Woman

by Natalie Angier

  Female strength is, even yet, seditious. It can make men squirm. They can get angry at a woman who is too strong, who may be stronger than they are. Part of me understands that reaction. I feel irritated and jealous when I see a woman who can lift more weight than I can. How dare she! I look for flaws, for evidence that her form is poor, that she is cheating. But once the initial irritation fades and I can see that she is good at what she is doing, I feel grateful toward her, and heartened by her power. She is a member of the sisterhood, the Vestal Subversions. Men seem to feel the need of absolutes, of an indomitable line between male and female strength. Physical strength hardly counts in this culture, and many men are lazy, and they don't necessarily mind if other men are stronger than they. Still, there must be abiding verities, and one of them is that in the arena of physical prowess, the categorical male will now and forever prevail over female. How else to explain the reaction I encountered while reporting the following story?

  In 1992, Brian Whipp and Susan Ward, of the University of California at Los Angeles, presented their analysis of trends in competitive running over the past seventy years. As they saw it, female runners were improving their performance by such breathtaking leaps and sprints and heave-hos that if present trends continued, they would catch up to and possibly surpass male runners sometime in the next fifty years. The researchers pointed out that while men's times have been improving steadily since the 1920s, with no sign of slacking off, women's performance has been accelerating at two to three times the rate of the men's, also with no sign of slacking off. Project those divergent trends into the future, and the verity of male primacy begins to totter.

  "Before I looked at the data, I would have thought the possibility of women catching up to men hovered somewhere between implausible and extremely unlikely," Whipp told me. "But then I looked at the data. I'm a scientist; that's what I do. And I saw that if current progressions continue, the consequence is that men and women might be running equivalent speeds in the next century." His voice took on a pleading tone. "This is not me talking, it's the data."

  Take as an example the one-mile event. In 1954, when Roger Bannister broke the fabled four-minute-mile barrier, Diane Leather became the first woman to breach the five-minute mile. If they had been in the same race, she would have finished 320 meters behind Bannister. In 1993, when Whipp and Ward wrote their paper, the world champion female miler would have finished only 180 meters behind the top man, and that figure has since dropped to 178 meters. The data won't shut up.

  Yet there was nothing so swift as the eruption of outrage and indignation from various jockhouses—male physiologists, male runners, male editors screening my copy—when I wrote this story. I asked Fred Lebow, then the high priest of marathons and the president of the New York Road Runners Club, what he thought of the findings. "Never!" he cried. "This may look good on paper, but women will never run as fast as men! Never, ever, ever!" Poor Lebow. He has since died of a brain tumor, and I can still hear his incantatory iteration: Never, ever, ever ... Peter Snell, an exercise physiologist who won three Olympic gold medals for running in the 1960s, flicked the report aside like so much dandruff on his collar. "I don't know why they bothered to do this," he said. "It's a waste of time. It's not even worth discussing. To suggest that women will approach men is ludicrous, just ridiculous." Absurd and Dr. Seussious!

  An editor looking over my story said, Let's move the skeptical stuff up higher.

  I already have skepticism in my second paragraph, I replied. Right after the lead, I start in with the critics.

  Yes, but there are other skeptical points later in the story that should be moved up too, he said.

  Why? I said. Why would I want to completely undermine the story from the start?

  Because it's sheer fantasy, the male editor said. It will never happen.

  That's you talking, I replied. It's not the data.

  Admittedly, the sneerers of Snell had a point. Elite female runners are still far behind the men in all events. The best marathon time by a woman is fifteen minutes slower than the world's record, a Grand Canyon of a gap by championship standards. Many physiological factors give male athletes the edge, apart from their larger muscles. Female runners, no matter how lean they are compared to most mortals, still have more body fat than world-class male runners do, and that fat is dead weight. Men have a greater ratio of red blood cells to plasma in their blood and thus can deliver proportionally more oxygen to their muscles. Their higher testosterone levels also help in muscle repair, which means they can train more rabidly. And so on, trudging from one page of Gray's Anatomy to the next. Just because the rate of improvement in female athletic performance has been spectacular, a linear progression toward the ionosphere, doesn't mean it will stay linear much longer. After all, if you carried that line out indefinitely, you'd reach the point where female runners were running faster than the speed of light, a feat beyond even the magic thighs of Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Obviously, the trend will have to flatten out. The divisions into male and female events at the Olympics are not going to disappear anytime soon, if ever. So wherefore the outrage, the indignation, the thunderous guffaw at the proposal that they might? What is the fear here?

  Never mind. We don't have to understand it. Let's just capitalize on it. Physical strength is a crude form of strength, and it won't solve much of the angst in life, but again, it's a flauntable property. Most women are much stronger than they realize, and they can be stronger still with a minimum of investment. I'm not talking about the buff-body ethos of egg-carton abdominals and striated quadriceps that now prevails in places like Los Angeles, New York, and Miami Beach, which is an aesthetic tyranny no less than the tyranny of thinness or of the Face. I'm talking about strong and earthy, a moosey strength, the strength that shrugs its shoulders and takes no bull. I've noticed in nearly every gym where I've worked out that women on the weight-training equipment use far too low a setting for their strength, particularly when they are exercising their upper body, where they are convinced they are weak. They'll stick with twenty or thirty pounds' worth of plates and then do many repetitions easily, and I can see that they could handle twice what they're pressing, but they're not doing it, and nobody's telling them to do it, and I want to go over and beg them to use a higher weight and tell them, Look, you're blowing it, here's your chance, your cheap and easy chance, to own a piece of your life and strut and be a comic-strip heroine, so please, stack it up, heave-ho, do it for yourself, your daughter, your mother, the International Maidenhood of Iron. I don't say anything. It's not my business. I'm not a personal trainer, and if somebody came over to give me unsolicited advice about my workout, I might be tempted to test the purported deficiency of my effort by dropping what I'm pumping on Gunhilde's great toe. Then she'd howl like a harpy and jump up and down and say, What the hell are you doing? That was meant as a compliment! And the next time I saw her in the gym, her foot in a cast, I'd invite her to join me in a workout, to see if there is more to me, and to her, than either of us knows.

  Men grow up with the conviction that they are always stronger than somebody. Even men who as boys were always picked last for the softball team and who look like the packing material for stereo equipment nevertheless are convinced that they are stronger than women. They are taught that they should never hit a woman, never, ever, and that's a reasonable thing to be taught, because physical assault is almost always a bad idea; but if the presumed corollary of that doctrine is that women are profoundly and immutably vulnerable to male violence and that they must rely on the courtly behavior of men and the vigilance of the legal system to keep themselves in one piece, then the doctrine is not entirely benign and may even backfire. If men believe that they are always stronger than all women, and that here at least they have the upper hand, by rights, by testosterone, by bone and hemoglobin, and if our species' sexual dimorphism is overrated and the heft of women understated, then a man, an angry, idiotic, small-souled man, will view the cost of hitting a woman as depres
singly low, and a woman will view the thought of protecting herself as ludicrous, ridiculous, because she can never, ever succeed. And sure enough, the prophecy will be fulfilled, the man will beat the woman at no physical risk to himself, because we all know that a woman can't stand up to a man and we all know that a woman should look toned, not bulky. I am not, absolutely not, blaming women who are assaulted by men for allowing themselves to be beaten, but I am questioning the mentality that effectively hypertrophies the size and strength dimorphism between men and women, and that makes men, even frumpy, lethargic, academic men, smug, and that makes women, even tall, substantial women, afraid. Think simian, subversive thoughts. Among patas monkeys, vervet monkeys, brown capuchins, stump-tailed macaques, and other species of monkeys, females often win in one-on-one agonistic encounters with males, even though the males are as proportionally bigger than the females as men are than women. Does this surprise you? A monkey tornado can pick you up and fling you to Oz and back. If a female macaque decides to fly in your face, her smallness, her fifteen pounds, will feel huger than any weather you have seen.

  Women don't have to be as strong as men to be strong enough, to stomp around like maenads. It was a man who told me as much, back in college. He was a large, broad-shouldered man, a competitive swimmer who qualified for the Olympics. He was the largest and most athletic man I had ever dated, and I felt overwhelmed by the expanse of him.

  You could snap me in two like a twig, I said to him.

  Oh, no, I couldn't, he said. You're strong, and you've got a lot of muscle there, he said, poking at my midriff. It would be very difficult to break you in half.

  Part of me wanted to yield to his power, to designate its authority, and to feel protected beneath it. But he knew his strength, and he had a measure of mine, and he had the strength to tell me that I was selling myself short. Men who respond with sputtering ire at the thought of female parity in athletic competition show that there is a faint, oaky note of doubt about male primogeniture. It can't hurt, and it may help, to question the absolutism of sexual asymmetry through any number of minor acts of smugness—a pushup here, a pullup there, a cueball bicep if you can get it. Bitch.

  Of course, being swift and strong will not protect a woman from being raped or molested. Antifeminists argue the opposite, that women who labor under the illusion of strength and self-sufficiency are the ones who do foolish things, go places they shouldn't, and end up paying for it. In 1989, when a female jogger in Central Park was almost killed by a gang of wilding boys, many people blamed the jogger, an accomplished athlete, for being so reckless as to run in the park at night. But women get attacked in daylight, and in their homes, and when walking from their job to their cars. Obviously there are no guarantees. It's worth pointing out that although the Central Park jogger was grievously wounded, she didn't die. She refused to die. She amazed doctors by her recovery. Perhaps her strength kept her alive—the blunt strength of her body and the obstreperousness of her mind.

  Men take strength for granted. Women have to fight for it. They have to trick themselves into their strength, or rather their strengths. Physical strength is but one allele of strength. There are all the other strengths: of self-conviction, of purpose, of being comfortable in your designated plasm. I don't know if physical strength can enhance those other, intangible strengths, if a better-braced body can give one ovarios of heart. It's a good gimmick, though, a place to start, or to return to when all else fails. The body will be there to do its bit, to take another crack at life, and to propel you forward, suitcase in hand, not on wheels. The trappings of physical strength are so persuasive that you can almost hear the spotted hyenas giggling in the dark.

  17. LABOR OF LOVE

  THE CHEMISTRY OF HUMAN BONDAGE

  THE BRAIN IS an organ of aggression, and there are many roads to this Rome of imagined conquests—so many that mental disorders, regardless of their particulars, often result in a derangement of our aggressive drive. Schizophrenics stand on the streetcorner screaming obscenely at passersby; depressives lie in their beds screaming mutely at themselves. Our gentle aggressions, the drive to be, prods us out of bed in the morning and draws us toward each other. And in each other we find what our aggressive brain desires: love.

  As we are wired for aggression, so we are wired to love. We are a lavishly loving species, aggressively sentimental. We are tireless in the pursuit of fresh targets for our love. We love our children so long that they come to despise us for it. We love friends, books, flags, nation-states, sports teams. We love answers. We love yesterday and next year. We love gods, for a god is there when all else fails, and God can keep all conduits of love alive—erotic, maternal, paternal, euphoric, infantile.

  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. For a while it was the going wisdom among historians that romantic love was a relatively recent invention, arising from the mercantile and troubadour tradition of late medieval France. In premodern and non-Western societies, the historians argued, men and women do not marry "for love"—their marriages are usually arranged, or bought and sold; nor do people in most cultures dreamily conjure up images of the beloved. More recently, scholars have shown otherwise. They have uncovered a cross-cultural and cross-temporal trove of love ditties, love geysers, and eloquent swoons. In a survey of ethnographic data for 166 contemporary societies, Helen Fisher, of Rutgers University, found evidence of romantic love in 147; for the rest, the data were too incomplete to rule it in or out. Historically, the ancient Babylonians, Sumerians, Akkadians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, and Meso-Americans left behind paeans to romantic love. Lovers leap to an immortal heat in the Song of Songs, written in the ninth century B.C, she with teeth like a flock of shorn sheep, lips like a thread of scarlet, and breasts like twin roes, and he with eyes as the eyes of doves and cheeks like a bed of spices and legs as pillars of marble set upon sockets of fine gold: "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine." Tutankhamen died before he was twenty, but he lived long enough to write love poems to his wife. If a Gothic cathedral is, as Rilke said, frozen music, then the Taj Mahal, which the Shah Jahan built for his beloved dead bride, is a frozen keen. "It's no use, Mother dear, I can't finish my weaving," Sappho wrote 2,600 years ago. "You may blame Aphrodite/soft as she is/she has almost killed me with love for that boy."

  Love is universal, yet we can't help but want to clutch it to ourselves. 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—the good ones, anyway. Science has not solved the love question. We know very little about what the bio-chemical and neural substrates of love may be. Love is a tremendously difficult problem to study. How do you define it? Which animals can you use? If scientists are going to do experiments on the deep biology of love, they need animals, and they need reliable assays. When cats are feeling hostile, they raise their fur, curl their lips back, and hiss in a stereotypical manner, and so cats are a favorite "model system" for studying aggression. But what are the dependable signs of animal love in the lab? What is the difference between two animals that huddle together to keep warm and two animals that huddle because they are "friends"? Is there a difference?

  At the same time that the problem looms so unruly, the "biology of love" doesn't sound quite serious enough for many scientists. "What do you study?" "Love." "Oh. And they pay you to do that?" "Sometimes. If I grovel, obfuscate, and use diversionary tactics. If I write my grants cleverly and talk about understanding the health risks of social isolation, say, or autism. If I never talk about love."

  Yet through biology we can approach love and see parts of it that we may not see when we are acting as self-styled experts by fall
ing in love. Love has its themes. Love is the child of outrage, arriving most readily in the wake of crisis. What we lose in great distress the body and brain strive to replenish in love, and ripe love that feels fattening is fattening, literally speaking, for it is designed to conserve our calories as well as our sanity. Love may feel impossible, but it is laughably easy, and once it has begun it is fed by every sense, every nerve fiber, every cell, and by the brain, our big remembering brains. With the brain, our proud throne of reason, we humans have become the best and longest lovers this world has known.

  The circuitries of love and attachment are everywhere within us. They are as manifold as the reasons that we befriend and fall in love. Why do we bother with love? Let's count the categorical ways. We love, at bottom, because we must, for we are a sexually reproducing species. The reasons that sexual reproduction evolved in the first place are not entirely known. In theory, an asexual style of reproduction, an amoebalike splitting in twain, would be comparatively more efficient than sexual reproduction, the merging of sperm and egg. The study of the origins of sex is a vigorous discipline, with a plethora of proposed justifications and a dearth of proof for any one of them. Suffice it here to say that the regular shakeup and rearrangement of the chromosomes wrought by sexual reproduction must offer great advantages to the production of viable offspring, for the vast majority of earth's creatures have adopted sexual reproduction rather than asexual photocopying of self. Once the need for sex arose, so did the need for the rudiments of affection. Males and females needed the behavioral capacity to set aside any hostility that individuals might feel toward each other and instead take a chance on amity, at least long enough to exchange gametes.