Woman: An Intimate Geography (53 page)

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Authors: Natalie Angier

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BOOK: Woman: An Intimate Geography
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always a bad idea; but if the presumed corollary of that doctrine is that women are profoundly and immutably vulnerable to male violence and that they must rely on the courtly behavior of men and the vigilance of the legal system to keep themselves in one piece, then the doctrine is not entirely benign and may even backfire. If men believe that they are always stronger than all women, and that here at least they have the upper hand, by rights, by testosterone, by bone and hemoglobin, and if our species' sexual dimorphism is overrated and the heft of women understated, then a man, an angry, idiotic, small-souled man, will view the cost of hitting a woman as depressingly low, and a woman will view the thought of protecting herself as ludicrous, ridiculous, because she can never, ever succeed. And sure enough, the prophecy will be fulfilled, the man will beat the woman at no physical risk to himself, because we all know that a woman can't stand up to a man and we all know that a woman should look toned, not bulky. I am not, absolutely not, blaming women who are assaulted by men for allowing themselves to be beaten, but I am questioning the mentality that effectively hypertrophies the size and strength dimorphism between men and women, and that makes men, even frumpy, lethargic, academic men, smug, and that makes women, even tall, substantial women, afraid. Think simian, subversive thoughts. Among patas monkeys, vervet monkeys, brown capuchins, stump-tailed macaques, and other species of monkeys, females often win in one-on-one agonistic encounters with males, even though the males are as proportionally bigger than the females as men are than women. Does this surprise you? A monkey tornado can pick you up and fling you to Oz and back. If a female macaque decides to fly in your face, her smallness, her fifteen pounds, will feel huger than any weather you have seen.
Women don't have to be as strong as men to be strong enough, to stomp around like maenads. It was a man who told me as much, back in college. He was a large, broad-shouldered man, a competitive swimmer who qualified for the Olympics. He was the largest and most athletic man I had ever dated, and I felt overwhelmed by the expanse of him.
You could snap me in two like a twig, I said to him.
Oh, no, I couldn't, he said. You're strong, and you've got a lot of

 

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muscle there, he said, poking at my midriff. It would be very difficult to break you in half.
Part of me wanted to yield to his power, to designate its authority, and to feel protected beneath it. But he knew his strength, and he had a measure of mine, and he had the strength to tell me that I was selling myself short. Men who respond with sputtering ire at the thought of female parity in athletic competition show that there is a faint, oaky note of doubt about male primogeniture. It can't hurt, and it may help, to question the absolutism of sexual asymmetry through any number of minor acts of smugness a pushup here, a pullup there, a cueball bicep if you can get it. Bitch.
Of course, being swift and strong will not protect a woman from being raped or molested. Antifeminists argue the opposite, that women who labor under the illusion of strength and self-sufficiency are the ones who do foolish things, go places they shouldn't, and end up paying for it. In 1989, when a female jogger in Central Park was almost killed by a gang of wilding boys, many people blamed the jogger, an accomplished athlete, for being so reckless as to run in the park at night. But women get attacked in daylight, and in their homes, and when walking from their job to their cars. Obviously there are no guarantees. It's worth pointing out that although the Central Park jogger was grievously wounded, she didn't die. She refused to die. She amazed doctors by her recovery. Perhaps her strength kept her alive the blunt strength of her body and the obstreperousness of her mind.
Men take strength for granted. Women have to fight for it. They have to trick themselves into their strength, or rather their strengths. Physical strength is but one allele of strength. There are all the other strengths: of self-conviction, of purpose, of being comfortable in your designated plasm. I don't know if physical strength can enhance those other, intangible strengths, if a better-braced body can give one
ovarios
of heart. It's a good gimmick, though, a place to start, or to return to when all else fails. The body will be there to do its bit, to take another crack at life, and to propel you forward, suitcase in hand, not on wheels. The trappings of physical strength are so persuasive that you can almost hear the spotted hyenas giggling in the dark.

 

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17
Labor of Love: The Chemistry of Human Bondage
The brain is an organ of aggression, and there are many roads to this Rome of imagined conquests so many that mental disorders, regardless of their particulars, often result in a derangement of our aggressive drive. Schizophrenics stand on the streetcorner screaming obscenely at passersby; depressives lie in their beds screaming mutely at themselves. Our gentle aggressions, the drive to be, prods us out of bed in the morning and draws us toward each other. And in each other we find what our aggressive brain desires: love.
As we are wired for aggression, so we are wired to love. We are a lavishly loving species, aggressively sentimental. We are tireless in the pursuit of fresh targets for our love. We love our children so long that they come to despise us for it. We love friends, books, flags, nation-states, sports teams. We love answers. We love yesterday and next year. We love gods, for a god is there when all else fails, and God can keep all conduits of love alive erotic, maternal, paternal, euphoric, infantile.
We are incorrigible romantics, who no more want to be relieved of our condition than an incurable optimist wants to have her rose-colored spectacles retinted. For a while it was the going wisdom among historians that romantic love was a relatively recent invention, arising from the mercantile and troubadour tradition of late medieval France. In premodern and non-Western societies, the historians argued, men and women do not marry "for love" their marriages are usually arranged, or bought and sold; nor do people in most cultures dreamily conjure up images of the beloved. More recently, scholars have shown otherwise. They have uncovered a cross-cultural and cross-temporal trove of love ditties, love geysers, and eloquent swoons. In a survey of

 

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ethnographic data for 166 contemporary societies, Helen Fisher, of Rutgers University, found evidence of romantic love in 147; for the rest, the data were too incomplete to rule it in or out. Historically, the ancient Babylonians, Sumerians, Akkadians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, and Meso-Americans left behind paeans to romantic love. Lovers leap to an immortal heat in the Song of Songs, written in the ninth century
B.C.
, she with teeth like a flock of shorn sheep, lips like a thread of scarlet, and breasts like twin roes, and he with eyes as the eyes of doves and cheeks like a bed of spices and legs as pillars of marble set upon sockets of fine gold: "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine." Tutankhamen died before he was twenty, but he lived long enough to write love poems to his wife. If a Gothic cathedral is, as Rilke said, frozen music, then the Taj Mahal, which the Shah Jahan built for his beloved dead bride, is a frozen keen. "It's no use, Mother dear, I can't finish my weaving," Sappho wrote 2,600 years ago. ''You may blame Aphrodite/soft as she is/she has almost killed me with love for that boy."
Love is universal, yet we can't help but want to clutch it to ourselves. We don't want it explained. We certainly don't want it anatomized and biologized. It seems at once too big and too private, too profound and too fleeting, for science to get its patch clamps and pipettes into. Relax! Your brain in love remains a sacred, suffocating swamp. We still need our poets and songwriters the good ones, anyway. Science has not solved the love question. We know very little about what the biochemical and neural substrates of love may be. Love is a tremendously difficult problem to study. How do you define it? Which animals can you use? If scientists are going to do experiments on the deep biology of love, they need animals, and they need reliable assays. When cats are feeling hostile, they raise their fur, curl their lips back, and hiss in a stereotypical manner, and so cats are a favorite "model system" for studying aggression. But what are the dependable signs of animal love in the lab? What is the difference between two animals that huddle together to keep warm and two animals that huddle because they are "friends"? Is there a difference?
At the same time that the problem looms so unruly, the "biology of love" doesn't sound quite serious enough for many scientists. "What do you study?" "Love." "Oh. And they pay you to do that?" "Sometimes. If

 

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I grovel, obfuscate, and use diversionary tactics. If I write my grants cleverly and talk about understanding the health risks of social isolation, say, or autism. If I never talk about love."
Yet through biology we can approach love and see parts of it that we may not see when we are acting as self-styled experts by falling in love. Love has its themes. Love is the child of outrage, arriving most readily in the wake of crisis. What we lose in great distress the body and brain strive to replenish in love, and ripe love that feels fattening
is
fattening, literally speaking, for it is designed to conserve our calories as well as our sanity. Love may feel impossible, but it is laughably easy, and once it has begun it is fed by every sense, every nerve fiber, every cell, and by the brain, our big remembering brains. With the brain, our proud throne of reason, we humans have become the best and longest lovers this world has known.
The circuitries of love and attachment are everywhere within us. They are as manifold as the reasons that we befriend and fall in love. Why
do
we bother with love? Let's count the categorical ways. We love, at bottom, because we must, for we are a sexually reproducing species. The reasons that sexual reproduction evolved in the first place are not entirely known. In theory, an asexual style of reproduction, an amoebalike splitting in twain, would be comparatively more efficient than sexual reproduction, the merging of sperm and egg. The study of the origins of sex is a vigorous discipline, with a plethora of proposed justifications and a dearth of proof for any one of them. Suffice it here to say that the regular shakeup and rearrangement of the chromosomes wrought by sexual reproduction must offer great advantages to the production of viable offspring, for the vast majority of earth's creatures have adopted sexual reproduction rather than asexual photocopying of self. Once the need for sex arose, so did the need for the rudiments of affection. Males and females needed the behavioral capacity to set aside any hostility that individuals might feel toward each other and instead take a chance on amity, at least long enough to exchange gametes.
We love because we are a species that nurtures its young. Sexual union can be perfunctory, and so can the dispersal of the fruit of that union. Many sexually reproducing species lay eggs and leave eggs, banking their posterity on chance, circumstance, and profligacy of output. But parental care for the young has its advantages. Parents can protect

 

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the young, feed them food they can't fetch for themselves, reserve territory in a world of tight real estate, and teach the young any number of skills, including how not to do things, for young animals learn by watching the fumblings of their elders as much as they do by observing their victories. Parental behavior has so many things to recommend it that it is found across the phylogenetic spectrum, among fish and insects as well as the more famously parental birds and mammals. "The evolution of parental behavior revolutionized reproduction," says Cort Pedersen, of the University of North Carolina. "Sustained parental protection and nurturing of offspring until they were able to fend for themselves allowed a much higher rate of survival and permitted a much longer period of brain development. Parental care was therefore a prerequisite for the evolution of higher intelligence. Species that care for their offspring have come to dominate every ecological niche in which they dwell." To care for your young means staying by your young, recognizing your young, and returning to your young again and again, even as your selfish, muttering self tells you, Hey, what about number one? A parent, a mother, must be drawn to her young, and the young must in turn be drawn to the mother, and the body and brain of a nurturing species must know how to love and be loved in turn.
That's personal. Then we have the political. There is strength in numbers, not just you and your immediate yours, but an army of yours. There is strength in being a social species and regarding the tribe as an extension of the self and engaging in civic behaviors. Social insects such as ants and honeybees, for example, spend a great deal of time in gestures of arthropod solidarity, exchanging chemical, tactile, and visual signals. They tell each other, Walk this way, dance like that, may I recommend the red flowers to your leeside, come fight with me, come fight come fight come fight. Through their continuous affirmation of community, social insects have become superorganisms, stampeding over any solitary species of insects in their path. "Wherever you go in the world, from rain forest to desert, social insects occupy the center the stable, resource-rich parts of the environment," Edward O. Wilson has written. Solitary insects such as beetles and moths are driven to the fringes, to the ephemeral parts of the habitat not preempted by the social insects. As a result of their competitive edge, social insects propagate in huge numbers. They account for only 2 percent of all the earth's

 

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