Liberation Biology

One knows early on one is reading a classic--a text so necessary and abundant and true that all efforts of its kind, for decades before and after it, will be measured by it. It is the writing, of course. Voice-driven, image-rich, by turns celebratory, incantational, doubtful and debunking, wondrous and robust and patient in its explanations, free ranging in its inquiries, ever on the look out for metaphor and icon and signs of intelligent life--it is the writing that makes the impression permanent. Long after the prizes and honors--and there should be plenty of these--Natalie Angier’s “Woman” will continue to instruct and inspire and argue for the species that so intrigues her and that she so clearly understands.

“It is a personal book, my attempt to find a way to think about the biology of being female without falling into the sludge of biological determinism. It is a book about things that we traditionally associate with the image of woman--the womb, the egg, the breast, the blood, the almighty clitoris--and things that we don’t--movements, strength, aggression, and fury.

“It is a book about rapture, a rapture grounded firmly in the flesh, the beauties of the body. The female body deserves Dionysian respect, and to make my case I summon the spirits and cranks that I know and love best. I call on science and medicine, to sketch a working map of the parts that we call female and to describe their underlying dynamism. I turn to Darwin and evolutionary theory, to thrash out the origins of our intimate geography--why our bodies work and behave as they do, why they look rounded and smooth, but act ragged and rough. I cull from history, art and literature, seeking insight into how a particular body part or body whim has been phrased over time.”

Few books live up to the promise of their titles or their “Introduction” from which the paragraphs above are taken. But Angier delivers all of this and more. “Woman” is geography and biology, sociology and psychology, homage and homeopathy, chemistry and body politics. It considers the female of the species in all her dimensions and multiple disciplines. Angier is wife, mother, daughter and granddaughter. She is, likewise, scientist, historian, reader, writer and a genuine thinker. The broad register of her curiosity brings power to her scholarship. And just as the consideration of the finite gives glimpses of the infinite, the body Angier investigates brings her to the brink of spiritual truths. She sees not just the skull beneath the skin but the woman in the woman’s parts, the mother in the mother’s milk and, thankfully, the hogwash in so much neo-Victorian polemic, warm-fuzzy victim-lit, feminist-separatist psychobabble and mannish pseudo-scientific blather. In place of manifesto, she offers an owners-manual, a guide for fellow pilgrims.

“Male and female fetuses look identical until the ninth week of gestation, and our adult organs are analogous structures, male to female. Inside its apricot-sized body, the antesexual two-month-old fetus has a pair of immature seedpods, the primordial gonads, which become testes in males, ovaries in females. . . . Starting in the third month, the nub of flesh either grows gracefully into a clitoris or grows more emphatically into the head of a penis.

“As symbols go, the phallus is a yawn. Tubes that point and shoot, and there you have it. The obelisk pierces the heavens, the gun ejaculates bullets, the cigar puffs like a peacock, the hot rod screams, the hot dog is eaten. A phallus doesn’t give you much to play with, metaphorically, and it doesn’t lend itself to multiple interpretations. A hose is a hose is a hose.

“But the vagina, now there’s a Rorschach with legs. You can make of it practically anything you want, need, or dread. A vagina in its most simple-minded rendering is an opening, an absence of form, an inert receptacle. It is a pause between the declarative sentence of the outside world and the mutterings of the viscera.”

This is language that works hard and plays hard and a writer who clearly enjoys the enterprise.

From her chapter “The Well-Tempered Clavier” come three evolutionary possibilities:

“1. The clitoris is a vestigial penis.

“2. The clitoris is a vestigial clitoris.

“3. The clitoris is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. I have listened to the music of Bach and thought, Without this there would be nothing. I have listened and thought, It was inevitable. Evolution has no goal, with the possible exception of giving the world the Second and Fifth Brandenburg Concertos, the Goldberg Variations, and the Well-Tempered Clavier. The dinosaurs died so that Bach may live.”

If so, then maybe Angier is a late-century, highly evolved incarnation of H. L. Mencken, whose wry wit, cold eye and intellectual hunger she seems to have inherited. And just as Mencken’s bluster could not hide his affection for humankind, so Angier’s scientific method does not obscure her awe. Here’s Mencken from “Prejudices: Fourth Series” (1924), on pair bonding:

“Love, in the romantic sense, is based upon a view of women that is impossible to any man who has had any extensive experience of them. Such a man may, to the end of his life, enjoy their society vastly, and even respect them and admire them, but, however much he respects and admires them, he nevertheless sees them clearly, and seeing them clearly is fatal to the true romance. Find a man of forty who heaves and moans over a woman in the manner of a poet and you will behold either a man who ceased to develop intellectually at twenty-four or thereabouts, or a fraud who has his eye on the lands, tenements and hereditaments (and perhaps also the clothes) of the lady’s deceased first husband.”

And here’s Angier on the same theme:

“We are incorrigible romantics, who no more want to be relieved of our condition than an incurable optimist wants to have her rose-colored spectacles retinted.

“Love is universal. We don’t want it explained. We certainly don’t want it anatomized and biologized. It seems at once too big and too private, too profound and too fleeting, for science to get its patch clamps and pipettes into. Relax! Your brain in love remains a sacred, suffocating swamp. We still need our poets and songwriters. Science has not solved the love question.

“Why do we bother with love? We love, at bottom, because we must, for we are a sexually reproducing species.”

Hard facts, well told--the liberation biology that Angier affirms is one in which both men and women range, with equal wonder, between the ridiculous and the sublime.

“The body is threaded through and through with the cilia of affiliation, which can be tapped and adapted and taught to beat in unison, provided we give them a chance. Look at the male rat. . . . If you put a young male rat into an enclosure with a litter of newborns and give him a chance to grow accustomed to their smells and hear their squeaks, he will eventually start nuzzling them. He’ll huddle over them and lick them. If one should stray from the nest, he’ll retrieve it. He has fallen in love with a pile of squirming pink pencil erasers. An essential factor in the experiment: The mother rat must be removed from the scene, for if she were there, she would sooner kill the male than allow him near her young.

“If women expect men to dive into the warm, rich waters of body love and to feel the tug of baby bondage, we must give over the infant again and again. Between feedings, between breasts, play touch football, baby as pigskin--pass it along.”

Pass it along, indeed.

If there is any miscalculation in Angier’s text, it is that her “average reader is a gal.” Here is a free-range thinker and a first-rate essayist at work in her prime, and her musings on any theme more than repay the effort of reading them. Whether breasts and hormones or four-barrel carburetion or the nature of the universe, this is a writer well worth the read, and the average guy and average gal should know it.

“Woman” is a text that instructs a species, not only a gender. To broaden the understanding of what it means to be female is to broaden the contemplation of what it means to be male. So much depends on our knowledge of each other. Men who woo women and sleep beside them, men who father daughters and watch their mothers age, men who work with women and for women, men who understand the power of bearing burdens as well as lifting weights will find, in “Woman,” fellows of the flesh and blood and bones.

After a careful read of this essential book, men should pass it along to someone they love--their sons, daughters, therapists or stockbrokers, golf and fishing buddies, lovers and spouses. For a fresh look into life’s sciences and sense and the pure pleasure of language in service to the facts of life, Angier’s “Woman” is as good as it gets. Here’s hoping she plans a companion volume.