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624 pages, Hardcover
First published October 3, 2023
We don’t have one mother; we have many. And to each Eve, her particular Eden: We have the breasts we do because mammals evolved to make milk. We have the wombs we do because we evolved to “hatch” our eggs inside our own bodies. We have the faces we do, and our human sensory perception along with it, because primates evolved to live in trees. Our bipedal legs, our tool use, our fatty brains and chatty mouths and menopausal grandmothers — all of these traits that make us “human” came about at different times in our evolutionary past. In truth, we have billions of Edens, but just a handful of places and times that made our bodies the way they are. These particular Edens are often where we speciated: when our bodies evolved in ways that made us too different from others to be able to breed with them anymore. And if you want to understand women’s bodies, it’s largely these Eves and their Edens you need to think about.
It’s not that topflight scientists still think female bodies were made when God pulled a rib from Adam’s side, but the assumption that being sexed is simply a matter of sex organs — that somehow being female is just a minor tweak on a Platonic form — is a bit like that old Bible story. And that story is a lie. As we’ve increasingly learned, female bodies aren’t just male bodies with “extra stuff ” (fat, breasts, uteri). Nor are testicles and ovaries swappable. Being sexed permeates every major feature of our mammalian bodies and the lives we live inside them, for mouse and human alike. When scientists study only the male norm, we’re getting less than half of a complicated picture; all too often, we don’t know what we’re missing by ignoring sex differences, because we’re not asking the question.
The majority of scientific stories about the evolution of human language fall in line: at each turn, human innovation has been driven by groups of men solving man-problems. One popular tale holds that language happened because we became hunters, forming large parties (of men) who needed to shout complex directions at one another across wide savannas. But wolves are pretty fantastic hunters, do it in groups, come up with surprisingly complex plans for the hunt that depend on members performing diverse roles, and don’t have a lick of language…So the male narrative of the evolution of human language misses the point. Language isn’t like opposable thumbs or flat faces — traits that evolution wrote into our genes. Our capacity for learning and innovating in language is innate, but nevertheless, for the largest gains in intergenerational communication to persist over time, each generation has to pass language on to the next with careful effort, interactive learning, and guided development. Language, in other words, is something that mothers and their babies make together and is dependent on the relationship between them in those first critical three to five years of human life. A long, unbroken chain of mothers and offspring trying to communicate with each other — that’s what’s kept this language thing going from the beginning.
Now, I’m hardly the sort of person who wants to think of women as simply baby factories. But as a species, let’s say all of us want to get smarter. That’s what it takes to cure cancer. To solve the climate crisis. How do we do that? For a start, we might want to acknowledge that human brains are something that are made primarily out of women’s bodies: first in their wombs, and then from their breast milk, and then from the quality of interactions mothers have with their children. So if you want the best possible chance to make a lot of kids with high IQs, you want healthy women who are fed well, and have been fed well, consistently, for at least two decades before they become pregnant. You want them to have had a rich and well-supported childhood education. And you want them to be well cared for throughout their reproductive lives, with readily available education about nutrition and healthy habits and newborn caretaking. You want them to have community resources available when they get sick and when their kids get sick. And, because STIs have such a proven effect on reproductive health, you want them to have ready access to prophylactics and good sex ed.
Reading itself is a deeply strange activity. You’re asking a human brain to tune out nearly all sensory information from the outside world for a long stretch of time in order to focus on a small area of somewhat obscure black markings on a white background, carefully shifting the eyes across those markings in a given direction. And while the eyes are so carefully focused, the ears are supposed to ignore any sounds in the environment so that the mind, meanwhile, can discern those markings as bits of language and immediately interpret that language without any of the usual clues speakers give: no facial expressions, no hand gestures, no useful variation in pitch…Reading is an extraordinarily difficult thing for the brain to learn how to do.I think that really sums up the appeal of your writing – you bring up things people usually take for granted and force us to really think about them.
As late as the 1920’s, clitoral stimulation was considered the proper treatment for feminine hysteria. That meant doctors—typically male—were obliged to stimulate moody women to orgasm in clinical settings. Hilariously, most of the doctors seemed to find the task boring and tedious, which drove the invention of the electric vibrator….In an odd tying together of my life to your book, I once manufactured some of the electronics used in vibrators – the harder you squeezed, the more intense the vibrations. This was not considered part of our medical product portfolio, you’ll be happy to hear.
It’s not quite accurate to say that loving another person is the the best thing that human beings do. Maybe it’s how we’re able to love our not-sisters in the way we love our sisters. That might be our best thing. The urge to protect others’ children, because most of us have an urge to protect children in general. The’s the best human thing – the way we took “primate” and made it better.And that led to a discussion of how much we would benefit by moving away from sexism and towards more reproductive choice and more male involvement in the duty of child raising.