This is a book about the female body – its biology, the mind it contains, the culture that surrounds it – and why it has turned out to be the strangest thing in existence. It has its origins, it has its future, and it also has immense power right now. Its influence pervades our lives from our base visceral functions to the esoteric artefacts of our modern civilisation. And it dictates what it feels like to be a human being – female or male.
Modern Western society is obsessed by the female body. Magazines lure readers of both sexes with it; the fashion industry accentuates, conceals or distorts it; we are continually told that it is becoming too large, too small, too exploited. We rehash questionable old statistics about how much time women spend looking in mirrors, yet ridicule women who go on ‘mirror diets’ – deliberately avoiding their own reflection. Women complain about the pressure they feel to conform to an ‘ideal’ body shape. We fear that young women are being psychologically damaged by the barrage of perfect, often heavily airbrushed female flesh they see, yet we persist in consuming the products of the media who proffer that flesh. The female body is, quite simply, everywhere.
Yet rarely do women seem content with their bodies. Research shows that between 50 and 80 per cent of women are dissatisfied with their bodies, a consistently higher value than for men. At any one time, far more women than men describe themselves as being on a diet. Fifty per cent of women say that they would change the shape or size of their breasts if they could. Parents, friends, enemies, the media, even dolls – all have been shown to affect women’s self-image.
People have higher expectations of what attractive women can achieve – and studies show that we assume skinnier women are richer and better educated. Even in the cradle, female babies possessing (objectively measurable) ‘cute’ characteristics receive more parental attention. Appearance and attractiveness have been described as the ‘personal billboard’ we present to the world, and creating that female fleshy billboard can be an unforgiving process. Women’s bodies vary enormously, and every day we all deal with that variation.
There were two simple observations which spurred me to study female body shape, and they will reappear in different forms throughout this book.
The first observation is that we are the only species in existence with curvy females, and this bizarre uniqueness demands an explanation. We are happy for animals to be considered ‘handsome’ or ‘cute’, but the idea of curvaceous she-monkeys, voluptuous mares or buxom sows strikes us as distasteful. We resolutely reserve the concept of curvy femininity for humans, and I believe that our uneasy reaction to breaking that convention demonstrates how we all instinctively understand the uniqueness of human female body shape. As will become clear, this exceptional female morphology has dramatic effects on women’s lives – it affects how they move, the diseases they suffer, their sense of self, and how other people treat them. And sometimes those effects can seem counterproductive – for example, how did our species evolve to a point at which most females cannot run naked and unsupported without experiencing actual physical pain?
My second observation is that women think about their bodies more, and in fundamentally more complex ways, than men think about theirs. Biologically, it makes sense for individuals to want to look good to the opposite sex, because this is how you attract a high quality mate to help you produce strong, successful offspring. However, I do not think that heterosexual women’s cogitations about their own bodies are often a response to that biological drive. Women think about their bodies a lot, and to a level of complexity and subtlety which amazes most men, but I would argue that they do not usually have men in mind when they do it. Indeed, I suspect that this is why they may often have misconceptions about what female bodies heterosexual men like, and how ‘adaptable’ men can be if the fleshy reality differs from the theoretical ideal. Compare, for example, the women’s bodies on the covers of women’s and men’s magazines: which vary more? As we will see, men do feature in the story of the female body, but not as much as they might hope – and there are potent evolutionary, sexual, psychological, social and cultural reasons why.
My intention in this book is to discover where all this came from – all the fascination, debate, unease and even fear about women’s bodies. It may seem obvious why men think about female body shape so much, but it is not immediately clear why women think about it even more.
I am a reproductive biologist and a vet, I have a zoology degree, and I teach anatomy and reproductive biology to university students. I have written books on pregnancy, sexuality, the brain, teenagers and middle age, and I am a forty-something Caucasian male. I am not sure if this makes me the ideal person to write a book about human female body shape, but I am also not certain who the ideal person would be. I could be argued to be a dispassionate observer or biased voyeur, depending on one’s point of view. One thing I do know is that men think about women’s body shapes a great deal, but I also know that they find women’s ways of thinking about those bodies bewildering.
Humans are the most unusual and complex animals on earth, so there can be no simple answer to why female body shape is so important and contentious. By standing back from the everyday mêlée of arguments about women’s bodies, and taking a more ‘zoological’ approach to this uniquely human phenomenon, I believe I can answer some questions which others do not like to ask. After all, a purely cultural or sociological approach cannot explain the power of the female form without an underpinning of evolution, biology and psychology. Each of us has inherited a central, non-negotiable, biological core of what female bodies are and how we react to them. Culture and society are extremely important of course, but they are changeable things which flutter impermanently around that biological core of femaleness. So, any cultural or social investigation of women’s bodies which did not build on basic biology would be without a genuine context, rootless.
Taking an evolutionary and zoological approach to the origins and power of female bodies will lead me to focus primarily on heterosexual relationships. It is true that homosexual women constitute a minority of the human population, and little research has focused on the role of the female body in same-sex relationships, but there is another reason why I must focus more on heterosexuality. This is the simple fact that the story of the evolution of our species is entirely dominated by heterosexual, child-producing unions. If you think about it, all of our ancestors fall into that category – it is only their genes which have survived to the present day. Heterosexual humans are the ones on whom the vicissitudes of natural selection have acted to produce the human race as we see it today.
Because of the multifaceted nature of our relationship with women’s bodies, I have divided this book into three parts – body, mind and society. The first is focused squarely on the bodily biology of womanliness – how human women acquired their unusual shape, how each young woman now acquires it anew, the dramatic variations in women’s body shapes and the surprising effects they have on health, physicality and fertility. In the second part, I will look at how women’s bodies affect the human mind – what it means to inhabit one, what it is like to desire them, and how modern women negotiate the conflicting pressures of food, mood and shape, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. And, in the third part, I will investigate the relationship between women’s bodies and the world outside – how different cultures and social environments judge, modify, conceal, celebrate and condemn the female body. Only then, with this combined physical-mental-societal understanding of women’s bodies will it be possible to finally explain, in the last chapter, why they obsess us so.
Women’s bodies are far more womanly than they absolutely need to be. All that most other animals need to function as a female are some discreet internal plumbing and inconspicuous mammary glands, but something much more radical has happened to human females. And for the first time in our history we now understand bodies, minds and societies sufficiently to comprehend exactly why women’s body shapes affect us the way they do.
At last we can piece together the story of how something as complex as women’s attitudes to their own bodies – how they affect relationships with men and other women, and even how we raise our daughters and sons – have been forged during millennia of evolution in the cauldron of human sexuality, thought and society, and a sheer desperation to survive.