Woman: An Intimate Geography (52 page)

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Authors: Natalie Angier

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BOOK: Woman: An Intimate Geography
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of those odious, inexplicably popular wheeled suitcases with the retractable handles. She will grow breathless more readily when she climbs a flight of stairs, for muscle facilitates oxygen transport throughout the body and eases the strain on the heart. Men too exchange muscle for fat as they age, but because they start with more muscle, the transformation is less extreme.
Women need muscle, as much muscle as they can muster. They need muscle to shield their light bones, and they need muscle to weather illness. If they have less muscle naturally than men do, they must work that much harder to compensate. Young women must exercise and seek great strength. The more a young woman exerts herself before the age of twenty-five, while her skeleton is as yet a work in progress, the more robust her bones will be at their peak, and the longer her slide, as she ages, back to the mother lagoon. Vigorous, load-bearing activities such as running, gymnastics, and weightlifting can all augment a young woman's bone mass. And though some authorities have expressed concern that excessive sportiness in girlhood can interrupt the menstrual cycle, blocking estrogen production and therefore raising the risk of osteoporosis, in fact a wealth of research has demonstrated that active girls have denser bones than their unathletic peers. Young women who build a foundation of muscle will find it easier throughout life to recall that muscle from mothballs. They may lapse into years of physical torpor, but when they finally shake themselves awake and give themselves a princessly kiss, they will regain their strength and meat in surprisingly short order.
Muscle is gracious. It does not hold grudges. Even an elderly woman who never learned to do cartwheels or bothered to join a fitness club in early adulthood can, in her oxidized age, become a mighty virago. Her muscles will be there for her. Miriam Nelson, a physiologist at Tufts University, has taken women in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, women who couldn't leave their apartments or rise from their chairs, women in nursing homes, and she has trained them twice a week with weights the way weightlifters in gyms train with weights not timidly, not holding back for fear of their frailty or fear that they might, heavens, "bulk up," but with intensity, using as high a weight as the women can manage. After only four months in the program, these women, these sedentary, often arthritic women with dowager's humps and humming-

 

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bird bones, grew astonishingly strong, were as though healed by a carnival preacher, tossing aside canes and walkers, getting down on their hands and knees to garden, canoeing, shoveling snow. The women did not become visibly larger. They gained about 10 percent in muscle mass respectable, but not terribly detectable. Of far greater importance, they doubled or trebled their strength. They became stronger than they had been in middle age. Their muscles hadn't been chastened by time. They hadn't learned their lesson. They hadn't learned to submit. Instead, the muscles repaid use with their stalwart Protestant ways and became productive again. The coordination between muscle and nerve improved. The muscles became infiltrated with nerve twigs and with capillaries bearing blood and oxygen. They were like telltale hearts, still thumping under the floorboards, not dead yet.
A woman's need of muscle is practical. She is a long-lived specimen, one of the longest this planet knows. Time will try to steal muscle and bone, but time in this case is not invincible. Muscle can be retrieved and restored, and when the muscle swells, the bone rejoices. It's very difficult to add to your bone density after age thirty, but by owning muscle you can keep the bone you have from departing, for muscle yanks on bone, and the mechanical action goads the bone to turn over, to be replenished, rather than to stagnate and gradually dissolve. Muscle and bone, our wild quadruped scaffolding, on which a fine, long dramedy of a life can be draped. Even a bit of fat can be accommodated on a sturdy frame. The dangers of body fat are exaggerated. Fat ipso facto is not a bad thing. The problem for most overweight people is that the extra fat makes movement harder and more unpleasant, and so they tend not to exercise, and muscles must be moved to remain engaged. But if a chubby woman remains active, she may prove surprisingly strong. Overweight people not only have more fat than the slender, they often have comparatively more muscle. When you gain weight because you're overeating, you put on three quarters of that weight as fat but one quarter as muscle. Fat people are so cowed into self-loathing that they don't realize the potential they carry. If they choose to exercise their submerged muscle on a regular basis, they'll be able to beat the sprat out of any thin ones who call them pigs.
As a not-young mother of a very young daughter, I feel a new obliga-

 

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tion to stay strong to stay strong so that I can stay alive and vigorous and force her to go camping and hiking with her aging parents, and to stay healthy and independent and postpone the time when she'll have to worry about nursing homes. I feel, in other words, pragmatic about strength. When I visited Miriam Nelson, she made it clear to me that women like us relatively small and slim women must never stop seeking strength. We are not naturally blessed. We don't have enough mass, enough animal matter, to rest on our laurels. So now I'm practical. In the past I cared less about the nuts and bolts of muscle and more about its meaning, the mind of muscle. I haven't abandoned my cheap and wistful philosophy of muscle, though. Women need all the reasons we can gather to build the strength that comes with comparative ease to men. Here's another: physical strength is explicit. It is crude and clear and possible. A woman does not need to get as strong as she thinks before she can be a hobbyist Fury. It doesn't take much to become imposing, a figure to be reckoned with. If a woman can do a set of, say, fifteen to twenty-five straight-bodied pushups or a few pullups, if she can lift a dumbbell that's heavy enough to be on the dumbbell rack rather than tossed on the floor like a toy, then people will say, Oh, you're so strong, and they will admire her and think her brave. And being strong in a blunt way, a muscleheaded way, is easier than being skilled at a sport. It is a democratic option, open to the klutzes and the latecomers, and women should seize the chance to become cheaply, frowzily strong, because the chance exists, and let's be honest, we don't have many. Being strong won't make you happy or fulfilled, but it's better to be sullen and strong than sullen and weak.
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

 

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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

 

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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,

 

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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

 

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