Meet the Eves (with Cat Bohannon) Family Proclamations: Exploring Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality

Cat Bohannon says for far too long the story of human evolution has ignored the female body. Her new book offers a sweeping revision of human history. It's an urgent and necessary corrective that will forever change your understanding of birth and why it's more difficult for humans than virtually any other animal species on the planet.  Her best-selling book is called Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, and we're talking all about it in this episode.    Transcript   BLAIR HODGES: When Cat Bohannan was working on her PhD, she noticed something was missing from the story she usually heard about human evolution. Specifically, women are missing. That seemed like a pretty big oversight. So she tracked down the most cutting edge research and pulled it together into a fascinating new book. Cat is here to talk about it. It's called Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution. Since we're taking a new look at families, gender and sex on the show, I thought, what better place to begin than the place where we all begin at birth? Let's look at how that messy dangerous, incredible process came to be. There's no one right way to be a family and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm your host Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.   INSPIRED BY SCI-FI (7:12)   BLAIR HODGES: Cat Bohannon joins us. We're talking about the book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution. Cat, welcome to Family Proclamations. CAT BOHANNON: Hey, thanks for having me. BLAIR HODGES: You bet. I'm thrilled about this. This is this is such a good book. Your introduction suggests the idea for it was conceived in a movie theater or after you had just seen a movie prequel to Alien. I didn't see that coming. Talk about how the book started. CAT BOHANNON: Right, so as a person who is femme-presenting, as a person who identifies as a woman, I have many triggering moments for where I might want to talk about the body and its relation to our lives. However, there was this one kind of crystallizing bit. I'm a big sci-fi fan, big Kubrick fan, big Ridley Scott fan, so I'm gonna go, when they come out, I'm gonna go. Now, this is a prequel to Alien, so you know going into this film that whatever characters you meet, it's not gonna go well for them. You just accept it in that kind of sadistic way as an audience of these things, like this is—yeah, you know where it's going. But in this case, what happened is the main character has been impregnated, effectively, with a vicious alien squid, as you do. And she's sort of shambling in a desperate state, and she arrives in this crashed spaceship at a MedPod. So it's like surgery in a box, you know, that's the idea. And she asked the computer for a cesarean. I think she actually says something like, “CESAREAN!”, you know, but she wants help with her situation, her tentacled situation. And the MedPod says, “I'm sorry, this MedPod is calibrated for male patients only.” And I hear in the row exactly behind me, a woman say, “Who does that?” Exactly. Who does that? Who sends a multi-trillion dollar expedition into space? Right? Presumably that's the, maybe it costs more and doesn't make sure that the medical equipment works on women, right? And it turns out us. Yeah, it's us. We're the ones who do that. Right now, in every single hospital, It's a problem. BLAIR HODGES: So your book is looking at the “male norm” problem. You're looking at how, and not just in medical science, but I think in the ways anthropology has worked, a lot of sociological studies, studies of medicine—they assume the male body as the norm and then proceed from there. There are practical reasons for this that you talk about in the book, with medicine trials, for example, where you want a body that isn't maybe going to experience a lot of hormonal flux over the course of the study, or that isn't going to be pregnant or something. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. BLAIR HODGES: And so women get left out of scientific conversations a lot, not just in medicine but also in the history of evolution. Your book wants to address that gap. CAT BOHANNON: Yes, absolutely. And you can see it even in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, where they're inventing the first tool, right? And they're banging a bone on the ground that they use to beat the crap out of a guy. The camera tracks it, the bone goes up into the air and turns into a spaceship. This is the classic idea of tool triumphalism—that where we come from is male bodies doing what we stereotypically associate with male body stuff, like beating the crap out of people. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: And there's no females in that scene. Where are they? Are they behind a hill having the babies? Like how—this is where evolution works, people. These are the bodies that make the babies, that make the babies that make the babies, right? And it's absolutely true that in the stories we tell ourselves about our bodies and where we come from, we often erase the idea of femininity. We often erase the presence of females as this kind of insignificant side character. But in biology, particularly in mammals, it's often quite the reverse. Things that drive mutations in female bodies, biologically female bodies, are often major drivers for the trajectory of that species because the outcome of our reproductive lives is strongly, strongly tied to the health of the bodies of the female. BLAIR HODGES: I love how you framed this: You invite us to think about our bodies as a collection of things that evolved at different times for different reasons. And you're looking especially at how female bodies have evolved. So breasts themselves have a heritage; milk has a heritage; ovaries have a heritage; senses have a heritage. And instead of one singular female that we'll look back to as our origin—like the biblical Eve, for example—you say there are actually a lot of different Eves. Because you're looking at the origins of all of these different parts of the body. CAT BOHANNON: Yep, absolutely. I mean, when you look in the mirror, what you see, if you're a sighted person is—well, it's a mix, right? It's actually the photons bouncing off of that mirror surface, which have already bounced off the surface of your body and then eventually find their way to your retinas. And that's all the technical features of how your eyeballs do what they do if you have eyeballs that do that. But it's also inevitably embedded in cultural understandings. And it's also embedded in an idea of time. That you begin at a certain point, your body arrives through—well actually through a very wet passage usually, into the world and so you are you. But actually, the body itself is a continuation of many processes that work very chaotically and intricately together that started a very long time ago. And your intestines are effectively way older than even your upright pelvis. Your pelvis is way older than your encephalized brain. So what you're looking at in the mirror is almost like, this might be too lyric, but it's almost like a point in a stream of light blasting out backwards from you and out forwards in front of you, because what you are isn't so much a thing, but something that is happening.   MORGIE AND THE MILK (7:12)   BLAIR HODGES: And you take us way back in time. 200 million years ago is when you take us, back to the first Eve. This is the “milk” mom, the mammal who kind of brought milk here. You describe her, you call her Morgie, and she's sort of this little weasel mouse. Tell us a little bit about Morgie. CAT BOHANNON: Morgie's fun. We nicknamed her Morgie because the Smithsonian did that before I did, thank you very much. She is an exemplar genus. There are many species of morganucodon, but they're often nicknamed Morgie in the community of paleo folk. And they are this lovely little kind of weasel rat bitch. She's great. She's only about the size of a field mouse. She is presumed to be burrowing. So she lives in little holes in the ground. BLAIR HODGES: The drawing is so cute, by the way, that you have in there. CAT BOHANNON: Isn't she wonderful? I hired this amazing illustrator. And as you'll see in the book and duly cited, she was very, very talented and we worked together. She wanted to have portraits of all the Eves. And I was like, yeah, let's do portraits of all the Eves. But she’s coming from a Catholic background, my mother's Catholic too, so she wanted to do them like Saint cards, where you have the iconography in the center, but then all in the periphery around the side, you have all of these symbolic things. So you have a picture of Morgie, which is the real Madonna, thank you. But she doesn't have nipples. She's sweating drops of milk out of her milk patches on her belly. And she has these weird little pups sipping from it. Anyway, this is a podcast. You can look at it for yourselves when you get the book. But it's a beautiful, beautiful portrait. And the reason I picked Morgie as the start is, what people often forget is that, okay, yeah, we know we're mammals. You might've heard that even in high school bio. You're like, okay, homo sapiens, mammals, right? But what’s not often talked about is, one of the many characteristic traits that make us mammals are deeply tied to how we reproduce, which is to say are deeply tied to the female sex of a species. And Morgie is this moment roughly when we think, okay, here's where we start lactating. Here's where we start making milk. And that becomes a key part of how we continue the development of our offspring after they exit the womb. And the funny thing about milk, of course, is that we're still laying eggs while we're first making milk, right? So we are egg-laying weird weasels, which is Morgie, in our little burrow, under the feet of dinosaurs, but also that we start lactating before we have nipples. When we often, for those of us who have breasts— BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I didn't know this. CAT BOHANNON:  I know, isn't it wild? I also learned this on my journey in the research. So when we look in the mirror, we think, oh, breasts, these things, where do they come from? And we think of them as a sexual trait. We think of them as a thing that is meant to signal attractiveness to our partners. But the thing is, is that exactly—But we may not even parse that, “Oh, are we talking about the shape? Are we talking about the fat? Are we talking about the— And it's like, whoa, no, the origin of lactation is before you even have a nipple, that you actually are just sweating this thing out from modified endocrine glands out of your skin through your hair. And in fact, the duck-billed platypus, which is often modeled as a kind of weird monitoring basal mammal, she doesn't have nipples either. Her pups through their weird little bills are slurping the milk off the bottom of her belly through these milk patches. So that's where these things come from. BLAIR HODGES: I had no idea. And also that milk wasn't just for nutrition, but also a way to sort of protect the eggs, right? So Morgie was laying eggs and then milk would be produced to help the eggs, rather than just feed the babies? CAT BOHANNON: Yes. So for a lot of egg layers—not hard shell, not like a chicken, but a softer leathery shell, there are many species that make leathery eggs, yeah? The trick is, is when you're on land, you need to keep them moist. You can't have them dry out while that offspring is continuing to develop in there. So a lot of egg layers, it's kind of gross, but they secrete this kind of egg-moistening goo that also has a lot of useful anti-fungal and antibacterial properties. Because of course you also don't want the eggs to be overrun like old bread. You want it to both be wet but not moldy. Wet but not infested with parasites, right? BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Sure. CAT BOHANNON: And so, yeah, the best model I've seen for the evolution of milk is actually derived from that original egg-moistening goo. Which is of course incredibly gross to think about, but more likely the origin of lactation. BLAIR HODGES: And you talk about the mechanics of the nipples themselves. So we do get to a nipple, evolutionarily we do develop these nipples. CAT BOHANNON: We do. I got two. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I do too! CAT BOHANNON: Some people have more. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: I mean, mine would be a little bit trickier to get to milk from, but you do point out in the book that some male folks can lactate, given the right exercises and the right stimulation, et cetera. But with the nipple— CAT BOHANNON: And the right hormonal cocktail, usually. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: Right, right. But with the nipple, it wasn't so straightforward. So even today, babies—it's not this natural, you know, it can be tough to get babies to latch. So it's like the odds were still stacked against us. Even though we developed a nipple. It's this dance that a breastfeeder and a baby have to do to figure out how to still transfer that food across. CAT BOHANNON: Absolutely, and some species seem to be a little bit better at that, what we often call latching than others. My son was terrible at it. Absolutely just mangled my chest wall in ways that alarmed even the nurses. They're like, “oh God, here's a pump.” It's okay, eventually, whatever, I didn't have a moral goal for it. Luckily, I was able to not be embedded in that debate that many women do in the way we punish ourselves. “Oh, I wasn't able to lactate well enough!” But yeah, come on, it's fine. I mean, and when you think of it from a biological perspective, when you think about it in that evolutionary frame, in many ways, the mammalian chest wall, our bodies know how to make milk better than babies know how to latch. It's an older trait, right? But there are many really, really cool traits about the latching when it does work, because milk is what's called a co-produced biological product. That means the mother and the offspring are actually making it together. Not simply because when you suckle, when an offspring suckles, that means you arrive at that letdown reflex—because we're not carrying a sloshing cup of milk around in our boobs no matter how big they are. This isn't a Ziploc bag in there, right? This is actually like maybe a couple tablespoons at a time if you're lucky when you're lactating. But no, the suckling actually triggers the milk glands to kick up production, and that's what starts the whole process rolling. But the more important thing there, for the latching—because once you have that vacuum-like seal, once the kid's mouth latches on, forms the seal like a weird lamprey, and sucks that relatively giant nipple into its mouth, well now actually you've created something of a tide. Because as the child suckles, it's creating a vacuum while it sucks its cheeks in. And that's to suck the milk down as it's coming. But the tongue's moving back and forth, which moves the focus of the vacuum back and forth, which creates a tide, like a wave on the shore, of milk over the top and under the bottom. The baby's spit is sucked back up into the nipple because that's how undertow works, it's just physics! Which is gross and invasive to think about as a person who's done it. But it's true that the spit is then drawn up into the whole lining of the tubing of the breast where it's read like some weird ancient code. BLAIR HODGES: Right! CAT BOHANNON: And the mother's immune system is responding. All sorts of different sensors are responding and changing the content of the milk to suit. So if the kid's sick, then you get more immunoagents coming down that nipple to help the kid fight off the infection. And a bunch of hormonal stuff and ratios of proteins to sugar. We make our milk to suit, given what we're effectively, anciently reading in the kid's spit. Now that said, breast pumps are awesome. Your kid will be fine if you're not able to do this, okay? You know, modern technology is beautiful, “Fed is best.” But if you are getting the latching, then that's what's actually happening. BLAIR HODGES: This is the kind of thing your book is chock full of. So many times people are going to run into things they may have never heard of that are just unreal. You also talk about how the breast can be dangerous business too. I mean, evolution has trade-offs. Breast cancer, for example, is so common with women. So you can benefit the baby, but having the ability to produce this milk and do this thing through the breasts also increases a risk to the breast-haver as well. You talk about such trade-offs throughout the book. CAT BOHANNON: Absolutely, and I'll also offer that male bodies and men and trans women are also all capable of getting breast cancer. We all actually have mammary tissue, but male typical bodies tend to have way less of it. And mammary tissue, because it's so dynamically responsive to hormonal signaling, is just one of those places in the body that's more vulnerable to the processes that can drive cancer. And BLAIR HODGES: Mmhmm. Cells going haywire. CAT BOHANNON: Exactly, exactly. So it's still something absolutely that non-binary folk and gender queer folk of all types should pay attention to. If something's bugging you in your body, talk to your doctor. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, there are so many footnotes that have that caveat of like, by the way, talk to your doctor just in case. CAT BOHANNON: Well, it's so important.   DONNA AND THE WOMB (16:27)   BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about the next Eve, this is Donna. And this is a chapter about the womb. Donna emerged after a catastrophic cataclysm, whatever killed off the dinosaurs. There was this little weasel type animal that made it through all that destruction. This is 60 million some odd years ago, and you point to her as a reason why so many women today have periods. Let's talk about Donna. CAT BOHANNON: Donna, which is, I nicknamed her Donna, of course, Protungulatum Donnae, but Donna's easier. It’s cuter to call her Donna. So she is an ancestor of the modern placental womb. Now we only have one womb. Many mammals still have two because they're evolved, of course, from the shell gland of our former egg layers. And the reason we have one, we're not entirely sure why, but we know the mechanism is that you have these two organs that are merging into one and producing that kind of, in our case, pear-shaped thing, but many, many women and girls are still born with a uterus that has a little dent in the top. Very common. Some even have a whole fibrous divide down the middle. Some are even still born with two uteri, less common, but happens, and two cervixes and two vaginas to match. CAT BOHANNON: So the easiest way to remember the difference between us and marsupials is: marsupials pouch, us no pouch. But also marsupials: two or more vaginas, which is fun, and us only the one. But the thing the reason to think about that isn't simply that it's cute and weird and fun imagining all of the things you might do with an extra vagina—all of which I'm sure are for the good, but that it's really talking about, at what point in development is that offspring coming out of that maternal body, and how much of development is finished outside of the womb, in or out of a pouch or a burrow or what have you. So this is the moment we start going down the path towards our somewhat catastrophic human reproductive system that is long derived from early, early mammals just after that cataclysm, which knocked out almost all the dinosaurs except for a few disgruntled birds, right? That's what's left of them. Your house sparrow. But what we have now is, we have this really patently crazy thing where instead of laying eggs like a sensible creature, we effectively hot dock them into our bodies within a uterus and then transform, not simply the uterus, but the entire body into this kind of eggshell slash meat factory of a burrow. Because our body is now effectively the burrow for that phase of development. In marsupials, it comes out like the size of a jelly bean, comes out a lot sooner, finishing out most of that development in the pouch and then elsewhere. For us, we're finishing a lot of the development inside our bodies, which has all kinds of knock-on effects. BLAIR HODGES: One of my favorite parts of the book that just blew me away was the illustration—I think it's on page 76—of the female pelvic anatomy. What we usually see is the uterus, and it's stretched out and it looks kind of like hip bones. It looks like our hips, like the ovaries are stretched out, the tubes are. And you show, no, it's actually sort of just like balled and smooshed up in there all together— CAT BOHANNON: Totally. BLAIR HODGES: —which I mean, I have never seen this illustration before! I’ve always seen that other illustration where it’s all laid out. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah. So a lot of us learn—if we're lucky enough to have something like sex ed. Sadly, not all of us do, but for those of us who are able to have that be part of our education, it's kind of like a T shape, like a capital letter T, where you have that uterus and the vag in the middle, and then you have those fallopian tubes extending out to the side with two little grapes, you know, near the fringy bits, right, which are the ovaries. But the body doesn't have all this extra room in it. It's not like stretching out its arms. It's all kind of smooshed up in there. Which means that I've had the very real and very common experience of having had a transvaginal ultrasound, where they're like trying to image my ovaries and they can't find one. Because for whatever reason, the path of that ultrasound beam is being blocked by a part of the bowel or the uterus itself, or just, something's in the way and the ovary's hiding.  And I was very alarmed at this moment, partially because I had a large thing inside my vagina and I was trying to maintain a conversation. It's rough. BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Right. CAT BOHANNON: But it's also like, this person's telling me they can't find one of my ovaries. I'm like, “Well where the hell is it?” Like, did I lose an ovary? Like what? You know? And no, actually it's just that everything is very smushed in there, which is part of why ovarian cysts can hurt so much for people who have them. Because you have that radiating signal of irritation hitting many different organs in that area, right? And so it can be kind of hard to pinpoint what you're feeling exactly. You just know it hurts or that it's like pressure, right? And it's different person to person. It's also unfortunately why ovarian cancer is so very dangerous. People who have these biologically female bodies, we kind of get used to aches and pains down there. It's kind of a weird common sensation, for fluctuations over a menstrual cycle, to have some kind of achy bits, some kind of bloated bits, some kind of “what was that sharp pain, I don't know, it went away, cool,” right? So in the early stages of ovarian cancer, it's often the case that a patient may not be fully aware that what's happening might be new. Now that's not to have your listeners be terrified. If something's bothering you, again, talk to your doctor. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: But it is absolutely why it's so dangerous, because of course, given that it's so smushed against everything in there, it's not hard to metastasize. You're right up against the bowel. You're very close to the liver. You're in the mix in there. BLAIR HODGES: It’s packed in there! And you talk about how bonkers this is, and how many people who have gone through pregnancy have said, like, “What the hell is this?!” [laughs] Like, why do I have to do this? CAT BOHANNON: Fair! Fair question. Yes. Somewhere in our very deep sci-fi future, if we don't blow ourselves up first—which given the news today seems very close to happening, thanks—but assuming we survive the insanity that is human culture and conflict, there is a future in which there is a truly external womb. Which would have to be effectively an entire synthesized female body, right? Because it's not just, it's also your immune system, it's your respiration, it's many things. But assuming in the very deep, many hundreds of years in the future that this happens, it immediately changes everything. Because of course, then it immediately becomes unethical to ever ask a female to do this dangerous thing. She may still choose, but it becomes unethical to ask, because there's truly an alternative. BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. CAT BOHANNON: Anyway, so there's a thought experiment for you in our future sci-fi. But yeah, it is nuts. It's nuts that we make babies the way we do. Our pregnancies and our births and our postpartum recoveries are longer and harder and more prone to dangerous complications that can and do cripple and or kill mother, child or both. And that's true compared to almost any other primate except for squirrel monkeys, and we feel sorry for them. But that's true for almost any other mammal. We suck at this! We're actually bad at reproduction, which seems counterintuitive because there are eight billion of us. But it's true. BLAIR HODGES: Right. And we see you trying to theorize as to why that is. Like, we're so bad at reproduction, but we're also so highly successful, one might even say an invasive species in a way. CAT BOHANNON: Right. BLAIR HODGES: We've spread out everywhere. How did that happen if we're so bad at reproduction and it's such a costly and dangerous thing to do? CAT BOHANNON: Well, it took all of our very classic hominin resources to pull it off. We had to be super social and super clever problem solvers who are good at thinking about the world as a tool user. Which is to say, tool use is about behavior. So it's not like a paleoanthropologist actually gives a damn about this rock that someone used to cut something, right? The stone axes are not the thing they care about. They care about what they can infer about the behavior of its user. All paleoanthropologists are deeply behaviorists. What that means is, if all tool use is essentially overcoming a limitation of your body in order to achieve a goal in your given environment and using some manipulation of your behavior to do that, well, our most important invention, if we suck at reproduction, was gynecology. Lucy—and I'm not the first to say this—Lucy the australopithecine, 3.2 million years ago, had a freakin’ midwife. And habilis after her had even more reproductive workarounds, as did erectus, all the way up to homo sapiens. We were manipulating our fertility patterns through behavior. And that's a huge upgrade. Now you don't have to wait around for your uterus to evolve to a thing that's less deadly—because, of course, you could also just go extinct. There's that. That's an option in evolution. You could also just not exist when you have bad reproduction. But if you can work around it behaviorally, if you can have midwives—we're one of the only species that regularly helps each other give birth. If you can manipulate your fertility patterns to up or down regulate your fertility too, because in any given environment, it might be better to cluster your births earlier in your reproductive life and then care for your sort of “useless” babies—I love my kid, but they're useless, right? For a long period of time, right? Like in your given environment, given your food supply, maybe that's a good plan. Or maybe things are more seasonal, or maybe it's actually there's not a lot of food at all and you need to stretch that sh*t out. You need to actually have them every four to six years or so, which is what chimpanzees do, which is what some known human communities do. So you have to think about how we choose to have babies and what we do to manipulate our fertility, including medicinally, including behaviorally, in the space of medical practices, as something that's adapting this buggy and fault-prone thing that is human reproduction to suit our different environments and lifestyles. And that starts not a few hundred years ago, not just in the deep history of racism and eugenics sadly in modern gynecology, but actually millions of years ago. BLAIR HODGES: Sure. And you're inviting us to think again about tools. So you talked about that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the tool is this bone that's a weapon, and we think about the rise of humanity as being tied to this type of tool. You're inviting people to re-envision that and say, actually, the tool of gynecology—which would have involved our own hands as tools—would have been such a crucial turning point for who we are as a species or who we could become. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. BLAIR HODGES: Because I think you even say, we “seized the means of reproduction,” or something at that point, which is a great pun. CAT BOHANNON: Yes, yes, and meant to be, because I too am a nerd. Yes, we do. We do indeed seize the means of actual freakin’ reproduction and get our hands on the levers that are controlling not only our reproductive destiny, but then effectively our destiny as a species.   PURGI AND HUMAN SENSE PERCEPTION (27:29)   BLAIR HODGES: That's Cat Bohannon and she's a researcher and author with a PhD from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. We're talking about her book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. It's a brand new book, and it's a fabulous book. The next part I wanted to talk about was perception. And you say you got thinking about whether men and women perceive the world in different ways. And you got thinking about this as a college student working as a nude model at the local art school. And when students would take a break, you'd kind of wander through and check out how people were seeing you, how they were drawing you. And you noticed, invariably often, the men would be drawing your breasts too big. You're like, those aren't mine. But then as the weeks went by, they would get closer to normal size. Like something was changing in how they initially saw you, how they were drawing you. And so you wondered, like, are they seeing things differently than me? Is perception different? CAT BOHANNON: Mmhmm. BLAIR HODGES: Now, the danger in this question is falling into the trap of “men are from Mars, women are from Venus,” right? Essentializing gender. CAT BOHANNON: Yyyuuup. BLAIR HODGES: So we'll keep that in mind as you talk about perception and what you found in this chapter. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, so there were some genderqueer folk in the art classes where I was a professional naked person, which was my job at the time. But for the most part, they were cis folk with a variety of sexualities. So I would just point out that in these rooms, there of course was diversity, and there was racial diversity too. However, the most obvious variable, you know, if you want to call it that, was simply that the male presenting folk who were almost universally cis, were drawing my boobs too big. Now, they're not small. I'm like a 34D. It's a problem. The straps dig into my shoulders. I know that I am not a small-breasted person for good and ill, but it's more that there's just the skill of literally, proportionally, how big are these knockers you're putting on this figure drawing. And the females, the women, the femmes, were not doing that. And it wasn't the case then—And it was happening semester after semester in multiple classes. So this is not a scientific study that I'm basing this on. This is an anecdote. But like, it was a thing. And I asked some other people who had been models and they were like, “Oh yeah, they always do that.” And I was asking them, what do you think it is? And they usually said something like, “Eh, it's just porn. Whatever, they get over it. It's fine. They just don't know how to not see porn when they see naked female bodies,” right? Although this was the late 90s and early aughts, so it was before the massive proliferation of internet porn, but whatever. It was a thing, is what I'm saying. It was a freakin’ thing that was fairly consistent. And so I had to ask myself, like, do they literally look larger to them? You know? Is this a cultural thing? Is this gender mess? Is this just sexism? Is it just, you know, that soup of that thing where it's complicated? Or is there something physiological going on? And so for that, I take us back to the dawn of primates. Not in the “men are from Mars, women from Venus” way, but actually when were we actually weird little proto monkeys in a tree? And can that tell us anything about why they draw my boobs too big? And it's a journey. I go through quite a lot because there's a lot that goes into the evolution of the sensory array. The nose, the eyes, the ears. So there's a lot to work with there and it doesn't always come back to my naked self. The central reason why, as best as I could tell, they were drawing them too large is that they were literally fixating on them. So when your eye looks out on the world, it's doing a mixture of things. It's doing a mixture of saccades, which are these twitchy little movements. Your eyes are doing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, that you don't even notice. And fixations, which means they're landing on one spot and staying there for a period before they move around again. And there does seem to be in the lab notable sex differences in how male saccade versus fixation patterns seem to work. Again, mostly these subjects are cis men. So there's your caveat, right? But one of the famous things about male versus female facial perception that classically in the psychological literature, cis women seem to be better at remembering faces—and these are sighted people of course—than cis men. And it seems to be, after doing some eye tracking studies with some careful cameras, that what's happening is that male eyes seem to focus more centrally on the center of the face, almost kind of around the tip and bridge of the nose, like that center zone. Whereas female typical eyes are doing fixations through all of the major points of facial features, eyes, nose, cheekbones, chin, up again, all around, all around, all around. BLAIR HODGES: Huh. CAT BOHANNON: Which is to say it may be the case that it's not that—you know, the stereotype women are more social, we're just better at remembering people because we're all kind of emotionally mushy or some sh*t, right? No. It's actually that where you fixate is giving you more signal for your long-term memory. And so if you're getting a broader range of information to dump into long-term memory, just literally what your eyes are doing may be helping you do that, right? Which is not about a psychology thing, it's a physiology thing. And in the boys' cases, I think they were quite literally fixating more on my breasts. Now, why they were doing that may well be cultural— BLAIR HODGES: Right. CAT BOHANNON: They don't have them for the most part. And you know they're 18 years old, people. I was naked in front of 18-year-old boys, so I have no more nightmares, right? But like, that's new. That's not in our culture. That's not a thing they've seen a lot in the social setting as opposed to an intimate setting, right? So you know, literally it's looming large in their mind and over the course of the semester as they get used to it—right? So it's both what their eyes are doing, but it's also cultural. BLAIR HODGES: Right, and this is where—and you point this out as well sometimes, especially in the footnotes—where studies on trans folks are going to shed a lot more light on this— CAT BOHANNON: Oh yeah. BLAIR HODGES: —where we can probably get a better sense of where culture fits in, where expectations fit in versus physiology. And we're still so early in scientific endeavors of thinking about trans perception— CAT BOHANNON: Absolutely we are. BLAIR HODGES: It's just huge questions to explore, so much more to explore there than we know. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. It's gonna be fun, it's gonna be great.   THE NOSE (33:38)   BLAIR HODGES: Yeah! This also talks about—So our eyes, our nose, and our ears are in this chapter. The nose, it was really cool to learn about how our faces flattened out over time, which made smell—We're not as great smelling like as we used to be. Our faces are flat. We don't have this big organ in there that does a lot of good smell stuff. And a lot of these changes happened when we were up in the trees, to our eyes and ears, that point to what seem to be some sex-based differences. Give us some examples of these sex based differences in smell, in sight, in sound, that still carry through today that are kind of throwbacks to this time when we were swinging from the trees, or I guess really just kind of crawling around in the trees. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, yeah, we didn't have those brachiated shoulders yet. So swinging less so. But no, this is a kind of classic story of how we got the so-called monkey face. Even a kid can kind of draw a monkey face on a piece of paper. You got the big ears, got that kind of flat face, two forward-facing binocular stereoscopic eyes. Like we know what that looks like, but that's a very big change from something like a weasel or a mouse, right? Where you have that elongated snout, you have eyes a little bit more to the side. Right, and most of the people who talk about the evolution of primates do talk about how this came about. If a face is a sensory array, it's not just what we use to smile at each other. It's where we're hanging our primary sensors of the eyes, the nose, and the ears, and how we position them on our head is very much shaping how we perceive our environment. So the move up into the trees is a very different environment from the ground, especially from burrowing. There are many different ways in which we have to process the world differently. When it comes to the nose, one of the things that's interesting about human beings is we lost what's called the vomeronasal organ. In a lot of mammals, the perception of pheromones, you know, smells that usually the opposite sex put out that we innately strongly react to, which in a mouse is incredibly a dominant part of their perceptive lives. For us, we don't have it. We evolved away from it. We actually still have a teeny tiny little passage. It's like at the bottom of our sinuses, but it ends in kind of a—it hits a wall. It's not much going on there. Human beings don't seem to have a whole lot of pheromone perception left. But what we do have is a whole bunch of cisgender women who are a lot better at smelling stuff than males are. And we're not entirely sure we know why it is. But it is absolutely true classically in olfaction that female subjects are going to be better at detecting scents that are faint in a room. That's a concentration thing. You only need a little whiff, you know, whereas a male typical might need a stronger dose. We're better at discerning between different kinds of scents and we're better at recognizing it quickly. So we're literally smelling more finely than males are. But it's not because we have more receptors, actually. And in fact, our noses, our nostrils sucking in that air are smaller than most males in fact. No, the big difference actually seems to be in the olfactory bulb itself. This is the part of the brain that processes smell information. Yeah. And the cells are more tightly packed with more of them, even controlling for body size, in a female typical brain than in a male. And that just means it is transmitting that signal more quickly and more widely and more effectively, and then sending a stronger signal out to other parts of the brain. So we're literally wired differently. Don't entirely know why. And we're not really sure if that's a tree problem or if it's just like a sex pheromone problem that's a leftover. Not really sure.   THE EARS (37:19)   BLAIR HODGES: Not only not only our smell is discussed in this chapter, but our hearing is as well. You say that probably the most important differences between sex as pertains to hearing here—volume and pitch, women tend to hear better in higher pitches, they retain hearing better with age. What are the differences that stood out to you in a male typical versus a female typical body when it comes to our hearing? CAT BOHANNON: Uh, this was kind of wild for me. So I'd often heard the story, and maybe you have too, that female ears, human female ears, are better tuned to higher pitches that often correspond to baby cries, right? Men and women can hear the same pitches for most of our early lives, but we're more tuned in to the pitches that are associated with the pitches that babies usually use when they cry. To me, this was kind of an annoying story. Once again, I seem to be hardwired to make babies. And as a feminist, I'm like, “ugh.” But it's true, so it's fine. It's a long-evolved thing. But the more interesting thing in that story for me was that most cis men start losing the upper range of their hearing starting at age 25. Now it's a gradual slope. Guys in their thirties don't need a hearing aid necessarily if they're normally hearing people, right? But you do have this slope of decline that's just, it's like a band filter. It's just cutting off the top end of your range, every year a little bit more, down, down, until you arrive in your fifties. And the thing is, female voices, female typical cis women's voices are a little bit higher pitched and our overtones on our voices, the full timbre of our voice, it really extends up to the top end of human hearing. So what happens is quite literally starting age 25, cis men aren't hearing women's voices very well and the older they get, the worse it gets, until finally in their fifties or so, quite without realizing it, a lot of men, a lot of cis men, our voices, our female voices sound thin, a little bit tinny, harder to pick out, and may well be boosted by a hearing aid. Right? So that totally changes some of how I understand the dynamic of a boardroom. Now, it doesn't explain why a sexist man cares about what a woman says less. It doesn't say that. That's just sexism. BLAIR HODGES: Right. CAT BOHANNON: But it does say that literally he might be having trouble hearing you without realizing he is. BLAIR HODGES: And again, as you discuss, all of these interesting things throughout the chapter of perception—and I don't remember if we mentioned Purgi is the name of this Eve, 60-some-odd-million years ago. CAT BOHANNON: Purgatorius, yes! BLAIR HODGES: Yes, ancestor of the primates. So if people want to learn even more about these kind of things about our nose, our eyes, our ears—Purgi’s chapter is the place to go. We're talking with Cat Bohannon about her book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. You can also check out some of Cat’s essays and poems. They've appeared in Scientific American, Mind Science Magazine, The Best American Non-required Reading, and other places. She lives with her family in Seattle but is currently touring to talk about this new book called Eve.   ARDI AND THE LEGS (40:21)   Let's talk about the legs. So we talked a little bit about being up in the trees already. But at some point, we came down, this is about four and a half-ish million years ago, we decided to stand upright. And that had some big implications for differently sexed bodies. Let's talk about some of those. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I don't know that we decided to do much of anything, at least in the sense of conscious choice— BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Maybe had to. CAT BOHANNON: We didn't choose, I mean, to modify our pelvic arrangement. Although some individual choices happen along the way. So yeah, one of the big things in a shift for the human evolution pattern is that we mistakenly believed for a while that our ancestors were knuckle walkers, like chimps or gorillas, and then we stood upright. You remember that old diorama, that old, you know, you got the knuckle walking— BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it's classic. CAT BOHANNON: —and then you eventually stand up and then there's jokes about it, eventually you're like sitting typing on the computer at the far right. You know? BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, all hunched over, yeah. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah. And so that kind of meme kind of has been around, but actually we were never knuckle walkers, none of our ancestors were, none of our Eves certainly. We were just hanging out in trees and then on the ground a bit more and eventually walking. The thing about walking is that what you really need to be able to do besides just having a spine absorb more pressure than it would otherwise—that's why we have an S-shaped lower back to help distribute that force over our bodies without crippling us. But also, what we needed to be able to do was endure. In other words, the story of walking and bipedalism is an endurance story. A primatologist once told me that there is no safe place to be in a room with a chimpanzee. There's no possibility that you are in a safe space because they are incredibly fast, incredibly strong, and can be incredibly violent. They will rip off your face—sometimes, literally, hopefully not, and they'll do it really, really fast. So the idea that we got faster when we became upright is actually wrong. What did happen, however, is that if a chimp does attack you, not long after all of that incredible violence and speed and running away more than likely, because that's mostly going to happen if the chimp's scared, you know, they're going to want to go eat a mango under a tree somewhere. They're not keeping it up for a long period of time. BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. CAT BOHANNON: What we can do is we can walk all freakin’ day. Very few animals have the kind of metabolic capability of doing such a thing. Because it's not simply what your muscles can do. It's how your muscles are utilizing what's called the substrate. Utilizing local energy resources, and when those run out, tapping into other resources—usually in our case from fat. So that's why we're able to walk from point A to B for hours and hours, whereas a chimpanzee can't do that sh*t, right? So the interesting thing about sex differences here is that, we know that female bodies in human bodies are slightly better at endurance by many different measures. So untrained bodies—bodies that haven't been trying to do this, in other words, haven't been working out in the gym—your classic female body does have slightly less muscle mass, but that isn't the big story. The bigger story is that when you do a deep tissue biopsy, female typical skeletal muscles have a little bit more of what's called slow twitch muscle. You might have heard, that's an endurance muscle. That's a type of tissue that's better at doing things for a long period of time, as opposed to fast twitches, which is what lets you be a sprinter, which is what lets you really have explosive strength. There does seem to be that sex difference, I mean, between male bodies—typical, average, I mean—and female bodies, just in terms of what those muscles seem to be geared for, right? And it's tricky, right? Most of us aren't ultra marathoners, for many reasons, most of them psychological! Uh, some of them financial actually, right? But most of us aren't going to do those extreme tests of endurance. But once you get up to those extreme lengths, actually, female runners, tend to not only match or beat male runners in those races, but actually tend to outpace them over time. Which is to say there may be something about the female body that, in long feats of endurance, is slightly better at this. Very slightly better at tapping into a second wind. And so if that's the case, then it's curious that usually how we tell the story about becoming upright is all about some sh*t that we assume guys were doing. Usually it's around hunting. The idea that we were running down big game, you’ve probably read some popular science books about that, that we evolved to run, right? BLAIR HODGES: Right. CAT BOHANNON: And sort of. Maybe. But it's a little bit weird, one, to assume that the males were the ones doing that. Two: We were upright way before we were hunting big game. Like Ardipithecus is the Eve I use in the legs chapter— BLAIR HODGES: Yes, Ardi! CAT BOHANNON: And you know, this is a very, very—Ardi, she's wonderful, recently discovered, wonderful, wonderful fossil. She was upright well before big game was a big part of our food strategies. So like we were actually doing stuff on two legs way before it was a matter of running anything down.   CRAFTING SCIENTIFIC NARRATIVES (45:23)   BLAIR HODGES: And this is where it seems tricky for researchers to pin down is, we're dealing with these huge lengths of time, and we're dealing with a pretty limited record. CAT BOHANNON: Mmhmm. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: And we see you piecing the story together in ways that challenge the conventional narrative. And you've got the evidence there—just as much evidence and sometimes more than what the typical narrative tells us, which is, like you said, we started walking upright because males were hunting and running after game or whatever. And you're like, “Well, actually, there's all this other evidence that shows there's probably other stuff going on.” And looking at today's bodies gives us some ideas about the bodies of the past as well. So you mentioned the different sort of muscle things that female bodies tend to have. Now would that definitely be something that developed through evolution rather than through, like, boys getting played with more or something in their youth than girls do, or roughhousing with boys versus girls, or something like that? CAT BOHANNON: You know, it's hard to say. I think that's a smart question. I think of the studies that I was using, that I was wielding—juggling even, in the legs chapter—those were all done on adult bodies, in part because there are ethics around doing a deep tissue biopsy in an infant. You know, like what is consent there? Why would a—you know, and also the occasion; why it might happen and what's the clinical setting. Like there are many ways into a scientific study, but adult consent and informed consent's a big one, right? BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm. CAT BOHANNON: So yeah, I don't think those were pediatric studies, and I think it's smart. I think it's smart to say that when we do studies on adult bodies, there have been whole lived lives and whole lived childhoods up to that point. That's absolutely true, and that plays into some of the issues we talk about later in the book too. So I don't know, I don't know. I do know that at least when there have been cellular studies of metabolism in human muscle cells, XX cells seem to be slightly better at utilizing multiple substrates, which is to say multiple energy sources—tapping into that second wind when the local sugar runs out is usually how we tell that story, yeah?—than XY cells, right? So it does seem to be true at the cellular level and not just types of tissue. But you're absolutely right that I don't know how much childhood is gonna play into that adult musculoskeletal system, at least not from the research I've seen. BLAIR HODGES: And you also say that going upright was harder on female bodies. Can you give me an example of why that would be? CAT BOHANNON: Yes. So, for one thing, relaxin. Relaxin is this thing that is floating around in the bloodstream of both male and female bodies, but it is slightly more dominant in female typical bodies. Again, I'm always here talking about “biological females,” usually pre-menopause here, okay? Just to put a pin in that so we know what we're talking about. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, okay. CAT BOHANNON: Relaxin is a thing that during pregnancy loosens the ligaments and the support structures around, not only the hip bones and the pelvic structure to help it widen and carry that additional load, but of course also to widen our very narrow birth canal, which is a problem! BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: But it's also, even when we're not pregnant, it tends to make the fixtures of the joints a little looser. It actually has to do with a vascular response around the joints, so I won't get too technical with you. But basically what it does is it makes a typical female body a bit more flexible, you know. Now this is part of why our feet expand when we are pregnant. It's not simply fluid retention, but for female bodies that become pregnant, it's also that these higher doses of relaxin are loosening the ligaments that are binding all of those foot bones together. So they literally get wider, and sometimes a little bit longer, which is very freaky when you think about it. And, uh, it doesn't always quite go back—I can tell you—afterwards, many women gain as much as a whole shoe size during pregnancy— BLAIR HODGES: Wow. CAT BOHANNON: —and then just retain that, which sucks for buying new shoes, but there you go. You have greater concerns when you're in your postpartum period, I could say, um, yeah. But it also means that we're especially prone to lower back pain, possibly because of some instability there in the lower back. Especially going through pregnancy and back again, that can make you more vulnerable too, because it does a lot to the curvature of the spine. Right? So in other words, being upright with this extra relaxin in your bloodstream can make you a little more vulnerable to certain kinds of bone and muscle related pains than it would be if you were a totally sensible four-legged creature who isn't doing this crazy thing, because basically we used to be like tables with four legs and now we're standing on two of the legs of the table and our body is still kind of catching up. BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Right. Yeah, and you're bearing that extra weight of a pregnancy, too, on that back. And so the common lower back pain is a remnant of this decision—or not “decision” as you pointed out, but this evolutionary move of going upright, exactly, right. CAT BOHANNON: Accident. Yeah.   PREGNANCY AND THE BRAIN (50:06)   BLAIR HODGES:  That's not the only change that women undergo during pregnancy, these physical changes you talked about—the joints, the feet. But also the brain undergoes changes similar to what happens to the brain during puberty. You describe it almost like a second sort of puberty. There's so much development and change happening in the actual brain that it's like a second puberty for women who become pregnant? CAT BOHANNON: It's like an extra transition in a life cycle. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: Okay, right. CAT BOHANNON: So in biology, you have these classic, maybe you've seen, developmental trajectories in the life cycle. It usually looks like a circle with arrows around it. You see like an egg and then a juvenile—like in insects, you'll have like a larva and then you have a chrysalis and then you have a butterfly. For mammals, we do this too. And we say, what are the developmental phases? What are the phases of this life cycle? And one of the interesting things, at least when it comes to how the human brain seems to go through this life cycle—because there are changes in our incredibly plastic, very malleable human brain that shift and actually have very notable physiological changes at each of these major transitions. So in puberty, there's actually an incredible rewiring and developmental thing that happens all throughout the teens. Can be very challenging, can make you more vulnerable to certain kinds of mental illness, actually, and then not suffer as much when you come into your twenties. There are outcomes, in other words, from what's going down in there. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Schizophrenia will often emerge around that time, for example, and a little bit later for women than men, right? CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, yeah, yes, absolutely so. And one of the cutting-edge things in research there is whether or not the brain development during puberty is in any way affecting that trajectory. Both men and women—and by this I mean males and females—are prone to schizophrenia, right? Schizophrenia, it's a strongly genetically related thing, but we're not entirely sure what all the triggers are. What we do know is that males and females both get it. But what happens is that males are diagnosed sooner. And very obviously so, they move into psychosis. Whereas females have a slightly different symptomology, slightly different path towards diagnosis. And then they have, and are diagnosed later in their twenties. Now some of that's a diagnosis bias in that— BLAIR HODGES: Sure. How signs are read by society or whatever. Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: Exactly, which is a cultural thing and sometimes a sexist thing. There are just, there are complications there. There are confounds. However, it may also be the case, that because the pubertal shift is sort of long and slow in humans, we actually start many of the features of our puberty sooner and then take longer to complete them in female bodies. Whereas for males, it hits you later and it hits you like a truck. It just hits you like a ton of bricks. It's just, um, it, that's just, it's just faster and a bit harder, if you will, because you're condensing that into a later point. And interestingly, even in rodents actually—though what you might call a puberty isn't exactly the same as what we do—they likewise in the female have a sort of longer period of going through it than the male. So it might just be a basic mammalian thing. But the effect in the human brain is that you have this longer and slightly…Subtle isn't the right word but you have this longer period of brain development that's dealing with the hormones of puberty, that has a slightly different slope while that brain's developing, whereas in the male brain, it's shorter, it's more impacted, it might be a bit rougher, you know. So in a brain that's already prone to psychosis—this is where the research, some branches of research are going, you know—is that a factor? Are there physiological shifts in sex differences in puberty that make those brains differently vulnerable to different kinds of mental illness? BLAIR HODGES: And so female brains are undergoing these changes during puberty. But then later during pregnancy, as we were talking about, there's also more shifts. And this is literally like stuff sort of moving around. Is this like neurons kind of remapping and different things? Like what's actually happening up there? CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What the hell is this wet lump of tissue in our heads that we center the self in? Good question, good question! Neuroscience would like to know. BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: No, it's true. Well, a pregnant female's brain—and by this I mean human now, actually shrinks in the third trimester, like significantly so, which is alarming. Like is the baby actually eating my brain? Good question! No one's really sure quite why this is happening. BLAIR HODGES: Mom brain! CAT BOHANNON: I know, actual mom brain, it turns out, is hella real. Yeah, in the stereotypical sense. So yeah, some of it actually, interestingly, doesn't seem to be a loss of neurons. It's not a loss of cells necessarily from what little they've been able to see in various studies. It seems to be more a loss of—There is a rewiring. There is a kind of clear, you know, snipping out a bunch of connections in your existing neural network, which in some ways may make room for new pathways. So one of the big arguments for why our brains develop so long during that pubertal period—which is very unlike other primates, right? We really have this huge period of social learning in our childhoods and then our adolescence—is that we have deep social learning to do. We have really complex social societies, and we're constantly having to map them and learn not just new things to do with ourselves, but new ways to be in different social environments, especially as we shift around through different social environments. So in that case, when you think about what's happening in the last trimester of pregnancy, and then in the postpartum recovery period, this is someone who is having major social shift. Now the story in the sciences is usually told that, oh, this is helping her better bond with her baby, her really, really vulnerable baby, who's so very useless, can't even hold up its head. You know, so like, wow, so this is all about that bonding. And it's true that some of the regions that show some of that shrinkage, if you will—which sounds like a bad thing, but is actually allowing for more pathways to form. That's the argument that's usually made about it— BLAIR HODGES: Okay. CAT BOHANNON: —have to do with social bonding and reading social cues, and so it's a sociality story. One of the things that I say in the book is that, must we again render the mother invisible? Maybe it's not all about the baby. Maybe she matters too. Because actually one of the big things that happens in a social species like ours when we give birth and come into motherhood, especially for the first time, is that we are learning new ways to be. We're learning how to differently map our social environment and new relationships with different sorts of people, and who's going to be most helpful in this new feature in my life. And who of my old friends are like, maybe not gonna help out with the kids so much. Just, you know, we love them, but that's not their strength. You know, in other words, and how to ask for things that you need, and when to learn new social rules. Which is to say, I suspect some of the brain changes that are happening there are not simply about bonding with the baby, but are about being able to read the room once you have one. Which I assume is a long-evolved trait that is just repurposed in the human. This is probably happening in chimps to a degree. It's more like, “Okay now that you're human, let's repurpose this trait in your hyper social environment.” Does that make sense? BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it does. CAT BOHANNON: Okay.   WHAT MAKES A WOMAN (57:16)   BLAIR HODGES: And time and time again, we see this in your book where you'll take the mainstream story about why a particular biological thing is happening—so mom brain, for example, which is that maybe people might encounter forgetfulness or feeling scattered or like ADHD type symptoms or whatever—and saying, “Oh, this is happening because they're doing this for baby.” And you're saying, “Okay, like, sure. But also, what if it's also this?” CAT BOHANNON: Yep. BLAIR HODGES: Because those type of questions are what are driving scientific outcomes and the theories that we have about it. So your book, again and again, is saying, well, what about this as well? Or what about this instead? So we're just sort of getting a different point of view. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. BLAIR HODGES: And I think with a lot of these questions, it's hard to just say, this is the definitive answer. And you do write with a level of humility there. But you're really opening up possibilities that can change the way we the way we interact with people who aren't parents, or people who are. Because you're also not saying, “Look, in order to be a perfect woman, you need to go through this change in your brain or else you're an unfulfilled woman!” CAT BOHANNON: Oh, god no. No no no no no. BLAIR HODGES: Right. So you're speaking to a lot of different experiences. CAT BOHANNON: You know, I think this is true for all women. We people who have uteri are not merely vessels for babies. Even in an evolutionary sense, because we are a hyper-social species in interdependent complex social environments and cultures. Which is to say, it is not a woman's destiny to freaking give birth. It is a woman's destiny to survive as best as she can, just like any other organism. You know what I mean? And it's also true that there are many, many ways to contribute to the wellbeing of a group, even in a biological sense, even in an ancient ancestral sense, besides simply producing more babies. And that's sometimes the confusion when we talk about the book. Some people have been confused thinking, “Are you saying that women are the way they are—you know, cis women—because it's our destiny to have babies?” And I'm like, “No!” It's more that the way we have babies is really crap, and many, many features in our bodies have evolved to withstand it. If this is a thing that hopefully you choose to do and isn't forced upon you, hopefully you have some long-evolved traits to make it suck less. It's more like that, more like that. BLAIR HODGES: And so, women who don't undergo that or have the same kind of like brain changes, it doesn't mean that their brains are somehow lesser than or whatever, they're just suited for different things. CAT BOHANNON: Exactly. BLAIR HODGES: And this is also where trans identities come into play as well. You don't have to be this “biologically sexed”—let alone intersex folks as well, where there's not this sort of binary that exists there—but that trans women can experience the world as women, as trans women especially, even though they may not be able to physically carry a pregnancy. Because I think one of the reasons people who are sort of anti-trans voices are really hung up on this: being able to biologically sexually reproduce as the pinnacle of what it means to be a female. And because trans women can't necessarily do that, therefore, they're not. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. BLAIR HODGES: And your book speaks to this. So maybe take a minute here to talk a little bit about trans identities. You've been signaling it all the way, but this is a moment to really sort of unpack it for folks. CAT BOHANNON: Sure. So I'm queer. I'm not gender queer. Have friends who are. That doesn't mean I got a hall pass for it, but I do. And of course, people who are genderqueer will speak most authentically to what it's like to be them, because of course, we are each the best authority on what it's been like to live in these crazy mammalian bodies. Like actually, when somebody tells you something about the intimate experience of what it's been like to live in their bodies, it's not just good to listen because it's polite. It's good to listen because you now have an opportunity to listen to the world's authority on a topic. Because literally no one else knows better about that than that person. So I do my best as best, as I can in the book—I'm not a perfect agent, but I do the best I can—to signal where the studies that I’m drawing from, juggling, wielding, you know, moving around on the page, when they're done on cis bodies—which is the vast majority of the time—and when there actually have been some beautiful papers on people who identify as trans or as genderqueer of other types. Unfortunately, a lot of that good work has to be done in footnotes to say, “This would have been a great moment for that data to exist. Shame it doesn't.” You know? BLAIR HODGES: Right. CAT BOHANNON: But there have been moments where I could then, and I use it not simply to wave a flag—although we all want to be part of the good work, right? But because it then helps discuss something I'm wanting to say in the book. For example, I met a lactation consultant for trans mothers, trans women in Seattle, because Seattle is awesome and has such people and they're not having to be in hiding. And she sent me—this was a cis woman, the consultant—but she sent me down this incredible research rabbit hole, because she's the first person who told me that trans women who want to have the experience of providing breast milk for their babies who have come into their lives either through adoption as newborns or, or through IVF, take the exact same hormone protocol as cis women who adopt and likewise want to be able to breastfeed their child. It's called the, I think it's called the Newman-Goldfarb protocol? I don't know. You can look that up in the book, but yeah. [Ed. Note: That is what it’s called!] And it's basically a sequence of hormones that effectively mimics the hormone cascade of estrogens, et cetera, that happens in the body and then mimics what happens during birth hormonally. And they do, they do in fact then lactate, right? And the reason to discuss that isn't simply to honor their experiences, but to point out that it's weird to call the male nipple “vestigial,” right? Because what we really are is mammals. BLAIR HODGES: Right. In other words, to say it's useless. It's a throwback to—it doesn't have a purpose. CAT BOHANNON: Right. Like there's no reason for it to be there. But it's like, oh, no, no. What we really are is freaking mammals, and what mammals are in some of the most ancient sense, are creatures that lactate. And given the right hormonal protocol, you know, the right hormonal signal, it’s just like the freaking Paul Revere ringing the bell, riding down, and your chest wall is saying, “Oh God, baby incoming better start making milk.” So even if you have a Y chromosome, if your tissue is dually exposed in the right sequence, you will lactate. And importantly, the milk is the same stuff. This is not like “special trans milk,” it’s just milk. It’s just human milk with basically the same profile of proteins and lipids and water, and the microbiomes involved, it's the same freaking stuff. It's not quite the same. They don't seem to on this protocol, um, produce colostrum. Um, or is it colostrum? I never know how to pronounce it— BLAIR HODGES: That's like milk early on. Yeah, I know. I don't either, but it's that special early on milk that's all like packed with stuff. Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: —and I've had to do it. The early milk. I know I keep doing this on podcasts. I'm like, which—? And this is the problem with doing interdisciplinary work, where you read a lot of stuff and then you have to talk about it. BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] I've heard it both ways. CAT BOHANNON: Anyway, but yeah. So the yellow early milk that happens after a person is given birth. So that hormone protocol in trans parents who have a Y chromosome and who want to lactate, they don't make the yellow stuff. But the white, mature milk, yes, they're making the exact same stuff. So that's one of the things I try and do in the book. Because I think Masha Gessen has written really, really beautifully about their experience of being a person from Russia, who as a teenager didn't have access to all of these ideas about trans identity or intersex, or access to the language to describe that experience they had growing up. But one of the things Masha's written about is how beautiful it's been to have conversation about the trans experience and intersex experiences be “normal.” It's not always about waving a flag. It's simply a part of the conversation. And when it's appropriate to say, you say it, and then when it's not a thing, you don't have to always ring the bell. That it's just—it's not like we have to have the whole conversation be about it now. It's just a normal natural part of the conversation of human experience. I hope I'm representing their work correctly there. They are far more beautifully intelligent about these topics than I am! But that was one of my guiding lights when I was working on the book. I was like, okay, I'm going to acknowledge that there is a dearth of research on trans reality, but it's getting better and here's where it's cool and here's when it directly ties into the topic. You know what I mean? BLAIR HODGES: I do, and people that read the book will know, too. You're signaling throughout in really helpful ways. Also, I think calls for research and for more questions to be asked, which is also useful too. CAT BOHANNON: Absolutely. BLAIR HODGES: For lack of time, we'll skip through—There's a great chapter on voice where you're talking about differences in voice and lung capacity and all sorts of things. So for people who want to check out the book—again it's called Eve, they can learn more about how voices are different. Like why our voices often sound different pitch-wise and how far they carry and all of that stuff. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. BLAIR HODGES: So people who check out the book can hear that, but let's connect with something you said just a moment ago here about women not just being here just to make babies. CAT BOHANNON: Oh yeah. THE GRANDMA THEORY (1:06:21) BLAIR HODGES: Animals reproduce, and when they can't anymore, they basically die, right? Humans and orca whales are the exceptions here you point out in the book, and human females go through menopause. So their periods stop, they stop being fertile, and they can live decades beyond that. Whereas other animals, they stop being able to give birth and it's basically it, they just die. And you talk about some of the theories about why that is. There's the “grandma theory,” which you don't find very convincing. Give us an idea of the grandma theory and why you don't find it convincing. CAT BOHANNON: So I think there are, I think it's like four species of toothed whales that have menopause the way we do. I talk mostly about transient orca because from what I saw in the research they were the best studied. It's really hard to study things that live in oceans in their natural setting— BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. Yeah, especially when they crash into your boats when you're like going alongside them. CAT BOHANNON: So many problems with cetacean research. I know, they're wonderful. And all the people who do cetacean research are just kind of like, like wild Buccaneers. They're just like really cool people to hang out with. Anyway. When it comes to menopausal orca, when I say that they have menopause the way we do—I mean, it's important to kind of define your terms. What that means is you're living a full third of your average lifespan after having ceased having babies. And in mammals, that means your ovaries have shut down. It's not like you've stopped having sex, but your ovaries are no longer doing the thing such that the sexing can produce the babies. So it's an unusual thing. It's kind of a deep mystery in biology in principle, you know, if reproductive fitness is the big evolutionary fitness of your species, right, then why on earth would you, give out a full third? So there have been a lot of just so stories—and some are better than others—around why we evolved to stop having babies. One of the most popular of them is called the grandmother hypothesis. And the theory, there are a few different angles on it, but the main theory is that it comes about because, instead of competing with her daughters for resources and sexual partners—we're talking primates now, we're not talking right now, right? But you know, that a female might stop having her own babies to help take care of the grandkids, and that therefore the very vulnerable—obviously sort of, again, I love my kids but kind of worthless offspring that we make who take so much extra care to keep alive you know, they have a grandma on hand, and isn't that so useful, and she's not busy taking care of her own kids so she can help with yours, you know. BLAIR HODGES: Also, let me just say that's not for the moral impact of it. Like “It's a nice thing for them to do,” but actually that makes them “more fit” because that means children are probably gonna be better taken care of— CAT BOHANNON: Precisely. BLAIR HODGES: And so, if these female chimps live longer, then those offspring are probably gonna be able to, et cetera, et cetera, because it makes them more fit. Not necessarily like, “It's nice for grandma to help out!” CAT BOHANNON: Exactly right. Like we're talking now about the evolution along a hominin line. So things that are chimpy—we didn't evolve from chimps but from chimp-y like things, yeah—all the way through up to humanity, the kind of primate we are, the idea is that if you help the grandchildren survive better and give them competitive edges in their given environment, then that's something that gets selected for in a genetic line, right, because those kids survive, have their own kids, and it keeps going on and on like this. The thing that I found a little bit dubious about that, at least when looking at what we know about the behavior of matriarchal menopausal orca—because they are matriarchs, actually, it's a female dominant society, the sons stay with their mothers their whole lives, and actually tend to die a bit sooner if the mom dies, actually. So it's really, they’re mama's boys, those killer whales. But the thing is, is that the grandmother figure, these older matriarchs in the pod, they're not really helping out with the grandkids more. Like they help the whole pod. It's not like they're jerks. They're, you know, it's a social species, but like, they're not on childcare duty. That's not what's up. What they're especially known for is when the pod is in crisis, or there has been a depletion of a local food source, they help lead the pod to other rarer food sources where there's good food. Or they're instrumental in helping teach the younger members of their pod how to do special hunting techniques, like all of the killer whales lining up in a row and kind of bum rushing an ice flow such that the bow wake knocks a seal off of the flow, which is terrible for the seal, but very nice for the orca, right? And very cool when you see the videos of it happening, but again, we're sad for the seal. It's how they live. BLAIR HODGES: With apologies to all of our seal listeners, yes. CAT BOHANNON: Exactly, you know what it is. Nature doesn't care how we feel about it, right? So this is how it is. So in other words, that model of the menopausal orca, at least, doesn't seem to be about extra child care. It seems to be about having wisdom, effectively. Now, that's a very human idea, “wisdom,” but just literally knowing stuff that younger members might not know because they literally haven't lived long enough to encounter that challenge and remember how you got around that challenge. Right? So in a deeply social species like ours, aybe instead what ends up happening is that the whole species, all of humanity, evolves to extend our lifespan. Remember, we're dying off much like chimps for a very long time until like age 35, 40 or so. At some point we actually extend our lifespan. And this is happening in deep stuff and how our cells are going about their business. It's not like we decided to live longer. It's like our bodies just found workarounds around death, right? Longevity is about not dying. So, both males and females evolve to live longer in the whole species. It just so happens that the female body is slightly better at it, and it might be that our ovaries are still running an older plan. Like if the ovaries didn't get the message that now we're living up into our eighties, and they're still senescing in that normal primate way—“Senescing” means aging. It's the slope of aging. How quickly is stuff falling apart down there. So if our ovaries are still aging in a normal primate pattern, well, then menopause is a side effect of just all of us selecting to live longer in complex social groups, where the wisdom of elderly people is beneficial. BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. Yeah. So women will often on average live longer than men, for example. And you're saying this could be like an accidental thing of deep evolution, where it just so happens that, yeah, we actually were sort of as a species, we would have been primed to die around the time that menopause happens. But that evolution found these other workarounds to extend our life, but the ovaries still kind of didn't get that memo. And so they're like, no, this is like, we put in our time. Goodbye! [laughs] CAT BOHANNON: Yes. And people who have ovaries are dealing with the fallout in the last third of our lives. Now, that doesn't mean that it didn't then as a kind of add-on perk—a door prize, if you like—become beneficial to help out with the grandkids and not compete with your daughters for resources for your own kids, right? It's not like that. It's more like, when we tell ourselves the story of how a thing evolves, it's useful to say, “Okay, is it actually tying into these very cultural stories we tell about women? Or is there a broader picture here?” And, weirdly, I think we were just kind of forgetting that old people are valuable just in general? [laughter] BLAIR HODGES: Right. Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: Like there might, that there is something valuable in a social group, in other words, in being old enough to remember valuable information in times of crisis. That's what I mean. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, like how to survive in a cold snap or a famine or drought. Like maybe folks that were able to do that could pass that information along. CAT BOHANNON: Absolutely. BLAIR HODGES: So this ties into the development of the brain where you talk about language happening. And that's also a big part. We kind of skipped through this, but in the voice chapter, you talk about “motherese,” the kind of communication like, “oh, little coochie coochie,” like the little things that are pretty universal in how we communicate with each other and the kind of storytelling that was developed, probably as women were nursing babies, and all of these things then. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm.   BATTLES OF THE SEXES (1:14:10)   BLAIR HODGES: So many of your chapters intersect with each other in just a really wonderful way. And it all takes us to the final section of the book, which is about love. Your last chapter tackles the history of relationships. And the human body itself is your scene of the crime, so to speak. You're going to find out this pressing question about like, were our ancestors, deep ancestors, polygamous, monogamous, patriarchal—like, how did it look? And you say by actually looking at our genitals, we can get a pretty good idea of sexual dominance, compared to other creatures. Talk about what the human body itself can tell us about whether our ancient ancestors lived in this world where cavemen were dragging women into their caves, or how it was actually working. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I assume some of our ancestors utilized caves, especially in cold places, because caves have this really nice benefit of always being at a fairly okay, but slightly chilly temperature. It's just a thing that happens when you go underground. So that's why caves are useful. It's not just about shielding from the rain. It's like, is it really freaking cold outside? It's less cold in the cave, But there are many cases in which we were living in the world without caves. Yeah. Anyway, that's a side note. So, yeah. In many ways, the love chapter is the thing I kinda—at first I kind of had to do because I kept getting this question of like, “So, was it like King Solomon? Is it like, you know, is it natural for men to cheat on women? Is it natural—” I get the “natural” question a lot. BLAIR HODGES: Right. Natural. CAT BOHANNON: Which is kind of weird because I'm like, you're asking me very contemporary, social, cultural questions, and then you're using the “natural” word. And I'm like, that feels loaded. Not sure exactly how to answer you, but I can tell you in biology. But what other animals do isn't necessarily what we want to do. So, like penguins, none of us should be like penguins. They are just terrible to each other, and I'm sorry for ruining penguins for you— BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. This was so sad. Yes. CAT BOHANNON: —but like, you know, yeah, I know. I know they're so cute. They're so cute, but their sex lives. I don't want any part of that ever again, having seen some of those reports. BLAIR HODGES: Ducks too! CAT BOHANNON: Ducks! I know, I've ruined ducks too. I promise the book doesn't ruin everything for everyone, but it's true, it's true. Which is to say the behavior of other animals isn't a good excuse for bad behavior in humans. How about that? But I still get the question, is it natural for one male and a bunch of females? Is that our ancestral past? Is it monogamy in our ancestral past? Or is it more like the chimps and bonobos where everyone's just kinda getting laid all the time, it’s just kinda like a daily orgy, but you know, add some fruit and a lot of fighting. Like, right? Like what is our mating pattern ancestrally? And the thing is, is that we're always tempted to look at contemporary cultures and just kind of weigh how many versions these contemporary cultures have, and say, well, this one seems to be winning, so that must be the way it always was. In other words, we want to retrofit our evolution to what we think is normal. And that's just bad science. You know, that's just not, that's not—remember our species is 300,000 freaking years old, possibly even older, it depends who you ask, right? Recorded history is a handful of thousands of years. That's not a good sample size! What we do have, as you say, is the body. Because history is quite literally, in the evolutionary sense, written on the body. So you can look to the body and compare it to what we see in other species to ask questions about our mating patterns. For example, species that have a lot of male-male competition, especially among primates, have gigantic testicles. So they have, when you need to literally compete with your sperm, you need to make more sperm, and therefore you have giant balls. Okay? BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm. CAT BOHANNON: So a chimpanzee has a pretty small penis, like not a lot going on there, kinda cone-shaped, not a giant thing. The balls are massive. Just for an animal that size, you would not expect that much to be swinging down there, and they are. Meanwhile, the gorilla, big-bodied male, right, has a harem, has a bunch of females around him. Not as much male-male competition, of course, because he mostly beats his chest to chase off the guys. Tiny little balls, like peanuts, just little, like nothing really to see down there. So in other words, like one of the places—weirdly, I know it's a book about the female body, but one of the places to look for our mating strategies is what's going on in the testicles, right? And what human beings have are kind of, for an animal our size, kind of medium balls, kind of Goldilocks, kind of like not too big, not too small, something kind of in the middle, right? So reduced male competition, in other words, but also not a harem, not King Solomon and his wives, because you would then expect— BLAIR HODGES: Smaller, yeah. CAT BOHANNON: Or at least if in the time in which we had those mating strategies, the time it takes for testicles to evolve differently. There's assumptions there, right? Because we don't know how fast that kind of stuff can change. But at least it's a clue. It's a clue. You have to kind of think of these as all clues from which we infer. It's also true that we do not have a lot of bells and whistles in the human phallus. The human penis is kind of boring, I mean compared to other species. You know, it's just kind of a very simple structure. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, like it doesn't have a bone inside of it, for example, right? Like some— CAT BOHANNON: It doesn't have a baculum, although that mostly seems like a sad thing for you guys, given that it's more vulnerable then, to have injuries without the baculum— BLAIR HODGES: Break it, yeah. CAT BOHANNON: Sorry about that. Ugh. But it's, it is true for example, that you don't have elaborate penile spines or curly-Q structures or any kinds of other things that are often seen in species that evolve with a lot of rape—because remember that the penis co-evolves with the vagina, which means that—in every species that has them, I mean— BLAIR HODGES: It’s war down there. CAT BOHANNON: It is, it's this very sexy Cold War down there. So, you know, the female vagina is evolving in ways, over deep time, that support female reproductive choice, effectively, given the history of the species. That's the general model. And likewise, the male is evolving to support male reproductive choice. And they are often in conflict, right? So ducks have very elaborate vaginas and very elaborate penises— BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, there's like folds and stuff in the vagina, right? Where they can—This reminds me of that congressman or whatever who had that ridiculous claim of like, “Well, if it's a legitimate rape— CAT BOHANNON: Oh god! BLAIR HODGES: —the female body has a way to shut that thing down.” Which is like, actually no, but— CAT BOHANNON: There are So. Many. Problems. with that sentence. Also grammatically, just so many problems. With the word legitimate is obviously the biggest problem. BLAIR HODGES: Yes! CAT BOHANNON: Like that's obviously a good starter point of like, “Um, what now?” But also, just the simple lack of information about biology. I mean, god, take Bio 101, please! What are you even saying? BLAIR HODGES: Yes. Because ducks, as you say, have these labyrinthine vaginas and the penis has evolved to sort of like try to get around it up in there. It's more like a tentacle type of a thing. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, in other words, what she has is kind of a trap door vagina. It's an elaborate curly-Q structure, but when she is experiencing sexual coercion, when she's having sex when she doesn't want to with some guy who’s forcing that on her, she can close off pockets of her vagina to trap the unwanted semen and sperm. And then when the assaulter thankfully goes away, she's able to expel that semen and it never makes it to the egg. And you can see this statistically in the studies that have been done that rape is actually not a highly successful mating strategy for the male. Just successful enough that they keep doing it, but not so much so that her body hasn't long evolved ways of helping support her choice, her reproductive choice, which in biology is a big thing. BLAIR HODGES: And we don't see a similar labyrinthine thing with humans. CAT BOHANNON: We don't have that in human beings. We do not. The miscarriage rate for women who have been raped versus women who have had consensual sex is absolutely the same. It is not the case that rape is an advantageous strategy, and it is also not the case that unwanted sex has been such a thing in the evolution of our bodies that our bodies have evolved workarounds. If it had been—in other words, if historically we had been rapey, you know, I mean, in deep time, I mean— BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm. CAT BOHANNON: Obviously people suffering right now is very, very real. But is that the best model for how we used to go about things most of the time as our bodies evolved? No, probably not. You would expect more elaborate genitals. You would definitely expect a different miscarriage rate between consensual sex versus not. There are many, many different signals that tell me, at least, that the absolutely horrific thing that some people do to other people in the world with sexual violence is actually not the base state for how our bodies evolved. BLAIR HODGES: Right. So we can't say rape is a product of like—evolution has evolved men to do this. And I think that increases the responsibility. CAT BOHANNON: Right. I mean, I think how we tell the story of ourselves matters. And talking about our evolution inevitably is also telling the story of ourselves. You know what I mean? Now, there's always a tension between what we want to be true and what may well have been true, which we may not like. And I've tried to be very careful in the book in saying what research supports and what it doesn't. And sometimes it says stuff I don't like. It does. Penguins are ruined for me now! But in this case, I think it's incredibly important at least to say no—or at least from what physiology can tell us, it's not the case that cis men and boys are born rapists. You know what I mean? That that actually is very, very much something that's coming out of our current social context. That's coming out of rape culture, not from an innate predilection of our bodies. BLAIR HODGES: Also in this chapter, you're talking about sexism. That sexism itself maybe had some evolutionary advantages, and you believe that it's pretty much outlived those advantages. So maybe just give us a sense of what some of those advantages might be, and how sexism has outlived those advantages to where it's time we really try to address it more than we have so far. CAT BOHANNON: The way I'm talking about sexism in the book is slightly different from how we usually talk about it. Here I don't mean institutionalized sexism, like in who gets a job. And I'm not even meaning some guy being a jerk to some girl in individual acts of aggression. What I am talking about when I talk about sexism in the book is the broadest sense, pulling the camera back and taking that broadest view of what's common across known human cultures. And one of the things that's very common are sex rules, which are fundamentally tied to controlling access to female bodies. Where can she go? What can she be seen in, and who with? How much of her body is allowed to be touched? And in what context? When is she allowed to be solo? Where does she go in a day? And certainly by the time you arrive at sex itself, who does she get to have sex with in what context? And what about the baby making and all of that? So all of those I call sex rules. And every human culture seems to have them. Not all the rules are the same, actually. And that's the important thing. There's nothing in your DNA that codes for the length of a freakin’ skirt. But there may be something in how we go about being the human species in that we are culture makers, and part of our deep culture making is making rules around sex. Why would that be from an evolutionary standpoint? Well, if it is true that we are crap at making babies, and I think I make a pretty good case in the book for that being true, and one of our big solutions there in deep time was the invention of gynecology, broadly defined—you know, not simply the moment of helping one another give birth in midwifery, but all of the different things that we have done in deep time to manipulate a female fertility pattern. Those are all behavioral workarounds. Well, there are other behavioral workarounds. There are sex rules. So if sex rules in your local culture help produce a local fertility pattern that fits your environment really well and helps your culture survive and thrive, then that is something that gets reinforced and develops over time. So in deep time, you can think about ancient gynecology and sex rules working in parallel. Some of these are still pretty good, actually. For example, I'm super down with the sex rule against pedophilia. Right? I'm just super, super into that not being a thing we're cool with. And in that sense, if you think about it from a biological point of view, many, many cultures have this rule because it's absolutely the case that the cost of becoming pregnant and giving birth before you're done with puberty in a female body is just massive. You think it's hard to do this as an adult? Try a 12-year-old. Omigod. Right? So in that sense, there are some rules that make obvious sense and some that make less sense. But if you can think about sexism as these sex rules and think about them in terms of manipulating female fertility patterns to suit local cultural environments, and basically directly having those hands on the levers of how we make babies and how we work around having more mothers and more babies survive the process, then you can see how it goes hand in hand. The trick is, is that at this point, modern gynecology is amazing! Like I would be so very deceased without modern gynecology just personally many times over—not just the hemorrhaging! Which is to say that if the goal, if the deep ancestral goal, would be to help more mothers and offspring survive, right, again moving away from that idea of male dominance because remember that men and women equally participate in creating and reinforcing these sex rules, right. So if were equal players, males and females, well then, with an outcome of having more females survive, that certainly makes sense for the female. But now that modern gynecology is so very good, it has way outpaced the benefits of sex rules. In fact, in many cases, sexism is very detrimentally impacting the health of women and girls throughout the world. So we're only just now, I think, coming to that point where we get to get our heads above water and choose. And personally, I think the choice is obvious.   REGRETS, CHALLENGES, & SURPRISES! (1:28:20)   BLAIR HODGES: Right. The book goes into detail about how sexism hurts health, wealth, and wisdom in particular, those three things. It gives examples of those. So people that want to check out the book can learn even more about that. Cat, before we go, I wanted to talk to you about regrets, challenges, and surprises. This is how we end each episode of Family Proclamations. As we go throughout the series, I'll ask each author to share something about their process of writing the book. Something that they regret now that it's out. Who hasn't finished a book and thought, ugh, if only I could have changed that one thing. So a regret. Or a challenge, what was the hardest part about doing your project? Or a surprise, something you learned in the process of it that you've really carried with you. You can give an example of all three of those or you can speak to one of them that just kinda has the best story. It's really up to you. Let's hear it. CAT BOHANNON: One of the things that I wish I could have told myself about five years ago when I was feeling really stressed about not being done yet—because of course this book took about 10 years of my life to finish—I was running it in parallel with my PhD experiments and writing up the dissertation. So I was busy, I was a little bit split brained. The PhD was only semi-related to the book at best. It prepped me a little bit for the brain chapter and voice chapter, but pretty much just that. The rest I was just climbing Physiology Mountain with all of the rest of my time. And I was having children. I do wish that I could have told myself five years ago that it is, it's okay, it's a big topic. Don't stress out. Sometimes the big questions take longer to work through. I certainly would have told myself that. One of the regrets I have in the book is that I do wish I could have found a way to wave the flag a little bit more for all of the amazing scientists whose work I completely rely on to tell the story of the book. What I ended up doing in the book is putting a lot of that in the notes. So the last third of those 600-some-odd pages are the bibliography and the notes. So I'm able to speak more directly to their work and wave the flag for them, talking about how wonderful they are. I wish I could have done more of that or maybe done a podcast or something where I could really shine the light on these amazing scientists, many of whom are women, many of whom are people of color, who are really a part of this big sea change in the biological sciences, driving forward the question of sex differences in new and awesome ways, you know? Mostly because I want them to get grants. I want that for them. I wish I could just rain money down on them. But I'm not rich enough personally, but I wish I could. Also because science is a collaborative project. We often hear these stories about these standout scientists and they had their “eureka!” moments. But actually, all modern science is done by a lot of people in a lab and is deeply collaborative. And it's not a hero's story. It actually involves, it's a community story. You know what I mean? So I wish I could have done more there. And maybe that's something I end up doing in another format later just because since there were literally thousands of scientists whose work I rely on in this book, I would not then have been able to wield them as characters. But I would like, in the future, to be able to do more for that. BLAIR HODGES: Fair enough. You did tuck away a lot in the footnotes, but you also made the footnotes pretty funny. And so there's a lot of incentive, I think, you're sending people that way, instead of being the kind of footnotes where you're like, I'm never gonna check these. I found myself going to the footnotes because I knew they'd be great. CAT BOHANNON: I try and make it fun for ya. BLAIR HODGES: And people that have listened to this interview, I hope they get a sense for your sense of humor and your voice, because they come out so strongly in the book. I can't recommend this book enough. Really, Cat, this is such a fantastic book. It's got this humor, it's got pathos, there's so much here. CAT BOHANNON: Thank you so much. BLAIR HODGES: Yes, and thank you for putting it together. It's called Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. Cat, congratulations. Keep doing what you're doing. You're a powerful voice and I love this book. CAT BOHANNON: Thank you so much, it was so nice to be on your podcast. BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening. We’re just getting started on Family Proclamations. I can’t wait to share more with you, there’s so much stuff. We’ll talk about adoption, foster care, single adult life, what it’s like to be an only child, we’ll meet people who can’t have kids, we’ll talk about hat it’s like to not want any kids. We’ll talk about queer families, feminism, masculinity, post-partum depression, immigration, family cults, gender identity, caregiving for older folks, and so much more. If you enjoyed this episode, you can do two quick things for me. First, please rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts, and second, share it with a friend. The more the merrier. Thanks to the great band, Mates of State, for providing our theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I’m Blair Hodges, and I’ll see you next time. [END]   NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.

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