Woman [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION INTO THE LIGHT This book is a celebration of the female body — its anatomy, its chemistry, its evolution, and its laughter. It is a personal book, my attempt to find a way to think about the biology of being female without falling into the sludge of biological determinism. It is a book about things that we traditionally associate with the image of woman — the womb, the egg, the breast, the blood, the almighty clitoris — and things that we don't — movement, strength, aggression, and fury. It is a book about rapture, a rapture grounded firmly in the flesh, the beauties of the body. The female body deserves Dionysian respect, and to make my case I summon the spirits and cranks that I know and love best. I call on science and medicine, to sketch a working map of the parts that we call female and to describe their underlying dynamism. I turn to Darwin and evolutionary theory, to thrash out the origins of our intimate geography— why our bodies look and behave as they do, why they look rounded and smooth, but act ragged and rough. I cull from history, art, and literature, seeking insight into how a particular body part or body whim has been phrased over time. I pick and choose, discriminately and impulsively, from the spectacular advances in our understanding of genetics, the brain, hormones, and development, to offer possible scripts for our urges and actions. I toss out ideas and theories — about the origins of the breast, the purpose of orgasm, the blistering love that we have for our mothers, the reason that women need and spurn each other with almost equal zeal. Some of the theories are woolier than others. Some theories I offer up because I stumbled on them in the course of research and found them fascinating, dazzling — like Kristen Hawkes's proposal that grandmothers gave birth to the