People also claim that exercise is the closest thing we have to an elixir of youth, and that if we could put it in a pill we'd all be taking it. They are right for many parts of the body, but for the face, your chronograph to the world, exercise will do nothing. The muscles of your face are not attached to the skull in as many spots as the other muscles are to the skeleton. The facial muscles have been liberated from the constraints of bone, the better to allow us to speak and grimace and smile and feign surprise or interest. But the downside to that freedom of expression is that we cannot lift up the facial muscles through strength training; there is nowhere to lift them to. It is too bad, really. No matter how much discipline and tenacity we may muster, the aesthetic benefits of exercise stop at the jaw.
If we don't ask of strength that it solve all our problems, though, we can start to make real use of it. We women need our muscles at least as much as men need theirs, and we should feel entitled to them. Yes, men are naturally more muscular, a result of their higher levels of testosterone. The hormone is anabolic—it builds muscle—and so having more of it allows for comparatively greater muscle bulk. Yet testosterone is not nearly as effective at enhancing strength as its reputation would suggest, and women should not lament their relatively low concentration of the hormone, nor think it means that they're not "supposed" to be strong. Ignoring official censure, athletes have long been injecting synthetic androgens on the conviction that steroids make them stronger and more muscular. In 1996, researchers finally substantiated the locker-room wisdom through a clinical trial and showed that super-high doses of testosterone did indeed increase muscle size and strength in normal, healthy young men. The results were not brilliant, though, and even the men whose blood was practically gelatinous with testosterone—five times the normal concentration—ended up no stronger, after ten weeks of steady exercise, than a lot of the men in the control group, who diligently worked out drug-free.
The results should not surprise us. After all, men's indigenous testosterone levels are ten times higher than women's, but men certainly are not ten times bigger and stronger than we. In fact, the size discrepancy between men and women—our so-called sexual dimorphism—is modest compared to that seen among males and females of many other species. The average man is only about 10 percent taller and 20 percent heavier than the average woman, while among orangutans and gorillas males are at least twice the size of females. Normally the sexual dimorphism of a particular species is attributed to evolutionary pressure on the males to grow large, the better to compete with other males for access to mates. As a rule, the more sexually dimorphic the species, the more polygamous it is, the theory being that the greater a male's opportunity to monopolize multiple females, the stiffer the competition among males and the more pronounced the pressure to be battle-ready. By contrast, among the more monogamous species males and females tend to be fairly similar in size and accouterments, for why should a male be outfitted for warfare when he is likely to find a mate and settle down and more or less mind his own business? Thus, a number of scientists have viewed the weak dimorphism in humans as evidence that we are a halfway, sexually opportunistic creature, semi-promiscuous, semi-monogamous, prone to pairing up and prone to philandering—fission, fusion, mass confusion. All of which may or may not be true; but the fact that men are not 400-pound gorillas doesn't on its own indicate a muting of competitiveness among males. The truth is that once humans started fashioning weapons, sheer brute strength became less important than inventiveness, and the arms race in body parts very likely gave way to the arms race in engineering skills. A good spear defeats a burly chest every time.
More to the point for our discussion, women and men may be closer in size than the males and females of some other great apes not because men have been freed of the selective pressure toward enlarged body size but because women have been under some pressure to become fairly large themselves. Assuming that women have been selected for enhanced longevity—a long life after menopause—it helps to have a respectable body mass to persist through the decades. Large animals generally live longer than small animals. Many factors besides lifespan influence the evolution of a female's body size, including habitat, method of locomotion, diet, and the demands of pregnancy and lactation, some factors serving to limit body size, others to augment it. But it is possible that in the triangulating, negotiating process of adaptive change, women's physiology has seen a modest thrust toward maximizing body size while still remaining within the developmental constraints of reproductive demands. After all, women are the second-largest female primates on the planet, bested only by female gorillas, who weigh an average of 185 pounds, compared to our nonobese norm of 125 to 130 pounds. Women are bigger than female orangutans, who weigh less than 100 pounds, and considerably bigger than female chimpanzees or bonobos. By comparison, men, with their standard weight of 160 pounds, are much smaller than male gorillas, and smaller too than male orangutans, who average 200 pounds.
I'm not saying this simply to have fun with numbers (although I am having fun with numbers, and as a fairly small woman it's heartening to think of myself as an impressively large female primate). What I am doing is offering grist for the argument that women need muscle mass more than men do, and that while nature has given us a nudge in a more monumental direction, we must take the hint and make the most of our long-lived vessel. We need muscle for practical reasons, and we need it for the mind's I, the uncertain self, and in both cases we need it now more than ever. We may not have large quantities of testosterone, and building muscle and strength does not come as easily to us as it does to men. But we have an extraordinary capacity for strength, the more impressive given our comparatively low levels of testosterone, as women throughout the world and history have always shown us. Women are workhorses in most of the developing world. !Kung women carry loads of a hundred pounds on their heads or backs for miles and miles. If the world's women went on strike, the world of work would effectively stop, and you cannot say that with certainty for the enterprises of men. For the vast majority of women, the injunction to be strong would ring silly. They are strong of necessity, by sweat and callus, and if they combined their strong ways with a better diet, clean water, and good medical care, they might prove a race of Jeanne Calments, the longest-lived person the earth has yet seen.
In the West, however, women have experienced a kind of contrapuntalism, a clashing of lifelines. Longevity has increased while the need for physical strength has declined. We are living longer. We are women, after all, and how sturdy our systems are. At the same time, we are demyosinated, with ever less seduction of the muscle tissue, which yearns to be wooed. The more we persist, the more we need muscle. But our world gives us little opportunity to obtain it naturally, and so we must seek it through artifice, discipline, and homily. We must give ourselves reasons to be powerful, and the more reasons we conjure, the better. You don't want to look muscular? You just want to look toned? But you're not a Gregorian chant; you're a century-in-waiting. Pray to Artemis, goddess of the hunt, for her huntswoman's quadriceps and her archer's orbed arms. You'll be happy to have them when gravity, ruthless gravity, starts fingering your merchandise and toying with your heart.
To understand a woman's profound need of muscle, it helps to consider the constituents of a nonexistent yet utilitarian couple, the Reference Woman and the Reference Man. This couple is a medical and political construct, a post-Hiroshima Atom and Eve. In the 1950s, under the aegis of the Atomic Energy Commission, scientists set out to determine the potential impact of nuclear radiation on the human body. They wanted to know how much alpha, beta, and gamma radiation the body could tolerate, and because different tissues react divergently to radiation, they had to come up with estimates of what substrates the average man and average woman were made. In the portraits that emerged, the Reference Hominids are both twenty-five years old. This is the age at which the body's various organs are thought to be at their peak size and performance and its metabolic set point is well establ
ished. The weight that you are at age twenty-five is the weight at which your body is likely to feel most at home. It is the weight that your metabolism strives to attain, adjusting itself up or down if you gain or drop a few pounds, which is why dieters have such a vicious time of maintenance. The body is no rabble-rouser. It loves the status quo.
But Reference People never diet. Our Standard Woman weighs 132 pounds, the Standard Man 154. She is 27 percent fat, 63 percent lean body mass. He is 16 percent fat, 84 percent lean. When we think of lean we think muscle, but lean includes everything that is not fat—muscle, bones, organs, water. In the Atomic Woman, about half of the lean mass, or 34 percent of her body weight, is thought to be muscle tissue, which means that she is almost as fat as she is muscled. Fat is not a bad thing in itself. Adipose tissue is a great way to store energy for the famine times that we humans were supposed to withstand on occasion. A gram of fat holds more than twice as many calories as a gram of muscle tissue. The average person, male or female, has enough body fat to survive forty days without eating; the fact that Jesus Christ fasted in the desert for forty days suggests that the biblical authors, attentive ascetics that they were, had a good idea of the body's physiological limits.
Fat, though, can't do much for you on a day-to-day basis. It isn't a terribly ambitious tissue, and it weighs you down. It is the muscle tissue that colludes with the liver to generate and metabolize the proteins that keep the body alive and upright and operational, that repair the perpetual damage of living and of breathing oxygen—radical, skittish, inescapable oxygen. A woman who loses half or more of her body fat may stop menstruating, but she'll live. A woman who loses more than 40 percent of her lean body mass, as people did in the Nazi concentration camps, will die.
It is hard to exaggerate the utility of muscle. We have more than six hundred muscles in our body, some of them under voluntary control—our skeletal muscles—and some of them smooth muscles, the autonomic staff. Muscles allow us to move, of course. They stand between us and dissipation, apathy. But muscle tissue helps us even when we are immobilized by illness. In sickness, the body loses its power to tap the caloric reserves of fat. If you're fasting, intentionally or otherwise, but you are healthy, your insulin levels fall and your body begins to call on its fat reserves for energy. But when you're sick, with either an acute infection or a chronic illness, your insulin levels rise. Because insulin levels also rise when you eat, your body grows confused. It thinks it is fed, so it won't tap its stored fat for calories. Your body still needs energy, though, and if you're too sick to eat, it will begin breaking down its muscle for fuel. Muscle has fewer calories to offer: the average woman stores only about 20,000 calories in her muscle tissue, compared to the 180,000 or so in her fat. An acutely ill person who cannot eat will starve to death in ten days rather than forty. (Cachexia, the wasting of lean mass seen in people with cancer or AIDS, occurs more gradually than that, but it too is caused by a disruption of the body's ability to burn fat and its fallback tendency to cannibalize its muscle.) The more muscle you have, then, the better your chances are of withstanding illness. Young people survive an acute disease more readily than the old do in part because they have more muscle in escrow.
We women have less muscle than men to begin with, and we also have lighter bones. A man and a woman of equal height will differ in skeletal mass, the male's being about 10 percent denser than the female's. If muscle counters inertia, bones defy the swamp—the archaic spineless state we tetrapods gratefully scrambled away from. As women age, they lose bone more rapidly than men do—we're all aware of that, of course, in this era of the mindful menopause. Muscle cushions the bone as a rubber bumper cushions a fender, and the more muscle there is draped on the skeleton, the more protected the bones will be, even as they become more brittle and porous.
The body needs its muscle, especially as it ages. Yet the perverse reality is that in the absence of a concerted effort to remain strong, the aging body loses muscle and gains fat. A woman may stay the same weight throughout her adulthood, and still, if she is sedentary, the components of that body weight will change. The Reference Woman who at age twenty-five weighed 132 pounds and was 27 percent fat will by age fifty-five, without having gained a pound, be more than 40 percent fat. She will still have the same six-hundred-odd muscles, but many of them will have shrunk and become marbled through with lard and surrounded by a comparatively larger ring of fat. Because she has less muscle volume than when she was young, she will be weaker, of course, unable to lift her luggage, and she will be forced to purchase one of those odious, inexplicably popular wheeled suitcases with the retractable handles. She will grow breathless more readily when she climbs a flight of stairs, for muscle facilitates oxygen transport throughout the body and eases the strain on the heart. Men too exchange muscle for fat as they age, but because they start with more muscle, the transformation is less extreme.
Women need muscle, as much muscle as they can muster. They need muscle to shield their light bones, and they need muscle to weather illness. If they have less muscle naturally than men do, they must work that much harder to compensate. Young women must exercise and seek great strength. The more a young woman exerts herself before the age of twenty-five, while her skeleton is as yet a work in progress, the more robust her bones will be at their peak, and the longer her slide, as she ages, back to the mother lagoon. Vigorous, load-bearing activities such as running, gymnastics, and weightlifting can all augment a young woman's bone mass. And though some authorities have expressed concern that excessive sportiness in girlhood can interrupt the menstrual cycle, blocking estrogen production and therefore raising the risk of osteoporosis, in fact a wealth of research has demonstrated that active girls have denser bones than their unathletic peers. Young women who build a foundation of muscle will find it easier throughout life to recall that muscle from mothballs. They may lapse into years of physical torpor, but when they finally shake themselves awake and give themselves a princessly kiss, they will regain their strength and meat in surprisingly short order.
Muscle is gracious. It does not hold grudges. Even an elderly woman who never learned to do cartwheels or bothered to join a fitness club in early adulthood can, in her oxidized age, become a mighty virago. Her muscles will be there for her. Miriam Nelson, a physiologist at Tufts University, has taken women in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, women who couldn't leave their apartments or rise from their chairs, women in nursing homes, and she has trained them twice a week with weights the way weightlifters in gyms train with weights—not timidly, not holding back for fear of their frailty or fear that they might, heavens, "bulk up," but with intensity, using as high a weight as the women can manage. After only four months in the program, these women, these sedentary, often arthritic women with dowager's humps and hummingbird bones, grew astonishingly strong, were as though healed by a carnival preacher, tossing aside canes and walkers, getting down on their hands and knees to garden, canoeing, shoveling snow. The women did not become visibly larger. They gained about 10 percent in muscle mass—respectable, but not terribly detectable. Of far greater importance, they doubled or trebled their strength. They became stronger than they had been in middle age. Their muscles hadn't been chastened by time. They hadn't learned their lesson. They hadn't learned to submit. Instead, the muscles repaid use with their stalwart Protestant ways and became productive again. The coordination between muscle and nerve improved. The muscles became infiltrated with nerve twigs and with capillaries bearing blood and oxygen. They were like telltale hearts, still thumping under the floorboards, not dead yet.
A woman's need of muscle is practical. She is a long-lived specimen, one of the longest this planet knows. Time will try to steal muscle and bone, but time in this case is not invincible. Muscle can be retrieved and restored, and when the muscle swells, the bone rejoices. It's very difficult to add to your bone density after age thirty, but by owning muscle you can keep the bone you have from departing, for muscle yanks on bone, and the mec
hanical action goads the bone to turn over, to be replenished, rather than to stagnate and gradually dissolve. Muscle and bone, our wild quadruped scaffolding, on which a fine, long dramedy of a life can be draped. Even a bit of fat can be accommodated on a sturdy frame. The dangers of body fat are exaggerated. Fat ipso facto is not a bad thing. The problem for most overweight people is that the extra fat makes movement harder and more unpleasant, and so they tend not to exercise, and muscles must be moved to remain engaged. But if a chubby woman remains active, she may prove surprisingly strong. Overweight people not only have more fat than the slender, they often have comparatively more muscle. When you gain weight because you're overeating, you put on three quarters of that weight as fat but one quarter as muscle. Fat people are so cowed into self-loathing that they don't realize the potential they carry. If they choose to exercise their submerged muscle on a regular basis, they'll be able to beat the sprat out of any thin ones who call them pigs.
As a not-young mother of a very young daughter, I feel a new obligation to stay strong—to stay strong so that I can stay alive and vigorous and force her to go camping and hiking with her aging parents, and to stay healthy and independent and postpone the time when she'll have to worry about nursing homes. I feel, in other words, pragmatic about strength. When I visited Miriam Nelson, she made it clear to me that women like us—relatively small and slim women—must never stop seeking strength. We are not naturally blessed. We don't have enough mass, enough animal matter, to rest on our laurels. So now I'm practical. In the past I cared less about the nuts and bolts of muscle and more about its meaning, the mind of muscle. I haven't abandoned my cheap and wistful philosophy of muscle, though. Women need all the reasons we can gather to build the strength that comes with comparative ease to men. Here's another: physical strength is explicit. It is crude and clear and possible. A woman does not need to get as strong as she thinks before she can be a hobbyist Fury. It doesn't take much to become imposing, a figure to be reckoned with. If a woman can do a set of, say, fifteen to twenty-five straight-bodied pushups or a few pullups, if she can lift a dumbbell that's heavy enough to be on the dumbbell rack rather than tossed on the floor like a toy, then people will say, Oh, you're so strong, and they will admire her and think her brave. And being strong in a blunt way, a muscleheaded way, is easier than being skilled at a sport. It is a democratic option, open to the klutzes and the latecomers, and women should seize the chance to become cheaply, frowzily strong, because the chance exists, and let's be honest, we don't have many. Being strong won't make you happy or fulfilled, but it's better to be sullen and strong than sullen and weak.
Woman Page 37