Book Review

The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter January/February, 2000, Vol. 7, Number 1. Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angiers Reviewed by Andrea Bertone

W hat do we have to learn from This Intimate Geography? What is geography after all but the study of space. Geographers examine the layout - distributions and patterns of a landscape. Natalie Angier, then, is a geographer and she has created her own Robinson Projection: a comprehensive and proportionate, yet extraordinarily creative perspective on the female human body. With our map, we may begin exploring. Bravo to her for a truly unique travel experience.

Angier offers cultural-biological argument for the woman. At the heart of Angier, the biologist thrives within her; she understands the complexities of the [female] human body. She has already won the Pulitzer Prize for her articles in the New York Times about biology. However, her most recent work, Woman, exceeds the boundaries of a biology text, where she shines with prose and poetry, dazzling the reader with her very special interpretation of how women (and men) view women's bodies and sexuality. I invite all women to read Angier for inspiration and amazement. One might assume that Angier is a dangerous feminist, a woman who is armed with the knowledge of every biological function of a female human body. With such a weapon, a woman could put a man in his place. However, this book will not in any way be offensive to men, in fact I invite men to read it for insight and appreciation. Angier best describes her point for writing, "This book is a celebration of the female body -- its anatomy, its chemistry, its evolution, and its laughter. It is a book about things we traditionally associate with the image of woman -- the egg, the breast, the blood, the almighty clitoris -- and things that we don't -- movement, strength, aggression, and fury" (ix).

Angier has organized her book like a biology textbook, with nineteen chapters, each dealing with a different part of the female body and psyche. However, it is possible to group the chapters under three headings. The first heading is female reproductive and sexual organs - clitoris, uterus, breast, breast milk, ovaries, eggs. The second is the functions and consequences of hormones - estrogen, androgen, and testosterone. The third is female psychology - what it means to be a human woman in our modern world.

In the first section, Angier supports what is, in my opinion, the first of three very interesting arguments. She asks if the female body is a passive construct. Are men the primary sex and women the "default sex"? The medical establishment and society have believed for years that a fetus is automatically a male unless somehow told otherwise. After all, Angier exasperates, culturally mothers feel comfortable dressing their girl babies in blue, pink and yellow, but mothers would never dress their boy babies in pink. It would be a horrible mark for the boy. He would be labeled as a sissy and this sort of faux pas on the mother's part might even be the thing that turns him gay! "It is the usual misogyny, the association of masculine with 'fully human.'" Angier is quite dedicated to dispelling the myth that the girl is the default sex by employing biological evidence. "Simone de Beauvoir may have been right about a lot of sociocultural inequities, but from a biological perspective, women are not the runners-up ... In a basic biological sense, the female is the physical prototype for an effective living being. [F]etuses are pretty much primed to become female unless the female program is disrupted by gestational exposure to androgens. If not instructed otherwise, the primordial genital buds develop into vulva and at least a partial vagina" (38-39). What was once thought as the "female" hormone, estrogen, is not even needed for a fetus to grow into a girl. Finally she invokes the argument of Anne Fausto-Sterling of Brown University, who complains that the notion of female as default is an intellectual vestige of the male domination in the study of developmental biology. The reason that no one has found any of the chemical signs that activate the female blueprint is that no one has looked for them.

This ignorance on the part of the predominantly male medical establishment, Angier indirectly suggests later in the book, might lead to doctors performing too many hysterectomies. In all cases, Angier says that the best thing for women to do is to educate themselves about their own bodies, and be aware of all the options available to them when it comes to surgery and their reproductive organs.

I must interrupt this review for a moment, by saying that I smiled and laughed and cringed at times about my own ignorance. What do I know about hysterectomies? But when Angier talked about the "almighty clitoris" my attention was absolute. I sat on the Washington D.C. Metro and read Angier for a week. I wondered if anyone was watching me become visibly embarrassed at my own stupidity. Angier nonchalantly exclaims "women may think they know the clitoris pretty well" (58).

"This leads to a tremendously important aspect of human females - 'free will.' "The human capacity for self-control must be counted among our species' great strengths, the source of our adaptability.'"

I immediately thought, so am I one of the few who doesn't know mine well? Do most women (or girls) by the time that they are 13 or 14 hold mirrors up to their vaginas so that they can see what is going on down there? I don't know about other women, but I can't see mine by simply looking down. It takes effort and interest to see what our bodies look like, especially because our reproductive organs are not outwardly visible-- unless women shave themselves completely, or have AIS (androgen insensitivity syndrome) in which a woman, through the lack of androgens, produces only peach fuzz on the vaginal area. Do we all know what our vaginas look like? And more importantly, are we aware that every vagina is as unique as the features of a human face? It has taken me a long time to learn about these characteristics of a woman. At times, reading this book made me uncomfortable, squirming in my seat at the largely medical descriptions of the woman's labia, clitoris, and vaginal canal. However, as a woman, why should I be embarrassed by these topics? Is it the culture that I have grown up in that has made me stupid as to how my body works? Is it that perhaps we are taught reproductive biology when we are too young to understand, or to even want to understand, because the topic is so 'juicy' that it hurts our ears? In other words, whatever we thought we knew, we don't, and we still have many positive things to learn about ourselves.

In the second part of the book, we encounter the second of the three interesting arguments. We learn about the role that estrogen plays in female sexual activity. Angier is proud to proclaim that " [a] female primate can copulate whenever she pleases, whether she is ovulating or not. There is no connection between the mechanics of her reproductive tract and the status of her hormones" (193). This leads to a tremendously important aspect of human females - "free will." "The human capacity for self-control must be counted among our species' great strengths, the source of our adaptability" (195).

Therefore, women can protect themselves; they are not controlled by their hormones. They are not driven to sexual relations with every man. Women can protect themselves from disease and pregnancy. Angier wants us all, however, to appreciate our hormones and how they positively affect our behavior. The way in which estrogen or any other substance works on the brain to create desire is not completely understood, however, it is known that estrogen affects emotion. Emotion is "the body's way of encouraging or inhibiting behaviors, which the body hopes will fulfill the need and restore balance" (197). Hormones are understood better in relation to desire, than genital performance. Angier paints a complex role for estrogen, probably one that might not be apparent in biology textbooks.

She envisions herself as responsible for dispelling myths or even conventionally held medical knowledge about hormones. Angier explains that many textbooks on human sexuality declare flatly that "testosterone is the source of all lust ... [b]ut if testosterone is relevant to female lust, evidence suggests that it is a handmaiden to estrogen," at least in the female body. Some proteins in the blood cling to testosterone more easily than estrogen. With the protein attached, it is more difficult for the testosterone to penetrate the barrier between blood and brain. Therefore, estrogen is freed up to reach the brain and do its work (200). In the end Angier downplays estrogen's role by claiming that its real job is to hone the senses.

Angier's third most interesting argument is that the neurobiological changes that accompany habituation have replaced genetic evolution. Angier pursues this against 'hardcore' Darwinists, and neo-Darwinists who insist that humans are genetically evolving. She instead chooses to spotlight and support a less accepted argument put forward by Ernst Mayr, "one of the grand figures of the twentieth century biology" (356). Basically, humans have ceased to evolve genetically. Instead, and this is the unique part, we are evolving culturally. Actually adopting new habits, like fastening your seat belt, can alter one's neural pathways, similarly explaining a cultural evolution of the brain. She links this to women's issues, unfortunately, by delving into some banal arguments about how women are going to work outside the home more than any other time in the past. Men should be allowed (by women) and encouraged (by society) to take more responsibility in raising children.

In the end, Angier tries too hard to advance human rights, simply by using her knowledge of the biological to support her argument. However, any woman-- or man-- will have much to learn and to ponder, after reading this unique geography. There are few authors who can intertwine science, poetry, creative writing, exposition, wit and laughter in one work the way Natalie Angier has.