reviewed by Kris Bierk and Brian Peters
(8/23/00)

Kris: Far removed from feminist rhetoric, riot grrl anger, or politically charged jargon, Woman: An Intimate Geography is an exploration of the masterpiece of evolutionary biology that is female anatomy. Disagreeing with everyone from Darwin to Paglia, Woman is a bit physiology, some anatomy, snippets of linguistic history, interviews, anecdotes, and the funniest of analogies.

Brian: All of which would make this a good book for men to be reading, but Angier does better than that. She has subtly shifted the perspective from "what makes girls different" to "what makes humans female," allowing her to gently point out that the perceived chasm between the sexes is as much a social construct as a biological divide. Angier celebrates, and is endlessly fascinated, by the biology that defines "female," but she works from the perspective that these are variations on a more universal "us." Since we're not likely to ever see a similar volume about men, let alone one as well written, this is a book for everyone.

Kris: Angier is a madwoman with a metaphor, and her style is far more fun than anything you've ever read in Biology 101. It's not quite accurate to say that she explains her subject in layman's terms; it's not "Girl Parts for Dummies," but it's not the Journal of Medicine either. Think, maybe, Discovery Channel special with no computer-generated simulations and a lot more humor. She's definitely pitching to the girls in the audience, and the constant reference to all of femaledom as a big sorority, with primates as our "ancestral sisters," gets to be a bit much at times. Her excitement about her subject, however, is great enough to override the locker room bonding. After all, who can resist a woman with the theory that perhaps the clitoris is an evolutionary gift of art-for-art's-sake, ranking up there with Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier -- functionally useless, but Oh My God!?

She covers it all: breasts, ovaries, orgasms, the uterus, a cost-benefit analysis of menstruation, estrogen, X chromosomes, the clitoris, polygamy and monogamy, women and muscle tone, fertility treatments, hysterectomies, male zebra finches with little red hats.

Brian: And here you can see why the (nonexistent) companion volume Men: The Anatomy of the Beasts would never be a great success; the story just isn't as poetic. Imagine how the chapter "Spiking the Punch: In Defense of Female Aggression" would translate to the Men volume --"Boys Will Be Boys: Pro Wrassling and Other Things Grown from Mother's Milk" seems likely.

But to be fair, that's not Angier's perspective at all. Throughout and with great care, she points out that biology divides the sexes less clearly than the Sunday supplements suggest. Testosterone -- often called the essential tonic of the violent and the oversexed -- becomes a great deal more ambiguous under her scrutiny, and estrogen a lot less deeply civilizing. Think that by three years of age the sexes have become practically separate species? Dress 'em in yellow and see if you can tell them apart, she suggests; then she warns that without color coded costumes you'll have better luck sexing earthworms.

A trip through the chapter headings may give you some perspective on how much Angier covers. Beginning with "Unscrambling the Egg: It Begins with One Perfect Solar Cell" where she contemplates origins and introduces a genetic hall of mirrors, she moves quickly to "The Mosaic Imagination: Understanding the 'Female' Chromosome," where she explores, among other things, werewolves and women with Y chromosomes. In "Default Line: Is the Female Body a Passive Construct?" she considers sex and the hermaphrodite within us, then studies the vagina as an environmental masterpiece. A chapter on the clitoris and two chapters on the uterus follow -- Kris touches on those elsewhere in this review.

In "Circular Reasonings: The Story of the Breast" and "Holy Water: Breast Milk" Angier romps through two of the happiest chapters in the book. Regarding the deep, significant, pivotal role of the female breast as an evolutionary construct, Angier suggests we all lighten up and recognize that sometimes a beautiful thing is just a beautiful thing. There follows "A Gray and Yellow Basket: The Bounteous Ovary," in which she may convince you that the ovulatory cycle really is poetry.

That's less than half the book. From there on, Angier examines our essential but suprisingly ambiguous hormones, celebrates grandmothers giving birth to homo sapiens by refusing to die when their ovaries stopped functioning, considers the entwining and beautiful biology of love in its many forms, and conducts an overdue skewering of the assumptions of evolutionary psychology.

Kris: I had a gynecologist once who handed me a mirror mid-exam, and proceeded to shine her little penlight around and show me what my cervix looked like. I think if women were meant to see that far into their own bodies, we would have more flexible spines, and I was a little unnerved by the experience. However, Angier's fascination watching a procedure as invasive as an abdominal hysterectomy is catching.

Some of my favorite passages are those where her detailed biological knowledge mixes with personal experience and out comes some wonderfully unexpected homegrown advice. For example, she talks about the connection between the hypothalamus, which "reigns over appetite: for food, salt, power, sex," the neocortex, which "cogitates, hesitates, and second-guesses every impulse," and the clitoris:

"Once learned, the skill [to climax] will not be forgotten. [But] sometimes wiring the clitoris to the hypothalamus demands a rerouting, a circumvention of the neocortex. Most effective are drugs that distract the intellect without dampening the body's network of impulse relays. Most of these drugs are illegal. Quaaludes were said to be extraordinary aphrodisiacs, but Quaaludes no longer exist. [...] But marijuana is still with us, and marijuana can be a sexual mentor and a sublime electrician, bringing the lights of Broadway to women who have spent years in frigid darkness. All the women in my immediate family learned how to climax by smoking grass."

And then, bringing the conversation back around to her sarcastic best:

"Yet I have never seen anorgasmia on the list of indications for the medical use of marijuana. Instead we are told that some women don't need to have orgasms to have a satisfying sex life, an argument as convincing as the insistence that some homeless people like sleeping outdoors."

Angier is the woman you'd never want to go up against on your high school debate team. She makes a touchy point elegantly and makes the scorekeeper laugh at the same time.

Brian: The very best of the writing comes when Angier is angry and pressing a point, making the introduction and the chapter titled "Wolf Whistles and Hyena Smiles: Testosterone and Women" standout sections, even for this well-written book. In the latter, Angier ties commercial images of girlhood to the half-science of biological determinism:

"If you are or have ever been a girl, you know that girls are aggressive. This is news the way the Code of Hammurabi is news. Yet the girls in station break Candyland are never aggressive; in fact they are getting gooier by the year. Nor are the girls who prance through the meadows of biological theory ever aggressive. No, they're prosocial. They're verbal, interactive, attentive, amiable. They're the friends you wish you could buy along with the Belchee Baby you saw on TV."

Kris: I'm afraid to use the easy phrase "girl power," but that's really what Angier's vibe is. She's not baiting a battle of the sexes; she finds the evolutionary biology of the male anatomy fascinating too. Nor does she spend 400 pages bemoaning the patriarchal history of the study of anatomy. Sure, doctors have misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and misrepresented women far too much in the past, but let's get on with it.

Part of her agenda may be to get other women interested enough in the mechanics of their bodies to spur more research about it. And maybe not be so creeped out by a doctor trying to point out where their cervix is.

Brian: So, no Siskel & Ebert-type bickering here; we both loved it. Even if you're not in on Angier's "ancestral sisterhood" you'll find Woman's sense of "human but unique" refreshing, and the clever, knowledgeable writing will leave you having learned as much as you laughed.