Think of it: the grandmother hypothesis inverts all the conventional sequences; it brays at the party line of human evolution. We usually assume that we got smart first and then had to have an extended childhood to cultivate the circuitry of that smartness, and then had to live long enough as adults to care for our smart, slow-growing kids. As Hawkes plays it out, the order of events is just the opposite. We got old, we got young, we got smart. She takes a thwack at the familiar figurine of Man the Hunter, questioning the role of the male in provisioning the young and allowing children to be children. The original division of labor, as she sees it, was between childbearing women and postmenopausal women. Mothers bred what grandmothers fed. Through that compact, human fecundity and human mobility knew no limits.
But what of men? They live a long time too. If longevity arose to benefit the female, what of the superannuated male? The answer to that can be explained mostly by the mechanisms of genetics. Women have no exclusive patent on any particular gene. Unlike genes located on the Y chromosome, which will be passed only from fathers to sons, mothers apportion all their genes to sons and daughters alike. Genes that enhance robustness postmenopausally when a female inherits them will find their way into male zygotes as well. The male lifespan gets dragged along. Still, it is possible that somatic robustness operates at its peak against a female background. Men do not live as long as women do, after all, and the disparity in lifespan applies globally. Maybe they don't have to live as long. Or maybe they don't want to. Maybe they get tired of losing their hair, and of the political pomp of the hunt, and of making bad jokes about their mothers-in-law.
If we accept the grandmother as the bedrock of our past and life after menopause as an ancestral right rather than a modern gratuity, then we can examine with a certain tempered skepticism the concept of "estrogen deficiency." Assuming that our bodies were built to senesce slowly, what should we make of the decline in estrogen that accompanies menopause? More to the point, should we treat it? Does the grandmother hypothesis tell us anything about whether or not we should take exogenous hormones when our follicles cease to burst cyclically and bless us unasked? The answer is ... complicated. On the one hand, nature is imperfect. She is a slapdash engineer whose motto is "It'll do." The body after menopause certainly looks like an example of "It'll do." Nasolabial canyons, liver spots, the occasional embarrassing sneeze-leak sequence. Hey, nature barks, you've got a pulse, haven't you? In other words, even if our somas persist in the absence of ovarian estradiol, that doesn't mean we can't do better and live stronger by taking estrogen tablets. There's a principle in evolutionary thinking called the naturalistic fallacy—making the mistake of assuming that what is, is for the best. Murder and infanticide are "natural," in our species as well as in most others, but they are not defensible human strategies. The same may be true for menopause. Living without ovarian estradiol may be natural but far from ideal. After all, if the senescence of our primate ovaries is not an adaptation per se but merely the result of evolutionary constraints on follicular supply, then the concomitant loss of ovarian estrogen may be an example of "Sorry, this was the best we could come up with. It'll have to do. You'll muddle through." Muddling unnecessarily is stupid. We're clever. We have organic chemistry. We have gynecology, cardiology, endocrinology. We have evidence that hormones help. Take your Premarin, darling—if we're clever by nature, it's the natural thing to do.
On the other hand ... the old pink Cadillac still drives. Nature is slapdash, yet the engine turns over and sometimes purrs. The analogy that many doctors make between menopause and hormone deficiency disorders such as diabetes and hypothyroidism doesn't hold up. If I were to stop taking my thyroid supplements, I would begin falling apart within days or weeks. My thyroid has failed me; I have a disease, I admit it, and I have no choice but to seek outside assistance. Menopause is not so dire. A woman's bones don't crumble or her blood vessels shatter once she has run out of eggs. Most women do extraordinarily well for years or decades after menopause without taking hormones. We might expect that during the evolution of the hominid life extension program, the female body developed mechanisms specifically to compensate for ovarian "failure." Recall that aromatase activity picks up as we age. Aromatase can turn precursor products from our adrenal glands into estrogen, and our adrenal glands do not quiesce at menopause. Is the improved aromatase performance a coincidence, or an adaptation that helps keep us healthy in the postovulation years? The body's fat content increases with age, even if we stay the same weight as we were at twenty-five. Fat makes estrogen. Do not spit at fat! It too may have value. It too may be an adaptive feature of the centennial woman. Our brains are said to need estrogen. Can neurons make their own steroids, and does neuronal steroidogenesis become stronger with age, in the manner of aromatase activity? We don't know. What we do know is that most women stay remarkably smart as they age, even without the ostensible brain food from their ovaries.
We also know that hormone therapy has risks as well as benefits, and that there's no escaping the complexity of the body or the individuality of any one body and its history. We are back where we began, forced to decide case by case, and to decide for ourselves. A woman with a sparrow's frame might choose estrogen therapy to help prevent osteoporosis. A sedentary woman with a family history of cardiovascular disease might make the same choice for the sake of her heart. A woman who is fit and fine, who has a forager's soul and knows that the body evolved to gather vegetables, not to become them, and who resists being absorbed entirely by the creamy perilife that is the desk-computer dyad, may decide, Feh, I'll forgo the pills, I'll take a walk, I'll lift a weight, I'll visit my daughter and offer to babysit her kids right now.
If the evolutionary analysis of menopause suggests anything about the merits or risks of hormone therapy, it is a lesson in harmony with the results of epidemiology. As we've seen, a number of studies have shown that the risks of contracting breast cancer increase the longer a woman takes estrogen replacement therapy. It is as though the body were saying, I don't need as much as you're giving me; I'm not a total idiot; I can take care of myself better than you think. Some doctors have suggested that women consider a two-step approach to hormone therapy, using supplements for a short stint right at menopause if they need them to weather such transitory symptoms as hot flashes and sleeplessness, and then postponing the use of maintenance supplements until the age of sixty or sixty-five, when the risks of heart disease and osteoporosis become substantial and the threat of dementia looms closer. This strategy seems reasonable to me. Even by the Gray Panther standards of the grandmother hypothesis, you start scavenging your reserve supplies once you're in your sixties. Aromatase and adipose tissue may no longer be enough. You're trying nature's patience. She's losing interest in you. You're past postmenopausal. If taking estrogen at that point helps you defy her odds, take it. You're a wise elder. Wisdom means realizing you've overstayed your welcome and not giving a damn.
Pharmacology is fine, but we want more from the organic matriarch, and she has more to give. The elder female is somebody we have always known. She is there in the corner of the female unconscious, quiet, fierce, loving, obliterating. She explains some of the impulses that agitate and confuse us. I've often noticed that daughters are hard on their mothers, much harder than sons are. Women will romanticize their fathers and forgive them many sins and failings, but toward their mothers they show no mercy. Whatever the mother did, she could do no right. The mother was cold and negligent, the mother was overbearing and smothering, the mother was timid, the mother was a shrew. Even feminism did not cure us of our mother hatred, our mother flu. We cling to our anger at our mothers. We don't want to give it up. It protects us. Not long ago, an editor asked me to contribute to a book of essays to be written by women about their mothers. My coauthors were novelists, poets, critics, historians, many of them well known, all of them intellectually formidable. I agreed, and I wrote a positive piece, praising my mother for having taught me the value of earning a paycheck a
nd for advising me on the best, though decidedly off-label, cure for anorgasmia. The editor called to thank me. I added a tone that the book needed, she told me. I was one of the few who said something nice about their mothers.
This is not a boast. It could have been otherwise. I've gone through long stretches of hating my mother mindlessly and obsessively, of crying bitterly when I think of her, of writing small fables in which she is the Ogress, the Great Gaping Cardiophage with no heart of her own. But then there are other times when I stop myself in the middle of a mother fit and say, This isn't rational, it isn't fair, and it's a bad precedent. Think now how you might drag yourself out of the sewer of mother hatred, lest your daughter grow up and blast you with hate and blame of her own. I was in that deliberative, grudgingly generous, self-defensive frame of mind when I wrote my good-mother essay. Otherwise, oh how beautiful my bile can be. And, it seems, how typical. We daughters, like pit vipers, have nonretractable fangs.
At the same time, women often remain quite close to their mothers. They talk to their mothers much more often than sons do. On average, a woman calls her mother once a week, compared to the son's rate of once a month. Women need their mothers. They blame their mothers, they dream of killing their mothers, but they keep coming back for more mother time. They want something, even if they can't articulate the desire. They expect something. They expect their mothers to be there for them, for years and years after they have become adults. Sylvia Plath wrote poems of luxurious violence about her mother: "You steamed to me over the sea,/Fat and red, a placenta/Paralyzing the kicking lovers.... Off, off, eely tentacle!/There is nothing between us." She also, as an exchange student at Cambridge University, wrote long, earnest letters to her mother, describing every detail of her life—the men she met, the parties she attended, her dislike of English girls for being "fair-skinned, rather hysterical and breathless," her pitiable wish for "someone to bring me hot broth and tell me they love me." Her pitiable wish for her mother.
The emotional axon between mother and daughter often has been seen as a matter of their shared sex and the fact that the daughter identifies with the mother and does not need to individuate, as a son must, to assert identity. By this analysis, women remain like children with their mothers because they can. It's not threatening for them to cry "Mommy," as it might be for a man. Their selfhood and sexual identity don't demand rejection of the all-powerful female. Thus, any expectations a woman may have of her mother's help can be viewed as nothing more than a little girl's petulant demands, perpetually recycled.
The grandmother hypothesis suggests another interpretation, with less emphasis on the puerile. If young women have long needed older women, and if that need was an organizing principle in early human society, then our constitutional hunger for our mothers cannot, should not end at puberty. It is much stronger than that. It is like the river of our lives. It flows on, and we must navigate it, and it surges and howls and falls, but it doesn't end and we must ride it. If an older woman took care of your children, the older woman was like your children: profoundly loved and wanted, a part of yourself. At the same time, the older woman does not belong to you alone; she has other familial clients to attend to. She will disappoint you, and you'll be angry at her, but you won't stop needing her, and you won't stop asking for her help. She'll give it when she can, and when she does, you feel safe. And when she doesn't, maybe another senior female will.
The structure of Western lives doesn't easily accommodate long-term links between older and younger women. We marry, we migrate, we live in apartments or small houses where the last thing we'd want is to have our mothers move in. We have little or no connection to relatives other than the most immediate ones. Yet the yearnings and needs don't evaporate, they simply mutate. Every unmet desire in adulthood is laid at the maternal doorstep. If anything, the loss of the larger kinship matrix focuses the fury of our helplessness entirely on our mothers. We expect help from an older woman, and our mother is the only older woman we know. When women go to therapists, the majority of the time they choose to see a female therapist who is older than they are. They are seeking support from one who fits the template in their heads of the potential savior. They're not looking for their mother. To the contrary, they are probably furious at their mother, and that's part of the reason that they are in therapy. But in the senior female therapist, they are looking for the missing elder, the woman in loco matris who fills in when their own mother is dead or deficient or otherwise engaged.
The naturalistic fallacy warns us against elevating the presumed innate to the presumed optimum. We may not want to spend our lives surrounded by relatives. We find our families suffocating. We flee small towns because we get tired of having our neighbors know our business and gabble over our every social transgression. Still, we are all of us compendiums—of ancestral patterns, a thousand subsequent overlays, and the singularity of the self. It doesn't hurt to find strength wherever we can, in the precursor as well as in the present. For example, touch feels wonderful. It is also one of the most ancient transactions, a defiance of the plasma membrane and the loneliness it brought. Touch can heal. Even when a person is in a coma, the simple touch of a nurse will lower the patient's blood pressure. We need touch, and as a rule the appetite serves us well. In a similar vein, I would argue that a woman's mother-lust, her need for the older female and for other women generally, is also ancient, and also worth heeding. There's no evidence that humans have ever lived in a true matriarchy, where women ruled. But the phenomenon of matrilocality, in which daughters remain in their natal group while sons disperse as adults, is not uncommon among traditional societies and is the overwhelming rule among nonhuman primates. Females form a stable core, while males come and go, talking of Michelangelo or, more likely, the Knicks. "Any model of proto-human society that neglects a central role for relationships among females is probably wrong," says the primatologist Kim Wallen. Hadza culture is not matriarchal; in many ways, women remain subordinate to men. But because they have each other and are anchored in matrilocality, nobody goes hungry, and that tacit arrangement is powerful medicine for the mind.
In the 1970s, women talked about sisterhood, and they made a yeowoman's stab at putting it into practice. But even the utopi-anists fell into the easy habit of apartheid by age. Young women bonded with young women. Older women split off and formed groups like OWL, for "older women's liberation," older at that point being anybody over thirty. It was a mistake to segregate then, and it's a mistake we still excel at. We codify barriers between generations with dreary names like baby boomers, Xers, and the latest edition, the millenniers, or the zeroasters ("Before us, all was negative"). We make friends among our chronological peers, rarely venturing more than a decade up or down. Thus we end up with girlfriends who are in the same precarious place as we are, anxious for all the same reasons, and we keep looking for our mothers, and those mythical creatures our female mentors, and a patch of earth where we can stop for one wretched little minute to breathe, safely breathe. A group of same-aged people is inherently unstable. Peers will compete just as siblings compete. The ancestral sorority was transgenerational, and if we want whatever strength and balm may come from sisterhood, it wouldn't hurt to recapitulate in some measure the timeworn model and brace our listing library of cohorts with bookends of the young and the seasoned.
That's my fantasy, anyway. I think I've always believed in the model of the diversified portfolio, the clan, the coven. For my college yearbook, I chose as my defining (if overly arch) quotation a line from Ulysses: "Youth led by experience visits notoriety." I loved the idea of being taken by the hand by a sharp older woman, her gray hair snazzily coiffed, and led toward the beckoning, threatening Elysium of notoriety. Notoriety was my gnosis, the spiritual truth, but firmer and darker, and my experienced one had to be a woman, for the idea of an experienced man smacked of the satyric. I had no idea how to find Experience; my female professors in college had to maintain a professorial distance, and they were worse than m
others and grandmothers in having so many dependents, pupils, to attend to. In any case, I was terrified of them and felt the weight of my weightlessness, of how little I had to offer in return. I still don't know how to make friends outside the age-concordant span, and I still yearn for the solace it would bring, though the mere image of that coven, and the hope of finding it, are comforts.
I have great, wild hopes of finding my daughter as she will be in adulthood, when she nominally stops needing me, when she is past the seizures and denunciations that I expect will come at adolescence because they came so brutally for me. I hope that I'm right in my interpretation of the organic grandmother, that mother hunger is a primal trait of womanness, and that my daughter's need for me may prove larger, more enduring, and more passionate than the child's need for meals, clothes, shelter, and applause. I hope that she needs me enough to show me who she is, to give regular dispatches, her intellectual progeny, and to trust me with their safekeeping. I hope that she likes to barter—Youth and Experience haggling over Notoriety. May she spit fire and leave me gladly, but sense in her very hemoglobin that she can find me and rest with me and breathe, safely breathe, if only for the fleeting intermission between cycles of anger and disappointment. For as long as they last, my bones, brain, and strength are her birthright, and they may not be much, but they're tenacious by decree, and they'll comply happily with the customs of dynasty. When Youth comes calling, Experience gets out her shovel and digs.
14. WOLF WHISTLES AND HYENA SMILES
TESTOSTERONE AND WOMEN
I DON'T KNOW WHY I still have a television set. By rights it should be broken, or at the very least have a nice, sneering crack snaking down the center of the screen. It doesn't, though. I don't keep a hammer or any other heavy object in the family TV room, so I haven't been able to satisfy the girlish rage that blackens my senses every time I hear a commercial for girls' toys. It's not that I hate dolls and dollhouses and training-wheel kitchenettes and Barbie wig-o-rama sets and Barbie minivans. I just hate the sound of the commercials, the caramelized music of them, the intimate, cooing voice of the pitch-mistress and the happy woos and ahs and giggles of the girls as they share the toy being hawked. The girls in these commercials are always great friends, and they are always gentle and generous, budding communitarians, fantasy kibbutzniks, although with consumerist flair. They love, love, love each other, almost as much as they love the object that has brought them together. Whatever else the producers of these commercials may have been, one thing is clear: they were never girls. Or if they were, they've grown up to have a serious sadistic streak to them. Giving a girl the impression that girlhood is an extended bounce on Barney's knee is like prepping a young gazelle for life on the Serengeti by dipping it in cream.
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