Woman: An Intimate Geography (51 page)

Read Woman: An Intimate Geography Online

Authors: Natalie Angier

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scendence. Your muscles can be sanctimonious, it's true, adhering to a materialist, puritanical, goal-oriented mentality, but at least they are reliable. You can spend every day on a therapist's couch and still wake up to your old frail spirit, but if you work out every day your muscles will grow strong.
Admittedly, the benefits of exercise can be, and are, oversold. People attribute vast magical powers to exercise, claiming that it will make you happy and optimistic and focused. Don't believe them. If you are a habitually unhappy person, exercise will not make you happy. You may feel a temporary sense of emotional expansiveness at the beginning of a new exercise regimen, as the improvement in blood flow transports comparatively more oxygen to your tissues and as you pat yourself on the back for your brave undertaking. But once your body grows accustomed to the more active pace and the gung-ho high of the novitiate dissipates, you will return to your biochemical and psychic baseline to the problem, as D. H. Lawrence put it, of being yourself. We have heard that exercise can help cure depression, but most clinical studies have found no such therapeutic effect.
People also claim that exercise is the closest thing we have to an elixir of youth, and that if we could put it in a pill we'd all be taking it. They are right for many parts of the body, but for the face, your chronograph to the world, exercise will do nothing. The muscles of your face are not attached to the skull in as many spots as the other muscles are to the skeleton. The facial muscles have been liberated from the constraints of bone, the better to allow us to speak and grimace and smile and feign surprise or interest. But the downside to that freedom of expression is that we cannot lift up the facial muscles through strength training; there is nowhere to lift them to. It is too bad, really. No matter how much discipline and tenacity we may muster, the aesthetic benefits of exercise stop at the jaw.
If we don't ask of strength that it solve all our problems, though, we can start to make real use of it. We women need our muscles at least as much as men need theirs, and we should feel entitled to them. Yes, men are naturally more muscular, a result of their higher levels of testosterone. The hormone is anabolic it builds muscle and so having more of it allows for comparatively greater muscle bulk. Yet testosterone is not nearly as effective at enhancing strength as its reputation would

 

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suggest, and women should not lament their relatively low concentration of the hormone, nor think it means that they're not "supposed" to be strong. Ignoring official censure, athletes have long been injecting synthetic androgens on the conviction that steroids make them stronger and more muscular. In 1996, researchers finally substantiated the locker-room wisdom through a clinical trial and showed that superhigh doses of testosterone did indeed increase muscle size and strength in normal, healthy young men. The results were not brilliant, though, and even the men whose blood was practically gelatinous with testosterone five times the normal concentration ended up no stronger, after ten weeks of steady exercise, than a lot of the men in the control group, who diligently worked out drug-free.
The results should not surprise us. After all, men's indigenous testosterone levels are ten times higher than women's, but men certainly are not ten times bigger and stronger than we. In fact, the size discrepancy between men and women our so-called sexual dimorphism is modest compared to that seen among males and females of many other species. The average man is only about 10 percent taller and 20 percent heavier than the average woman, while among orangutans and gorillas males are at least twice the size of females. Normally the sexual dimorphism of a particular species is attributed to evolutionary pressure on the males to grow large, the better to compete with other males for access to mates. As a rule, the more sexually dimorphic the species, the more polygamous it is, the theory being that the greater a male's opportunity to monopolize multiple females, the stiffer the competition among males and the more pronounced the pressure to be battle-ready. By contrast, among the more monogamous species males and females tend to be fairly similar in size and accouterments, for why should a male be outfitted for warfare when he is likely to find a mate and settle down and more or less mind his own business? Thus, a number of scientists have viewed the weak dimorphism in humans as evidence that we are a halfway, sexually opportunistic creature, semi-promiscuous, semi-monogamous, prone to pairing up and prone to philandering fission, fusion, mass confusion. All of which may or may not be true; but the fact that men are not 400-pound gorillas doesn't on its own indicate a muting of competitiveness among males. The truth is that once humans started fashioning weapons, sheer brute strength became

 

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less important than inventiveness, and the arms race in body parts very likely gave way to the arms race in engineering skills. A good spear defeats a burly chest every time.
More to the point for our discussion, women and men may be closer in size than the males and females of some other great apes not because men have been freed of the selective pressure toward enlarged body size but because women have been under some pressure to become fairly large themselves. Assuming that women have been selected for enhanced longevity a long life after menopause it helps to have a respectable body mass to persist through the decades. Large animals generally live longer than small animals. Many factors besides lifespan influence the evolution of a female's body size, including habitat, method of locomotion, diet, and the demands of pregnancy and lactation, some factors serving to limit body size, others to augment it. But it is possible that in the triangulating, negotiating process of adaptive change, women's physiology has seen a modest thrust toward maximizing body size while still remaining within the developmental constraints of reproductive demands. After all, women are the second-largest female primates on the planet, bested only by female gorillas, who weigh an average of 185 pounds, compared to our nonobese norm of 125 to 130 pounds. Women are bigger than female orangutans, who weigh less than 100 pounds, and considerably bigger than female chimpanzees or bonobos. By comparison, men, with their standard weight of 160 pounds, are much smaller than male gorillas, and smaller too than male orangutans, who average 200 pounds.
I'm not saying this simply to have fun with numbers (although I am having fun with numbers, and as a fairly small woman it's heartening to think of myself as an impressively large female primate). What I am doing is offering grist for the argument that women need muscle mass more than men do, and that while nature has given us a nudge in a more monumental direction, we must take the hint and make the most of our long-lived vessel. We need muscle for practical reasons, and we need it for the mind's I, the uncertain self, and in both cases we need it now more than ever. We may not have large quantities of testosterone, and building muscle and strength does not come as easily to us as it does to men. But we have an extraordinary capacity for strength, the more impressive given our comparatively low levels of testosterone, as

 

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women throughout the world and history have always shown us. Women are workhorses in most of the developing world. !Kung women carry loads of a hundred pounds on their heads or backs for miles and miles. If the world's women went on strike, the world of work would effectively stop, and you cannot say that with certainty for the enterprises of men. For the vast majority of women, the injunction to be strong would ring silly. They are strong of necessity, by sweat and callus, and if they combined their strong ways with a better diet, clean water, and good medical care, they might prove a race of Jeanne Calments, the longest-lived person the earth has yet seen.
In the West, however, women have experienced a kind of contrapuntalism, a clashing of lifelines. Longevity has increased while the need for physical strength has declined. We are living longer. We are women, after all, and how sturdy our systems are. At the same time, we are demyosinated, with ever less seduction of the muscle tissue, which yearns to be wooed. The more we persist, the more we need muscle. But our world gives us little opportunity to obtain it naturally, and so we must seek it through artifice, discipline, and homily. We must give ourselves reasons to be powerful, and the more reasons we conjure, the better. You don't want to look muscular? You just want to look toned? But you're not a Gregorian chant; you're a century-in-waiting. Pray to Artemis, goddess of the hunt, for her huntswoman's quadriceps and her archer's orbed arms. You'll be happy to have them when gravity, ruthless gravity, starts fingering your merchandise and toying with your heart.
To understand a woman's profound need of muscle, it helps to consider the constituents of a nonexistent yet utilitarian couple, the Reference Woman and the Reference Man. This couple is a medical and political construct, a post-Hiroshima Atom and Eve. In the 1950s, under the aegis of the Atomic Energy Commission, scientists set out to determine the potential impact of nuclear radiation on the human body. They wanted to know how much alpha, beta, and gamma radiation the body could tolerate, and because different tissues react divergently to radiation, they had to come up with estimates of what substrates the average man and average woman were made. In the portraits that emerged, the Reference Hominids are both twenty-five years old. This is the age at which the body's various organs are thought to be at their peak size and performance and its metabolic set point is well estab-

 

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lished. The weight that you are at age twenty-five is the weight at which your body is likely to feel most at home. It is the weight that your metabolism strives to attain, adjusting itself up or down if you gain or drop a few pounds, which is why dieters have such a vicious time of maintenance. The body is no rabble-rouser. It loves the status quo.
But Reference People never diet. Our Standard Woman weighs 132 pounds, the Standard Man 154. She is 27 percent fat, 63 percent lean body mass. He is 16 percent fat, 84 percent lean. When we think of lean we think muscle, but lean includes everything that is not fat muscle, bones, organs, water. In the Atomic Woman, about half of the lean mass, or 34 percent of her body weight, is thought to be muscle tissue, which means that she is almost as fat as she is muscled. Fat is not a bad thing in itself. Adipose tissue is a great way to store energy for the famine times that we humans were supposed to withstand on occasion. A gram of fat holds more than twice as many calories as a gram of muscle tissue. The average person, male or female, has enough body fat to survive forty days without eating; the fact that Jesus Christ fasted in the desert for forty days suggests that the biblical authors, attentive ascetics that they were, had a good idea of the body's physiological limits.
Fat, though, can't do much for you on a day-to-day basis. It isn't a terribly ambitious tissue, and it weighs you down. It is the muscle tissue that colludes with the liver to generate and metabolize the proteins that keep the body alive and upright and operational, that repair the perpetual damage of living and of breathing oxygen radical, skittish, inescapable oxygen. A woman who loses half or more of her body fat may stop menstruating, but she'll live. A woman who loses more than 40 percent of her lean body mass, as people did in the Nazi concentration camps, will die.
It is hard to exaggerate the utility of muscle. We have more than six hundred muscles in our body, some of them under voluntary control our skeletal muscles and some of them smooth muscles, the autonomic staff. Muscles allow us to move, of course. They stand between us and dissipation, apathy. But muscle tissue helps us even when we are immobilized by illness. In sickness, the body loses its power to tap the caloric reserves of fat. If you're fasting, intentionally or otherwise, but you are healthy, your insulin levels fall and your body begins to call on

 

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its fat reserves for energy. But when you're sick, with either an acute infection or a chronic illness, your insulin levels rise. Because insulin levels also rise when you eat, your body grows confused. It thinks it is fed, so it won't tap its stored fat for calories. Your body still needs energy, though, and if you're too sick to eat, it will begin breaking down its muscle for fuel. Muscle has fewer calories to offer: the average woman stores only about 20,000 calories in her muscle tissue, compared to the 180,000 or so in her fat. An acutely ill person who cannot eat will starve to death in ten days rather than forty. (Cachexia, the wasting of lean mass seen in people with cancer or AIDS, occurs more gradually than that, but it too is caused by a disruption of the body's ability to burn fat and its fallback tendency to cannibalize its muscle.) The more muscle you have, then, the better your chances are of withstanding illness. Young people survive an acute disease more readily than the old do in part because they have more muscle in escrow.
We women have less muscle than men to begin with, and we also have lighter bones. A man and a woman of equal height will differ in skeletal mass, the male's being about 10 percent denser than the female's. If muscle counters inertia, bones defy the swamp the archaic spineless state we tetrapods gratefully scrambled away from. As women age, they lose bone more rapidly than men do we're all aware of that, of course, in this era of the mindful menopause. Muscle cushions the bone as a rubber bumper cushions a fender, and the more muscle there is draped on the skeleton, the more protected the bones will be, even as they become more brittle and porous.
The body needs its muscle, especially as it ages. Yet the perverse reality is that in the absence of a concerted effort to remain strong, the aging body loses muscle and gains fat. A woman may stay the same weight throughout her adulthood, and still, if she is sedentary, the components of that body weight will change. The Reference Woman who at age twenty-five weighed 132 pounds and was 27 percent fat will by age fifty-five, without having gained a pound, be more than 40 percent fat. She will still have the same six-hundred-odd muscles, but many of them will have shrunk and become marbled through with lard and surrounded by a comparatively larger ring of fat. Because she has less muscle volume than when she was young, she will be weaker, of course, unable to lift her luggage, and she will be forced to purchase one

 

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