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Book ClubsChapter 4: Clitoris | "Woman: An Intimate Geography" by N. Angier
Hi Everyone! And thanks for your interest in reading "Woman: An Intimate Geography"! Since each topic is has so much information and is perfectly contained in one chapter, I will be making weekly threads per chapter to discuss each aspect of female biology described in this book. Note that there is a 1999 version, as well as a 2014 refresh with updated/additional information. I am using the 2014 version.
These threads will primarily focus on one book, and I ask that the discussion generally limit to the book itself. If after reading, you went off to do additional research, I encourage you to share how that has supplemented your engagement with the book. And of course, if anyone decides to pick up this book at a later date, you're welcome (and encouraged) to continue the conversation!
Chapter four is all about the all-mighty clitoris!
I especially enjoyed this chapter, even though it does include incredibly grim information.
I've not read Mary's book, but I've seen her discuss it in three interviews.
I'm a third generation atheist, anti-theist, communist, libertine, anti-natalist, environmentalist, libertarian (à la Noam Chomsky), palaeobioligist. Everything in me should dislike Catholic Mary.
But I think Mary has one of the most correct biological and societal takes, I have ever read (not read), beyond a very few RF books. Not surprising, she comes from the gender studies crowd.
I won't go into everything I like about what she says, but I will point out the biggest biology mistake, which is the same mistake Heather Heyer (of the Bret Weinstein crowd) makes, when they discuss palaeobiology:
Humans are not evolved to pair-bond. Monogamy is a patriarchal civilisation invention that imitates birds, or more specifically crows. Birds are some of the only animals who pair bond for life, ALL individuals of that species. But compare to a wolf, a wolf may pair-bond for life, but less than a 10th of wolves reproduce, only the alphas do.
Our oxytocin high from "love" and "bonding" is a group high, not a one-on-one high. Before patriarchal civilisation began around 7000 years ago, we ate in groups, groomed in groups, slept in groups, and sexed in groups. Paternity wasn't known until a couple of thousand years ago AFTER agricultural monogamy had happened. The Gay Rights Movement used to know this, but in order to achieve acceptance in society, the Gay Rights Movement had to comply with patriarchal civilisation, had to conform with patriarchal civilisation.
This is not of course a prescription for how to live your life. But simply a debunking of historical biological lies. Mary says becoming a mother changed her for the better. There are two statements in there, one objective, the other subjective.
Mary understand modern history well, but she's not made any effort to understand our evolution. Heather Heyer on the other hand HAS made an effort to understand human evolution, but her danged itiotic husband keeps pushing patriarchy onto her... and she complies. I wish Heather divorced Bret! He drags her down!
Humans are pseudo-monogamous at best. Out of all the people I've met during my lifetime, only one single couple were true monogamous; my grandparents. They met as young teenagers, and stayed together until they died of old age. That's not "normal" human mating, however much we would like it to be. Humans don't mate at menarche, and stay with that first love until death. It rarely ever happens. Humans are generally either serial-monogamists or worse.
I wouldn't add the morality "worse" part tho. Reproductive systems just are. Biological mating diversity :)
Of all the old couples I know, the large majority don't bed together anymore in old age. They barely live together. My grandparents lived in separate parts of the house, she made meals, and quit cleaning up after him. When they passed, his side of the house was in bad shape. And I'm near 60, so my grandparents were really old time!
So few people are capable, or even want to touch this discussion.
I am very clear that cheating is bad. So "worse" is accurate in my opinion. And that is obviously part of this discussion, even though I didn't specifically name it.
I view cheating as breach of contract. People with so little self awareness that they'd commit to a marriage contract, then break that committent... I'm not a moralistic person, but I don't like people who get into contracts they can't keep. ;)
Look, I give MH a side-eye for advocating for women to drop the pill, but:
The sexual revolution was ‘less a moral change than a technological one’, she says, which strikes me as an extraordinary disavowal of the agency of the women of the 1950s and 1960s who campaigned for greater autonomy. It surely gets things the wrong way around. It wasn’t the Pill that transformed sexual behaviour, as if a mere tablet could shatter centuries of social tradition. Rather, it was the desire among human beings to explore new sexual and social frontiers that created the conditions in which something like the Pill could be conceived of and invented.
The author is a male who benefits from women being on the pill. And it was males who invented the pill, so I kinda feel like it was male desire from the very start that drove this. So yes, this fact—that men are able to indulge their desires without any notion of commitment—needs to be balanced with the net benefit to women (controlling our personal fertility). I think the point MH is trying to make is that “Progress” isn’t always perfectly good. It’s like, industrialization was great, but now we also have to talk about climate change. Same thing, but with male-female dynamics and families for MH.
Progress remains my aspiration. ‘What travels under the term “progress” is revolutionary destruction of previously immutable-seeming limits’, cries Harrington. Boom. That’s me. Guilty as charged.
I honestly find this guy’s notion of progress adolescent. Some limits are good, and the perpetual transgression of limits in the name of progress (so equating progress with transgression) is how we got here. No, I don’t think transgressing every social sexual norm is “progressive” because that’s how we got legalized prostitution and widespread porn and young people trying to queer everything in the name of “revolutionary destruction of previously immutable-seeming limits”.
We need to stop lionizing this very adolescent way of thinking about progress. I don’t agree with MH about the pill or abortions, but I do think she’s opened up a better way to think about “progress”, which is that it always comes with trade-offs and it’s important that we talk about them.
However, I kinda agree with not being bogged down with pessimism. I hope we (society in general) start talking about the values we do want to keep and the future we do want more. Postmodernism and relativism and now wokism really killed that for awhile, and I’m super done with pretending that I have to respect every stupid idea equally.
One of the problems is that a lot of men want to be able to behave with wild abandon, and they care less about consequences, especially if those consequences happen to someone else. So to them, every transgression of boundaries is progress. Especially when it comes to sexual boundaries.
So very male a perspective. How much you wanna bet he's one of those "enjoying the new sexual horizons"?
I haven't read Harrington's book but I listened to her talk about it on Triggernometry. Very strange premise. I can understand what she's saying but in order to make her point she has to completely ignore a lot of very unpleasant truths about how people lived in the past.
It comes off as an academic thought exercise rather than a serious analysis. IMO this kind of nonsense, as well as Queer Theory s a result of academics having to make shit up to justify their existence.