The Real Truth About The Female Body

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PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL LLEWELLYN

HUNTER -- Old evolutionary thinking: while the men went out and tracked down dinner, the women stayed back at base camp, taking care of the kids. New thinking: women were important providers too, and probably took part in communal hunts

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?