's sex. It was the ultimate gut feeling, and it growled like a boy. I dreamed about an egg colored a bright royal blue, and I woke up embarrassed at the crude exhibitionism of the symbol. At least that clinches it, I thought; Mama is about to hatch a son. Well, the amniocentesis spoke otherwise: he was a she.

  The equation of the female body with mystery and sanctum sanctorum extends its foolish villi in all directions. We become associated with the night, the earth, and of course the moon, which like the bouncing ball of old Hollywood musicals so deftly follows our "inescapable" cyclicity. We wax toward ovulation, we wane with blood. The moon pulls us, it tugs at our wombs, even gives us our menstrual cramps. My dearest damas, do you ever feel like creeping out at night to howl at the full moon? Maybe so; the full moon is so beautiful, after all, particularly when it's near the horizon and smeared slightly into buttery breastiness. Yet this desire to howl with joy has little to do with our likelihood of buying tampons; in fact, I'd guess that most of us, those of us who menstruate, haven't a clue where in the lunar cycle our period falls. Nevertheless, flatulisms die hard, and so we continue to encounter slickly tired descriptions of woman as an ingredient on an organic food label, like the following. "Nature's cycles are woman's cycles. Biologic femaleness is a sequence of circular returns, beginning and ending at the same point," Camille Paglia has written in Sexual Personae.

  Woman does not dream of transcendental or historical escape from the natural cycle, since she is that cycle. Her sexual maturity means marriage to the moon, waxing and waning in lunar phases. The ancients knew that woman is bound to nature's calendar, an appointment she cannot refuse. She knows there is no free will, since she is not free. She has no choice but acceptance. Whether she desires motherhood or not, nature yokes her into the brute inflexible rhythm of procreative law. Menstrual cycle is an alarming clock that cannot be stopped until nature wills it. Moon, month, menses: same word, same world.

  Ah, yes. Etymology is ever the arbiter of truth.

  It makes a gal so alarmed, so lunatic really, to witness the resuscitation in recent times of all the fetid clichés that I, and probably you, my sisters, thought had been drawn, quartered, and cremated long ago. I have been writing and reading about biology and evolution for years now, and I am frankly getting sick of how "science" is pinned to our she-butts like donkey tails and then glued in place with talk of hardheaded realism. I am tired of reading in books on evolutionary psychology or neo-Darwinism or gender biology about how women are really like all the old canards: that we have a lackadaisical sex drive compared to men and a relatively greater thirst for monogamy, and, outside the strictly sexual arena, a comparative lack of interest in achievement and renown, a preference for being rather than doing, a quiet, self-contained nature, a greater degree of "friendliness," a deficient mathematical ability, and so on et cetera back to the bleary Cro-Magnon beginnings. I'm tired of hearing about how there are sound evolutionary explanations for such ascriptions of woman's nature and how we must face them full square, chin up and smiling.

  I'm tired as well of being told I mustn't let my feminist, pro-woman beliefs get in the way of seeing "reality" and acknowledging "the facts." I am tired of all this because I love animalism, and I love biology, and I love the body, particularly the female body. I love what the body brings to the brain when the brain gets depressed and uppity. But many of the current stories of the innate feminine are so impoverished, incomplete, and inaccurate, so remarkably free of real proof, that they simply do not ring true, not for me and not, I suspect, for many other women, who mostly ignore what science has to say to them and about them anyway.

  At the same time, the standard arguments against Darwinism and the biological view of womanhood don't always succeed either, predicated as they often are on a rejection of the body, or at least of the impact the body has on behavior. It is as though we were pure mind, and pure will, capable of psychospiritual rebirth throughout our lives, in no way beholden to the body or even encouraged to take a few tips from it now and again. Many of those who have criticized Darwinism and biologism are, alas, feminists and progressives, noble, necessary citizens, among whom I normally strive to count myself. Admittedly, the critics are often justified in their animadversion, whether they're attacking the myth of the passive female or the studies that purport to show immutable differences between male and female math skills. Nevertheless, they disappoint when all they can do is say nay. They pick out flaws, they grumble, they reject. Hormones don't count, appetites don't count, odors, sensations, and genitals don't count. The body is strictly vehicle, never driver. All is learned, all is social construct, all is the sequela of cultural conditioning. Critics also work from a premise, often unspoken, that human beings are special—maybe better, maybe worse, but ultimately different from the rest of evolution's handicraft. As such, they imply, we have little to learn about ourselves by studying other species, and we gals especially have a lot to lose. When, after all, have we ever benefited from being compared to a female lab rat?

  In fact, we have a great deal to learn about ourselves by studying other species. Of course we do. If you watch other animals and don't see pieces of yourself in their behaviors, then you're not quite human, are you? I, for one, want to learn from other animals. I want to learn from a prairie vole about the unassailable logic of spending as much time as possible cuddled up with friends and loved ones. I want to learn from my cats, professional recreationists that they are, how to get a good night's sleep. I want to learn from pygmy chimpanzees, our bonobo sisters, how to settle arguments peacefully and pleasantly, with a bit of genito-genital rubbing; and I want to discover anew the value of sisterhood, of females sticking up for each other, which the bonobos do to such a degree that they are rarely violated or even pestered by males, despite the males being larger and stronger. If women have managed to push the issues of sexual harassment, wife abuse, and rape into the public eye and onto legislative platters, they have succeeded only through persistent, organized, and sororal activity, all of which female bonobos perfected in their own protocognitive style long ago.

  I believe that we can learn from other species, and from our pasts, and from our parts, which is why I wrote this book as a kind of scientific fantasia of womanhood. As easily as we can be abused by science, we can use it to our own ends. We can use it to exalt ourselves or amuse ourselves. Phylogeny, ontogeny, genetics, endocrinology: all are there to be sampled, and I am a shameless carpetbagger. I rifle through the female chro
mosome, the giant one called X, and ask why it is so big and whether it has any outstanding features (it does). I ask why women's genitals smell the way they do. I explore the chemical shifts that occur in a woman's life—during breastfeeding, menstruation, the onset of puberty, and menopause, among others—and consider how each breaks the monotony of physical homeostasis to bring the potential for clarity, a sharpening of the senses. And because we are none of us a closed system but, rather, suspended in the solution of our local universe, I ask how the body breathes in chemical signals from the outside and how that act of imbibing the world sways our behavior—how inspiration becomes revelation. The book is organized roughly from the small to the large, from the compactness and tangibility of the egg to the great sweet swamp of the sensation we call love. It divides into two overall sections, the first focused on body structures—the art objects of our anatomy—and the second on body systems, the hormonal and neural underpinnings of our actions and longings.

  I want to say a few words about what this book is not. It is not about the biology of gender differences and how similar or contrary men and women may be. Of necessity, the book contains many references to men and male biology. We define ourselves in part by how we compare to the other, and the nearest other at hand is, as it happens, man. Nevertheless, I don't delve into the research on the way that different regions of the brain light up in men and women while they're remembering happy events or shopping lists, or what those differences might mean about why you want to talk about the relationship while he wants to watch hockey. I don't compare male and female scholastic aptitude scores. I don't ask which sex has a better sense of smell or sense of direction or innate inability to ask for directions. Even in Chapter 18, when I dissect some of the arguments put forth by evolutionary psychologists to explain the supposed discrepancies in male and female reproductive strategies, I'm interested less in the debate over gender differences than in challenging evolutionary psychology's anemic view of female nature. In sum, this book is not a dispatch from the front lines of the war the sexes; it is a book about women. And though I hope my audience will include men as well as women, I write with the assumption that my average reader is a gal—a word, by the way, that I use liberally throughout the book, because I like it and because I keep thinking, against all evidence, that it is on the verge of coming back into style.