Cat Bohannon’s Eve is a book born out of the need to train the spotlight on the female body – a body that despite being a masterpiece of evolution has been sorely neglected by the medical and scientific community. “There is still such a thing as the ‘male norm’’’ says Bohannon. All too often, scientific studies and medical research are carried out on the male body. Also called ‘male bias’ in scientific literature, it makes it very likely that a
Cat Bohannon’s Eve is a book born out of the need to train the spotlight on the female body – a body that despite being a masterpiece of evolution has been sorely neglected by the medical and scientific community. “There is still such a thing as the ‘male norm’’’ says Bohannon. All too often, scientific studies and medical research are carried out on the male body. Also called ‘male bias’ in scientific literature, it makes it very likely that a clinical trial of a medication on human test subjects might never have been tested on female animals.
This has led to huge gaffes – it was only in 1999 that modern medicine became aware of the fact that women wake up from anaesthesia faster than men do! Imagine waking up in the OT because your doctors used the male-normative dose of anaesthesia on you!
In the 2017 book Inferior: How Science got Women Wrong and the new Research that’s Rewriting the Story, author Angela Saini touches upon the issue as well and says that “Feminism can be a friend to science. It not only improves how science is done by pushing researchers to include the female perspective, but science in turn can also show us that we’re not as different as we seem”. In some ways, Bohannon’s Eve goes a step further and issues a clarion call to scientists and researchers to be more egalitarian, to educate themselves on cross-disciplinary women-oriented research and piece together a more comprehensive narrative of the human body.
With a strong feeling of “something needs to be done”, Bohannon, a researcher and science author, decided to write what she calls “a user-manual for the female mammal”. Eve is a deeply researched timeline of the evolution of a woman’s body – from the first mammal (the Eve of Milk) to the first hominin who developed language (the Eve of Voice) ending with the Eve of Love – us Homo Sapien women and men with the capability to love!
Each chapter explores one aspect of evolution and sports a picture of an Eve who best embodies that feature. For instance, the Eve of Milk is cute Morganucodon aka Morgie – a tiny cuddly weasel-like creature and the first mammal. For a book that talks about a topic as convoluted and hard-to-explain as evolution, Bohannon does a splendid job of putting the evolutionary timeline into perspective. With her natural sense of humour and her innate ability to tell a good story, Bohannon takes the reader on a wonderful journey through the swampy forests of the Triassic when humanity’s ancestral Eve was just a weaselly little mammal, to prehistoric hunter-gatherer communities, and to the Eves responsible for the advent of settled agricultural society.
While the study of evolution, like most other fields of science has been largely male-centric, Cat Bohannon hypothesises on how many of our uniquely human traits might have been driven by female evolution. Storytelling for instance. Isn’t it more plausible that the first story ever told in the history of humanity was by a mother to her child – especially to “a fussy child who needed to sleep and a mother who needed to sleep even more?” Whether the hypothesis holds good is anybody’s guess but all mothers who have had to amuse a cranky child will feel its truth.
Bohannon does not mince words. She does not care to play safe and casually calls out sexism, misogyny, transphobia and more in the course of the book. “It is clear that trans women are women” she says, as if explaining 2+2 to an imbecile. She calls out countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran where illiteracy in women is rampant. In the same vein, she points out the increased maternal mortality in the conservative American states of Texas and the American South. A spade is a spade and Bohannon is not afraid to say so.
To wrap up the loose ends, Bohannon theorises on the evolution of sexism. How did sexism ever benefit society and is sexism continuing to benefit society – she asks. As one might guess, while sexism may have arisen out of an evolutionary benefit, right now it is killing us. Countries known for their machismo have a higher incidence of sexually transmitted diseases (this despite modern medicine) and some of those diseases in turn hamper a woman’s ability to bear children. Add to the mix evils like child marriages and high maternal mortality even in developed countries and it is easy to see why sexism no longer works from an evolutionary perspective.
What is special about the book is that it makes one think. Instead of simply and rather mindlessly consuming information, it compels one to ruminate over what our first Eve might have been like. Why are women plumper than men? What evolutionary purpose does the fat serve? Why do human beings need gynaecology and is there such a thing as a ‘female brain’? Eve may not resolve all these questions, but it does clear the way for the answers.
Yashodhara Sirur is a part-time writer and full-time IT professional based in Mumbai.
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