Free Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier Page A

the remainder table"? In part, yes, we're still very much a misogynist culture, and therefore the boys' stuff is good enough for girls it may even, when used judiciously on daughters, reflect a certain parental panache but never, ever vice versa. Girl goods are too silly, too icky, and, let's not mince our words, too inferior for a boy.
This thought is familiar. It's disheartening. And since we're not about to change the pattern anytime soon, it's distinctly unhelpful. So in my ongoing campaign to sweeten brackish waters and to give a female-friendly twist to an old truism, let me suggest the following: our willingness to clothe females in male garb but not the opposite, and the concomitant acceptance of the tomboyish girl and distaste for the sissyish boy, indicate, albeit on an unconscious level, an awareness of who is the real primogenitor, the legitimate First Sex, and therefore which is ultimately the freer sex. Simone de Beauvoir may have been right about a lot of sociocultural inequities, but from a biological perspective women are not the runners-up; women are the original article. We are Chapter 1, lead paragraph, descendants of the true founding citizen of Eden, whom we may cheerfully think of as Lilith, Adam's first wife. Lilith is not mentioned in the canonical Old Testament, and in the sources where she does make an appearance for example, the sixteenth-century Alphabet of Ben Sira she is predictably described as having been created after Adam, designed for his companionship and erotic pleasure. In these accounts, the couple took to quarreling when Adam announced that he was partial to the missionary position. He liked it not so much for the way it felt as for the political point it

     

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made. "You are fit to be below me and I above you," he said to Lilith. His companion refused to acknowledge her subordinate status. "Why should I lie beneath you?" she demanded. "We are both equal because we both come from the earth.'' Lilith's act of rebellion cut short her tenure in the Garden and assured that all her children would be cursed by God ever after (then again, her more pliant replacement hardly fared much better). But in my unkosher retelling of the story, Lilith was outraged at Adam's pronouncements for their imperialist trash. She knew, even if he did not, bloody hell, she was there first.
By saying that Lilith preceded Adam, that she, not he, was the one with the rib to spare, I'm not being gratuitously contrarian. In a basic biological sense, the female is the physical prototype for an effective living being. As we saw with Jane Carden, fetuses are pretty much primed to become female unless the female program is disrupted by gestational exposure to androgens. If not instructed otherwise, the primordial genital buds develop into a vulva and at least a partial vagina. (The brain may also assume a female configuration, but this far fuzzier issue we will discuss later.) By the conventional reckoning of embryology, females are said to be the "default" or "neutral" sex, males the "organized" or "activated" sex. That is, a fetus will grow into a girl in the absence of a surge in fetal hormones, with no need for the impact of estrogen, the hormone we normally think of as the female hormone. Estrogen may be indispensable for building breasts and hips later in life, and for orchestrating the monthly menstrual cycle, but it doesn't seem to have much of a role in mapping out girlness to begin with. The male body plan, in contrast, is wrought when the little testes begin secreting testosterone, müllerian inhibiting factor, and other hormones. The hormones organize or, more precisely, reorganize the primordial tissue into a masculine format.
But the term default sex has such a passive ring to it, suggesting that girls just happen, that making them is as easy as unrolling a carpet downhill; you don't even have to kick it to get it going. A number of women in biology have objected to the terminology and the