POM POMS

Give it up for my new monthly feature: POM POMS. Hey, cheerleaders everywhere will correct me--it's officially Pom Pons, I know--but we all get license in inventing our own acronyms, right?

POM: Product, Person, or Place Of the Month

POMS: POM Story to go along with it, because I'll never recommend anyone or anything I don't know about firsthand. Unlike Patriot Radio, I do not run stories with prefaces like, "There's this terrible book, it's undermining all we believe in. Now I haven't read it, mind you, but here's why you shouldn't either."

My POM for March, women's history month, is the book Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier. Angier, a Pulitzer-Prize winner, writes the way I want to write--she tackles the intricacies of science with a clear, funny, personal, and subversive style. Gloria Steinem blurbs: "[The book] is nothing less than liberation biology. Anyone living in or near a female body should read this book."

Angier is a master of the art of narrative (yes, science in stories--Einstein meets Kingsolver) in laying out all that science has to offer us on the female body, with chapters like:

Unscrambling the Egg: It Begins with One Perfect Solar Cell

Greasing the Wheels: Estrogen and Desire

Wolf Whistles and Hyena Smiles: Testosterone and Women

Cheap Meat: Learning to Make a Muscle

It's an eight-year-old book, so maybe some of you have already read it. I keep it in my bathroom, next to Sports Illustrated (we still have last year's issue with the cover of Joe Mauer) and USA Hockey and O. My copy is wavy with wrinkles from my bathtime soaks. Sound too heavy for your Calgon getaways? Really, no, you should give the book a try. On female aggression and our chemical make-up:

"The problem with ignoring female aggression is that we who are aggressive, we girls and women and obligate primates, feel confused, as though something is missing in the equation, the interpretation of self and impulse. We're left to wander through the thickets of . . . our roaring hungers and drives, and we're tossed in the playground to thrash it out among ourselves. . . wondering why we aren't nicer than we are, and why we want so much, and why we can't sit still."

*****

In first grade I lived in Texas and attended elementary school on an Air Force base where my dad was stationed. We had teachers from town who earned "hardship pay," extra salary for coming in to teach us military transients. I had Mrs. Dennis, a solid sixty-year-old with the bust of Auntie Em. It was my first year attending full-day school and so my first introduction to recess. Because we were in El Paso, Texas, we were always outside. The girls were assigned the parking lot for play, and there we could draw out our boxes for hopskotch or line up for Chinese jump-rope. We were like mini-inner cities, those military bases, and I was friends with many kids of color and from lower economic classes. Well, except for the officer's kids, we were all on the lower rungs.

The boys, at recess, got the grass playing field, and had a baseball diamond and the long metal slide. Room to run and bat and play tag with abandon, without fear of scraping a knee or bruising a shoulder on the hot-tar parking lot we girls were stuck with. After about a month, I couldn't stand the inequity. I snuck over to the boys' side and climbed up the tall stairs of the slide and sat at the top, blocking the boys from going down. "Hey, you can't do that. You're not even supposed to be over here." They bullied me and jostled me and then one of them shoved me down that long slide so that I landed hard on my butt down at the dirt end. He quickly flew down after me so that one of his sneakers kicked me hard in the back. I turned to him with such vengeance that he took off running, way out in the open field. I was a fast runner and tackled him. I didn't know how to punch or otherwise fight so I grabbed and bit his fleshy upper arm as hard as I could.

Later, after recess, Mrs. Dennis came over to my desk and asked me to come out to the hall. There Johnny-what's-his-name was crying, with his shirt-sleeve rolled up and the principal holding that same fleshy upper arm out, so that I could see the damage I had done. The kid had been wearing a windbreaker and a sweatshirt but I had apparently bitten so hard you could see the horseshoes of my teeth marks and the spots where I had drawn a little blood.


*****

The first book on the female body that I read front to back was Our Bodies, Ourselves. Those were the first pictures of a woman's body I saw in detail without the editing and airbrushing of Hugh Hefner and the like. Wow, it's fun to think back about how taken I was with all that new knowledge. And from Angier's book, I can see I've always got much more to learn about who we are, what we're made up of, what more we can be.