The Real Truth About The Female Body

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PHOTOGRAPH FOR TIME BY ROBERT SEBREE

POWER SURGE -- Long a fabled liability of the female condition, menopause is becoming a rite of passage worthy of celebration. Among early humans, postmenopausal women may have had a key role as providers

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.