Woman: An Intimate Geography (2000) - Plot & Excerpts
Feminist evolutionary biology! Almost an oxymoron. The closest I’d seen to evo-psych that didn’t strongly favor the established construct of “men philander, women are chaste because DARWIN” was Sex at Dawn, and this has a notably more grrl-power bent than that, but without being cloying, intimidating, or overly exclusionary. I like how Ms. Angier writes. She sent me scurrying to the dictionary more than a handful of times, too.The first third of the book reads like an anatomy textbook with a handful of jokes thrown in. The second third is more of a personal dialogue, mostly about going to the gym, with an exponential increase in jokes and the jarring use of the word “bitch”. The final third is part literature review, part reasonable conjecture, and 100% dedicated to taking stabs at established evolutionary psych norms. Which, hey, be my guest, shake up those nerds, they’re balancing on a house of cards anyway.Following are some excerpts that I found especially interesting.“At twenty weeks’ gestation, the peak of a female’s oogonial load, the fetus holds 6 to 7 million eggs.”This was weird to consider. Men produce sperm pretty much always, by accident, and faster when they look at boobs, which is always. Women are born with a precise motherlode (teehee) of eggs which they chamber, fire – often blank – then discard. If it seems wasteful, it’s only because of the stockpile.“Take your Premarin, darling – if we’re clever by nature, it’s the natural thing to do.”No fun facts in this one, I just thought it was clever.“A female slave was a sexual being; she had no choice, and very often she was dressed for the part. To distinguish herself from the race of slaves, a woman could do no better than to cherish her chastity and to flaunt it in flagrant modesty.”And here, the potential origin of the cultural contagion of pure and modest womanhood. The spawn point of “I hate her, she’s such a slut”! The possible progenition of the Romantic ideal that even the Romantics didn’t really care for, since Guinevere banged Lancelot anyway. Distancing oneself from sex slavery as a means of increasing demonstrable value, pushing any desire one might have to occasional objectification well into the realm of the repressed and driving up the rates of BDSM experimentation. Oh, humana.“Female strength is, even yet, seditious. It can make men squirm. They can get angry at a woman who is too strong, who may be stronger than they are. Part of me understands that reaction. I feel irritated and jealous when I see a woman who can lift more weight than I can. How dare she! I look for flaws, for evidence that her form is poor, that she is cheating. But once the initial irritation fades and I can see that she is good at what she is doing, I feel grateful to her, and heartened by her power.”Pfft, nice squat, girl-bro. Form sucks, though. Do you even lift? (I’m glad girls get this too. This is a definite milestone on the march toward full equality.)“I’m talking about strong and earthy, a moosey strength, the strength that shrugs its shoulders and takes no bull. I’ve noticed in nearly every gym where I’ve worked out that women on the weight training equipment use far too low a setting for their strength, particularly when they are exercising their upper body, where they are convinced they are weak. They’ll stick to twenty or thirty pounds’ worth of plates and then do many repetitions easily, and I can see that they could handle twice what they’re pressing, but they’re not doing it, and nobody’s telling them to do it, and I want to go over and beg them to use a higher weight and tell them, Look, you’re blowing it, here’s your chance, your cheap and easy chance, to own a piece of your life and strut and be a comic-strip heroine, so please, stack it up, heave-ho, do it for yourself, your daughter, your mother, the International Maidenhood of Iron. I don’t say anything. It’s not my business.”This, too, hit me right in the deep-set Bro Feels. In days of yore, friends used to have me teach them how to lift. Whatever they hoped to accomplish, be it weight loss, muscle gain, or the construction of an ass from near nonexistence, I got them there by way of lifting heavy weights, eating a ton of meat, and doing occasional, begrudging cardio. Most of these friends were women. I was known in some circles as “Matt Holmes: Ladytrainer”. Few circles. Let’s not reflect. Point is, I am way into her message, give or take the hokey Iron Maiden reference. There’s no such thing as toning, ladies, and a square inch of ladymuscle is, pound for pound, as strong as an inch of dudemuscle. Besides, deliberately limiting yourself to avoid getting “too bulky” is ludicrous. You think Arnold Schwarzenegger just accidentally overdid it one day and woke up Mr. Olympia? You gotta work your ass off, even as a dude pumped full of catalyzing testosterone and ornithine, to strap on that sweet sweet FlexSteak. You’re not gonna get too bulky. Odds are you’re not even gonna get bulky, just strong and hot. You see all these dudes going off about Ronda Rousey? You think that’s coincidence?Which brings us to the detractors, the pitiful hicks who deride SSJ Ronda and any other strong women. It is fear, plain and simple. They are weak creatures, they are afraid of losing what low rung of pack hierarchy they have managed to get their tenuous little fingers around. They should be afraid. You should make them afraid.All right, let’s wind that back down a bit…“If women could be persuaded that men didn’t mind their being high achievers, were in fact pleased and proud to be affiliated with them, we might predict that the women would stop caring about the particulars of their mates’ income.”There are a panoply of psychological factors at work in this little torrent, but I agree that most of it amounts of the male’s perceived social stigma. Gotta win that bread, or I fail as a man! If I win slightly less bread, I still fail as a man! Quit being so sensitive, dweeb. Your ceramic ego is your masculine failing. Let her bring home some bacon. Bring home some of your own. Double up on bacon. Who is hurt by double the bacon?“It seems premature to attribute the relative lack of female interest in sexual variety to women’s biological nature alone in the face of overwhelming evidence that women are consistently beaten for promiscuity and adultery,” Barbara Smuts has written. “If female sexuality is muted compared to that of men, then, why must men the world over go to extreme lengths to control and contain it?”BOOM, BABY. Because it’s not. Alluding once again to Sex at Dawn, there are schools of thought that indicate human women are evolutionarily programmed to be damn near sexually insatiable. You remember that whole thing with each orgasm coming (teehee) more readily than the previous? Get a good one started, and you got yourself a chain reaction? Where does that fit into your conception of monogamous prudery, while Kinsey studies put the average vaginal sexual encounter at a tragic seven minutes from penetration to cigarettes and resentment.The take home is most of these silly social problems are born of insecurity and fear, often on the parts of the men. The beautiful irony is, it could all be avoided, if only they woulda-drumroll pleaseMan Up.
This was a weird one. On the one hand, the actual information contained in the book was fascinating and important. I learned a lot about ovulation, for example, and menopause, and breasts, and enjoyed the learning immensely.But the prose. I suspect lines like, "by Hecate!" and, "the Grand Canyon, the world's grandest vagina," are meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek, but I just found them off-putting. Some of this is I think par for the course with feminists of a certain age (the book is PACKED with mom-jokes, the kind of thing my mom puts in her Facebook status and makes me facepalm--'she yam what she yam' and so forth).But I think underlying problem was that the prose assumes a certain conception of "woman" that I find restrictive. Even when talking about the wide variation in female bodies and minds, it makes broad, sweeping statements about the desires and personalities of both women and men. It assumes that women are straight and cisgendered, for example, when in fact many women are neither. Mind you, the CONTENT of the book is generally inclusive and demonstrates variety, but the prose, the little throw-away lines and jokes, really don't.That concept of "woman" is also philosophical, and leads to incredibly tedious pages and pages about, for example, which sex came first, which one is our 'default' setting? (Who cares! Does biology care?) So much talk about mothers and daughters and grandmothers, like being female-bodied makes you part of this grand sisterhood.I'm a woman and a feminist, and I'm proud of both. I just wish that I'd been able to access the information in this book without having to wade through such a wall of over-lofty ideas and prose.
What do You think about Woman: An Intimate Geography (2000)?
I love the joyful power this book gives to women by tackling some basic biological facts.It gives enjoyment to being a woman instead of this time-honoured dread that a long personal history of reading only male authors as no woman were really available in bookform had brought on me.I am personnally fed up to the bone of the menstruation taboo, despite all affirmation to the contrary. Angier sees menstruation as a defense mechanism, older women as flexible and strategic..This book helps. No, this book is grandiose!
—Odile Stuart
This book taught me so much about what it means to be a woman from a physiological perspective. Angier writes in a witty, conversational style - not condescendingly, but in a way that keeps the reader willing to stick with her through some pretty hard-core biological science stuff. Just as importantly, she talks about the psychology of women and how we relate to our bodies and their sometimes mysterious ways. Every woman should read this book (and men who want to know more about what makes women tick under their skins should, too).
—Tracy Rhodes
I ordered this title in response to other similar books which included this in their bibliography. I was not disappointed. Natalie Angier makes the scientific side of the subject of the working of a woman’s body very accessible with great writing and a sense of humor. The reader is awarded by follow-up comments which weave together the chapters. The chemistry of the body, serotonin, testosterone and estrogen sections did go on and on, chapter after chapter (after chapter!), a bit much for me. All in all a worthwhile, informative read.Quotable:We may love men and we may live with men, but some of them have said stupendously inaccurate things about us, our bodies, and our psyches.During courtship, a male pig will spit on his sow heart’s face and in doing so expose her to a pungent steroid compound that causes her to freeze with rear legs conveniently parted. All of which might help explain the now quaint term male chauvinist pig – yessir, a bit of spit and the little woman is yours!We mistakenly equate emotionality with the primitive and rationality with the advanced, but in fact the more intelligent the animal, the deeper its passions. The greater the intelligence, the greater the demand on the emotions, the portmanteaus of information, to expand their capacity and multiply their zippers and compartments.A girl who is angry ofter responds by stalking off, turning away, snubbing the offender, pertending she doesn’t exist. She withdraws, visible so, aggressively so. You can almost hear the thwapping of her sulk. Among eleven-year-olds, girls are three times more likely than boys to express their anger in the form of a flamboyant snub. In addition, girls at thisage, more than boys, engage in a style of aggression called indirect aggression. Only among humans have males succeeded in stepping between a woman and a meal, in wresting control of the resources that she needs to feed herself and her children. Only among humans is the idea ever floated that a male should support a female, and that the female is in fact incapable of supporting herself and her offspring, and that it is a perfectly reasonable act of quid pro quo to expect a man to feed his family and a woman to be unerringly faithful, to give a man paternity assurance and to make his investment worthwhile.A number of historians have argued and the evidence strongly suggests, the first human slaves were women, and the impetus behind slavery was the possession of nubile wombs.We are all women with many pasts. We are old primates and neo-hominids. We feel drawn toward other women, we feel a need to explain ourselves to them and to impress them, and we run away from women, we disavow them, or we keep them around only until the real thing comes along. We can do each other mischief, even violence, nut we can do each other good as well. Both options are open to us, in the plastic opportunistic flow chart of our strategies and choices… What we women can’t do is to ignore each other. It is a man’s world, but our aggressions are women-centered, harsh and intimate.“If female sexuality is muted compared to that of men, then why must men the world over go to extreme lengths to control and contain it?” Barbara Smuts
—Kathy
