Natalie Angier's "Woman: An Intimate Geogrpahy" is a voyage where no man has gone before, because only a woman could write this book. Packed with facts you wonder why you didn't learn in school, as well as insights that challenge the few facts you thought you knew, this book rates a solid "+". It just barely misses being a "strong +" because of the disappointment of the last chapter, but I'll get to that later.
Angier's writing style deserves special mention. She has a talent for wry humor and deft metaphor that had me grinning nearly every page. For example, speaking of the clitoris compared to the penis, she says,
"Who would want a shotgun when you can have a semiautomatic?... The clitoris is usually spoken of as a homologue of the penis, ... but the comparison is not wholy accurate. A woman doesn't pee or ejaculate through her clitoris. She does nothing practical at all with her clitoris. The clitoris is simply a bundle of nerves: 8,000 nerve fibers, to be precise. That's a higher concentration of nerve fibers than is found anywhere else on the body, including the fingertips, lips, and tongue, and is twice the number in the penis. In a sense, then, a woman's little brain is bigger than a man's. All this, and to no greater end than to subserve a woman's pleasure. In the clitoris alone we see a sexual organ so pure of purpose that it needn't moonlight as a secretory or excretory device. For this reason, maybe it's best that the clitoris is normally hidden in the vulval cleft: it is, in a way, a private joke, a divine secret, a Pandora's box packed not with sorrow but with laughter."
I learned three cool things about female biology by page 22, and I thought I knew a lot of biology from taking it in college. Did you know that a boy is 6% more related to his mother than his sister is? Or how about that men are more like women than women are like men? How can that be? Read the book. And the rest of the pages are similarly packed with surprising and nifty things you never learned about the life of double-X, perhaps because men mostly decide what is to be deemed "interesting" and "worthy of study" in biology. We didn't even understand some of the most fundamental hormonal processes in the menstrual cycle until the mid-1990s. They just didn't seem that important to male scientists (who don't, of course, menstruate).
Angier's book is a great reminder that science is not gender-neutral. But instead of approaching this thesis directly, by focusing on the male-centered results we all know (thus drawing attention to them yet again), she simply directs her focus toward women. She tells readers what we know about female biology; male biology is a sidelight brought in for comparison as necessary. This book is sort of a nonfiction version of Tepper's "Gate to Women's Country," in which the reader can suddenly look up and say deliciously, "Wow! I've read about women for sixty unbroken pages! I'm not sure I've ever done that before. Certainly not in school!"
Angier has a few things to say about culture as well as nature. She gives an excellent reinterpretation of the reason for menopause, based on solid scientific evidence. We have Grandma to thank for our big brains (and whiny, immature children). It was also interesting to read some alternative explanations for why humans pair-bond-- neither the usual patriarchal reasons of "protection" for the woman (hah!), nor the feminist exhortation that bonding is nothing but bondage for the woman. I came away with a greater sense of human bio-cultural potential, and a stronger awareness of the myopic view of modern anthropologists.
To my great disappointment-- as I raced toward the end of the book in excitement at Angier's ideas-- I found the last chapter to be a stunning reversal of style. Instead of delighting at giving alternative views, Angier lapses into canned feminist rhetoric that could have come right out of a "People" magazine story on "modern women." The chapter is a long explanation about why men have gender roles and biological straightjackets to contend with just as surely as women do (so far, so good), but her conclusion is jaw-droppingly banal: women ought to help men solve these problems. Once again, feminism's charge is to solve all the problems of the world-- women's problems, men's problems, war, hunger, poverty, you-name-it. We can and should DO IT ALL. And if we don't, well then, we can hardly complain that men won't bother to do the laundry, now, can we? I thought of any writer, the unconventional and irreverant Angier wouldn't give in to this mainstream mush.
Except for the last chapter, which could have been written by another author for all it matches the rest of the text, this is a fabulous book. As usual, I think women ought to read it, but men need it even more. While it is a big improvement that we can now buy books with frank, insightful, and even humorous information about femaleness, we've only come halfway if only women read them. I want my lovers to know just how power-packed my clitoris is. I want my sons to know that breastmilk is highly specialized sweat. I want George W. Bush to know how much he has his grandmother to thank for the structure of family values.
If you think the topography of womanhood is smooth, soft, curved, and well-understood, read "Woman: An Intimate Geography." I bet you'll learn three things by page 22.
Copyright © Kim Allen 2000
