Woman: An Intimate Geography (54 page)

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Authors: Natalie Angier

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BOOK: Woman: An Intimate Geography
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millions of insect species, but they make up 80 percent of the insect biomass.
Among mammals too the gregarians rule. Most feline species are solitary, with two exceptions: the lion, which lives in highly social prides, and the domesticated cat, which has focused its social exertions on its human keepers. Lions and housecats are thriving, while many of the other cat species are at risk of extinction. Elephants are elaborately social, while other pachyderms such as the rhinoceros and the hippopotamus are not. It may be no coincidence that elephants lately have managed to recover from human depredations and the lust for ivory, and in some parts of Africa their numbers are booming, while the rhinoceros, whose horn is among the most coveted body parts on the international black market, is unlikely to survive as a free-ranging species into the next century.
Sociality alone doesn't guarantee ecological dominance. African wild dogs, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas are all social, and none is faring particularly well as a free-ranging species. Interestingly, though, the greatest threats to these social mammals come from other social mammals. Wild dogs, for example, have difficulty competing on the savannah against lions and spotted hyenas, themselves tribally minded carnivores. Chimpanzees and gorillas are up against us, their avaricious cousins, and even Nim Chimpsky, the language-trained ape, can't talk the talk that we can, the talk of everlasting love and the divine rights of man.
We humans also love because we think too much. We need to have our thoughts periodically shaken up and rearranged, like chromosomes, or like the immune molecules that fight disease. Allison Jolly, a primatologist, has compared the benefits of intelligence to the benefits of sexual reproduction. Both are systems for transferring information between individuals. Both allow information from different sources to be combined and used by one individual. If sex evolved so that your children are not condemned to be just like you, she said, then intelligence means that you are not condemned to remain just like yourself.
The greater the need for communication and for the transfer of intellectual gametes between individuals, the greater the need for affiliative gestures, behaviors, sensations. You can force a person with fist or sword to give you sex or food, but the more the currency of value is

 

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intelligence and ideas, the more we need to assuage and engage and befriend.
We love for posterity and protection, to preserve the self and to set the self aside. We love for the sake of fending off boredom and mental calcification. We have reasons to love, but what is the means, the biomedium of the art? It turns out that to understand love we must think again about aggression, for the pathways of love and aggression are linked, neurologically, hormonally, experientially. Sometimes the link is easy to see, for love can feel aggressive to the point of violence. We commit our most heinous acts of aggression in the name of love. The love of God drives crusades and jihads; the love of tribe drives genocide. When we are madly in love, we
are
mad. We are sleepless, anxious, panicky. At the thought of the loved one, our heart literally aches and our knees literally weaken. When we see the person, our pupils dilate, our palms sweat, our aching heart pounds. It's as though we were about to give a speech to an audience of thousands. The state of romantic passion is so overwhelming that we can be infatuated with only one person at a time.
What is going on here? Two things. A thousand things. In passionate love, the body's stress response, its fight-or-flight axis, is aroused, to heighten animation and possibility. The adrenal glands contract and flood the blood with adrenaline and cortisol, which prompt the heart to pound, eyes to widen, gut to wrench, sweat to leak. But there is more than anxiety and fidgetiness. Romantic passion is euphoric and obsessive too. On that analogy, Helen Fisher and others propose that romantic love taps into the same pleasure circuits of the brain through which such recreational drugs as cocaine and amphetamines ply their high. If you take cocaine, the concentration of stimulative neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain rises, making you feel manic, hyperalert, sleepless, anorexic, expansive. These are also symptoms of passionate love. In the throes of romance, we want to take flight from the loved one, to the loved one. We want to fight, with the lover for holding back, with ourselves for craving more. And we want to embrace the world for being uncommonly beautiful, and for giving us the flawless creature with lips like crimson threads and neck like the tower of David.
Needless to say, the brain's dopaminergic and norepinephrinergic

 

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circuits predate the use of speed and cocaine and certainly did not evolve to give us an appreciation for psychoactive drugs. Instead, the circuits of pleasure arose to reinforce behaviors and activities of possible use to the individual. If we assume that we are attracted to a particular person for good reason that our instincts detect something worthwhile about the person, some reason to want to mate and spend time with the person then a neural system designed to amplify our initial attraction, not to let us off the hook, might prove handy, for we are inclined toward laziness and sometimes need a kick in the pants. So romantic love could be the original addiction, and dopamine and norepinephrine and related catecholamines could be the neural stage on which Everywoman acts the part of Guinevere, Juliet, or Hildegarde von Bingen, who loved her God ecstatically and girlishly.
We love the heady swirl of romantic love. We also love the taste of our aggressions, often more than we care to admit. Yet enough is enough. As the Buddha said, life is pain, and this pain is caused by desire the desire to seize and devour the beloved as you might seize and devour food. So in love we seek not just passion but a balm for passion, a cure for our aggression and its sidekicks, anxiety and fear. We seek to feel soothed, safe, and happy. We want, in love, our mothers, our idealized mothers, our soulful other halves, our children, our haven. We want a love of affiliation, or pair bonding, or, as many of us might call it,
true
love, as opposed to infatuation, dalliance, obsession. We even expect it. The extremities of passionate romantic love must be resolved, and dissolved, with true love, or we feel out of joint, cheated, surly. Who has not seen multiple productions of
Romeo and Juliet
without secretly, guiltily, wishing that just once Juliet would wake up in time to stop her lover from drinking the poison? Poor Charles Dickens was forced by public outcry to write a second ending to
Great Expectations
. His original ending had Pip and Estella meeting after a long hiatus and then going their separate ways, Pip glad to have seen in Estella's face and bearing the signs that "suffering . . . had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be." The crowd-pleaser rewrite kept the pair together, walking hand in hand, the "tranquil light" of evening showing "no shadow of another parting" before them. William Dean Howells, editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
, tried to negotiate a bow to public sentiment while serializing Henry James's novel
The American
. Howells

 

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urged James to allow the American hero and the French heroine to be united in the final chapter. James refused, and the heroine stayed in her convent. "I am a realist," he replied to Howells. "They would have been an impossible couple." James wrote twenty novels, twenty works of unsurpassed genius, but not one of them ends with a happy, anodized pair bond. For him, all couples were impossible, and he himself lived alone. If you spend too much time reading Henry James, you will get sullen and tetchy, a state of literary angst best relieved by rereading Jane Austen, the mistress of consummation.
We know that we expect a happy ending to follow from a story of tribulation and upheaval, and that we crave consummation, the reciprocation of our love. What's interesting is that arousal, stress, and anxiety may be not merely antecedent to but instrumental in the creation of deep love and attachment. The physiology of stress appears to set the stage and prep the circuitry for a new set of cues: of openness, receptivity, and love. It tenderizes the brain. Many mammals that pair up or form fast friendships are animals with an extremely vigorous stress response axis. Their adrenal glands readily release stress hormones such as cortisol and corticosterone. The animals fidget a lot, and they fall in love. New World monkeys like cotton-top tamarins and marmosets are rich in stress hormones and rich in social affections. Prairie voles, a favored species for the study of attachment, are ridiculously pair bonded. If they were humans you wouldn't want to invite them to your party, because they'd bore you with their inseparability. Prairie voles mistakenly called field mice, although they're not mice have five to ten times the level of stress hormones of montane voles, which are the same size but are nonmonogamous, loveless, and solitary. Guinea pigs release rivers of adrenal hormones when under stress, and they too develop close attachments to each other. In humans, stress can breed unbreakable, uncanny bonds between soldiers in a foxhole; between kidnapper and kidnapped, as we see in the so-called Stockholm syndrome; between an abusive man and his doggedly loyal wife.
That aggression and stress can set the neurophysiological stage for attachment makes sense. Aggression drives an animal outward and toward another. Acts preceding the need for a bond between individuals are rife with stress. For creatures that couple up to rear their young, such as prairie voles, zebra finches, or cichlid fish, the act that cements

 

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the bond between male and female is sex, and having sex, however consensual, is an act of aggression, anxiety, foolhardiness, and courage.
For mothers that will be expected to suckle and care for their young, the antecedent to the arrival of dependent newborns that is, giving birth is a feat of almost cataclysmic stress. This is true for mammals generally (think of the wretched hyena, giving birth through her clitoris!), yet the role of birth as crucible for bonding is nowhere better exemplified than it is among us. We extend the extreme agitation of parturition back in time. Even before her first uterine contraction, a woman who is approaching delivery is overcome by foreboding, panic, and a sense of vulnerability. She craves the support and companionship of others. The thought of giving birth alone terrifies her. In that sense, woman is matchless in her taxonomic class. When other female mammals are about to give birth, they seek solitude. They find a dark quiet spot away from troop or herd, and grunt and push alone.
Only among humans is birth almost universally a shared enterprise, the labor of a woman, her kin usually females and a midwife or two. For every culture documented, according to Wenda Trevathan, an anthropologist at New Mexico State University, women in labor routinely seek assistance or companionship rather than isolation. We have an image of the peasant woman who squats in the field, plops out an infant, straps it to her breast, and keeps working, but the image is a piece of apocrypha, or a rarity that's been inflated by rumor and repetition into the primitivist norm. Literally dropping a baby in the field is like giving birth in a cab or on the subway. It happens, but it is rare, and it is unintentional. What women intend to do when giving birth is to be attended to.
Midwifery, Trevathan proposes, is the oldest medical profession, dating back perhaps three to four million years, when we began walking upright. Our upright posture changed the mechanics of delivery, of the baby's odyssey down the infinite six inches of the birth canal. Because our pelvis had to be remodeled to accommodate bipedalism, and because a baby's head is unusually big and its shoulders unusually wide in proportion to its body, birth is comparatively painful and prolonged; and as the newborn starts to emerge from the vagina, it faces backward rather than toward the mother's front, as other primate newborns do. A chimpanzee mother can help pull her emerging young out and up

 

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toward her. If the umbilical cord is wrapped around the baby's neck, as cords often are, a chimpanzee mother can unwrap it herself. She can wipe the mucus from the baby's mouth and prevent it from aspirating the plasm of the uterus, the vestiges of its aqueous life.
Not so a human mother. The baby faces backward, and if the mother were to try pulling it forth with her own hands, she'd risk damage to its spine and neck. She can't negotiate the untwirling of the umbilicus if the cord is wrapped around the baby's neck. She can't clean its face and allow it to gasp its first breath. She needs help. She needs help so badly that she begins to panic shortly before the birth. She starts to anticipate pain and difficulty, and she feels lost and vulnerable, but the anxiety is not pathological, it is not the byproduct of the hormonal maelstrom of late-stage gestation, as some have said. It is rational anxiety, and as human as our opposable thumbs, our depilated breasts, and our Lamaze classes. The anxiety leads a female to pursue an audience for the birth rather than seclusion. Like the deep anxiety of romantic love, the anxiety of a woman in labor is tinged with fear, which spurs the autonomic urge to flee, but
toward
the other rather than away. The urges are inexorable and aggressive, which means they are rowdy. As a person in love can lash out at the loved one, a woman giving birth is a famous Wicked Bitch of the Nest, foaming and snapping at her beleaguered support staff.
When I was giving birth, I was surrounded by a loving and exhortative choir: my husband, my mother, two midwives, and a nurse. They urged me on and told me when to push. With each push they swore I was doing beautifully, I was so strong and so close, really, it wouldn't be long now, I was so close. And as I pushed, for an hour and fifty minutes, each minute a dog year of life, I looked out at my choir and I felt like Rosemary surrounded by Satan worshippers, and I thought, You are all liars, you are ridiculous, you are all full of shit, will you shut up please and leave me alone; but if they had left me alone, I would have gone into shock, unable to push or to breathe, reptilian to the core. After the birth, I was in love with all my tormentors my daughter and husband, yes, yes, and also the women who were there, chanting the truth, absorbing my despair, and unwrapping the umbilical cord coiled around my baby's neck. O wondrous women! "I have compared thee, O love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh's chariots."

 

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