Woman

by Natalie Angier

  The progression of patriarchy and its specific impact on women throughout prehistory and history is a long and involved tale, which has been explored beautifully by Gerda Lerner and others. It is a tale that will never be wholly understood. By the time written records first appeared, much of the social, economic, political, and emotional underpinnings of the fatherland already were in place and women had already accepted their secondary status. Three thousand years ago, for example, a Mesopotamian princess prayed not for her salvation but for the preservation of her lord, "that I for my part may prosper under his protection."

  Women needed male protection because alliances among men were often military pacts, the combining of forces to capture what others have. And one of the earliest and most favored forms of booty to be seized was young women. When two tribes clashed, the victorious group killed the male prisoners and took the females back as slaves and breeders. The capture of females enhanced the reproductive potential of the triumphant males, and it enhanced their status as well. Wherever there are written records, the records describe the raping and taking of women in the aftermath of war. In Homer's Iliad, presumed to reflect social conditions in Greece circa 1200 B.C., the warriors haggle, sometimes petulantly, over the proper distribution of female spoils. Early in the narrative, King Agamemnon reluctantly agrees to give up his favorite concubine, Chryseis, a highborn war captive, when her priest father threatens to take his case to the gods. Agamemnon demands another woman in compensation for the loss, but his men point out that all the female captives already have been claimed. Being king, Agamemnon turns around and claims Achilles's concubine-slave Briseis for himself. That act very nearly leads to defeat for the Athenians, for Achilles spends much of the Trojan War sulking over the indignity in his tent and seeking the sexual sustenance of another of his concubines, "one he had taken from Lesbos, Phorbas's daughter, Diomede, of the fair coloring." Achilles shares the tent with another warrior, Patroklos, who has in his bed a gift from Achilles: Iphis, the "fair-girdled," whom Achilles captured when he conquered the city of Enyeus. Girls, girls, girls! We don't hear much from these captive women, of course, nor learn how they felt about being shuffled from man to man like baseball cards. Chances are they didn't raise a fuss. They were thankful to be alive. After all, there is no mention in the poem of enslaved men; the men of Enyeus, Lesbos, Troy, and other defeated poleis were slaughtered. Eventually, of course, men learned how to enslave other men as they did women, and to use men's muscle as they might use mules and oxen; but as a number of historians have argued and the evidence strongly suggests, the first human slaves were women, and the impetus behind slavery was the possession of nubile wombs.

  The fact that female slaves were debauched by their abduction and that their humanity was peeled and shucked, as happens in slavery, and the fact that female slaves almost invariably served as concubines to their conquerors, helped to codify a distasteful mental association (which persists to this day) between the carnal female and the degraded female. A female slave was a sexual being; she had no choice, and very often she was dressed for the part. To distinguish herself from the race of slaves, a woman could do no better than to cherish her chastity and to flaunt it in flagrant modesty. There were many reasons that female virginity became an obsession in the world of bonded men. Alliances between kingdoms often were sealed through marriage, and the prince of one state wanted assurance that his bride did not conceal a bastard beneath her fair girdle. Even among families of the lower castes, the chastity of daughters could prove remunerative. In highly stratified societies such as those of feudal Europe, sometimes the only way for a lowborn family to better itself was through the marriage of a daughter to a nobleman. Thus, as the anthropologist Sherry Ortner has argued, the enforcement of female virginity became a family affair, guarded by the men—violently when necessary—and regarded mythopoetically among women. Females no longer banded together for the sake of resisting harassment or swatting back the infanticidal male; instead, the force of gynophilia, of love between mother and daughter, sister and sister, was turned to the task of protecting female chastity, a woman's greatest asset in the postforaging fen.

  The abduction of women as war booty perforce resulted in taking the women from their natal homes and any protection their kin could give them. But on a larger scale, the elaboration of patriarchal social and economic structures resulted in, perhaps demanded, the extinguishing of matrilocality and the matriline in favor of patrilocality and the patriline. Almost without exception, women fare better in a matrilocal system, in which they stay where they were born, are surrounded by their friends and relations, and have their menfolk move in, than they do when they must leave home to join their husband's domain. The Iroquois, for example, were a strongly matrilocal culture, and the Iroquois had one of the most egalitarian cultures known to anthropology. But the more women came to be seen as resources to be bartered, the less sense it made to oblige them by moving to their pitched tents. Some biblical scholars have seen in Genesis a recapitulation of the struggle to replace matrilocality with patrilocality, a critical step in enabling the Hebrew tribe to exchange nomadism for statism, centered on the rule of the patriarch. Early in Genesis (2:24) is the passage "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife," a likely reference to a matrilocal system of wedlock. But later, Jacob, the son of Isaac, rejects the premise of matrilocality. He pledges to Isaac that he will return to his house, and after courting and marrying Laban's daughters, Rachel and Leah, he fulfills his vow. He takes his wives and their sons, camels, flocks of sheep, pottery, everything they can carry, back to the house of Isaac. To underscore the profound significance of her desertion, Rachel even steals her father's teraphim, his house gods, which represent the tide to Laban's property. She accepts the overthrow of matrocentrism. She casts her lot with her husband and his primogeniture, and so pantomimes in her theft Jacob's right to claim her estate.

  The plight of Briseis, the exaltation of the hymen, woman's loss of her natal infrastructure—all were hard enough on the cause of female autonomy. But when the goddess principle was expunged from the pantheon, women lost even their right to salute, however modestly, their fleshy fertility, the redemptive, regenerative power of the female body. Virtually all human cultures have had some sort of religion, some coherent creation narrative to consolidate and counterbalance human terrors, desires, limitations, and inclinations. Generally those religions are populated by a mix of animal and humanoid gods, some male, some female, some bisexual. Yet as Lerner convincingly shows, the ascendance of patriarchy is paralleled by a shift in the balance of power among the resident deities. "The development of strong kingships and of archaic states brings changes in religious beliefs and symbols," she writes in The Creation of Patriarchy. "The observable pattern is: first, the demotion of the Mother-Goddess figure and the ascendance and later dominance of her male consort/son; then his merging with a storm-god into a male Creator-God, who heads the pantheon of gods and goddesses. Wherever such changes occur, the power of creation and of fertility is transferred from the Goddess to the God."

  With the advent of monotheism, even a metaphorically ovariectomized goddess is banished from the tabernacle, for she is a threat, with her fat thighs and her outlandish udders and her taint of the old, beloved fertility cults that held sway among so many for so long. In Genesis we see the ultimate pact between males, Yahweh and Adam, to expropriate female procreative power. Adam agrees to honor a monotheistic vision, stripped of the Goddess, and Adam in turn wins the right to name Eve and thus to give symbolic birth to her, and so to be the mother to the mother of us all, and so by rights to own the products of her womb. Eve shall be ruled by her husband and shall be exalted by him alone, and she will not be distracted by flattery and false hope. Eve shall see the serpent for what it is, her enemy, the embodiment of sin—the filth-eating worm, the detached phallus, the eternal umbilicus, the fugitive, the free. "In the historical context of the times of the writing of Gene
sis, the snake was clearly associated with the fertility goddess and symbolically represented her," Lerner writes. "We need not strain our interpretation to read this as the condemnation by Yahweh of female sexuality exercised freely and autonomously, even sacredly."

  Under monotheism, patriarchy attained full grandeur. For women, the world had been bureaucratized, wrapped in red duct tape like a massive work by Christo. The old sources of strength were gone: the ballast of nearby blood relations, the deed to one's body, and the reflection of the female self on larger stages—the mortal stage of the polis and the immortal stage of the gods. To gain what they needed to survive and to feed their young, women had to go through their intermediaries, their middle men. A man was no longer a mate. A man was air. You don't argue; you have to breathe. With this gradual, complex, and revolutionary transformation from foraging to the fatherland, the worth of women to one another also changed, for much the poorer. The strategic sorority was swept aside. If there are no tubers to be dug or forests to rummage through, and if vast tracts of resources are held by men, what can a woman do for you?

  In the neohuman brain, a woman who is not your relative is a potential threat beyond anything seen elsewhere among primates. The woman may be your in-law, beholden to your husband by genotype or the affections cultivated by longstanding proximity. Or she may be a stranger and a potential competitor, in a new, ultimate, terrifying sense of the term. Another woman may take your man, and if your man is your air, that woman is a succubus, a true femme fatale, fatal to you and yours, to the sum of necessity, your food, your shelter, your young. What good can one woman do for another in the land of the middle man, of agraria and animus husbandry? Not much, practically speaking, not much at all. But the harm she can do is immeasurable. She can scratch your eyes out. She can rob you blind. Or so it can feel to the daughters of Eve, who are not shut out of the garden but locked within it. The costs of camaraderie begin to look exorbitant, and the risks of rebellion untenable.

  Women are not and never have been innocents. Many have concurred with the process of being deprimatized. They have fed and accelerated their loss of autonomy. They have complied with customs that control female sexuality, such as infibulation, purdah, and claustration, and they have insisted that their daughters comply as well. They may even be the active agents of such customs.

  They, we, are not fools, and we want our families. We want what is best for our children, and for thousands of years we have needed the help and love of men to keep our children safe. Many of us still do, and we still suffer in the absence of men. In this country, the vast majority of the people living in poverty are single women and their children. When a couple with children divorces, the woman usually gets poorer than she was during her marriage, while the man gets richer. It is still too costly to behave in a way that risks the investment and tolerance of a man, of the greater male coalition that is our post-tuber planet. And so at times we perform little clitoridectomy equivalents on ourselves. We reject the idea of sisterhood and of female solidarity. We make fun of it. We scorn the term feminist, roll our eyes at it. We say we're beyond it, we're all fine, we've fixed all the problems that feminism can fix, which were never problems to begin with anyway. We organize antifeminist groups and give them smart, snappy names with words like freedom and independent in them. We have so much aggression in us, we're so alive, we're wild, golden-eyed, and strong, and we take out our pistols and shoot at each other, or at the floor, at our glass-slippered feet.

  What sort of nonsense do we swallow? What sort of slaphappy hee-hawing nonsense? Consider the movie Jerry Maguire, which is a silly movie and would be harmless but for a gratuitous and puzzling flourish of misogyny, stuck in there for the women in the audience, I guess, or for the men who accompanied the women who accompanied the men to a male-centered, sports-themed movie. The moviemakers inserted a "love interest" for Tom Cruise, who plays Jerry, in the fetching, bee-stung-lipped person of Renee Zellweger as Dorothy. Dorothy has an older sister, a graying divorcée, and the sister is part of a female support group, a cabal of abandonees who get together regularly to moan about the betrayals of men. This is annoying enough, for the women all look haggard, hardened, and unhappy, and they never laugh, although real women laugh constantly when they congregate to dish about men. At one point, for no discernible reason, Dorothy leaps to her feet and interrupts their gathering. "Maybe you're all correct," she says. "Men are the enemy. But I still love the enemy!" The women erupt in a chattering chorus of denials and confusion, as though they know they've been trounced and that Dorothy has a point (which is?). The women are trying to support each other, shore each other up, but Dorothy won't let them. She wants Tom/Ierry back. She needs him, not just emotionally but for her solvency. She is a single mother with a young son. In her need, Dorothy feels she must nullify these other women, dissociate herself from them and the grim future they represent. Their presence taints her. She wants a second act. There are no second acts for Thelma and Louise.

  Okay, maybe we shouldn't read too much into fluffernutter entertainment. But if you think it's sweet and harmless and you keep eating it, one day you wake up and all your teeth have fallen out.

  We are all women with many pasts. We are old primates and neohominids. We feel drawn toward other women, we feel a need to explain ourselves to them and to impress them, and we run away from women, we disavow them, or we keep them around only until the real thing comes along. We can do each other mischief, even violence, but we can do each other good as well. Both options are open to us, in the plastic, opportunistic flow chart of our strategies and choices. Chimpanzees and bonobos are equally related to us. Their genes are 99 percent identical to our own. To give you a sense of how close that is, the mouse genome is only 50 percent homologous to ours, and mice are mammals too, and thus very close to us taxonomically. But chimpanzees and bonobos, the two living members of the genus Pan, are our sister groups. Their milk would feed our infants beautifully. Chimpanzee females are attenuated allies. Bonobo females are a constructed matriarchy. We can go either way. We can draw upon both. What we women can't do is ignore each other. It is a man's world, but our aggressions are woman-centered, harsh and intimate.

  16. CHEAP MEAT

  LEARNING TO MAKE A MUSCLE

  IN ALL THE YEARS that I have been working out in gyms and lifting weights and preaching to other gals, with admitted obnoxiousness, about the glories of strength training, the commonest and most irritating response I have heard goes something like this: "I wouldn't want to bulk up or look too muscular. I just want to get toned." The remark chafes at me for two reasons. To begin with, Holy Maria Lactans, I wish it were that easy to "bulk up" and build visible muscle. I wish that I could grow a bumper crop of fruits and moons and imitation buttocks on my shoulders, legs, chest, and back simply by working out on a regular basis. In fact, getting overtly muscular is extremely difficult for most women. People who watch me work out are always surprised to see how much weight I can lift, because I don't look particularly meaty. I don't conform to some sort of mythical image of Gunhilde du Brawn, slayer of golems and burster of spandex. I am perpetually disappointed by my biceps. They're strong, but they refuse to pop up when I flex my arms, the way I remember my father's biceps doing each time I begged him to "make a muscle."

  For another, let us suppose that a woman does get more noticeably cut and hillocked than I can—and some women certainly can. What is wrong with looking muscular? Muscles are beautiful. Strength is beautiful. Muscle tissue is beautiful. It is metabolically, medically, and philosophically beautiful. Muscles retreat when they're not used, but they will always come back if you give them good reason. No matter how old you get, your muscles never lose hope. They are forward-looking. They are responsive to stimulation. Few cells of the body are as capable as muscle cells are of change and reformation, of achievement and transcendence. Your muscles can be sanctimonious, it's true, adhering to a materialist, puritanical, goal-oriented mentality, but at least they are reliable. Yo
u can spend every day on a therapist's couch and still wake up to your old frail spirit, but if you work out every day your muscles will grow strong.

  Admittedly, the benefits of exercise can be, and are, oversold. People attribute vast magical powers to exercise, claiming that it will make you happy and optimistic and focused. Don't believe them. If you are a habitually unhappy person, exercise will not make you happy. You may feel a temporary sense of emotional expansiveness at the beginning of a new exercise regimen, as the improvement in blood flow transports comparatively more oxygen to your tissues and as you pat yourself on the back for your brave undertaking. But once your body grows accustomed to the more active pace and the gung-ho high of the novitiate dissipates, you will return to your biochemical and psychic baseline—to the problem, as D. H. Lawrence put it, of being yourself. We have heard that exercise can help cure depression, but most clinical studies have found no such therapeutic effect.