Woman: An Intimate Geography (37 page)

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Authors: Natalie Angier

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BOOK: Woman: An Intimate Geography
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unimpeded. This power of distraction could explain why testosterone therapy works for some women with low libidos: it keeps the blood proteins busy and lets estrogen breaststroke straight to the brain.
But to view estrogen as the hormone of libido is to overstate it and underrate it. If estrogen is the messenger of the egg, we should expect the brain to pay attention, but not in any simple, linear fashion. Just as the mechanics of our genitals have been released from the hormonal chokehold, so have our motives and behaviors. We would not appreciate a hormonal signal that is a blind nymphomaniac, an egg groupie, telling us we're horny and must fornicate. We do not want to indulge an egg just because it is there. We live in the world, and we have constraints and desires of our own. What we might like, though, is a pair of well-appointed glasses, to read the fine print better. Estrogen's basic behavioral strategy is to hone the senses. It pinches us and says, Pay attention. A number of studies have suggested that a woman's vision and sense of smell are heightened at ovulation. So too do the senses shine at other times of high estrogenicity, such as right before menstruation, when your progesterone levels have dropped way down and left estrogen to act unopposed. During pregnancy, you can smell a dirty cat box from two flights away, and you can see dim stars and the pores on every face you meet. It must be emphasized that we don't
need
estrogen to pay attention or to smell a thing, but there it is, coursing from blood to brain and lending the brain a mild buzz, just as it does the bones and heart and breast and little gray basket.
If estrogen is to help at all, it should help us best when our minds must be wonderfully concentrated. Ovulation is a time of danger and of possibility. Estrogen is like hunting magic, the hallucinogenic drug that Amazonian Indians extract from the skin of the poison-dart frog to lend them the sensorial strength of heroes. The more we are of the world, the greater are our chances of meeting others who suit us, but the more incumbent it is on us to notice and assess those around us. If there is such a thing as feminine intuition, it may lie in the occasional gift of a really sweet estrogen high, the great emulsifier, bringing together disparate observations. But estrogen is also at the behest of history and current affairs. If you are in a sour, reclusive mood to begin with, the hump of estrogen at ovulation, or its unopposed premenstrual

 

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energy, may make you feel more rather than less reclusive. Estrogen is a promoter, not an initiator. We can understand this by considering how estrogen contributes to breast cancer. The hormone is not, strictly speaking, a carcinogen. It does not crack or destabilize the genetic material of breast cells, in the way radioactivity or toxins such as benzene can. Yet if an abnormal cell exists, estrogen may stoke and stimulate it, abetting its growth until a minor aberration that might otherwise regress or be cleaned up by the immune system survives and expands to malignant dimensions.
The strength of estrogen lies in its being context-dependent. It does not make us do anything, but it may make us notice certain things we might otherwise neglect. Estrogen may enhance sensory perception, giving us a slight and fluctuating advantage overlaid on the background of the self. If we are good, we may have our moments of being very, very good, and if we are mediocre, well, we can blame it on our hormones. They are there to be used.
As a lubricant for learning, estrogen is of greatest benefit in young women, who are sorting themselves out and gathering cues and experiences. Young women may reap advantages from intuition for lack of anything better to draw on as they assess the motives and character of another. But we can become too enamored of our intuitive prowess, our insight into others, and believe too unshakably in the correctness of our snap judgments. The older we get, the softer the peaks and valleys of our estrogen cycles are, and the less we need them and their psychotogglings. Experience, after all, is a trustworthier friend than intuition. How many times do you have to encounter a man who reminds you of your cold, aloof, angry, hypercritical, and infinitely alluring father before you can recognize the phenotype in your sleep and know enough to keep your eyes and nose and hormones far, far away?
Each of us is a privately held chemistry lab, and we can play with ourselves if we want. You may find your ovarian cycle too boring to dwell on or you may try to explore its offerings, and you may be disappointed or you may not. It took me many years to realize that my orgasms were very strong at midcycle. I always knew that they were good right before menstruation, but I thought that had to do with mechanics, the congesting of the pelvis with premenstrual fluid, and I didn't attend to the other side of the equation, because I didn't believe

 

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in it. When I started to investigate the link between rising estradiol and the quality of climax, I found a wonderful connection. The midway orgasms are deep and resounding, accentuated, maybe by estrogen, maybe by decoy testosterone, maybe by autohypnosis. I could be experiencing a placebo aphrodisiac. It doesn't matter. As a chemist, I'm an amateur, and I can't do a controlled experiment with myself. Nevertheless, on matters that count I'm a quick study, and I've learned to find my way home to ecstasy whatever the moon, month, menses, may be doing.
We each of us have but one chemistry set and brain to explore, and the effects of estrogen will vary from head to head. Yet if there is a principle to be drawn from the general recognition that hormones can stimulate and emulsify the brain and sensitize it to experience and input, it is this: puberty counts. Under the influence of steroid hormones, the brain in early adolescence is a brain expanding, a Japanese flower dropped in water. It is also vulnerable to the deposition of dreck and pain, which can take a lifetime to dump back out again. The plasticity of the pubertal mind is grievously underestimated. We've obsessed over the brain of early childhood and the brain of the fetus, and though those brains matter deeply to the development of all-round intelligence, character, and skill, the adolescent brain counts in another way. As the brain stumbles toward maturity, and as it is buffeted by the output of the adrenal glands at age ten and of the gonads a year or two later, it seeks to define itself sexually and socially. The brain of a prepubertal girl is primed to absorb the definitions of womanness, of what counts and what doesn't, of what power is and how she can get it or how she will never get it. We've all heard about the crisis of self-confidence that supposedly strikes girls as they leave childhood and climb the Bunker Hill of junior high, but what has been less recognized is the correspondence between this period of frailty, this tendency for the personality to mutate beyond recognition, and the hormonal squall in the head. The pubertal brain is so aware of the world that it throbs, it aches, it wants to find the paths to calm it down and make sense of the world. It is an exposed brain, as tender as a molted crab, and it can be seared deeply. Who can forget adolescence? And who has ever recovered from it?
At the same time that hormones challenge the pubertal brain, they change the body. A girl's high estrogen content helps in the deposition

 

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of body fat on the breasts, hips, thighs, and buttocks, subcutaneously, everywhere. Because of estrogen and auxiliary hormones, women have more body fat than men. The body of the average woman is 27 percent fat, that of the average man 15 percent fat. The leanest elite female athletes may get their body fat down to 11 or 12 percent, but that is nearly double the percentage of body fat found on the elite male athlete, who is as spare as a pronghorn antelope. We can look at the deposition of body fat that comes with womanhood and say it's natural for girls to fatten up when they mature, but what
natural
means is subject to cultural definition, and our culture still hasn't figured out how to handle fat. On the one hand, we're getting fatter by the year, we westerners generally and North Americans particularly, and why should we expect otherwise? We are stapled to our desks; food is never far from our hands and mouths, and that food tends to be starchy and fatty and overrich; and we get exercise only if we exert willpower, not because sustained body movement is an integrated feature of work, social life, or travel. On the other hand, we are intolerant of fatness, we are repulsed by it, and we see it as a sign of weak character and sloth. Contradictory messages assail us from all sides: we must work all the time, the world is a competitive place, and technology requires that our work be sedentary, cerebral, but we must not get too fat, because fat is unhealthy and looks self-indulgent. So we must exercise and control our bodies, because our natural lives won't do it for us.
Girls, poor girls, are in the thick of our intolerance and vacillation. Girls put on body fat as they pass into adulthood. They put on fat more easily than boys do, thank you very much, Lady Estradiol. And then they are subject to the creed of total control, the idea that we can subdue and discipline our bodies if we work very very hard at it. The message of self-control is amplified by the pubescent brain, which is flailing about for the tools to control and soothe itself and to find what works, how to gather personal and sexual power. Dieting becomes a proxy for power, not simply because girls are exposed through the media to a smothering assemblage of slender, beautiful models, but because adolescent girls today are laying down a bit of fat in an era when fat is creeping up everywhere and is everywhere despised. How is a girl to know that her first blush of fatness will ever stop, when we're tearing our hair out over

 

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how the national fat index keeps on rising and we must wrestle it to the ground right
now
?
There are other, obvious reasons that a girl's brain might decide that a fixation on appearance is the swiftest route to power. There are too many of these
Beauty 'n' You, Beast
magazines around, far more than when I was a prepubescent girl circa 1970. (There were too many of them back then.) Supermarkets now offer no-candy checkout aisles for parents who don't want their children screaming for Mars bars as they wait in line. Where are the no-women's-magazine aides? Where are the aisles to escape from the fascism of the Face? Any sane and observant girl is bound to conclude that her looks matter and that she can control her face as she controls her body, through makeup and the proper skin care regimen and parsing her facial features and staying on guard and paying attention and thinking about it, really thinking about it. No wonder a girl loses confidence. If she is smart, she knows that it is foolish to obsess over her appearance. It is depressing and disappointing; for this she learned to read, speak passable Spanish, and do calculus? But if she is smart, she has observed the ubiquitous Face and knows of its staggering power and wants that power. A girl wants to learn the possible powers. By all indications, a controlled body and a beautiful face practically guarantee a powerful womanhood.
I'm not saying anything new here, but I argue that people should see adolescence as an opportunity, a fresh coat of paint on the clapboards of the brain. Girls learn from women: fake women, amalgamated women, real women. The Face is inescapable, but it can be raspberried, sabotaged, emotionally exfoliated. Repetition helps. Reassuring a girl that she is great and strong and gorgeous helps. The exhilarating, indoctrinating rah-rah spirit of the new girl-power movement helps. Girls helping each other helps, because girls take cues from other girls as well as from women. Ritual helps, and anti-ritual helps. We can denude totemic objects and reinfuse them with arbitrary mania. Girls can use lipstick to draw scarification patterns on each other's backs or faces, or a line of supernumerary nipples from armpit to pelvis. Build a hammock with brassieres and fill it with doughnuts and Diet Coke. Combine the covers of women's magazines with cut-out parts from nature magazines to make human-animal chimerical masks: Ellephant

 

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MacPherson, Naomi Camel. Glue rubber insects and Monopoly hotels onto the top of a bathroom scale. Girls can imagine futures for each other, with outrageous careers and a string of extraordinary lovers, because it is easier to be generous to another than to yourself, but imagining greatness for a friend makes it thinkable for yourself. Sports help. Karate helps. Sticking by your girlfriends helps. Writing atonal songs with meaningless lyrics helps more than you might think. Learn to play the drums. The world needs more girl drummers. The world needs your wild, pounding, dreaming heart.

 

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