Woman

by Natalie Angier

  We'll take help wherever we can get it, and there are tides in our favor that have nothing to do with feminism or the quest for parity. We have the cataract of the global market, with its demands that all hands be on deck and its call for an educated (at least technically educated) workforce. Moreover, the planetary distribution of infomerchandise may work modestly to women's advantage, because the image of the liberated Western woman in her pumps and smart skirt, toting a laptop en route to the airport, however fabricated and delusive the image may be, has a certain marketing appeal, speaks to the female thirst for freedom, and can be, may be, a source of subversion, a reminder that we are bipedal foragers, unstoppable nomads.

  Nonetheless, cultural evolution demands permanent revolution, which means never giving up, never coasting or falling prey to complacency, never saying, Okay, we don't want to push or offend and we don't want our canines to show. Virginia Valian cites the example of Monica Seles, the tennis player who in 1991 argued that men and women should compete for equal prize money in tournaments. "Two other female players responded publicly," Valian writes. "Steffi Graf was quoted as saying, 'We make enough, we don't need more,' and Mary Joe Fernandez reportedly said, 'I'm happy with what we have; I don't think we should be greedy.' A lack of entitlement thus interprets equality as greed." Women have to keep asking, that much is clear. We have to be on sentry duty, for if our attention lapses, wham, there's the local Taliban, kicking us to the ground and throwing a black chador over our heads. The Icelandic singer Björk recently complained about feminists. They really bugged her, she said. They whine about things not being equal and that men get all the breaks. She could understand that feeling for people of her mother's generation, or her grandmother's, but not now. Today the prison door is open, she insisted. All you have to do is walk out of it.

  Part of me was happy to hear her say that, to know that she sees the door as open and herself as a free and fiery primate. More of me thinks, Get thee to an optometrist, Lady Magoo, for thy pale eyes are boiled blind. Sure, the door may be open—for now—but it's kept open by the strength of a lot of blistered female fingers and female feet and the wedging in of a rounded female haunch or two. Björk is a successful avant-garde rocker and has little personal cause to doubt the splendor of the system; nevertheless, the world of rock and roll remains overwhelmingly male, and women musicians still are tarred with assessments like that of Juliana Hatfield, the slacker pop singer, who has spluttered publicly that "female guitarists suck."

  Women have done much by pushing and whining and getting habituated to sovereignty, but we are not there yet; we're still gripped with self-doubt, gynophobia, and cramps of spiritual autism. We are so hard on one another. We dismiss women for not being serious enough about their work. Chrissie Hynde, of the Pretenders, is a legend among female rockers for her rasping, crafty, lyrical style. But Chrissie Hynde, now in her forties, doesn't want to be an icon for the growling girlhood. "I never said I'm a feminist, and I don't have any answers," she told the critic Guy Garcia. "As long as we're getting paid and can vote, what's the problem?" She, for one, prefers playing with the boys. "I work with men," she said. "They're single-minded, straightforward, and they can rock. Most women can't."

  We're not dedicated. We're not quite up to the task. But the woman who wants to be up to the task, to flog away at work year after year even when she has young children, is subjected to another sort of animadversion, the guilt sling. She is warned of the damage she will do her baby by not affixing it to her bosom for the first three crucial years of brain development. She is told repeatedly that nothing beats parental care when it comes to maximizing her child's potential. All of biomedicine now weighs down on the side of full-time parenthood and the ineluctable demands of the baby's growing brain. Always it is assumed that the mother will be the primary brain sentry, by nature and personal predilection. Every magazine you flip through, there it is, the mommy dreck, the disquisition on the guilt that working mothers feel and how it persists despite decades of feminist change, to the point where if an employed mother doesn't feel guilty about working, she feels guilty about her lack of guilt. Some fathers feel the guilt, we are told, but not many of them, and not as severely. That's not their job, even now. They haven't added the guilt habit to their repertory. Why should they feel guilty? They're not supposed to feel guilty. During the 1997 trial of the British nanny accused of killing a nine-month-old boy in her charge, the mother of the boy, a physician, received a flurry of angry letters, mostly from women, placing the child's death on her shoulders for having gone back to work (a mere three days a week) rather than staying home with her children full-time. Needless to say, the boy's father, also a doctor, escaped public outrage for daring to be a dedicated professional.

  It's a sad business when women indict other women for their take on life, for their choice of reproductive and emotional strategy. It may be understandable, given the role of female-female competition in recent human history, but I argue that it is maladaptive for women to continue on this course of she said/she said, the yowling and mud wrestling. We need each other now. The next phase of the permanent revolution needs an infusion of Old World monkey sorority. We're not supposed to talk about women's rights anymore, for to do so is to commit the sin of "victimology," to act the weak whiner, the neurasthenic corseted Victorian lady. The charge of victimology, like that of political correctness, instantly squelches all effort at precise protest, neutering a complaint before it has been uttered, for complain is what victimologists do. But if you don't ask for a raise, you won't get one, and if you don't snarl about an injustice, it won't go away. If women are prejudged as women to be lesser this or that, if a female guitarist is assumed to "suck" before she has taken out her instrument and played a single note, if women are still blamed for being bad mothers because they work outside the home, and if women are told there is an evolutionary reason that they don't really want sex, or if they do they should hide it, then we are not done with our women's moil yet.

  Women care about their children, of course. Yet just as mate choice is contingent on what you bring to the bargain—the particulars of your needs, upbringing, temperament, immune system, metabolism, and so forth—so the ways in which women choose to invest in their children will differ from woman to woman. Mothering strategies are as diverse as mating strategies, and no one strategy is the one, the twenty-four-carat, the alpha and omega of maternity. Some mothers may feel that the best thing for their children is their attention, love, touch, comfort on command, and they will do everything in their power to be there for their children, getting by on less money, part-time jobs, piecework, patchwork. Some mothers may feel that their children need a show of strength, a facsimile of adult autonomy—grindstone evidence that women deserve their work, income, and authority and that you, daughter mine, will deserve yours as well in time. These mothers will not stop working, even if they can afford to. They want to work, and that appetite is part of their game plan, their customized investment in their children. But if a horrible accident befalls the child in day care, leading to the child's death or disability, how disgusting to blame the mother and only the mother for working; how reprehensible, when children die in their mothers' care all the time. They drown in bathtubs, they fall down stairs, they drink contaminated apple juice. Every mother learns this lesson, of life's porosity and her impotence against it. She can't shield her child against all hurt.

  Whatever mothers do, by choice, chance, or necessity, we mothers need help. We need emotional support, not the slam from one side, dunk from the other: You're a feckless worker! You're a narcissistic mother! Enough already. We're guilty. It's the X chromosome's fault—it has too much DNA on it. It's Eve's fault—when she wasn't busy stuffing her face with fruit and tubers, she was leaving Africa and bringing us here. It's Lilith's fault—she abandoned us to the merciless docility of Eve. It's our mothers' fault (goes without saying). It's our eggs, our cunning, our blood, our bustiers, our hip-to-waist ratio, our fat depots, our sa
lmony smell, our solar flair. We've confessed. Now where is our mammal indulgence, our feminine, heathen writ of absolution? Where is our vim and forgiveness, the Dallas Cowgirls for womankind?

  Mothers need practical help as well. They always have. It takes 13 million calories to raise a child, and these days nearly as many dollars. Businesses have been arthritically slow about helping parents. We beat our leaky breasts over child care. We grouse and grouse and get a few stale animal crackers tossed our way. After decades of feminist change, the slogan of the business world is still "Your babies? Your business." National child care must be an ongoing goal, a system like the public schools, available free to all. We can't afford it? Says which voting bloc? Women vary widely in their sexual and maternal strategies, and as Patricia Gowaty has pointed out, correctly, the feminists of the 1970s erred in their assumption that all women share the same goals; but if there's any objective that comes close to being of universal benefit to women, it's fine, free day care. Even women who don't have children will gain from universal day care, for anything that keeps women in the world, visible and unrelenting, that neutralizes the acidic effect of mother guilt and its corollary presumption that women are not up to the task of professional tenacity, buoys all women, raises all our madly paddling canoes.

  And then there are the men, the fathers. Every time I read an article about the guilt of working mothers and the comparative lack of said guilt among working fathers, I want to know, why don't they feel guilty? And why don't we talk about their feelings and their responsibilities more than we do? Why are paid paternity leave and the full-time homemaking father still the stuff of cultural sideshows? While it is true that in some segments of postindustrial society fathers now are more involved with the dailiness of child care than men have ever been, men still have not habituated themselves to babies as readily as women have to paychecks.

  In explaining the asymmetry of newly acquired burdens and male lassitude and exculpation, we lazily grope toward biology. Women are said to be naturally inclined to motherhood, to bonding with their babies, to nurturance, patience, and generosity. Real mothers know that mothering is not a reflexive behavior but an acquired art. "We learn, often through painful self-discipline and self-cauterization, those qualities which are supposed to be 'innate' in us: patience, self-sacrifice, the willingness to repeat endlessly the small, routine chores of socializing a human being," Adrienne Rich has written. We indoctrinate ourselves to motherhood, through nursing, through touch, through the willingness to sit and stroke and capitulate. We give our bodies the chance to wrap around the infant and devour it with all our senses, and to present it to our bodies as our immune cells present the antigenic mark of selfhood to each other and thus declare, I am of you, and I belong. And our bodies give us back a whole-body blast. "We are ... to our amazement, flooded with feelings both of love and violence intenser and fiercer than any we had ever known," Rich writes.

  The habit of loving and nurturing an infant is not restricted to women. It is a habit that women fall into out of habit, because they spend so much more time around infants than men do. But sex be damned. The body is threaded through and through with the cilia of affiliation, which can be tapped and adapted and taught to beat in unison, provided we give them the chance. Look at the male rat. A male rat does not normally care for newborn pups. Fatherly devotion is not in the standard contract. Yet he has the raw goods of affection. If you put a young male rat into an enclosure with a litter of newborns and give him a chance to grow accustomed to their smells and hear their squeaks, he will eventually start nuzzling them. He'll huddle over them and lick them. If one should stray from the nest, he'll retrieve it. He has fallen in love with a pile of squirming pink pencil erasers. An essential factor in the experiment: the mother rat must be removed from the scene, for if she were there, she would sooner kill the male than allow him near her young.

  Men can love babies madly, and the more they sit and smell and clutch their babies against them, the more sensorily embellished the love becomes. How often, though, does the average father sit and rock his baby against his naked breast? Not often enough, and not nearly as often as the average mother does. Mothers tend to monopolize their babies. Of necessity they must hold their infants to breastfeed, and so they get into the habit of holding, and they are reluctant to let go. Too often a father's contact with his baby is restricted to those times when the mother is tired and wants a break, and so it becomes a chore and a duty to him rather than a rite. He keeps his shirt on. He's buttoned up. The nerve endings of his flesh detect the baby's frequency only faintly. And the mother watches the father to make sure he is doing everything properly. She is the baby expert, after all, and he is forever callow, a babe in the woods. Women chortle about men's clumsiness in holding babies, their fumblings, their bafflement. The nursery is still the mother's domain. There, she is poobah. Yet if we want men to do their share and to shine at it, it's unfair to give them the handicap of our doubt, to practice a reverse form of discrimination: "We suckle; you suck." If women expect men to dive into the warm, rich waters of body love and to feel the tug of baby bondage, we must give over the infant again and again. Between feedings, between breasts, play touch football, baby as pigskin—pass it along.

  Not all men may want to throw themselves bodily into compleat parenthood, or spend their nights with their nose buried in a baby's fontanel, or take paternity leave if offered. But I'll bet that many more of them would than currently do if such behavior became possible, acceptable, and fashionable. Which it might, as the economy goosesteps onward and women must work harder than ever before to stay abreast of life, and as they negotiate for reciprocity and fairness. I don't buy the arguments that men are inevitably less invested in their children than women are, that because there is always a chance to do better reproductively, to conquer new wombs, their feet are always shod and halfway out the door. In this murderously competitive habitat of ours, this teeming global agora, men's reproductive success may well hinge on their capacity to do just the opposite, to pay attention to every offspring, to shower each child with every possible advantage. Men need women and children now, just as women and children are always thought to need their men.

  Human bonds are deep, as wild as minks, and for that, paradoxically, we have our brains to thank and rebuke. We love long and hard because we know too much. We know that we will die, and that awareness has shaped us profoundly. It has given us the world's religions. It has taken all our ancient hungers—for power, esteem, love, connection—and buffed them till they gleam like chrome, bouncing our reflections back at us. Stop for a moment, please, and talk. Stride away in full strength, but remember that time and space are curved and you will come back to talk again to me, your friend, your daughter, your mother, your love.

  I am a Utopian pessimist by nature, a mechanistic phantas-magorist. I believe in permanent revolution of the mind and will. In 1987 I sat over dinner with my grandmother, who was then in her late seventies, my mother, and my eighteen-year-old cousin, Julie. We talked about whether we would choose to be men if we could. Yes, we all said, even, to my surprise, my grandmother. "Men have more freedom," she said.

  Recently I reminded my mother of that conversation. We agreed that we no longer felt the same. We no longer wanted to be men. It isn't merely a function of getting older and more accepting of ourselves. My grandmother was older than either of us when she said, I would if I could. Nor is it because I think women have made so much progress in the past decade, or that the prison door has melted and the merry inmates are now in charge. Instead, for me, and I think for my mother, the change of heart is the result of revelation, the realization that our strength and our anima stem in good part from our womanness, and from thinking about what it means to be a woman, here, now, in this culture, and in our imagined future. Our tribe is the tribe of woman. It is our tribe to define, and we're still doing it, and we will never give up. We live in a state of permanent revolution. The frisson of it! We will not abandon the tribe
or the battle. We will not define the tribe as a default zone or a consolation prize. The wish to be a man is a capitulation to limits and strictures we never set for ourselves. It is lazy. It does not belong to us.

  I have a daughter now. She's still too young to know that she has any limits at all, that she is not queen of the Milky Way, and that someday she will die. She knows she's a girl but she doesn't yet care about it, or realize what it means. Maybe it should mean nothing. Maybe that's what I want for her: that she will not think about being a girl, or a woman, in any categorical way. That it will not interest her, for she is too consumed with a glamorous calling, like calculating comet paths, playing the harpsichord, or pandering to her generation's nostalgia for purple pedophilic dinosaurs and the Internet. Maybe she'll pull a Björk on me, rolling her eyes and miming a patted yawn whenever I mention the political trilobite called feminism.