Cat Bohannon’s book, a refreshing, revelatory account of how we came to be, brings to light newfound evidence to help eliminate biases perpetuated against women
Is there a male and a female brain? Why are women’s breasts the way they are? And if men have nipples, why can’t they breastfeed? Was it a man who created the first tool ever used by primates? Why are women not speaking as often in a professional setup? Isn’t it surprising that no human is “born with the ability to speak, but most are language ready”?
Spend a moment meditating on the volley of questions above. And note that raising and finding answers to them involves rummaging through the annals of history. Or to put it simply: each of them needs an origin story. Interestingly, any such story can reveal only so much depending on who gets to tell it.
And for aeons, only men have had this privilege to tell, and, as a result, to control the narrative to maintain the status quo — read: their dominance over other genders. Researcher and author Cat Bohannon’s stellar book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (Hutchinson Heinemann, Penguin Random House) stands as a welcome correction to this norm and the normative.
Interesting, deeply engrossing, and exhaustive in its appeal and the breadth of issues it focuses on by discussing “the evolution of women’s bodies and how that deep history shapes our lives” through an array of “defining features”, this pioneering account not only brings to light newfound evidence to help eliminate biases perpetuated against women, but it also offers a sensitive, LGBTQIA+ inclusive commentary parallelly.
Bodies as units of time
Longlisted for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, Eve begins with a fundamental question researchers seem to sidestep: Why are biological science and related studies “rested on the ‘male norm’? The author then asks whether “women’s bodies are just bodies in general”.
Furthermore, she problematises the progress we seem to have made by sharing this: “And of course, nearly all of the studies that produced these findings include only cisgender subjects — in the world of scientific research, there’s been very little attention to what happens in the bodies of people assigned one or another sex at birth who then go on to identify differently.”
Right from the introduction, the centralisation of the intent and the need for raising these questions pave the way towards the logical and revolutionary backtracking of how we came to be. Divided into nine chapters, each of them with a dedicated Eve for each defining feature such as milk, womb, perception, menopause, etc., the book seems to be emphasising time and again what the author notes in the introduction: “Bodies are basically units of time.”
Her belief in it is strengthened by the research findings she shares. For example, in the chapter titled Milk, discussing the Eve of nipples, she cautions blaming “our stressed-out mothers for all our social anxieties.” She writes, “Being social takes a lot of energy. If the milk you’re drinking — which as a baby is all you’re drinking — has fewer sugars in it, or if you’re able to nurse less often than you’d like, you have less energy to spare. … Spending that energy on a bunch of roughhousing and time- and energy-intensive socialising is unwise.” In that sense, female bodies have been fuelling life for millennia, isn’t it? So, shouldn’t it imply that their “bodies are the literal engineers of urban population”? Think.
Bohannon’s prose simplifies grander things. A style that serves her purpose immensely. Sample this, “What’s not normal, in other words, is giving birth to live young.” That’s just one sentence highlighting the immensity of the risk pregnant bodies are put through. It’s deeply troubling that anyone who identifies as a woman is expected to procreate. Then, another example is the following consideration: “It turns out the mammalian uterus isn’t a lush pillow — it’s a war zone. And ours may be one of the deadliest. Human women menstruate because it’s part of how we manage to survive our bloodsucking demon foetuses.”
A clarion call for understanding, and change
These are existential concerns. While they need all the urgency, they could do with some humour, too, for anything serious begets lubricating it with humour, and no one knows it better than Bohannon. Try this: “Cocks, in fact, do not have one. Human language often misrepresents reality,” she supplies this footnote for this sentence — Most male birds don’t even have a penis.
While reading this book is an experience in itself, in my view, ‘Perception chapter is a must-read for all. The myth-busting in this chapter backed by scientific arguments, along with data-based evidence — that masculine thing that somehow makes men moan, helps highlight this fact: We know so little about our bodies. It’s not for nothing that not only misogynistic but also poorly generalised questions like this get asked: Why can’t women run fast?
“Becoming upright was in some ways harder on Ardi [“the first known bipedal hominin”] and her granddaughters than it was on the males,” writes Bohannon. Then, cushioning it with a finding, she puts an end to the debate by sharing that female “runners typically log faster speeds in the longest ultramarathons.”
To borrow from the author herself, the crux of this book is as follows: “Maybe it comes down to the idea of women’s bodies in the world — what they’re supposed to do, what they aren’t, and how they serve as a counterpoint to the idea of Manhood.” Ideas have been currency for ages. Their purchase can turn things upside down — make untruth the truth. However, we need less of such ideas and more of what the witty, necessary, and uninhibited Eve offers that not only serve as clarion calls for understanding but also for change.
