Defining Gender on Her Terms

A self-described worrier with a temperament she once described as “Rocky Road,” Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Natalie Angier is nevertheless riding alternating waves of praise and criticism for her third book, “Woman: An Intimate Geography” (Houghton Mifflin) with the panache of a veteran surfer of controversy.

“Whether or not anyone agrees with the specifics that I raise, I don’t care,” Angier says, her slight frame almost swallowed by one of the big armchairs that dot the lobby of the Chateau Marmont Hotel on the Sunset Strip, where she is staying during her book tour. “Just so long as we open things up. All I wanted to say was: The story is not finished.”

“The story,” which has provoked spirited arguments at both ends of the critical spectrum, concerns the theories of evolutionary psychologists, or “evo-psychos,” as Angier sometimes describes them with her trademark edgy humor.

Evolutionary psychologists are Darwinists who tend to see immutable biological differences between men and women, which they say have been part of our makeup since the Stone Age. Men are inherently promiscuous and inevitably seek out young, attractive women, they say, while women yearn for stability and are always attracted to high-status men.

“Hogwash” has always been Angier’s gut response to this kind of either-or thinking, in her science columns in the New York Times and now in her book.

“The only thing I can figure about human nature is that we tend to be binary thinkers and come to snap decisions, perhaps for survival reasons,” she says. But she wishes scientists could “get beyond” such divisive reasoning, which, she says, only exacerbates women’s difficulties making it in a still-largely male-dominated world.

Though by no means the central theme of the book--which Angier describes in her introduction as “a celebration of the female body”--Angier’s comments on evolutionary psychology and the shadow it casts on sexual politics is what gets people chattering and chirping as animatedly as the monkeys or birds in the cross-species comparisons that also populate her pages.

Most of the reviews have been positive, lauding Angier’s grasp of science, her clearsighted reflections on gender, her personal ruminations on what it means to be a woman, her lyricism and humor. Still, the criticisms have been harsh. One well-known anthropologist, Lionel Tiger, called Angier “a bizarre cousin of postmodern intellectual nihilism,” while Helena Cronin, a British evolutionary psychologist who was asked to review “Woman” for the New York Times Book Review earlier this year, called the book “idiotic.” Cronin’s review was ultimately killed for being “too snarky” and failing “to address the whole range of the book,” Book Review editor Chip McGrath told the media in April.

“I was actually surprised they killed it,” since the New York Times is “by no means protective of its writers,” Angier says. She speaks quickly and intensely, half-formed sentences often running on into the next.

“I can say this--and this is only after the fact--that one of my nightmare scenarios was that they would assign the book to Helena Cronin. She is an evolutionary psychologist, so giving her the book to review is like giving the pope a book to review about the history of abortion. Of course he’s not going to like it.”

In fact, Angier considers herself a Darwinist, but if she were to call herself anything, it would be an “integrationist.” Biology shapes us, but so does the environment, the 41-year-old writer says.

“What I think is the most important understanding of human behavior is its infinite flexibility and responsiveness to environmental conditions. You know when you change the environment for a songbird it usually can’t adjust, and you have problems with extinction. But in the case of humans, there’s nowhere we can’t go, there’s nothing we haven’t been able to adapt to. That’s why all these discussions of ‘men are like this and women are like that’ are so frustrating. I have to say, wait a minute, men are like this under these circumstances, and each one is subject to individual variation.”

Angier’s original idea for the book had little to do with political controversy, however.

“What I really wanted to write was a book about the human body because I felt most people didn’t know what was in their bodies and that most books I saw were either dry or incomprehensible. Then Peter Davison, my editor at Houghton Mifflin, suggested I write about the female body, and I said, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea.’ ”

It was her husband, Rick Weiss, a science writer for the Washington Post, who pushed her toward the more political aspects of the book in discussions over breakfast at their home in Tacoma Park, Md.

“He wants to build me a soapbox--he still hasn’t done it--but he’s listened to me rant over breakfast many, many mornings. And he thought that rather than just talk, I should write about these ideas.”

And her special rants were?

“I really object to the idea of females as more cooperative and less aggressive than men,” both in terms of sexual drive and ambition, she says. “Having covered these issues and read so much about them, I said, ‘Well, in fact, female promiscuity is a very salient feature of most species, including our own.’ ”

As for female aggression, she says, “maybe it’s also because I grew up in the Bronx, where it’s so rough to be a girl and where establishing your place in the hierarchy was such a full-time occupation. . . . I know it’s not true that women don’t have an innate hunger to succeed.”

She also wants acknowledgment of a female reality that’s often downplayed, that “a lot of women’s fiercest aggressions are aimed at other women.” And though the book is by no means self-help-oriented, Angier underscores the idea of choice in women’s lives, from whether to have a hysterectomy to a violent rejection of cliterodectomy--one of the few areas of the book where she gets really furious.

“It’s all a question of defining yourself on your own terms,” she says.

Weaving together science, sociology and politics was a nearly impossible task, Angier says. There were many moments when she despaired of ever finishing the book. She also knew she would be attacked, and that scared her. But she felt there was “too much at stake” to give up.

Weiss kept Angier going by encouraging her to write the book as a missive to their daughter, Katherine, now 2.

“He, like me, doesn’t want to feel that she’s being defined and limited by science or anything else. She may never read this book or care about it, but somehow I felt that if I wanted her, as a woman, to have this infinite possibility, then I couldn’t quit. But it was hard. I’ve talked to my editors at the Times about only writing about geology from now on!”

Angier says her upbringing prepared her well for the book’s combination of feminism and rigorous thinking. The third of four siblings, Angier was born to two former Communists in New York. She had a working mother, a schoolteacher who later became a computer programmer; and a would-be artist father who worked as a machinist at Otis Elevators. Her 69-year-old mother lives in Manhattan now. Her father died from skin cancer in 1977.

“From my mother, I definitely got the strong woman, feminist approach, and I picked up on that,” Angier says. “From the time I was in second or third grade, I started reading through schoolbooks and noticing that all this stuff was about boys and there were very few girls in these books, so I started protesting about that.

“My father really liked ideas and tried to come up with these frameworks and theories about how life worked--even though most of it was a crock!”

Her father appears in the book arguing with her mother about X and Y chromosomes. And like many men of his era, he had old-fashioned ideas about women, which prompted violent arguments between her parents and ultimately caused them to separate, Angier says.

“He seemed to think women’s creativity was mostly going to be focused on their children--that woman was just this kind of nurturing muse. I remember once when I was 15 getting into an argument about it. But from him I did get the idea that it was fun to play around with ideas.”

As recently as 1987, Angier says, she felt she would have preferred being a man for the power that men have and the ease with which they can travel around the world. Writing this book, however, completely changed her--a “real emotional change,” Angier says--into someone who now celebrates her own womanhood.

“It has made me say, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s redefine the terms. Why say that the male way of seeing things is the way to see things?’ ”

The bottom line is that “it’s really rough to try and make it in the world.” And Angier recalls a comment made to her by biologist Sarah Hrdy while she was writing the book.

“She told me, ‘It’s bad luck to be born either sex.’ And I think that’s one of the best quotes of all time.”