Potent quotables
One-size-fits-all doses of antidepressants are given to men and women, despite evidence that they may affect the sexes differently. Prescriptions for pain medications, too, are considered sex neutral, despite consistent proof that some may be less effective for women. Women are more likely to die of heart attacks, even though they’re less likely to have them—symptoms differ between the sexes, so women and their doctors alike fail to catch them in time. Anesthetics in surgery, treatments for Alzheimer’s, even public education curricula suffer from the ill-conceived notion that women’s bodies are just bodies in general—soft and fleshy, and missing a couple of significant nether bits, but otherwise, just the same as men’s.
Unless we’re specifically researching ovaries, uteri, estrogens, or breasts, the girls aren’t there. Think about the last time you heard about a scientific study—some article about a new window into obesity, or pain tolerance, or memory, or aging. More than likely that study didn’t include any female subjects. That’s as true for mice as it is for dogs, pigs, monkeys, and, all too often, humans. By the time a clinical trial for a new medication starts testing on human subjects, it might not have been tested on female animals at all.
When scientists study only the male norm, we’re getting less than half of a complicated picture; all too often, we don’t know what we’re missing by ignoring sex differences, because we’re not asking the question.
Most women’s bodies begin preparing for pregnancy in childhood, not because it’s a woman’s destiny to be a mother, but because human pregnancy sucks, and our bodies have evolved ways to help us survive it.
Once they are born, newborn animals face four essential dangers: desiccation, predation, starvation, and disease.
Here’s a good place to start: anywhere you see scientific assumptions that seem suspiciously cultural—tied, in other words, to recent human ideas about the way things are, rather than to numbers—you can dig a little deeper.
In general, I’d say mothers everywhere owe us far less than we like to think they do. And we owe them more.
That meant giving birth to larger babies wouldn’t kill us by ripping our tubing to shreds. It might kill us in other ways, but not that one. Still, there are always trade-offs when it comes to new body plans. In principle, the more recent a feature, the more likely it is to fail—as true of smartphones as body parts.
If it sounds as though I’m describing human motherhood as a kind of horror movie, you’re not entirely wrong. I love my children and wouldn’t trade them for the world. But I did risk my life to have them, as do all women who have children, some more obviously than others.
Americans are very, very, very uncomfortable with children knowing anything about sex. We also have some of the worst teen pregnancy and STD rates in the industrialized world. Yes, these two things are related to each other.
It’s terribly empowering to be a young woman facing down a group of young men actively judging your naked body and realize that you don’t care. Take that, nightmares.
The Self is something a brain makes. Change the brain in deep ways—and its ways of sensing and relating to the environment around it—and you must inevitably change the Self.
When you’re long adapted for one environment, you need a reason to risk life and limb to venture into an environment you’re not as well suited for.
Female bodies may be innately better than men’s when it comes to long-term, grueling tests of endurance… Women recover from exercise more quickly than men do… In the short term, men can do more “strong stuff” with their muscles than women, but it will hurt them more in the long run.
The entire American military has a problem with sexual abuse and assault, so knowing it’s evenly distributed despite some groups’ regular exposure to mixed-sex teams is disheartening. But at least they can’t blame it on the mere presence of a woman.
There’s one strict rule in bonobo society: nobody messes with the kids.
Whatever’s driving it, what does seem clear, just about any way you try to measure it, is that the very few functional differences in general intelligence between the sexes don’t add up to all that much.
There is a moment in every young girl’s life when she realizes that she’s being watched. That her body is a thing that’s seen, and that men are the ones who are doing the seeing.
“Stereotype threat” is real. Psychological research is pretty clear about this. If you tell a woman that girls are bad at math and then give her a math test, she’s not going to do as well as a woman who wasn’t exposed to that threat. This effect is astonishingly robust; it works at every age, in nearly every possible experimental scenario, and even when you’re not testing women. When you tell male subjects that men aren’t as good at interpreting emotion, they’ll be worse at a test asking them to discern what facial expressions mean. If you tell Black subjects that Black people aren’t good at engineering, they, too, will score lower in subject tests. In people who encounter threat every day, the HPA axis is overactive. They’re waking up with higher cortisol levels than people who aren’t stressed in this way. After a certain amount of time, chronic stress causes knock-on effects in many different parts of the body. But in the brain, especially, you’ll see that classic pattern: difficulty with memory access, generally slower processing, and higher distractibility. You can see similar patterns in people who suffer from chronic pain or depression, and in refugees who’ve recently had to flee a conflict zone. Too much cortisol every morning. Too many random bursts of epinephrine. Too much, and too frequent, vigilance. Then, if you experience enough low-grade stress over enough time, you’ll tend to develop emotional and perceptive detachment. Such numbness is essentially what happens when the brain itself adapts to be less responsive to its own signals: cortisol has a lesser effect, and to get a boost, those brains require more epinephrine.
So if women are more socially attuned than men, maybe it’s because they learned to be: a matter of the sheer number of hours that women and girls feel obliged to devote to such skills. A kind of cognitive muscle memory. Do a thing enough, and you get good at it. Maybe teenage girls are in tune with the kinds of social threats that surround the idea of girls being good or bad at math, good or bad at school, good or bad at being competitive or ambitious, good or bad at being desirable. One way to cope with that threat is to obfuscate. Play dumb. Grown women do it all the time. Do we really think teenage girls don’t? That they might choose to give up on their math homework sooner than boys because they believe they’re not supposed to be any good at it? That they might choose to spend more energy on subjects that win them social praise instead of alienation and ridicule? It’s not right to say that stereotype threat makes teenage girls psychologically fragile, that they lack “grit.” Sometimes, grit means faking your way through a minefield. So, in a world that punishes you for being smart, if you pretend to be less intelligent than you really are, does that mean you don’t have grit? Or does it mean your mind is quickly, quietly, even unconsciously, learning the rules for how to survive?
No other animal has human grammar. They don’t have language. They can’t cook up complex ideas and dump them into each other’s brains simply by swapping around the order of a few sounds. They can’t teach someone how to open up a man’s windpipe with a scalpel and insert a bit of tubing and then drill a hole in his skull to save his life. Speaking to someone isn’t ordinary at all.
To learn to speak, you need a human childhood. For language to evolve and be maintained in the way it has, ancient babies needed constant exposure to another language user while their brains were growing. For all of human prehistory, going back to the origins of language itself, human beings have learned how to speak primarily by interacting with their mothers.
With human grammar, we can make anything behave like an agent: a shoe can want; an eyelash can whisper. Likewise, we can turn anything into an action: we can table a discussion; we can shoulder the blame. We can make subtle combinations of ideas to get at something more nuanced. We can create what-if scenarios. We can treat the impossible as possible.
What the grandmothers are responsible for is teaching the pod in times of crisis. When food is scarce, the grandmothers are the ones who lead the way to places that are more likely to have good food. Once the pod arrives, the grandmothers are more likely to be the ones to demonstrate how to get that food, should there be particular challenges. For instance, creating bow waves to wash seals off ice floes and herding fish. What grandmothers do, in other words, is remember. Living a really long time as a social mammal is good for two things: reinforcing the social status of adult children, and ensuring the well-being of the group overall in a crisis by remembering how to survive in a world that changes over time.
That’s the real story about menopause. It’s not the night sweats. It’s not the dry vagina. It’s not really about menopause at all. It’s that we outlive the men we love. We outlive our brothers and husbands and lovers
But I am an Eve, as are you, just like every single living human today. We are the drivers of our species’ tomorrows. We are all writing the future of humanity through the choices we make, day to day, in these bodies we inhabit, in the children we have or help raise and protect, in the societies we push against and collaborate with and innovate on. We live, at all times, both in the present and in the long rivers of evolutionary time. So these lives we’re living are all the lives of an Eve. These hours. These small things. My memory of rain leaking through a car door. Wherever it was you woke up this morning. How you drew the first, conscious breaths of your day.
As an American, I can easily tell you how expensive poor health can be. But it’s not just a matter of whether one has a nationalized health-care plan: poor health is terribly expensive for communities over generations, not simply by passing on debt, but by crippling the income potential of any given family as it wrestles with the poor health of its members.
So that’s the first way sexism makes us less wise—across the span of human cultures, time and again, sexism puts us in danger of starving the very brains we build in the womb and early childhood. If you want a culture to produce smart children, then you have to take care of maternal and childhood nutrition.
Where women are undereducated, entire societies eventually go fallow. If history proves right, neglecting girls’ education is a sign of a civilization’s decline. You can neglect half the brains in your community for only so long.
Monsters don’t have a very good record of bolstering human progress. Monsters who are given real social power usually set us back, not just through death and destruction and widespread despair, not just by bringing out the worst in human nature, but because recovering from monsters after they die is really hard… Unless we work, together, collectively, to reinforce them, we’ll lose them to any given asteroid or asshole… The best thing we do is create institutions to support and protect those fragile extended bonds. And those institutions, like them or not, are precisely what allow us to overcome our less desirable behaviors: territoriality, sexism, competition for dominance. They are the way we push beyond the limitations of our bodies’ evolution. They are the means by which we become truly free.