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So how different are we really? The revisionist evolutionary story tells us that both sexes share the legacy of our hunting, gathering, fighting, roaming ancestors. In addition, both sexes are confronted daily with the same kinds of hard choices: Do the fun thing or what your tribe considers the moral one? Go for security or adventure, sex or a handshake? And both sexes appear to have the same internal equipment for making these choices, equipment that we know as conscience or free will. But from a femaleist point of view, the whole business of difference is getting a little old: Different from whom? And how did he get to be the standard for the human race?
There are still staggering obstacles in the way of a body-proud, open-minded and biology-affirmative female consciousness. Pressured to conform to impossible notions of beauty, girls are falling prey to eating disorders at tragically young ages. There are groups who object to any straightforward reference to female biology, like the school-library censors who periodically ban Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, because it deals with menstruation. In the culture that came up with Baywatch, police officers still sometimes confuse breast feeding with indecent exposure. And, willfully or not, the evolutionary psychologists keep fueling the pop wisdom that the sexes originated on separate home planets, neither one of them earth.
So maybe we should be awed and amazed that there are so many women eager to celebrate their female selves: scientists and science writers exploring the female body and evolutionary history, rappers asserting their tough-minded female sexuality, lawyers and homemakers marking their menopause by throwing a party or climbing Mont Blanc. Call them "estronauts," these new bio-positive women, for their ability to feel the delicious tug of the hormonal tides as well as the gleaming challenge of the mountain peaks. Or--what does it matter?--just call them human.
--With reporting by Barbara Maddux/New York