Woman

by Natalie Angier

  Rounded too is the sound of love, the rising and falling voice with which we coo at babies and at a mate. Babies respond most strongly to a voice modulated in clear highs and lows. They must learn language. They must wrap their brains around language, and they learn through well-defined pitches and ups and downs and each word spoken clearly and spoken to them. If baby talk sounds warm, it is a transfer of another sort of warmth, for through baby talk a parent gives a baby mind food, gives the founder units of language, the surest source of human strength. As adults, we coopt the warmth of baby talk to win a lover's affections. We step ontogenically backward, offering through burbles, coos, swoops, and fey nicknames of our own invention.

  We know when we are in a groove, and it feels good, and it feels as though we can go on with it forever. A loved one sedates us when we are frazzled and elates us when we have lapsed into inertia. A well-bonded pair of old marrieds are synchronized watches. Their faces have become alike, because their facial muscles have taken to mimicking, unconsciously, the motions of the other. Their speech rhythms are similar. They walk at the same pace. When a husband or wife dies within a few days or weeks of his or her long-term spouse, we infer that the second person dies of grief or shock. But often there is no sign of shock or despair, for after all, the couple has lived long lives and known that death is there. Instead, one death may follow the other coincidentally. Over the years, the cells of the spouses had assumed a similar rhythm, were beating apace, and so ran out of molecular time in tandem.

  There are the stimuli of attachment that we know of, and those that slip in unsung and unknowable. Years and years after a woman has delivered a child, she continues to carry vestiges of that child in her body. I'm talking about tangible vestiges now, not memories. Stray cells from a growing fetus circulate through a woman's body during pregnancy, possibly as a way for the fetus to communicate with the mother's immune system and forestall its ejection from the body as the foreign object it is. The fetal-maternal cell dialogue was thought to be a short-lived one, lasting only as long as the pregnancy. Recently, though, scientists have found fetal cells surviving in the maternal bloodstream decades after the women have given birth to their children. The cells didn't die; they didn't get washed away. They persisted, and may have divided a few times in the interim. They're fetal cells, which means they've got a lot of life built into them. A mother, then, is forever a cellular chimera, a blend of the body she was born with and of all the bodies she has borne. Which may mean nothing, or it may mean that there is always something there to remind her, a few biochemical bars of a song capable of playing upon her neural systems of attachment, particularly if those attachments were nourished through a multiplicity of stimuli, of sensorial input—the hormonal pageantry of gestation, the odors of fetal urine, the great upheaval of delivery, and the sight and touch of the newborn baby.

  For all the reasons that I remain a staunch supporter of abortion rights, for all the reasons that a woman is entitled to her full sexuality regardless of the unreliability of birth control and of the human heart, here is another one. It is vicious to force a woman to bear a baby she doesn't want, to prod her vengefully through the compound priming of pregnancy and force her to be imprinted through every physiological contrivance at evolution's disposal with an infant she can't keep, an infant that will remain forever stuck in her blood, an antigen to the attachment response, try as she will to shed her sad past. The "adoption option" is fine if a young woman chooses it and is at peace with it. But option it must remain, for the body is a creature of habit, and the longer it has been exposed to the chemistry of bondage, the more prone it becomes to emotional flashbacks, to recurrent neuroendocrine nightmares, the sort of nightmares where you keep returning to your childhood neighborhood and you're not sure why, and you know you don't belong there anymore, yet still you return, step up to your old door, and ring the bell. Nobody answers. It's the wrong house. Your house is gone.

  All is fair in love, and love knows that, and love conquers all with anything it can get its tender talons into, at forty strokes per minute. There are multiple, interlacing neural systems of attachment, and the gut jumps in, and the heart plays too, through the graces of stress. But love is more than a gut feeling or a raw emotion. It has its cognitive side as well. Too often we ignore the thoughtfulness of love. We may even deride the intellect when we talk of love, accusing somebody of being too "cerebral" or "analytical" about love, as though cognition were the antithesis of emotion. It is not. Thought can strengthen love as readily as it can allow the passive-aggressive rationalist poseur to weasel out of love. A thought alone can arouse the entire sensorial panel of love. When a lactating mother is away from her baby and imagines nursing it, her chest grows warm and she may start secreting milk. Susan Love described a colleague of hers, a surgeon, who said that once she started thinking about her baby in the middle of performing an operation, and within moments breast milk had leaked through her clothes and onto her unconscious patient.

  Cort Pedersen has pointed out that we humans can maintain with our mind's eye the neuronal state of attachment, which other animals need their real eyes, noses, and ears to keep alive. We rarely can sever all components of an intimate bond, he says. We have photographs. We have friends who mention the loved one. We walk the same streets and eat in the same restaurants where once we strolled and dined and released cholecystokinin with the loved one. We have Sam playing that song, you must remember this. We have too many senses and systems eager to reenact the past, and we have too much memory. Again and again the pathways of old love are reignited. Our analytical minds feed and protect the circuits of attachment. The human capacity for thought and memory keeps love alive long after the lower brain, the Rattus brain, would have thrown love away. Eternal love is a myth, but we make our myths, and we love them to death.

  18. OF HOGGAMUS AND HOGWASH

  PUTTING EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY ON THE COUCH

  WE CAN LOVE, and there are many reasons to love, but whom do we love, and why do we love them? We understand the genetic logic behind loving our children and our parents, although there are limits to these loves. Conflict between parent and offspring is an abiding fact of life, as much as we wish it otherwise, as much as we think we can talk our way out of it. The conflict is built into the system. Children want more than their parents are willing to give, and they'll try to manipulate things to procure their share and then some; but parents usually have more than one child, and they may plan on having even more children down the road, so they resist devoting too much to any single child and having their resources and strength sucked dry. As children—real or inner—we privately nurse a little myth of the perfect mother, the all-giving, all-loving mother. Mothers know they can be no such thing, that they cannot and will not give their all for one. Mothers must keep some for themselves, for the others, and for the eggs they have yet to hatch.

  Mother-offspring conflict begins before birth, in a clandestine skirmish between the fetus, which tries to build a very big placenta and to absorb as many maternal calories as it can, and the mother, whose body responds by inhibiting the explosive growth of the placenta and protecting the mother from the precipitous depletion of her energy stores. The conflict continues throughout childhood. Babies cry, toddlers throw tantrums, children wheedle. And then, when the children reach puberty, the nature of the conflict shifts dramatically. The offspring want independence and a garden of their own; they might even hope that the parents soon will die and leave their resources to them. For their part, the parents may try to keep their grown children around a bit longer, enlisting them in the care of younger siblings and thereby enhancing the parents' personal reproductive success. Oh, it goes on. Children need love and nurturing to thrive, and parents are inclined to give it, are strung like fine violins to give it. But then the sweetness and filial light turns taut and sharp, snaps back to our old beetle-browed friend: aggression. Love and aggression are conjoined like Chang and Eng, the most famous sideshow act of all time
: where you find one, the other must be.

  Yet parent-offspring conflict pales in comparison to the war of love we all know best, the war we know so well that we've given it a morose, flaccid tag line, the Battle of the Sexes. To talk of the physiology of love and the evolution of love raises the question of what we want from love, what we look for when we search for love. We don't choose our children or our parents, and so the love we feel for them is leavened by a sense of fatalism; only a few New Agey types have the gall to blame a person for choosing his or her parents badly. But for our choice of mates and the expectations we hold for our mates, we must accept at least a modicum of responsibility. So what do we want from a mate, which for most women means a man, and what do men want from us? What is the taproot of romantic love? Why do we bother getting married? Is it nature? Is it habit? Are we the marrying kind—we meaning humans in general, and then, parsed a notch or two closer, women in particular? Certainly we see marriage everywhere around us. In most cultures today, and historically, people have gotten married through some sort of ritualized ceremony, a public declaration that this man and this woman are an item on the tribe's register. Still, commonness doesn't necessarily indicate innateness. Just because we do get married doesn't mean we really want to get married, down to our Darwinized stem cells. Marriage could be like the written word, a tool so useful that it has become almost universal. But really, does anybody enjoy writing? And none would argue that writing is natural, even as natural as speech.

  Let me confess right here and now that I don't know when, where, or how marriage was invented. I don't know if we're naturally inclined toward marriage or if it's like your mother's wedding gown—you'll need a brilliant tailor to make it fit you. Prairie voles are the marrying kind, or rather, the pair-bonding kind. They're born to affiliate, Noah-fashion, male by female. So are a lot of birds. They couple up and raise their fledglings as a nuclear family unit. Nonhuman primates are not the marrying kind. Chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, monkeys—almost none of them are inclined to pair bond. They are polygamous. Males mate with many females. Females mate with many males.

  Do you feel like a vole? A macaque? A canary, perhaps? Were you born to bond? Do you know? I don't. I surely don't. Sometimes I think that marriage suits us as well as or better than any alternative, and that children recognize the inherent Tightness in having a daddy and a mommy on hand to rear them. Sometimes the words of Samuel Johnson sound like Newton's Principia. "Sir," he said to a dinner companion, General Paoli, "it is so far from being natural for a man and a woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together."

  I don't know the depths of our desire to marry. I don't know why we choose the partners we do, or what women really want from men and what men want from women. What I do know is that nobody else knows either. I know that the deep psychology of human love and human bondage is as yet a great mystery, though there are a few glittering sequins scattered here and there that tempt some to think, Oh yes, we see the light.

  Love and marriage are considered womanly arts. They are ostensibly our property. We are said to want them. Men cadge, men scramble, men sweat, but finally men capitulate, sighing like stallions being led to the stable, while we, as women, need no persuasion. They bridle; we are brides! We are the marrying sex.

  This, of course, is the party line, and has been for many years. It has earned a little ditty—written by William James, no less—which R. V. Short quoted, coyly, at the conclusion of his recent book, The Differences Between the Sexes:

  Hoggamus, higgamus

  Men are polygamous

  Higgamus, hoggamus

  Women monogamous.

  And lately that idea has found new fodder and new fans, through the explosive growth of a field known as evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology professes to have discovered the fundamental modules of human nature, most notably the essential nature of man and of woman. Now, it makes sense to be curious about the evolutionary roots of human behavior. It's reasonable to attempt to understand our impulses and actions by applying Darwinian logic to the problem. We're animals. We're not above the rude little prods and jests of natural selection. But evolutionary psychology as it has been disseminated across mainstream consciousness is a cranky and despotic Cyclops, its single eye glaring through an overwhelmingly masculinist lens. I say masculinist rather than male because the view of male behavior promulgated by hardcore evolutionary psychologists is as narrow and inflexible as their view of womanhood is.

  Evolutionary psychology likes to think of itself as new and thrilling, but it is really just a subset of sociobiology, a discipline that is decades old. One of the patriarchs of sociobiology, E. O. Wilson, defined his field as "the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior," though by biological he really meant evolutionary, for he was less interested in the proximate end of things—the "how" behind a behavior—than he was in the ultimate cause, the why of it. Many sociobiologists long have applied their reasoning to the study of human behavior; evolutionary psychologists simply formalized the application through the use of the anthropic term psychology. Evolutionary psychologists have been enormously successful at promulgating their views, I give them credit for that. Writing in The New Yorker in 1997, the movie critic David Denby talked about how fashionable evolutionary psychology is and how it has replaced Freudianism as the preferred method at cocktail parties for ad hoc dissections of a lover's despicable conduct. In my view the evo-psycho rendering of human nature has been granted far more homage than it deserves, perhaps because so much of it endorses our old prejudices and conforms to our mental Dewey decimal system. I don't like jabbering in perpetuity about the differences between men and women and who is better at mentally rotating a geometric figure in three-dimensional space or why it might be that different parts of the brain light up on a magnetic resonance scan when men and women think about the same things. As I said in the beginning, I have chosen to write a fantasia of the female body and mind rather than hashing and thrashing over what we do and don't know about X versus Y. I'm not going to explain to men what they really want or how they should behave. If a fellow chooses to tell himself that his yen for the fetching young intern in his office and his concomitant disgruntlement with his aging wife's housekeeping lacunae make perfect Darwinian sense, who am I to argue with him? I'm only going to propose here—in good humor, honest—that the hardcore evolutionary psychologists have got a whole lot of us gals all wrong, and that we want more and deserve better than the cartoon Olive Oyl handed down for popular consumption.

  The cardinal premises of evolutionary psychology of interest to our discussion are as follows:

  1. Men are more promiscuous and less sexually reserved than women are.

  2. Women are inherently more interested in a stable relationship than men are.

  3. Women are naturally attracted to high-status men with resources.

  4. Men are naturally attracted to youth and beauty.

  5. Our core preferences were hammered out long, long ago, hundreds of thousands of years ago, in the legendary Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, or EEA, also known as the ancestral environment, also known as the Stone Age, and they have not changed appreciably since then, nor are they likely to change in the future.

  In sum: higgamus, hoggamus, Pygmalionus, Playboy magazine, eternitas. Amen.

  Hardcore evolutionary psychology types go to extremes to promote their theses, and to argue in favor of the yawning chasm that separates the innate desires of women and men. They declare ringing confirmation for their theories even in the face of feeble data. They suffer amusing internal contradictions of their data. They pick and choose, one from column A, one from column B, and good food, good meat, holy Darwin, let's eat!

  For example: Among the cardinal principles of the evo-psycho set is that men are innately
more promiscuous than women are, and that men are much more accepting of casual, even anonymous sex than women are. Men can't help their desires, they say, although they stress that men needn't act on such desires. Nevertheless, they are smitten by crude desires that women cannot fully understand. When a female friend of mine questioned Robert Wright, the author of The Moral Animal and one of the prime popularizers of evolutionary psychology, about some of his convictions in the male-female contrariety, he opened his eyes wide, stared at her, and said manfully, "You don't know what it's like." And she replied, "You don't know what it's like for us either." David Buss, of the University of Texas, another evolutionary psychologist of the unerring Nicene Creed, has said that asking a man not to lust after a pretty young woman is like telling a carnivore not to like meat.

  At the same time, the biobehaviorists recognize that the overwhelming majority of men and women get married, and they have much to say about the differences between innate mate preferences among men and women. Men look for the hallmarks of youth, like smooth skin, full lips, and perky breasts; they want a mate who has a long childbearing career ahead of her. Men also want women who are virginal and who seem as though they'll be faithful and not make cuckolds of them. The sexy vampy types are fine for a Saturday romp, but when it comes to choosing a marital partner, men want the earmarks of modesty and fidelity. They want a little Lassie.