Over the years I have written features about polar bears, jaguars, tigers, cheetahs, lions, hyenas, crocodiles, turtles, pit vipers, why we curse, why we laugh, why we play, why I'm a crybaby, why I hate the beach, why women's shoes don't fit their feet, cuteness vs. beauty, empathy, altruism, anthropomorphism, laziness, the evolution of the family, childhood, menopause, pack behavior, baboons, bonobos, orangutans, lemurs, gorillas, mandrills, chimpanzees, cotton-top tamarins, dolphins, cichlids, dung beetles, yellow jackets, cockroaches, bee brains, African bee-eaters, toxic birds, toxic frogs, orchids, fungi, men's aches and pains, men's self-destructive behavior, men's effect on women's health, suicide, bad mothers, good enough mothers, my mother, my father and Timothy Leary, GI Joe dolls, the X chromosome, the Y chromosome, telomeres, the cell cycle, estrogen, testosterone, oxytocin, leptin, protein folding, free radicals, evolutionary convergence, interstellar space travel, autoimmune diseases, depression, manic-depression, happiness, love, biophilia, women in science, atheism and science, Gary Larson, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Tony Fauci, Harold Varmus, Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, Jackie Barton, Stephen Jay Gould... to name but a few.
She has some funny and memorable things to say about women and men's ideas and statements about women. One of the most gripping things she has taught me so far is what happens inside a female fetus on its way to becoming a girl.
Angier says that men have no sperm in them until they reach puberty but women are born with their eggs. Human eggs are the largest cells in a woman's body but are still very tiny, about the size of the hole left by a baby's hair poked through a piece of paper.
She writes
I said a moment ago that my daughter had all her eggs in midfetushood. In fact she was goosed up way beyond capacity, a fatly subsidized poultry farm. She had all her eggs and many more, and she will lose the great majority of those glittering germ cells before she begins to menstruate. At twenty weeks' gestation, the peak of a female's oogonial load, the fetus holds 6 to 7 million eggs. In the next twenty weeks of wombing, 4 million of those eggs will die, and by puberty all but 400,000 will have taken to the wing, without a squabble, without a peep. The attrition continues, though at a more sedate pace, throughout a woman's youth and early middle age. At most, 450 of her eggs will be solicited for ovulation, and far fewer than that if she spends a lot of time being pregnant and thus not ovulating.
Angier, Natalie (1999-04-06). Woman: An Intimate Geography (p. 2). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
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