The Real Truth About The Female Body

It’s always been classier, and a lot more dignified, to be a woman than a female. Thanks to 30 years of feminist striving, the category “woman” has expanded to include anchorpersons, soccer moms, astronauts, fire fighters, even the occasional Senator or Secretary of State. But “female” still tends to connote the oozing, bleeding, swelling, hot-flashing, swamp-creature side of the species, its tiny brain marinating in the primal hormonal broth. From Aristotle to Freud, the thinking on gender has been that only one sex had fully evolved out of the tidal pool, and it wasn’t the sex that wears panty hose.

Biology has usually been only too glad to claim the human female as its slave. The sociobiologists of the ’60s and ’70s, followed by the evolutionary psychologists of the ’90s, promoted what amounts to a prostitution theory of human evolution: Since males have always been free to roam around, following their bliss, the big challenge for the prehistoric female was to land a male hunter and keep him around in a kind of meat-for-sex arrangement. Museum dioramas of the Paleolithic past still tend to feature the guys heading out after the mastodons, spears in hand, while the gals crouch slack-jawed around the campfire, busily lactating. The chivalrous conclusion is that today’s woman can do whatever she likes–start a company, pilot a plane–but only by trampling on her inner female.

Yet a new attitude is bubbling out of that old female hormonal swamp, powered by new research and, at least in preliminary form, fresh perspectives on the gender-bifurcated human condition. There are signs of a growing acceptance of the female body with its signature cycles and turning points. Some midlife boomers are finding ways to celebrate the menopause, while a generation of “grrrls” is coming of age, with a new view of the menstrual period as an emblem of primal female power. At the same time, some of the sacred tenets of evolutionary psychology–that men are innately more aggressive, more promiscuous and more likely to fall for cute young things–have come under fresh challenge. As the century turns, it could be, Goodbye, women’s lib; hello, female liberation!

The revolution already has a manifesto in the form of an ebullient new book, Woman: An Intimate Geography, by Natalie Angier, a science writer for the New York Times. There are other female-positive books hitting the stores, like Dianne Hales’ thoughtful and eloquent Just Like a Woman: How Gender Science Is Redefining What Makes Us Female (just published by Bantam) and anthropologist Helen Fisher’s The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Will Change the World (due from Random House in May). But it’s Angier, who has already won a solid reputation (and a Pulitzer Prize) at her day job, who most decisively lifts the concept of the human female out of its traditional oxymoronic status. You gotta love a self-described “female chauvinist sow” who writes like Walt Whitman crossed with Erma Bombeck and depicts the vagina as a “Rorschach with legs.” Woman: An Intimate Geography is a delicious cocktail of estrogen and amphetamine designed to pump up the ovaries as well as the cerebral cortex.

VIVE LA DIFFERENCE!

“Feminist” was always a little too dainty sounding, so call the new consciousness “femaleist.” The femaleist premise could be summarized as: Yes, we are different–wanna make something of it? Up till now, feminists have usually been leery of acknowledging gender differences, arguing that all but the most visibly obvious of them are the products of culture, not genes, and could be erased by the appropriate legislation and child-rearing practices. But the differences are real, various and not easy to parse in terms of the Framer’s intentions, if any. Women are more likely to be righthanded and less likely to be color-blind than men. Their brains are smaller, as befits their smaller body size, but more densely packed with neurons. Women have more immunoglobulins in their blood; men have more hemoglobin. Men are more tuned in to their internal aches and pains; women devote more regions of their brain to sadness. You do the scoring.

Yes, men are the physically more imposing sex. On average, they are 10% taller, 20% heavier and 30% stronger, especially in their upper bodies. But women are more resistant to fatigue; the longer the race, the more likely they are to win it. Furthermore, as millions of women prove daily by the sweat of their brow, the muscle gap is not carved in stone. Hales reports on a 1995 U.S. Army test of female physical potential, in which 41 out-of-shape women–students, lawyers, bartenders and new mothers–achieved the fitness level of male Army recruits in just six months of working out, getting to where they could jog two miles with a 75-lb. backpack and do dozens of squats with a 100-lb. weight on their shoulders. In competitive sports too, women have been playing a stunning game of catch-up. Today’s women stars can run, swim and skate faster than any man of a few decades ago, and the gap may eventually close. Since 1964, women’s marathon running times have dropped 32%, compared with only 4.2% for men. If the trend continues, female marathoners could be leaving men in the dust sometime in the next century.

As biology advances, some of the differences between the sexes are turning out to be a little more complicated than we learned in 10th-grade biology, when testosterone was clearly the boy hormone and estrogen the girl hormone. Not only are both hormones present in both sexes, but estrogen is a real busybody, acting on just about every kind of tissue there is. Angier likens it to chocolate, “since almost every two-bit organ or tissue wants a bite out of it.” Men deficient in estrogen aren’t more manly; they’re more prone to such diseases as osteoporosis. Women produce testosterone, and may even need it for sexual arousal. But despite its reputation as the roughneck’s Power Bar, scientists can find no clear-cut relationship between testosterone levels and aggressiveness. Angier reports that men’s testosterone levels actually drop before certain challenges like parachuting or, to judge from Saving Private Ryan, landing at Normandy. So whatever the molecular motives of estrogen and testosterone, sorting hospital nurseries into pink and blue sections may not be foremost among them.

There are some metaphysically meaty differences between the sexes, but they’re not easy to rate in terms of which sex should rule. Females, as you can tell at a glance, have the more sociable anatomy, including a uterus that fluffs itself up every month in hopes of housing a baby, and a pair of spigots on the chest at which Baby eventually may dine. The surprising thing is that women are the more communistic sex, right down to the cellular level. Fetal cells derived from a woman’s offspring may survive in her bloodstream decades after childbirth. What’s more, the fabled liabilities of the female condition are sometimes revealed as strengths. Researchers have found that PMS–which has become a handy three-letter slur directed at the aggressive, or merely irritated, woman–is experienced by many as a state of “heightened activity, intellectual clarity, feelings of well-being,” according to Angier. “One of my most beautiful memories of college,” she recalls, “is of a first day of a period. I was sitting in my living room, studying, and felt an unaccountable surge of joy. I looked up from my book and was dazzled by the air.”

Of all the “female troubles,” it’s menopause that has been undergoing the most decisive makeover. Fifteen years ago, when Geraldine Ferraro ran for the vice presidency, the question buzzing anxiously around the Beltway was, “Has she gone through menopause yet?” You certainly wouldn’t want a Veep who flashed hot or popped Midol. Fast-forward to 1994, and the Washington Post could calmly interview power gals Pat Schroeder and Olympia Snowe on their feelings about hormone-replacement therapy–and no one was blushing or giggling. In fact, in the new femaleist vernacular, those aren’t hot flashes; they’re power surges. True, you might hesitate to rip off your sweater and start fanning your face at a meeting full of alpha males. But outside of that hostile environment, menopause is becoming a celebration-worthy rite of passage. Two New York City women, free-lance writer Beverley Douglas and graphic artist Alice Simpson, have just launched their Two Hot Broads line of greeting cards. Then there are the Red Hot Mamas, whose inspirational support groups for menopausal women have spread from Brooklyn to 18 states, drawing as many as 800 at a time for meetings.

So, whether viewed from the laboratory bench or the kitchen table, difference is fascinating, difference can even be strength. As Hales puts it, “The differences between men and women, we can now see, are exactly that: differences, not signs of defects, damage or disease. Women are not the second, but a separate sex…”

RETHINKING EVOLUTION

But if women embrace biology, which male-chauvinist diehards still equate with “destiny,” won’t they have to give up something else–like dignity and free will? The popularity of evolutionary theories featuring man-the-hunter from Mars and his Venusian sidekick, woman, has led many feminist scholars to assert that biology is a sexist “ideology,” not a science, and Darwin just another dead white male with an ax to grind. In the mid-’80s, the influential French feminist theorist Christine Delphy advised thinking women to “ignore” biology, and in this country there were mutterings that research into sex differences should be de-funded forthwith, since no good could come of it. Recall those “scientific” theories of the innate inferiority of African Americans and Jews compared with the more highly evolved Wasps.

But the only cure for bad science is more science, and the story of human evolution has been evolving pretty rapidly itself. There were always plenty of prima facie reasons to doubt the Mr. and Mrs. Man-the-Hunter version of our collective biography, such as the little matter of size, or, in science-speak, “sexual dimorphism.” If men and women evolved so differently, then why aren’t men a whole lot bigger than they are? In fact, humans display a smaller size disparity between the sexes than do many of our ape cousins–suggesting (though not proving) that early men and women sometimes had overlapping job descriptions, like having to drive off the leopards. And speaking of Paleolithic predators, wouldn’t it be at least unwise for the guys to go off hunting, leaving the supposedly weak and dependent women and children to fend for themselves at base camp? Odd too, that Paleolithic culture should look so much like the culture of Levittown circa 1955, with the gals waiting at home for the guys to come back with the bacon. In what other carnivorous species is only one sex an actual predator?

Beginning in the ’70s, women began to elbow their way into the field and develop serious alternatives to the old, male-centered theory of human evolution. It shouldn’t matter, of course, what sex the scientist is, but women had their own reasons for being suspicious of the dominant paradigm. The first revisionist blow came in the mid-’70s, when anthropologists Adrienne Zihlman and Nancy Tanner pointed out that among surviving “hunting” peoples, most of the community’s calories–up to 70%–come from plant food patiently gathered by women, not meat heroically captured by men. The evidence for Stone Age consumption of plant foods has mounted since then. In 1994 paleobotanist Sarah Mason concluded that a variety of plant material discovered at the Paleolithic site of Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic was in fact edible roots and seeds. At the very least, it seems, the Paleolithic dinner was potluck, and it was probably the women who provided most of the starches, salad and raspberry-mousse desserts. The mother-of-us-all was beginning to look a little peppier and more self-reliant.

Not that even the most efficient gatherer gal doesn’t need a little help now and then, especially when she’s lactating. Nursing a baby may look pretty effortless, but it can burn up 500 calories a day–the equivalent of running about five miles. Where was the help coming from? Was the female completely dependent on her male significant other, as the prevailing theory has always implied? An alternative possibility lay buried in the mystery of menopause. Nature is no friend of the infertile, and in most primates, the end of childbearing coincides with the end of life, so it was always hard to see why human females get to live for years, even decades, after their ovaries go into retirement. Hence the “grandma hypothesis”: maybe the evolutionary “purpose” of the postmenopausal woman was to keep her grandchildren provided with berries and tubers and nuts, especially while Mom was preoccupied with a new baby. If Grandma were still bearing and nursing her own babies, she’d be too busy to baby-sit, so natural selection may have selected for a prolonged healthy and mature, but infertile, stage of the female life cycle.

To test this possibility, anthropologist Kristen Hawkes made quite a nuisance of herself among the hunting-gathering Hadza people of Tanzania, charting the hour-by-hour activities of 90 individuals, male and female, and weighing the children at regular intervals. The results, published in late 1997 and reported by Angier in detail, established that children did better if Grandma was on the case–and, if not her, then a great-aunt or similar grandma figure. This doesn’t prove the grandma hypothesis for all times and all peoples, but it does strongly suggest that in the Stone Age family, Dad-the-hunter was not the only provider. The occasional antelope haunch might be a tasty treat, but as Hawkes and her co-workers conclude about the Hadza, “it is women’s foraging, not men’s hunting, that differentially affects their own families’ nutritional welfare.” If the grandma hypothesis holds up, we may have to conclude that the male-female pair bond was not quite so central to human survival as the evolutionary psychologists assume. The British anthropologist Chris Knight–who is, incidentally, male–suggests that alliances among females may have been more important in shaping the political economy of Paleolithic peoples.

The thinking that led to man-the-hunter was largely inferential: if you bring the women along on the hunt, the children will have to come too, and all that squalling and chattering would surely scare off the game. This inference was based on a particular style of hunting, familiar from Hemingway novels and common to the New England woods in October, in which a small band of men trek off into the wild and patiently stalk their prey, a deer or two at a time. But there is another way to get the job done known as “communal hunting,” in which the entire group–women, men and children–drive the animals over a cliff or into a net or cul-de-sac. The Blackfoot and other Indians hunted bison this way before they acquired the horse–hence all those “buffalo jumps” in the Canadian and American West–and net hunting is the most productive hunting method employed by the Mbuti people of the Congo today. When driving animals into a place where they can be slaughtered, noise is a positive help, whether it’s the clashing of men’s spears or the squeals of massed toddlers.

But there was only indirect evidence of communal hunting in Paleolithic times until archaeologist Olga Soffer came across the kind of clue that, a gender traditionalist might say, it took a womanly eye to notice. While sifting through clay fragments from the Paleolithic site of Pavlov in what is now the Czech Republic, she found a series of parallel lines impressed on some of the clay surfaces–evidence of woven fibers from about 25,000 years ago. Intrigued to find signs of weaving from this early date, Soffer and her colleagues examined 8,400 more clay fragments from the same and nearby sites, eventually coming across the traces of a likely tool of the communal hunt–a mesh net. The entire theory of man-the-hunter had been based on “durable media,” Soffer explains, meaning items like the sharpened stones that can serve as spearheads, rather than softer, biodegradable goods like baskets, fabrics and nets. But in archaeologically well-preserved prehistoric sites, such as those found underwater or in dry caves, the soft goods predominate over the durable by a ratio of about 20 to 1. If the hard stuff was the work of men, then “we’ve been missing the children, the women, the old people,” she asserts. Thanks to Soffer’s sharp eye, Paleolithic net hunting is no longer invisible, and in net hunting, Soffer says, “everybody participates.”

Furthermore, as Mary Zeiss Stange points out in her 1997 book Woman the Hunter, there’s no reason to rule out women’s hunting with hard-edged weapons too, perhaps even of their own making. Among the Tiwi Aborigines of Australia, hunting is considered women’s work, and until the introduction of steel implements, it was done with handmade stone axes the women fashioned for themselves. By putting women’s work back into the record, the new female evolutionary scientists may have helped rewrite the biography of the human race. At least we should prepare to welcome our bold and resourceful new ancestor, Xena the hunter princess.

The news of Soffer’s discovery, which is too recent to have found its way into Angier’s or Hales’ book, will disconcert many feminists as well as sociobiologists. After all, the gratifying thing about man-the-hunter was that he helped locate all the violence and related mischief on the men’s side of the campfire: no blood on our hands! But there are other reasons to doubt the eternal equation of masculinity with aggression and violence, femininity with gentleness and a taste for green salads. In ancient Greece and Sumer the deities of the hunt, Artemis and Ninhursag, were female–extremely female, if you will, since these were also the goddesses who presided over childbirth. Even more striking is the association of ancient goddesses with nature’s original hunters, the predatory animals. In Anatolia, the predator goddess was Kybele, known as the commander of lions. In Egypt she was Sekhmet, portrayed as a lioness whose “mane smoked with fire [and whose] countenance glowed like the sun.” Images of goddesses tell us nothing about the role of actual women, but they do suggest that about 3,000 years ago, at the dawn of human civilization, the idea of the fearsome huntress, the woman predator, generated no snickers among the pious.

RE-EVALUATING THE ROLES

No one, so far, is suggesting a new view of human evolution centered on, say, woman-the-hunter-gatherer and man-the-idler-and-camp-follower. Human evolution is a 2 million-year-long story at least, enacted in a multiplicity of settings–deserts and forests, coastlines and vast continental plains, cool zones and tropical ones–each requiring different survival strategies. The theoretical Achilles’ heel of contemporary evolutionary psychology is that it posits an “ancestral environment” in which humans evolved and developed their repertoire of hardwired responses. But there never was “an” ancestral environment. Ice ages came and went; landmasses fused and separated; whole species of edible animals expired. Our inherited tool kit of psychological responses has had to be at least as varied and complex as the situations there were to respond to.

If we accept that adaptability, meaning a knack for problem solving, is the hallmark of our species, then it gets a lot harder to make dogmatic assertions about human nature in either masculine or feminine form. And if we accept that females played a varied and active part in the evolutionary struggle for survival, much of the popular wisdom about the psychology of the sexes begins to look a little dated and lame. Cases in point:

Men are innately more aggressive than women? It certainly looks that way, at least if you count only the kind of aggression expressed with bullets and fists. Men brawl more; they are the principal occupants of penitentiaries and paramilitary groups worldwide–which is what you might expect if they had evolved as the designated spear chuckers of the species. But in laboratory studies of aggression, women display little difference from men in their willingness, for example, to administer an electric shock to another person. Cross-cultural studies of toddlers show that both sexes are equally physically aggressive until age three, which is about the age when girls get their first Barbies and boys get their plastic light sabers. In cultures in which physical aggressiveness was encouraged in girls, they sometimes grew up to be professional warriors. Just two years ago, archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball of the Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads, in Berkeley, Calif., reported on her discovery of what appear, almost beyond doubt, to be women warriors from 2,500 years ago. Grave sites she excavated near the Kazakhstan border in Russia contained female skeletons buried with daggers, arrowheads, swords and whetstones for sharpening metal. One of the women has a bent arrowhead lodged in her body cavity, suggesting that she was killed in battle.

Why focus on physical aggression anyway? As Angier notes, and any survivor of the sixth-grade clique wars knows firsthand, the female arsenal includes more insults and snubs than sticks and stones. “Most aggressive” is not a title that anyone other than Mike Tyson aspires to, but there’s no point in awarding it prematurely to the sex that, through no fault of its own, may simply have the more poorly developed verbal skills.

Men are randier and more promiscuous than women? David Kendall didn’t use it, but this could have been the biological brief for the President’s defense during the impeachment proceedings, as propounded by M.I.T. cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker in the New Yorker. It’s in the male’s genetic self-interest to impregnate as many females as possible, while the female usually can produce only a dozen or so offspring in her lifetime no matter how much she messes around, so why should she try? Furthermore, the female consort of man-the-hunter didn’t dare cheat on him lest he stomp off and take the zebra carcass with him. So Hillary fumes, Monica pines, and Bill, propelled mindlessly by his evolutionary male legacy, looks for new places to dispense his seed.

Few could doubt that male promiscuity is widespread and probably genetically driven. The question is whether females are any less inclined to seek a diversity of partners, should the opportunities arise. Basing your answer on the behavior of women in recent times is a little like studying giraffes in a zoo and concluding they can’t run. Most cultures, at least of the complex, “civilized” variety, have penalized women who stray or have taken sadistic measures to prevent that from happening in the first place, from raping or killing them to labeling them “cheap.” In parts of Latin America and the Middle East, “honor killings” of wayward daughters or sisters are common and treated indulgently by the courts. In some African countries, young women have their clitorises excised to dull their sexual appetite. If women are the innately more monogamous sex, why the widespread and fanatic efforts to get them to keep their legs crossed?

In fact, there may have been an evolutionary advantage to sluttiness. The females of our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzees and the bonobos, are not exactly paragons of sexual probity. A recent DNA study of chimp behavior in the Tai forest of Africa’s Ivory Coast showed that despite the bullying of local males, the wily females were sneaking off so often that half their offspring turn out to be fathered by outsiders. Of bonobos, perhaps the less said the better, at least in a family magazine. These “pygmy chimps,” as they are also known, share 98% of our genes and a tendency to what Freud termed “polymorphous perversity.” They will have sex with anyone, male or female, as readily as we humans shake hands and apparently for the same purpose, as in, Good to see ya, let’s rub genitals.

The interesting thing is that female promiscuity seems to be a reproductively advantageous trait, which may explain why it prevails in the animal world. The more males a female prairie dog mates with, for example, the more likely she is to conceive and the larger her litters. Angier reports on data, still disputed, that suggest human females are more likely to get pregnant from sex with an adulterous lover than from sex with their spouse. Besides, if anatomy has anything to do with destiny, you would expect the human female, with her unique ecstasy organ–the clitoris–to be the sexual powerhouse of the species. The man’s penis, after all, has to double as a urine-and-semen-delivery tube and contains only half as many nerve fibers as the more refined and specialized clitoris.

So, to the extent that females relied on male help in raising a family, the smartest female reproductive strategy may have involved no less treachery than the male one: behave promiscuously, so you’ll be sure to get pregnant, but pretend to be monogamous–professing undying love–so that at least one of the fellows will think the kids are his and possibly take an interest in them. Hey, it fooled the evolutionary psychologists!

Men fall for pretty faces, women fall for healthy portfolios? Here’s another object lesson sometimes drawn from the evolutionary allegory of Monica and Bill: men go for ample breasts and buttocks accessorized with thong underwear, while women are attracted to power and money, even when it comes in a chubby, gray-haired middle-aged package. True, there are more cases like ex-Playmate Anna Nicole Smith and her late, wheelchair-bound millionaire husband than there are like elementary school teacher Mary Letourneau and her 13-year-old boyfriend. But since men tend to accrue wealth and power as they age, it’s a bit odd, as zoologist Desmond Morris once noted, that baldness doesn’t necessarily activate the female swoon response. It may be smart for women to go for the billionaires and tribal big shots, but in practice their choices are often politically and economically irrational, if not self-destructive. Helen dumped a perfectly good warrior-king for the cute but feckless Paris. Juliet fell for a scion of the enemy clan. In rock-‘n’-roll tradition and movies from The Wild One to Shakespeare in Love, it’s the penniless no-account who makes the girls scream–and did anyone see Titanic?

There is in fact a respectable evolutionary rationale for such “irrational” female choices. Women may want loyal, provider-type mates to help them raise their children. But if their sons are, in turn, to be attractive to other women–and hence keep the lineage thriving–it might help if Dad is a heartbreaker himself. Unfortunately, though, physical attractiveness is not a reliable guide to reproductive “fitness,” as in health and wealth. Consider the peacock. Its gorgeous tail renders it highly vulnerable to predators, so any peahen with a concern for her sons’ longevity should opt for a more modestly endowed mate. Trouble is, all the other peahens are fools for those huge tails and may turn up their noses at the short-tailed sons of their practical-minded sister. So, the evolutionary strings are pulling us in two directions: Go for the geek with the Microsoft stock, says Mating Program A. No, wait, says Program B, did you see that adorable rake with the earring and the black leather blazer?

Plus–need it be said?–the human sexual impulse, like that of the bonobo, is not as tightly coupled to reproduction as certain pro-family moralists like to think. Even in so-called primitive hunter-gatherer societies, such as that of the Australian Aborigines, women have always managed to invent forms of contraception–herbal drinks, pessaries to block the cervix, oils to bog down the sperm. Then there is homosexuality, a reproductively senseless but nevertheless deeply compelling sexual strategy for millions of both sexes. Not to mention masturbation, celebrated by rapper Foxy Brown’s chart-topping song Ill Na Na, in which she promises to “hold my own like Pee Wee in a movie theater…I can do bad by my damn self.” Men are not the species’ only sex machines.

So how different are we really? The revisionist evolutionary story tells us that both sexes share the legacy of our hunting, gathering, fighting, roaming ancestors. In addition, both sexes are confronted daily with the same kinds of hard choices: Do the fun thing or what your tribe considers the moral one? Go for security or adventure, sex or a handshake? And both sexes appear to have the same internal equipment for making these choices, equipment that we know as conscience or free will. But from a femaleist point of view, the whole business of difference is getting a little old: Different from whom? And how did he get to be the standard for the human race?

There are still staggering obstacles in the way of a body-proud, open-minded and biology-affirmative female consciousness. Pressured to conform to impossible notions of beauty, girls are falling prey to eating disorders at tragically young ages. There are groups who object to any straightforward reference to female biology, like the school-library censors who periodically ban Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, because it deals with menstruation. In the culture that came up with Baywatch, police officers still sometimes confuse breast feeding with indecent exposure. And, willfully or not, the evolutionary psychologists keep fueling the pop wisdom that the sexes originated on separate home planets, neither one of them earth.

So maybe we should be awed and amazed that there are so many women eager to celebrate their female selves: scientists and science writers exploring the female body and evolutionary history, rappers asserting their tough-minded female sexuality, lawyers and homemakers marking their menopause by throwing a party or climbing Mont Blanc. Call them “estronauts,” these new bio-positive women, for their ability to feel the delicious tug of the hormonal tides as well as the gleaming challenge of the mountain peaks. Or–what does it matter?–just call them human.

–With reporting by Barbara Maddux/New York