maybe someone could explain here how b. ehrenreich is deploying social constructionist arguments that render material reality inconsequential to our *gender* identies in any way that's somehow different from what's been said here? i'm sorry you missed it, katha, but i was merely pointing out that pinning women to their biological clocks is a mistake if that means you miss out on how men end up having biological clocks that tick away ceaselessly for them as well --which only means that both groups share the desire to have children within a certain age limit it does not mean that i said that they feel differently about it. and that, to me, is interesting --that men's identities are *still* bound up with marriage and children. despite their biological freedom from that material reality.
The Real Truth About
The Female Body
BY BARBARA EHRENREICH
March 8, 1999, Time Magazine
http://www.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/articles/0,3266,20616-2,00.html
It's always been
classier, and a lot
more dignified, to be
a woman than a
female. Thanks to 30
years of feminist
striving, the category
"woman" has
expanded to include
anchorpersons,
soccer moms,
astronauts, fire
fighters, even the
occasional Senator
or Secretary of State. But "female" still tends to
connote the oozing, bleeding, swelling,
hot-flashing, swamp-creature side of the species,
its tiny brain marinating in the primal hormonal
broth. From Aristotle to Freud, the thinking on
gender has been that only one sex had fully
evolved out of the tidal pool, and it wasn't the sex
that wears panty hose.
Biology has usually been only too glad to claim
the human female as its slave. The
sociobiologists of the '60s and '70s, followed by
the evolutionary psychologists of the '90s,
promoted what amounts to a prostitution theory
of human evolution: Since males have always
been free to roam around, following their bliss,
the big challenge for the prehistoric female was
to land a male hunter and keep him around in a
kind of meat-for-sex arrangement. Museum
dioramas of the Paleolithic past still tend to
feature the guys heading out after the
mastodons, spears in hand, while the gals
crouch slack-jawed around the campfire, busily
lactating. The chivalrous conclusion is that
today's woman can do whatever she likes--start a
company, pilot a plane--but only by trampling on
her inner female.
Yet a new attitude is bubbling out of that old
female hormonal swamp, powered by new
research and, at least in preliminary form, fresh
perspectives on the gender-bifurcated human
condition. There are signs of a growing
acceptance of the female body with its signature
cycles and turning points. Some midlife boomers
are finding ways to celebrate the menopause,
while a generation of "grrrls" is coming of age,
with a new view of the menstrual period as an
emblem of primal female power. At the same
time, some of the sacred tenets of evolutionary
psychology--that men are innately more
aggressive, more promiscuous and more likely to
fall for cute young things--have come under fresh
challenge. As the century turns, it could be,
Goodbye, women's lib; hello, female liberation!
The revolution already has a manifesto in the
form of an ebullient new book, Woman: An
Intimate Geography, by Natalie Angier, a science
writer for the New York Times. There are other
female-positive books hitting the stores, like
Dianne Hales' thoughtful and eloquent Just Like a
Woman: How Gender Science Is Redefining
What Makes Us Female (just published by
Bantam) and anthropologist Helen Fisher's The
First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and
How They Will Change the World (due from
Random House in May). But it's Angier, who has
already won a solid reputation (and a Pulitzer
Prize) at her day job, who most decisively lifts
the concept of the human female out of its
traditional oxymoronic status. You gotta love a
self-described "female chauvinist sow" who writes
like Walt Whitman crossed with Erma Bombeck
and depicts the vagina as a "Rorschach with
legs." Woman: An Intimate Geography is a
delicious cocktail of estrogen and amphetamine
designed to pump up the ovaries as well as the
cerebral cortex.
Vive La Difference!
"Feminist" was always a little too dainty
sounding, so call the new consciousness
"femaleist." The femaleist premise could be
summarized as: Yes, we are different--wanna
make something of it? Up till now, feminists have
usually been leery of acknowledging gender
differences, arguing that all but the most visibly
obvious of them are the products of culture, not
genes, and could be erased by the appropriate
legislation and child-rearing practices. But the
differences are real, various and not easy to
parse in terms of the Framer's intentions, if any.
Women are more likely to be righthanded and
less likely to be color-blind than men. Their
brains are smaller, as befits their smaller body
size, but more densely packed with neurons.
Women have more immunoglobulins in their
blood; men have more hemoglobin. Men are more
tuned in to their internal aches and pains; women
devote more regions of their brain to sadness.
You do the scoring.
Yes, men are the physically more imposing sex.
On average, they are 10% taller, 20% heavier and
30% stronger, especially in their upper bodies.
But women are more resistant to fatigue; the
longer the race, the more likely they are to win it.
Furthermore, as millions of women prove daily by
the sweat of their brow, the muscle gap is not
carved in stone. Hales reports on a 1995 U.S.
Army test of female physical potential, in which
41 out-of-shape women--students, lawyers,
bartenders and new mothers--achieved the
fitness level of male Army recruits in just six
months of working out, getting to where they
could jog two miles with a 75-lb. backpack and
do dozens of squats with a 100-lb. weight on
their shoulders. In competitive sports too, women
have been playing a stunning game of catch-up.
Today's women stars can run, swim and skate
faster than any man of a few decades ago, and
the gap may eventually close. Since 1964,
women's marathon running times have dropped
32%, compared with only 4.2% for men. If the
trend continues, female marathoners could be
leaving men in the dust sometime in the next
century.
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?