Article published on POV.international //
RESEARCH & THE FUTURE // INTERVIEW – Making milk makes us mammals. Carrying and giving birth to vulnerable babies makes us dependent on others than ourselves. It is the female body that makes us human and creates society, says researcher Cat Bohannon in her international bestseller about 200 million years of bodily (r)evolution.
When researcher Cat Bohannon, 45, travels from Seattle to Copenhagen on Friday May 24 to give a lecture, the flight is “like the blink of an eye” for her after more than 10 years of immersing herself in not only her own history, but 200 million years of female body history.
“It’s those many years that make me optimistic,” she says one morning across the globe after dropping her five-year-old daughter and three-year-old son off at kindergarten. She sees a better future for both her children’s genders “and all other genders”, emphasizes the 18-year-old, who broke with her Irish Catholic background, became passionately involved in the queer community and is now an atheist.
“I see the big picture. The long haul. Change is happening, despite today’s backlash from the right wing and men who feel power crumbling. The overall biological, cultural and societal development over millions of years shows that humans are becoming more and more alike. Gender differences will diminish,” she states.
All the knowledge that is not
Cat Bohannon is touring Europe with her debut book, which brings together her own and others’ years of research into what makes us human. It is the book’s accumulation of knowledge that gives her hope for the future, even though the book was prompted by the disheartening realization that in terms of research – both in science and in all other fields – humans are not human at all.
They are men.
“Almost all research is based on men. Biologically it’s much easier, the explanation goes, because women’s bodies change all the time, every month and throughout our lives, so you can’t do clean science, pure research,” she says as an example.
She wondered. Culturally, too. Several times she has told the media how she was watching one of the “Alien” movies, “Prometheus” from 2012, where the heroine gets pregnant by an evil octopus and has to abort to avoid dying. Part of the plot is that the computer that makes up their hospital can’t figure it out. It’s like a given that there’s no studying it in this 12-year-old movie, made for men only.
She grabs her head and summarizes:
“There is this knowledge gap. A knowledge gap. Women have simply not been seen as human beings. Everything is seen through men’s eyes. What were the guys doing? Even in paleoanthropology. And all the graves that have been opened! If it was a big grave with a lot of weapons, then of course it was a man lying there. Now we’re testing with DNA. Oops, that was a warrior queen, sorry about that…”
Breastfeeding mammals
Cat Bohannon’s wonderment grew as she kept reading research news that revealed that the human race is not or has not only been made up of men, and that men have not always been the most important.
So, alongside her PhD studies on the development of human learning and storytelling abilities, also as a societal construct, and her teaching of research writing, she began her 10-year study of the most common yet unexamined body, the female body.
“It was pretty wild. I didn’t think I would come to such an accurate conclusion,” says Cat Bohannon, who gave her book the summary title: Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.
The fact that our ancestors developed the ability to produce milk made us mammals, as it’s so accurately called. And the fact that we give birth to vulnerable babies who need more than a father and mother to survive creates societies, big and small, and makes us live long past our childbearing years.
“There is of course a chicken-and-egg dilemma in all this kind of research, but it is the development of the very characteristics that only the female body has that secures us as a species.”
The many foremothers
She has organized her knowledge by looking at each function of the female body and tracing them back to the first creature with that ability.
“We don’t have a single point of origin for our bodies. We have millions of them. We have countless ancestors and foremothers, countless Eves, but there are certain times when our bodies change significantly. These are the Eves I have found.”
The first chapter is about the little mouse-like Morganucodon, “Morgie”, who lived 200 million years ago in the era that gave its name to an entire industry, the Jurassic era. She laid fertile eggs, but was the first to nurse her young. Her milk provided vital fluids and protective bacteria. Since then, breasts have been attractive as they ensure reproduction.
Der er så meget skam forbundet med den kvindelige krop. Der er noget, vi gør forkert, når infertiliteten rammer. Det er der ikke. Det er helt almindeligt
“Men can breastfeed too, but are not nearly as good at it as women,” she states in her book. Men’s nipples can soothe children, and close contact with the weak little ones is crucial for the survival of many species. Despite this, breastfeeding has been hidden away in Western culture, for example.
“Breastfeeding is a biological, but also a powerful social act. And it is only performed by women. As a result, it has been looked down upon. Today, breastfeeding is used as pressure on women. If a woman can’t or won’t breastfeed, she’s the one doing something wrong,” she states about the role of breastfeeding in today’s American society.
Dangerous abdomen
In the book, she notes that even today it is considered an advantage that breastfeeding is free. Free, she asks rhetorically and replies that it can only be because the work of the female body is not valued. Many other times during Cat Bohannon’s work, it became clear how much culture and nature mutually influence each other over time. If she didn’t look both ways, a lot of knowledge was lost. Just as it has happened to other researchers.
“It was absurd at times, because for those same 10 years I lived a life completely at the mercy of my own body.”
She underwent hormone treatments to get pregnant with all the side effects. Got pregnant, but outside the womb and several times.
“I was in and out of hospitals. I, being over-educated, had no idea it was so common and so dangerous. A hidden and forgotten danger for millions of women. Two percent of all pregnancies!”
Her own life suddenly and harshly became part of the history of the female body.
At vi ikke blev udryddet skyldtes, at vi begyndte at hjælpe hinanden. Især kvinderne. De begyndte at hjælpe hinanden med fødslerne, mindske blødninger, hindre infektioner
It was seen as her fault that she didn’t just get pregnant straight away.
“There is so much shame associated with the female body. There is something we are doing wrong when infertility hits. There isn’t. It’s not. It’s completely normal.”
She got pregnant twice. Just like the little squirrel-like Donna she writes about in her second chapter. The first animal with a uterus and, more crucially for the mother’s life, a placenta.
Its invasive effectiveness can make it dangerous to be pregnant, as she found out, but no plausible explanation has been found for why females became so adapted.
The survival of humanity is a miracle
In fact, there are so many dangers associated with having such a tightly packed abdomen as women have that Cat Bohannon has to turn to her Catholic upbringing to find the word that best describes why humanity has survived above so many other species.
“It’s a miracle. It’s quite appropriate to use a religious word here. As I write in my book, we really shouldn’t have survived with the reproductive system we have.”
If you had looked at the first hominids like Lucy millions of years ago, no one would have believed in a future for the upright creatures.
But something proved stronger than biology.
“The reason we weren’t wiped out was because we started helping each other. Especially the women. They started helping each other with labor, reducing bleeding, preventing infections. Simply put, it’s gynecology that saved us.”
Child brides are modern
Women’s bodies and mutual solidarity have kept the human race alive. As long as their knowledge was considered valuable, as in hunter-gatherer societies, they did not have many children, but enough, and they did not have them until they were old enough. Biology adapted to culture.
“Women didn’t start menstruating and therefore ovulating until around the age of 16, and then there were four to six years between children. Child brides and many children is something that belongs to the so-called modern era.”
The book is a solid scientific book with sources and cross-references, but written in such a way that you read the 614 pages in amazement without wincing. It’s not possible to memorize the entire book and its many, many examples, but the basic story sticks.
“Humans have a deep longing to know where we come from and why we are the way we are. It’s common to all of us. So is understanding the world narratively, through stories. Just as religions do,” explains Cat Bohannon about the field of research that is her specialty and the reason she chose to write the book as a story about Eve.
“Most religions have a story about an original mother. In the Abrahamic religions, it’s the story of Eve. And, as my mother would say, our curiosity to expand the story of her with more knowledge is also created by God. As an atheist, I don’t think it is, but I have great sympathy for the longing we all have to create meaning in life.”
Cat Bohannon would like to end with hope. The hope she has gained from working on the book. And which she shared in Copenhagen, where she performed at the Bloom Festival www.bloom.ooo “Hope is not about being stupid and denying that sexism exists,” she states and continues: “Hope is about committing to the continued effort to find more knowledge, to make life better for others, reduce suffering, create a better world. It can be done. My hope is strengthened by the increased knowledge I have gained that the great and irrefutable story of humanity is that humans are going to be more and more equal. And that goes for all genders.”
