Woman: An Intimate Geography

National Book Award finalist
A New York Times notable book


"A tour de force, a womderful, entertaining and informative book." —Abraham Verghese, New York Times Book Review

After fifteen years in print, Woman remains an essential guide to everything from organs to orgasms and hormones to hysterectomies. With her characteristic clarity, insight, and sheer exuberance of language, bestselling author Natalie Angier cuts through the still prevalent myths and misinformation surrounding the female body, that most enigmatic of evolutionary masterpieces. Woman is a witty and assured narrative with a reliable grasp of science.

 

1100622956
Woman: An Intimate Geography

National Book Award finalist
A New York Times notable book


"A tour de force, a womderful, entertaining and informative book." —Abraham Verghese, New York Times Book Review

After fifteen years in print, Woman remains an essential guide to everything from organs to orgasms and hormones to hysterectomies. With her characteristic clarity, insight, and sheer exuberance of language, bestselling author Natalie Angier cuts through the still prevalent myths and misinformation surrounding the female body, that most enigmatic of evolutionary masterpieces. Woman is a witty and assured narrative with a reliable grasp of science.

 

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Woman: An Intimate Geography

Woman: An Intimate Geography

by Natalie Angier
Woman: An Intimate Geography

Woman: An Intimate Geography

by Natalie Angier

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Overview

National Book Award finalist
A New York Times notable book


"A tour de force, a womderful, entertaining and informative book." —Abraham Verghese, New York Times Book Review

After fifteen years in print, Woman remains an essential guide to everything from organs to orgasms and hormones to hysterectomies. With her characteristic clarity, insight, and sheer exuberance of language, bestselling author Natalie Angier cuts through the still prevalent myths and misinformation surrounding the female body, that most enigmatic of evolutionary masterpieces. Woman is a witty and assured narrative with a reliable grasp of science.

 


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780544228108
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date: 08/05/2014
Pages: 512
Sales rank: 135,593
Product dimensions: 5.30(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

NATALIE ANGIER is a Pulitzer-Prize winning science columnist for the New York Times. She is the author of The Canon, The Beauty of the Beastly, and Natural Obsessions. She lives outside Washington, D.C.

Read an Excerpt

Preface

The Karo Batak are traditional farmers who live in small villages scattered along the highland plateau of North Sumatra, Indonesia. They lead tough, subsistence lives, wear brightly colored clothing, and are rarely exposed to Western media, and the men have a thing for women with big feet. This last detail may seem whimsically beside the point, but as anthropologist Geoff Kushnick of the University of Washington argued in the September 2013 issue of Human Nature, the Karo Batak preference for large-footed women doesn’t square with certain Darwinian notions about the traits men seek in their mates.
   According to the glossier and more emphatic strains of the research enterprise called evolutionary psychology, men and women have evolved to consult very different internal checklists when choosing a romantic partner. Women are said to want a provider to help them raise their children, so they look for signs of status and wealth in a man—handiness of spear, bulginess of wallet. Men, by contrast, want a mate with a long reproductive career ahead of her, so they scan for hallmarks of youth and nubility: shiny hair, bee-stung lips, perky breasts. And because a woman’s feet tend to widen with every passing year and parturition, evolutionary psychologists posit that foot size should also figure into the male nubility monitor, and that men are likely wired to find dainty feet more appealing than their haggish, Sasquatch counterparts. Sure enough, a number of cross-cultural studies appeared to confirm the small-foot preference, lending a bit of scientific cachet to the old Fats Waller lyric “Don’t want you ’cause your feet’s too big.”
   Yet as Geoff Kushnick discovered, Karo Batak men were refusing to sing along. When he showed 159 of them a set of five silhouettes of a woman in which all details remained the same except for the size of her feet, the men judged the one with the biggest feet as more attractive than the other four. In addition, the men actively disliked the image of the woman with the tiniest feet—the very picture that men in previous studies had, on average, deemed the most fetching. As it turned out, the Karo Batak were not alone in their predilections. When Kushnick revisited the cross-cultural preference surveys in detail, he found that while small feet prevailed in aggregate, there was considerable cultural variation: the less urban the population, and the less its exposure to Western media, the likelier its men were to appreciate images of women whose feet had been significantly enlarged.
   The foot results echoed studies that had called into question another piece of evo- psycho dogma: the purportedly universal appeal of the wasp waist. Men everywhere were said to prefer women with small waists relative to the width of their hips over women with chunkier, boxier forms. After all, nothing cries “young female in the full flower of her estrogenic powers” better than an hourglass figure, right? But here, too, researchers found exceptions to the rule, benighted cultures in which the men claimed to like the thick-waisted women, and to find the cinched-in women with their “ideal” waist-to-hip ratios a bit sickly looking. Again, the contrarian men were from remote cultures with scant exposure to Western media, Beyoncé, and Spanx. Research like his, Geoff Kushnick wrote, “has implications for the concept of universality espoused in some versions of evolutionary psychology” and calls into question “the notion that one size fits all.” Perhaps, just perhaps, Kushnick bravely postulated, human mating preferences are “flexible,” responsive to local circumstances, rather than preordained by one’s chromosomal makeup. Hard as it might be for Westerners to fathom, men in subsistence societies just may favor the appearance of sturdiness and surefootedness over a head-to-toe package of “youth signifiers,” the lovely semiotics of Lolita en pointe.
   I bring this up because Woman deals at length with some of the more complacently tendentious claims about male-female differences that have emerged from evolutionary psychology—that women are coy and fastidious while men are ardent and promiscuous, for example, or that women are just not as obsessed with power and achievement as men are, and, hey, that’s a good thing, especially if it means more homemade red velvet cupcakes for the school bake sale. Since Woman was first published, the application of Darwinian ideas to the study of human behavior has itself speciated into an array of different schools, some of them quite creative and sophisticated. The researchers call themselves evolutionary anthropologists, human behavioral ecologists, evolutionary developmental biologists, or simply scientists. They view humans as very smart animals with a long, messy past, and they are devoted to decoding the complex interplay between biology and biography, genes and culture, individual variability and hominid continuity. Many of these evolutionary scholars will express reservations in private about the subdiscipline of evolutionary psychology and its penchant for intellectual overreach, the ease with which its most ardent proponents will spin a highly preliminary finding into a grand saga about the deep evolutionary roots of male-female differences. Still, it can take courage to speak out against the proclamations of evolutionary psychology, which is why I characterize Kushnick’s questioning of the “one size fits all” model of human mating preferences as brave. When confronted by results that cast doubt on their core convictions, or by skeptics who question their interpretation of a given data set, evolutionary psychologists can be remarkably tetchy and thin-skinned. They will accuse their critics of ignorance, of not believing in evolution, of letting their political opinions cloud their scientific judgment, or all of the above. David Buss, a patriarch of the evo-psycho industry, has compared himself to Galileo defending truths as incontrovertible as heliocentricity against the forces of darkness. In 2012 Alice Eagly and Wendy Woods, respected psychologists steeped in Darwinian theory, published a lengthy and abundantly footnoted report entitled “Biosocial Construction of Sex Differences and Similarities in Behavior.” They discussed the considerable variability of psychological sex differences across cultures and throughout time, and they noted the challenge that such variation posed to “essentialist” beliefs about male and female nature. That elicited a predictable response in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, in which Barry Kuhle of the University of Scranton slapped down Eagly and Wood as “gender feminists” whose thinking “needs to evolve.” And their feets are probably too big, too.
   The debate over evolutionary psychology is no mere parlor game. Many people have taken its more diaphanous and peremptory claims all too seriously, and some of those people wield influence. When Lawrence Summers, then the president of Harvard University, famously suggested in 2005 that the lack of women in the upper tiers of science might have less to do with sex discrimination or the difficulty of combining motherhood and career than with women’s innately inferior math skills and the relative weakness of their competitive drive, a number of critics observed that Summers’s position sounded suspiciously EP. By the gospel of EP, women are the sane and balanced ones, humanity’s multitaskers, so of course you’d expect to find them comfortably ensconced beneath the great middling bulge of the cognitive bell curve. Men, on the other hand, are the risk takers, the hunters, whose fetal brains had rotated wildly through testosterone hyperspace before crash-landing at either end of the IQ distribution scale. The result? More male geniuses and more male fools, and more all-round wham-bang momentum for whatever those males may do.
   Summers’s comments caused an uproar, but did he perchance have a point? Does math genius favor the masculine mind? The trend lines say no. Thirty years ago, among the nation’s top scorers on standardized math tests, there were thirteen boys for every girl; today that ratio is three to one and shrinking, and in some countries the male-female math gap has vanished altogether. As for whether men hold the copyright on ambition and drive, well, Larry Summers really wanted to be chairman of the Federal Reserve. He pursued the position publicly, unabashedly, and manfully through much of 2013. Too bad for him Janet Yellin wanted the same thing.
   Evolutionary psychology is a rich thematic vein that I can’t seem to stop mining, and readers who wish to excavate further can find a selection of my essays on the topic, written since Woman first came out, in the appendix of this new edition.
   Beyond the EP escapades, a number of longstanding assumptions about the limitations of the female body lately have been shaken. Evidence now suggests, for example, that girls may not be born with all the eggs they’ll ever have in life—long a bedrock principle of reproductive biology—but instead retain the power to generate new eggs well into their postfetal years. The three-step vaccine that blocks infection by the most dangerous strains of human papilloma virus promises to render cervical cancer obsolete in the near future, taking with it, we can only hope, the dreary annual Pap smear  I most emphatically do not wish the same fate for men, even though scientists have recently managed to transform women’s bone marrow cells into protosperm.
   But perhaps the biggest change in the women’s health department has been the spectacular collapse of hormone replacement therapy as wonder drug [I think wonder drug works ok here, thanks] the one-stop solution to whatever ails the older gal. When I wrote Woman, the use of formulations like Prempro—a combination of estrogen and synthetic progesterone—was on the ascent, prescribed to millions of women aged fifty and older whose own ovaries had retired from the hormonal supply business. Prempro and similar pills were pitched as the equivalent of taking insulin for diabetes or Synthroid for thyroid disease—the sensible solution to the hormone “deficiency” disorder that is menopause. And evidence did seem to be accruing that estrogen could protect postreproductive women against an array of miseries, minor to macro: hot flashes, mood swings, bone fractures, heart disease, Alzheimer’s. Add in progestin to counter estrogen’s known tendency to overstimulate the uterine lining, and you had what looked like a great treatment for many of the worst banes of aging.

Table of Contents

Preface xvii
Introduction: Into the Light xxv
Unscrambling the Egg 1
It Begins with One Perfect Solar Cell
The Mosaic Imagination 19
Understanding the “Female” Chromosome
Default Line 40
Is the Female Body a Passive Construct?
The Well-Tempered Clavier 64
On the Evolution of the Clitoris
Suckers and Horns 93
The Prodigal Uterus
MASS HYSTERIA 124
Losing the Uterus
Circular Reasonings 138
The Story of the Breast
Holy Water 162
Breast Milk
A Gray and Yellow Basket 182
The Bounteous Ovary
Greasing the Wheels 199
A Brief History of Hormones
Venus in Furs 217
Estrogen and Desire
Mindful Menopause 232
Can We Live Without Estrogen?
There’s No Place Like Notoriety 241
Mothers, Grandmothers, and Other Great Dames
Wolf Whistles and Hyena Smiles 266
Testosterone and Women
Spiking the Punch 294
In Defense of Female Aggression
Cheap Meat 319
Learning to Make a Muscle
Labor of Love 336
The Chemistry of Human Bondage
Of Hoggamus and Hogwash 360
Putting Evolutionary Psychology on the Couch
A Skeptic in Paradise 397
A Call for Revolutionary Psychology
Appendix 411
References 446
Acknowledgments 463
Index 465

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"...a remarkable document of universal interest.... a tour de force, a wonderful, entertaining and informative book."—Abraham Verghese

"...dazzling.... What you'll see through her eyes will startle and amaze you."—Marilyn Yalom The New York Times

"The revolution already has a manifesto in the form of the ebullient Woman: An Intimate Geography. There are other female-positive books hitting the stores - but it's Angier 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 is a delicious cocktail of estrogen and amphetamine designed to pump up the ovaries as well as the cerebral cortex. " Time Magazine

"In Woman, Angier wields her poetic scalpel to explore female biology, and the result is awesome."—Dr. Susan Love, Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book

"[Angier] is my kind of feminist. Unlike, say, Catherine MacKinnon, she has a sense of humor about the war between the sexes. .... It is the open-mindedness of Woman that is so beguiling. Natalie Angier encourages us to celebrate the diversity of human nature and to realize that the process of cultural evolution is only just beginning."—Erica Jong, The New York Observer

"O joy, O rapture unforeseen! Natalie Angier's fascinating book about the female body is a hilarious romp through, well, our innards. In a deliciously irreverent, energetic, and clear writing style, she demystifies and de-mythicizes women's anatomy and biological workings. Along the way, Angier leaves no metaphor unexplored....She reveals the mysterious universe of women's bodies for even the most scientifically impaired souls. Like the evolution she describes, Angier is self-selecting in what she writes about, but her passion for what make us gals tick is infectious. Her explanation of chromosomes veritably sings. Woman: An Intimate Geography will leave the reader, male or female, in sheer awe of the complexity and power of women's bodies."—Ms. Magazine

"A delightfully mischievous yet serious book on the biology of the female body. Mischievous in that the science is interpreted in terms of modern feminism. It is a great read."—Phillip Sharp, MIT professor and Nobel laureate

"A delighted and delightful book, scientifically intelligent, politically astute, and replete with the intense complexity and fascination of biology. The writing is wonderful and the humor and sensibility are as rare as they are welcome."—Perri Klass, M.D.

"Woman is so captivating I couldn't put it down. It is jam-packed with fascinating, carefully researched facts I never knew before about how we women work. Best of all, Angier's abundant sense of humor and colorful writing style make this an irresistible read for everyone interested in women's bodies and women's health."—Miriam E. Nelson, Ph.D., Strong Women Stay Young

"In this witty, learned, adventurous book, Angier gives feminism a cheerful, evolutionary twist. Her deflation of the 'new science of evolutionary psychology' is a brilliant combination of hard science, humor and common sense exactly right."—Katha Pollitt, The Nation

"Angier has brought both her considerable intellect and wry sense of humor to this book. The result is brilliantly accessible and wonderfully subversive."—Dr. Christiane Northrup, Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom

"Having occupied a woman’s body for nearly sixty years, I didn’t think any book would have much to teach me. How wrong I was!"—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, ethologist and author of The Hidden Life of Dogs

"Passion and intelligence meet in a gorgeous book about what it means to be a woman today, yesterday, and forever. Herein lies a fund of knowledge beautifully conveyed, as well as questions that have yet to be answered." Kirkus Reviews

"It's hard not to sound effusive about Woman: An Intimate Geography, since it's fabulous. Angier's book contains more facts about women than anything I've read since the Boston Women's Health Collective published Our Bodies, Our Selves in 1973. My advice about Woman is, get three copies, one for the beach, one for the bathroom and one to read under the covers with a flashlight." Elle

"To read Woman is to banish the gods of negative body image. It is transformative in the way Our Bodies, Our Selves was in the '70s, and no less radical. In fact, if Our Bodies, Our Selves has become the bible of women's bodies, let Woman: An Intimate Geography be our Shakespeare." Mirabella

"It's exhilarating to follow Angier's subversive logic as she dismantles the misogynist mythologies once advanced as the scientific gospel of the female body and replaces them with theories more congenial with the female soul....Angier's brilliant and witty fantasia will inspire women to believe in their powwers." Boston Globe

"One knows early on one is reading a classic—a text so necessary and abundant aand truuuuue that all efforts of its kind, for decades before and after it, will be measured by it. ... After a careful reading of this essential book, men should pass it along to someone they love-—their sons, daughters ... lovers and spouses. For a fresh look into the life's sciences ... and the pure pleasure of language in service to the facts of life, Angier's Woman is as good as it gets."—Thomas Lynch, Los Angeles Times

"The chief manifesto of the new 'femaleist' thinking, this ebullient and provocative treatise on women's bodies reads like a mixture of Walt Whitman and Erma Bombeck."—Barbara Ehrenreich, TIME cover story, "The Truth About Women's Bodies"

Reading Group Guide

"Natalie Angier's dazzling new book calls upon biology and evolution to celebrate the female body. Its upbeat message. . . is supported by rigorous scientific underpinnings." —The New York Times

The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Woman: An Intimate Geography.

1. Angier describes her book as "a celebration of the female body" (p. xiii). Having read her chapters on the intricacies of the egg, the clitoris, the uterus, the breast, and so on, are your ideas about the female body substantially altered? How?

2. In her introduction, Angier quotes cultural commentator Camille Paglia, who writes of the menstrual cycle as follows: "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" (p. xvi). Why is Angier so opposed to this kind of thinking?

3. Angier discusses medical evidence purporting that whether a person becomes a male or a female is a matter of chance, dependent upon the switching on or off of certain genes and the sensitivity of certain tissues to hormones while the fetus is forming. How does the evidence presented here affect your understanding of sexual difference, and the relative importance of biological and cultural determinants of sexual identity?

4. Do you agree with Angier's assessment that "the clitoris is designed to encourage its bearer to take control of her sexuality" (p.76)? What is the evolutionary purpose of the clitoris if, as it appears, it is an organ "dedicated exclusively to sexual pleasure" (p.70)?

5. Given the cases of Jane Carden, Cheryl Chase, Martha Coventry (pp. 28, 84-85) and others like them, should surgeons alter the genitals of infants and children whose bodies they consider abnormal? How similar is such cosmetic alteration to the genital cutting practiced in many African countries? If it is true that surgical alterations are made to womens' bodies far more often than to mens', what are the cultural assumptions that account for such inequity?

6. The use of HRT—hormone replacement therapy—for post-menopausal women has stirred much controversy, as has the widespread use of hysterectomy as a solution to the problem of fibroids. How does Angier's approach to these issues affect your position? Should the body be left to follow its own natural course, or do such medical interventions improve upon nature?

7. Angier contends that the institution of patriarchy belongs exclusively to the human species: "Only among humans is the idea ever floated that a male should support a female, and that the female is in fact incapable of supporting herself and her offspring, and that it is a perfectly reasonable act of quid pro quo to expect a man to feed his family and a woman to be unerringly faithful, to give the man paternity assurance and to make his investment worthwhile" (p. 302). Is there any evidence that patriarchal thinking has weakened in contemporary American life? Why has patriarchy been so successful in suppressing most expressions of female power except for those crucial to the domestic and maternal areas of life?

8. Following her discussion of the role of post-menopausal women in primitive societies, Angier presents her opinion of the necessity of female bonding, both within and beyond the group of one's age mates. Extrapolating from her own experience, Angier claims that "we keep looking for our mothers and those mythical creatures our female mentors" (p. 257). How widespread is this desire among women?

9. Angier has said, "I really object to the idea of females as more cooperative and less aggressive than men, both in terms of sexual drive and ambition....I know it's not true that women don't have an innate hunger to succeed" [Interview in Los Angeles Times, June 28 1999, page E1]. What then explains the fact (p. 361) that as recently as 1996, only four of the Fortune 1000 companies were headed by women? If, as Angier claims, "our strongest aggressions and our most frightening hostilities may be directed at other women" (p. 295), is it possible that women inhibit one another's success?

10. Angier notes that "most female animals are promiscuous" (p. 381) and strongly disagrees with evolutionary psychologists who "insist on the innate discordance between the strength of the male and female sex drive" (p. 364). Do you agree with her that women are as interested in sex as men? Do you think women pursue their sexual desires as aggressively as men do?

11. What message is being sent in the movie Thelma & Louise about what happens when women go in search of independence? Why do you think the film ended the way it did? If the film was made today, would the ending be the same? Is there any evidence that Americans are becoming less conventional and more flexible in their thinking about the independence of women?

12. Epidemiological studies show that, in terms of longevity and health, men benefit from marriage more than women do. Angier points out that this data conflicts with the position of evolutionary psychologists "men are 'naturally' ill-suited to matrimony" (p. 386). How do you make sense of this seeming contradiction?

13. Angier says, "It is still too costly to behave in a way that risks the investment and tolerance of a man, of the greater male coalition—We reject the idea of sisterhood and of female solidarity. We make fun of it" (p. 309). Still, she argues, female bonds are important, and women need them. Is she right in saying that in our culture, feminism gets no respect? If so, why have the energies of feminism dissipated since the 1970s?

14. Gloria Steinem calls Woman "nothing less than liberation biology," and says that Angier "proposes revolutionary possibilities for both men and women." How would women's lives be different if mainstream culture shared Angier's perspective on women's power and potentiality?

15. In Chapter 18 Angier takes issue with evolutionary psychologists who claim that we still live under the sway of prehistoric instinct when it comes to choosing a mate. Women, they say, seek stability and economic security, while men tend to seek youth and beauty. Why have the ideas of Robert Wright, David Buss, and others in their field gained such wide acceptance? Does Angier ultimately come closer than they do to answering Sigmund Freud's famous question, "What do women want"?

16. Why are women's relationships with their mothers often so difficult? What do you think of the wish Angier expresses for her relationship with her daughter, once her daughter is herself an adult, "that my daughter's need for me may prove larger, more enduring, and more passionate than the child's need for meals, clothes, shelter, and applause" (p. 258)? Do women in fact need their mothers more, not less, as they get older?

17. Woman is a very personal book for Natalie Angier. What has Angier risked—and what has she gained—by speaking of her own experience so freely, by making use of her quirky sense of humor, and by being so playful with language? How do the author's voice and prose style affect your experience of the book?

18. Remembering a conversation in 1987 between herself, her grandmother, her mother, and her cousin in which all four women agreed that if given the choice they would have chosen to be men, Angier ends the book by rejecting that wish: "the wish to be a man is a capitulation to limits and strictures we never set for ourselves. It is lazy"—and by inviting her women readers to celebrate their womanhood. "Our tribe is the tribe of woman. It is our tribe to define, and we're still doing it, and we will never give up. We live in a state of permanent revolution" (p. 401). Do you find this inspiring, liberating, or simply unrealistic?

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