Woman: An Intimate Geography (63 page)

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Authors: Natalie Angier

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BOOK: Woman: An Intimate Geography
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''There is absolutely no chance of the human species evolving," he said. "We cover every niche, we cover every spot on the earth. There's no system of isolation, and so we can never speciate. You need a system of isolation for the mechanism of natural selection to operate. There's no basis for a real change in our genes, for a physical change. Granted, there have been people like Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, who introduced eugenics and the concept that we can 'improve' the species through controlled breeding. But eugenics is impossible for various reasons, and we don't want to try it. We don't want another Nazi horror on our hands. We don't want to try to evolve a race of supermen. Whatever evolution we see from this point on will have to be cultural evolution rather than genetic evolution. That's unfortunate, because cultural things can be lost so easily. But that's where we are. That's what we have to work with."
I published Mayr's opinions in an article that appeared in
Natural History
magazine, and a lot of readers were outraged. They waxed incredulous at Mayr's conviction that humans have stopped evolving genetically. They thought he was shortsighted, behind the times, naive. They talked about biotechnology and advances in gene therapy and the ability to manipulate the human genome. They talked of populations of humans colonizing other planets, being freed from the mother ship, thenceforth isolated well enough to mutate off on a parallel lifeline.
I'm with Mayr, and happily so. Sure, cultural evolution is shakier than genetic evolution, and more prone to backsliding and amnesia. But the engine of natural selection does not give us better, nobler, or more righteous individuals. Natural selection gives us whimsy and excess. Natural selection advises, Go forth and multiply. Conquer and divide. We've conquered and divided quite enough, thank you very much. We need a little culture here, a little education and deliberation. Cultural evolution works pretty well. Culture has a way of becoming a habit, and habits have a way of getting physical, of feeding back on the loop and transforming the substrate. Think of a simple good habit, such as wearing a seat belt. You get in the car and you automatically reach for the seat belt. If something upsets the routine say, you're toting a large package into the seat with you and you fail to fasten the seat belt as soon as you sit down, you'll probably feel a vague sense of discomfiture, as though your body were trying to tell you something, as though a little

 

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red light were blinking on your internal dashboard. Warning! Warning! Do not relax! The seat-belt routine is now operating on a subconscious, physicalized plane. You have become habituated. Neurobiologists have shown that habituation occurs through structural changes in brain cells. The cultural practice, the wearing of the seat belt, shapes your synapses as surely as a mutant gene might do. You can't bestow the behavior on your children passively, through cracking open an egg. It is not specified in your genome, of course, and so every generation must learn it anew. But no matter; if you start 'em on the seat-belt habit young enough, they won't be able to escape. Where heredity ends, stump-tailing begins.
Women are proof that it is easier to add than to overhaul. In recent decades, women have assumed new roles while scarcely abandoning the old. We have become breadwinners, and we still do most of the child care. We have learned to like the taste of acclaim, whether it comes in large drafts of professional eminence or in the extraordinary ordinary appearance of a regular paycheck. At the same time, we have not given up our taste for the old, socially approved female drug, the laudanum of personal intimacy. Power and warmth: they both taste wonderful. And though women are warned that they can't have it all, that they can't be accomplished whatevers and still be loving mothers (and wives!), women can say, Brazzz! We can, we're doing it, we're paddling our little canoes to that fine autarchic shore as fast as we can, and there's no turning back, no matter how many tridents you wag and thunderbolts you throw. Feminism can't take all the credit for opening up economic and educational opportunities for women, as feminism's many foes have been at pains to point out. Feminism has mattered laughably little, they say. The mass entry of women into the workplace over the past thirty to forty years was driven by economic necessity and the shrinking of the economy. The model of the father as the sole support of a family was a socioeconomic aberration, a twentieth-century straw man slapped together by postwar economic expansion. That expansion could not be sustained, so of course women must work. Feminism has nothing to do with it. Women worked before, and they're working now. Women have always worked. Nothing new there.
True enough. Except that there are some new features in the world of near-tomorrow. Women are doing more than working, as they always

 

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have. They are gaining ground, albeit slowly, in the acquisition of genuine wealth. In the postindustrial nations, women account for better than half of all the owners of new small businesses. In America, businesses owned by women employ more people than all the Fortune 500 companies combined. The percentage of women purchasing a home in the United States has risen sharply over the past twenty years, and the claim to territory remains a deep source of hominid might. Of equal importance, women are being educated now as never before. As recently as the early 1960s, only 4 percent of the students in law school and 3 percent of the students in medical school were women; today, the figures are about 50 percent for both. American high school girls are slightly more likely to attend and complete a four-year college than high school boys are. Higher education is becoming a habit, and educated people are scandalously prone to ambitiousness, and to making demands, and to expecting parity and fairness. Whenever and wherever women are educated, they rediscover their core female desires to gain direct access to resources and to control the means of personal reproduction. As a rule, educated women have smaller families than uneducated women do, not only because getting that education takes time, but because educated women want a good education for their children, and they know that they can't afford to feed, clothe, and credential more than a handful of progeny. Educated women are surprisingly apelike in their family planning practices, for female apes generally have small families; one of the most prolific and successful chimpanzee matriarchs on record, named Fifi, has given birth to only seven young in her long life, two thirds the number of offspring spawned by Darwin's wife. Educated African women, says Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, a Sudanese anthropologist, are more likely than uneducated women to reject the practice of pudendal desecration. They want their clitoris intact. They want to keep learning, with every brain in their bodies.
We'll take help wherever we can get it, and there are tides in our favor that have nothing to do with feminism or the quest for parity. We have the cataract of the global market, with its demands that all hands be on deck and its call for an educated (at least technically educated) work-force. Moreover, the planetary distribution of infomerchandise may work modestly to women's advantage, because the image of the liber-

 

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ated Western woman in her pumps and smart skirt, toting a laptop en route to the airport, however fabricated and delusive the image may be, has a certain marketing appeal, speaks to the female thirst for freedom, and can be, may be, a source of subversion, a reminder that we are bipedal foragers, unstoppable nomads.
Nonetheless, cultural evolution demands permanent revolution, which means never giving up, never coasting or falling prey to complacency, never saying, Okay, we don't want to push or offend and we don't want our canines to show. Virginia Valian cites the example of Monica Seles, the tennis player who in 1991 argued that men and women should compete for equal prize money in tournaments. "Two other female players responded publicly," Valian writes. "Steffi Graf was quoted as saying, 'We make enough, we don't need more,' and Mary Joe Fernandez reportedly said, 'I'm happy with what we have; I don't think we should be greedy.' A lack of entitlement thus interprets equality as greed." Women have to keep asking, that much is clear. We have to be on sentry duty, for if our attention lapses, wham, there's the local Taliban, kicking us to the ground and throwing a black chador over our heads. The Icelandic singer Björk recently complained about feminists. They really bugged her, she said. They whine about things not being equal and that men get all the breaks. She could understand that feeling for people of her mother's generation, or her grandmother's, but not now. Today the prison door is open, she insisted. All you have to do is walk out of it.
Part of me was happy to hear her say that, to know that she sees the door as open and herself as a free and fiery primate. More of me thinks, Get thee to an optometrist, Lady Magoo, for thy pale eyes are boiled blind. Sure, the door may be open for now but it's kept open by the strength of a lot of blistered female fingers and female feet and the wedging in of a rounded female haunch or two. Björk is a successful avant-garde rocker and has little personal cause to doubt the splendor of the system; nevertheless, the world of rock and roll remains overwhelmingly male, and women musicians still are tarred with assessments like that of Juliana Hatfield, the slacker pop singer, who has spluttered publicly that "female guitarists suck."
Women have done much by pushing and whining and getting habituated to sovereignty, but we are not there yet; we're still gripped with self-doubt, gynophobia, and cramps of spiritual autism. We are so hard

 

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on one another. We dismiss women for not being serious enough about their work. Chrissie Hynde, of the Pretenders, is a legend among female rockers for her rasping, crafty, lyrical style. But Chrissie Hynde, now in her forties, doesn't want to be an icon for the growling grrlhood. "I never said I'm a feminist, and I don't have any answers," she told the critic Guy Garcia. "As long as we're getting paid and can vote, what's the problem?" She, for one, prefers playing with the boys. "I work with men," she said. "They're single-minded, straightforward, and they can rock. Most women can't."
We're not dedicated. We're not quite up to the task. But the woman who wants to be up to the task, to flog away at work year after year even when she has young children, is subjected to another sort of animadversion, the guilt sling. She is warned of the damage she will do her baby by not affixing it to her bosom for the first three crucial years of brain development. She is told repeatedly that nothing beats parental care when it comes to maximizing her child's potential. All of biomedicine now weighs down on the side of full-time parenthood and the ineluctable demands of the baby's growing brain. Always it is assumed that the mother will be the primary brain sentry, by nature and personal predilection. Every magazine you flip through, there it is, the mommy dreck, the disquisition on the guilt that working mothers feel and how it persists despite decades of feminist change, to the point where if an employed mother doesn't feel guilty about working, she feels guilty about her lack of guilt. Some fathers feel the guilt, we are told, but not many of them, and not as severely. That's not their job, even now. They haven't added the guilt habit to their repertory. Why should they feel guilty? They're not supposed to feel guilty. During the 1997 trial of the British nanny accused of killing a nine-month-old boy in her charge, the mother of the boy, a physician, received a flurry of angry letters, mostly from women, placing the child's death on
her
shoulders for having gone back to work (a mere three days a week) rather than staying home with her children full-time. Needless to say, the boy's father, also a doctor, escaped public outrage for daring to be a dedicated professional.
It's a sad business when women indict other women for their take on life, for their choice of reproductive and emotional strategy. It may be understandable, given the role of female-female competition in recent

 

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human history, but I argue that it is maladaptive for women to continue on this course of she said/she said, the yowling and mud wrestling. We need each other now. The next phase of the permanent revolution needs an infusion of Old World monkey sorority. We're not supposed to talk about women's rights anymore, for to do so is to commit the sin of "victimology," to act the weak whiner, the neurasthenic corseted Victorian lady. The charge of victimology, like that of political correctness, instantly squelches all effort at precise protest, neutering a complaint before it has been uttered, for complain is what victimologists do. But if you don't ask for a raise, you won't get one, and if you don't snarl about an injustice, it won't go away. If women are prejudged as women to be lesser this or that, if a female guitarist is assumed to "suck" before she has taken out her instrument and played a single note, if women are still blamed for being bad mothers because they work outside the home, and if women are told there is an evolutionary reason that they don't really want sex, or if they do they should hide it, then we are not done with our women's moil yet.
Women care about their children, of course. Yet just as mate choice is contingent on what you bring to the bargain the particulars of your needs, upbringing, temperament, immune system, metabolism, and so forth so the ways in which women choose to invest in their children will differ from woman to woman. Mothering strategies are as diverse as mating strategies, and no one strategy is the one, the twenty-four-carat, the alpha and omega of maternity. Some mothers may feel that the best thing for their children is their attention, love, touch, comfort on command, and they will do everything in their power to be there for their children, getting by on less money, part-time jobs, piecework, patchwork. Some mothers may feel that their children need a show of strength, a facsimile of adult autonomy grindstone evidence that women deserve their work, income, and authority and that you, daughter mine, will deserve yours as well in time. These mothers will not stop working, even if they can afford to. They want to work, and that appetite is part of their game plan, their customized investment in their children. But if a horrible accident befalls the child in day care, leading to the child's death or disability, how disgusting to blame the mother and only the mother for working; how reprehensible, when children die in their mothers' care all the time. They drown in bathtubs, they fall

 

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