What We Got Wrong About the Female Body (Cat Bohannon, PhD)

Listen now (45 mins) | "It's important to figure out how to have universal buy-in to the idea that we should study sex differences, right? It's not just a matter of pity. It's not..."

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Cat Bohannan is a researcher and the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Years of Evolution. It is full of fascinating detours about how the female body came to be. Today, we get into some of my favorite tidbits.

We talk about how the historical lack of research on the female body has hurt women, men—really, everyone. And Cat shares some of the latest research on what has been learned about the female body. Like, how women tend to metabolize painkillers differently than men, and why the fat around our butts and hips is quite special.

Cat breaks down the evolutionary origins of breast size and shape, and she debunks the myth that men are much larger than women. She talks about how women tend to have a bit of a boost when it comes to endurance, and why we heal better and live longer than men. We talk about how we’re all harmed by stereotype threat. And what’s really at stake for our health and lives when it comes to understanding sex differences.

MORE FROM CAT BOHANNON:

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Years of Evolution

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

It seems like the genesis for this book, you sort of lay it out in the introduction that we live in a culture where the man is essentially taken as the norm and the woman is deviant, and the man is the one that is presumed to have led culture forward, led evolutionary biology forward, and certainly continues to lead science now as the defacto subject object, right? We're much more inclined to study men because they're simpler, and I think most listeners know that, that women were not routinely included in medical research until the nineties. If then, right, there are lots of workarounds still.

CAT:

Oh, very strong. If then very strong if then the awesome win that we have in the nineties is that the FDA shifted its rules, and now you had to include females of reproductive age in your study unless you had a reason not for anything that would then be on the market as a medical treatment, any research that would lead to that essentially, and so that's a great win. We should celebrate that win. That's the thing about being a chick, right? You have to both be enraged on the regular, but you also have to celebrate your wins. You have to dammit, if for no other reason than our joy infuriates them, so that too, right? But in this case, I think it was really a scientific win to have the FDA make that shift. But the thing is, is that here we are going on 30 years later, and it is still true that women are radically under-enrolled in phase one clinical trials. And so it's one thing to change a rule, it's quite another thing to change a culture, and this is a culture of science. This is a community of scientists and clinicians that are in this paradigm shift, in this major cultural shift, and so I'm trying to get that shift to happen a little faster.

ELISE:

A little faster. Yeah. I mean, it's not core to the theme of the book, but I did not know that, for example, that there were no studies to understand the impact of general anesthesia on women until the nineties, and that we metabolize it much faster. A friend of mine just woke up during surgery last week.

CAT:

Not cool,

ELISE:

Bro. Not cool. No, no. So we metabolize it faster. Yeah,

CAT:

Yeah. That's often the case. It's often the case that we seem to metabolize many of those drugs that are used in anesthesia to put us under, and then they call it emerge, emerge into consciousness. Isn't that a lovely idea that we would rise from the lake as it were, into consciousness a bit faster, and some of it seems to be how we metabolize the drugs. There was a cool new study using rats that said also it's just sex differences and a key part of the brain. In other words, it's a liver story, it's a tissue story, it's a brain story. It's complicated, but just because it's complicated doesn't mean we shouldn't get a better sense of that. So that, yeah, I don't know. So that fewer people have to have the experience of being awake sooner than they should maybe, but also pain relief in general. We just want all of that. We want suffering to go down, and part of that is making sure you're treating the body in front of you and not a poorly modeled idea of this body in front of you.

ELISE:

Right? I'm trying to recall, but women metabolize pain, we need a higher dose of painkiller. Is that accurate or is it the opposite?

CAT:

It depends on the painkiller. That's the thing. We have a number of different oroc receptors. Those are our pain receptors. Our pain pathways do seem to have some significant sex differences, and there are different painkillers that work on different pathways. That's your basic idea. We do know that of opioid drugs, most female patients seem to need more of them to achieve that same level of pain relief than a male patient, even when that body is the same size, and you would think it's about mass, how big your body is. Sometimes you would think of it as a body fat percentage thing, but actually it also seems to have to do with our livers. Many of these things are metabolized through our livers. The female liver behaves differently. We're learning a lot of this stuff retrospectively, and we should have learned it first before the meds are on the market. That's the big thing we need to change. Oops, no more oopses maybe, or at least fewer,

ELISE:

No more oopses. The other thing that I loved learning, again, this is just in the first 20 pages of the book, is that women's fat is different and a different predictor of puberty. Can you talk about that? It was so interesting.

CAT:

Yeah, so unfortunately, like a good number of your listeners, I did experience eating disorders when I was a teenage girl, specifically preteen to older, and I really wish I had known at the time that my fat is not this cosmetic thing. It's not this superfluous feature of the body. It's not just where I store my cake, that it's actually this long evolved really integral part of our bodies that people who study fat these days call it the fat organ that is an organ system just like your brain or your lungs or your liver. So do you slice off a bit of your lungs to make yourself be more in fashion? Probably not. Maybe we should be thinking about our fat that way. So female bodies in humans, human females seem to have different butt fat. Basically, it's gluteal femoral fat, so that's your upper thighs and your hips and your buttocks.

Those fat pads, they seem to behave a little bit differently than say the fat on your stomach or the fat under your arms. They specifically store these really special lipids, these chains of long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids. Think Omega-3 think like fish oil. So we're bad at making that stuff from smaller parts, so we mostly get it from our diet, but it turns out that those things are really, really important for baby brains and retinas. So one of the theories out there is that human females are storing up these special lipids in our butts, basically our hips, our thighs, our butts from before puberty and on where it's protected. The first place you gain, last place you lose, right? Except for when you are pregnant in your third trimester and when you are breastfeeding. If you're a person that does that, okay, then it's like the baby's got a crazy straw straight to your freaking butt, and it's just sucking all of those lipids out. The idea, the theory is that, well, we needed that to build our stupidly huge human brains and our human retinas that we can't just have the baby eat it, it's going to come from us and then from our milk stores, and so we store it up over our lifetimes because these are these special fats. We need to build that stuff.

So yeah, maybe if that was how we talked about these features of female bodies, we would have a different relationship to these features of our bodies than thinking of them as a matter of fashion,

ELISE:

Right? Then you write a bit about the repercussions of liposuction and when you start taking these fat deposits out and then potentially moving them to other parts of your body or just depleting them in general, and that we just don't really understand necessarily the long-term implications of what that means.

CAT:

It's absolutely the case that your average cosmetic surgeon is not read and deep in Evo bio. That's not a thing. They are busy. They're filling out a lot of insurance forms. They're doing good things often by and large, but they are not like reconstructive surgeries, but they are not thinking about, oh, is fat a long evolved organ with functions that we barely understand? And should we really be thinking about this as a cosmetic surgery? Should we be thinking about this as non impactful? Because it does seem to be the case that when you get liposuction on one part of your body, you do have fat regrow later, but it tends to be in other areas. So if there are specific fat depots that have this special functionality and then they don't recover, what does that mean for how they function over the course of your lifespan? And we don't have that answer, man. We should have that answer, but we currently don't. People are going to run the studies, we're going to figure it out, but in general, we should be thinking about female bodies in more nuanced and more, I don't know, ethical ways.

ELISE:

It is actually quite stunning. It's not a huge part of the book, but I also thought it was interesting when you explore the evolutionary origins of breast size and shape, because your whole book in many ways is about nature and culture and how you can't necessarily trying to understand the nature is a distinct mechanism from understanding how culture drives nature. And you get more into culture in the back half of the book, and we will definitely talk about that, but it feels like we also as humans like to conflate social preferences as having some sort of natural root. And so the conversation that you have about breast size and shape is interesting because it's not necessarily correlated at all with being a more sexually desirable partner, right?

CAT:

Yeah. So it's absolutely true that a lot of people in the world, not all, but many hetero guys, many queer folk of all types and genders are into boobs. But there is this confusion about like, oh, because so many are, that must mean that they evolved the shape to attract, right? There's that idea and evolution, of course, which is all about some things do evolve to attract mates and then become this signal that we use to pass on our genes, la la, okay? But the thing is is that it's really hard to nurse babies if you're a mammalian mom, just period. Just breastfeeding is not, or tet feeding is not a simple thing for a lot of us. That's certainly true of human beings. And so you have to say, okay, wait. If evolution works by producing mutations and then cross your fingers as it were by accident, then messing with something as important as how our babies survive for the first chunks of their lives is not a small thing that if we change our breast shape and that makes it worse for them to feed, that would be terrible for the evolution of our species.

That would not be great. And so if you look out on human being chest, you can see that there are so many different types, perfectly healthy bodies that have so many different breast types. And I can tell you that actually the bigger boobs, the bigger breasts are not actually known necessarily for producing more milk. It is absolutely the case that the more desirous shape, whatever that is in that culture, smaller or larger, is not necessarily better, again, at getting milk into the kid. Maybe some things are, but the signal is so small that really there is no perfect nursing breast. And if that's the case, then actually breast shape and size have a basic model that's probably for feeding, and the rest of that variation was relatively non-harmful. And because the rest of that variation is not necessarily more desirable to the sperm makers, to the guise, that also means that there isn't a perfect shape that is then a sexual signal for them.

The simple fact is our ancestors are broadly horny. They're attracted to lots of stuff just broadly hor it. That's true of chimpanzees and bonobos and other creatures like us too. Just really good to go. A lot of the time, a lot of us historically, deep evolutionary time would've been right, but actually the evolution of breast shape was so important in humans. The first place you should look is how our babies use them, because otherwise we would've gone extinct. And it is true that because our babies have slightly flatter faces than other monkeys. If you look at our profile, our forehead was more forward than it chimps. Our mouths are closer to our noses. The best paper I found says that our particular pendulum kind of swingy breast shape with a slightly upturned nipple is really good for helping our babies not suffocate when they try to breastfeed when they're first born, just that it's good to breathe. That's why they look like this and not like a chimps. And the rest of it is just our bodies having fun over time.

ELISE:

And you could say, and I want to talk to you about stereotype threat, but you could talk too about the cultural influence of gender roles defining bodies look like. And that's where you start to see this convergence. I don't know if you know Angela Saini or you guys have met, she writes a lot about women inferior better. She's written three books. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, she was saying to me, even body size or this idea that men are inherently larger. When you look at cattle hayek and you examine that site, men and women are essentially the same size, and they're both exposed to the same amount of indoor smoke, et cetera. She's like, so it's not impossible to imagine that size differentials and or body shapes haven't been bred into us by cultural preferences, and in that instance, patriarchal culture. And so when you think about something like breast shape, how do you tease out what is a biological imperative or drive that's pure and not at all touched by the culture that we live in?

CAT:

I think it's a perfectly natural question to have. What of this is my situatedness? What of this is the world I live in and what of this is authentic to me? And what is authentic to me is because of the animal I am, and what of it is simply because of how I grew up? That's the nature versus nurture kind of thing. And in part, we ask those questions so often because it's hard to be alive, and it's hard to make moral choices, and it's hard to know what the best way to be is. And we would very much like something in the world to tell us what to do. And so we confuse what is natural, what may have deeply evolved in our bodies for guidance, for how to be. And that, of course, is a terrible idea. If you look at the natural world, there are a lot of things in there that we should not be doing just as good people.

But I think that because as a species, we are so social, we are among the most social out there, among primates, among mammals, that trying to say what is social in our bodies? What is socially shaped our desires, what is socially shaped even many of the features of our bodies and what is not is often a false question. I would say that our sociality shapes just about everything about us, not simply in our physiological developmental path, but also along our evolutionary path from det time. It is true that on average, male humans tend to be slightly larger. You can always find exceptions to this rule, but like I say in my own book, the fact of that slightly larger feature is so much less than you find in other social primates that actually tells us something about the evolution of human sociality. You know what I mean?

That actually you see this trend along the hominin line, so that's like the aine, so that's like Lucy, down, we're talking millions of years. You trace in the fossils a reduction in what we primatologists would call male male competition, male dominance, male male competition, and more of a move towards, well, not to anthropomorphize man, but more of a move towards egalitarianism, more of a move towards sex sameness, right? And so what's interesting about that is that that's actually maybe a deep story of our evolution, a move away from male competition and towards that more cooperative living, that more collaborative living, more sex egalitarianism.

ELISE:

And when you think about patriarchy as a cultural institution, it's really not that old and is not necessarily indicative of how we mostly have lived. You write about Artie as this typical single mom, we would've been trying to survive. It's really kind of new. And in many ways, the contemporary trans movement is pushing this issue of the spectrum of gender, and that this is kind of a bizarre debate in its own way, but it's also conversely reifying gender, I think at this moment in time where you see sort of the hyper-masculinity and hyper femininity, but most of us are sort of in between. And same with height and weight. And the other thing that I think is so, and there's been several people, I don't know if you know Soraya Chemaly, and there's a lot of people writing, I think it was that one research paper that came out in the early maybe 2021 or 2022, about women as endurance athletes sort of beating men, and I think they beat men in 99% of ultra-marathons of a certain distance.

CAT:

Yeah, I write about that in the Legs chapter.

ELISE:

Yep. Yeah, yeah, exactly. In the chapter about Captain Greased, is that how you say her name?

CAT:

I think it was gr. I just did the audio book and I remember being corrected, and I would have to go and check. There are many,

ELISE:

Many

CAT:

Words that I read and say rarely out loud, but she's wonderful.

ELISE:

I loved reading about her. Can you talk a little bit about her? And I know she did it with another woman.

CAT:

Wells completed. Many other women started, but that's true, again, of the men. So these were the very first class, very first cohort that was across gender of the Army Ranger School, which is this ultimate test of endurance in the US Army where you get to be a ranger. And so this is like the marine recon, this is the Navy Seals. These are the elite forces, as it were, of our many military branches in the us. And so no one had ever done it before. No female had ever been allowed to try to go through Army Ranger school, much less finished. And so she was a part of that first cohort. A lot of women started way more men, and she and two other women managed to complete, however, again, so many of the men dropped out. So let's not take this as a story about female bodies,

But let's also remember that this is a volunteer army. So if you're thinking scientifically about this, this is a self-selecting group. People who are already very physically strong are going to end up registering for this kind of thing. People who are already super fit, people who are already, you talk about grit. These are people with psychological grit, however you define that, right? So these are already exceptional bodies, and one of the reasons I wrote about her of course is because until this moment that was talked about as this ultimate test of manhood that loaded term, but very much the physical idea of it, you had to do so many things with upper body strength, which statistically female bodies tend not to have as much of partially because our upper arm bones are shorter, and so just because of the physics of the thing, we tend to have slightly, and then there's a muscle mass distribution.

There are many physiological reasons, the average body, but again, we're not talking about average bodies. So these women who are competing had slightly different than average bodies that were very strong, and they managed to finish this incredible endurance test. And the reason they did it well, they wanted to be army officers of a certain type, and it was a big accomplishment. The reason the army let them do it was more complicated, right? Well, one was because the army was under a lot of pressure. Should female soldiers be allowed to compete in forward facing combat troops? There are a lot of women in the army, man, there are so many, so many, but the army is huge. You can be a person running radar and be in the army, but are you going to be a forward facing combat troop, elite combat troops, and does your physical whatever get in the way of that?

Is it going to get in the way of the cohesion of the group? The psychological thing is they're a brotherhood that depends on everybody having a penis, basically. And so they wanted to actually let women compete because then they could say that they did whether or not they succeeded. So there's that kind of PR move. It was also true as I write about in the book, that some of the main guys who were running the Army Ranger School were under pressure to lower their standards, their physical competitive standards because there were fewer people qualifying. And so there's a recruitment problem. Now I'm a pacifist, so let's set all of our feelings about the military aside. This isn't a great glorifying of the army. This is just literally how do they work and why did they do this? So they were also quietly motivated to let women compete in the Army Ranger School because they didn't want to lower their standards because they could say, well, if women are supposed to be weaker and they can succeed, then here's a good reason not to lower our standards.

So it's actually a really complex moment. Weirdly, in the military, these women competing to become army rangers, they did succeed. It was amazing. And so I use that as a kind of frame to investigate the evolution of our musculoskeletal system and what do we know statistically in the sciences about sex differences in this space and where might it matter and where might not it matter actually. And then that really amazing thing about how female bodies do seem to have a little bit of a boost when it comes to endurance. Our endurance strength is actually pretty strongly sex differentiated, which is interesting. We still haven't figured out all the mechanisms for it physiologically. We're still investigating it. Some of it is down to the very cells and how they utilize their substrates, how they use energy. In other words, there's some sex differences there in muscle cells. There's a lot of stuff in other words that might build this complex difference, but that it's there is worth looking into.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, and it also challenges, which I think is good for all of us who want to continue to expand and grow our understanding of who we are and where we come from. It certainly expands the idea that women were this fair, weaker cave dwelling, foraging part of society, wholly dependent on men to protect and provide. That's always interesting too, when you look at how creative and multi-varied our current culture is, that of course, we existed in these various ways before when we would've been far less concerned with, again, reifying sex roles and saying, no cat into the cave.

CAT:

Also, we didn't live in caves that much in Africa. Many of our hominin ancestors were totally living in trees and or open plane and or no shelter turtle. So that too. Anyway, back to the main text.

ELISE:

Yeah, and I loved, just as another footnote to this part about the military that as you mentioned, one of the primary concerns about integrating women into these bands of brothers would be that it would break these bonds of belongingness, or they would not have faith that these women could carry themselves and them through combat, and that was also not shown to be true. So that's great.

CAT:

Absolutely not by the military's own studies, including in the Marines, who were some of the biggest resistors to the idea of cross-sex groups. Yeah, absolutely. It's this idea of group cohesion is so, so important in any group under stress that has to do difficult things at the military, by definition. Many cases, that's a thing, but it's defined as brotherhood. It's defined as brotherhood. And I think, and what I don't talk about as much in the book, I just lay out the studies, is I think there's a deep seated idea that we can't form close, reliable, intense, awesome bonds across the sexes and across the genders. There's that idea that we can only be tight with other people who are exactly like us, and actually, no, no, actually our whole species is famously good at forming tight, amazing, slightly inexplicable bonds with people who are radically unlike us. Yeah,

ELISE:

It made me laugh when you make the point that of the millions slash billions of people who live on this planet or the millions maybe that you'll encounter in your life, there are very few of them that you have any interest in having sex with.

CAT:

Yes,

ELISE:

Yes. And yes, this idea that somehow the sex drive is so pronounced that if you're in the proximity of the opposite sex, you would be compelled to sleep with them is crazy.

CAT:

It's legit crazy. Yes. I mean, 8 billion people in the world. Okay. You are not attracted to the majority of people in the world. Even remotely. Even remotely. No, I think it's actually, it's not just a disservice. I think it's degrading to all men and boys to tell the story. You know what I mean?

I think many women and girls, but especially adult women are just equal partners in building rape culture and this idea of not just permissiveness, but also bad ideas of masculinity and bad ideas of what their sexuality is supposed to look like in that hetero context.

ELISE:

Well, I think it goes back to this idea of the social container and stereotype threat, which I really want to talk about with you, which is this idea that we have that, for example, that women and girls are bad at math. You tell a woman that you give her a math test, she will perform less. Well, this holds across every slice of culture that we can to stereotypes, which is wild. But it gives you a sense of how trainable behavior is or how we comply with these ideas, even when they're not true at all.

CAT:

It's absolutely the case that what you can really rely on in any reasonably cognitively functional person is that we are attending to social signals. Some of us do it a little bit more accurately than others. Neurodiversity is a thing, but we're all doing it to a certain degree. And if that's the case, then it would be absolutely weird to think that all of that attention the human brain gives to social signaling wouldn't affect its basic functionality day to day, year to year, minute to minute. Of course it does. Of course it does, and it will not be conscious. So here's a moment in the sciences that's both disappointing, but but disappointing, but fine, but okay, and sometimes a good thing. So stereotype threat research when it first came out, and this is the idea that if you expose a girl to the idea that girls are bad at mouth, then she'll perform more poorly.

When it first came out, it was very, very popular in psych, and in social psych it was like woo. And there was this flood of research around it, and some of that research was good, and some of it was poorly constructed, turns out. And so then there was a whole crisis of replicability in psych. That means that if someone did the same experiment again, you wouldn't come up with the same results, which is a big thing that psychology has been wrestling with. So this field in particular turned out to have some bad research. I still think it's the case that stereotype threat is actually a known effect. I think that you can create it in many known scenarios. It's actually really important to be able to say, we screw over girls by telling them they're bad at math because we do on every tier. Right?

ELISE:

Well, and I think it aligns with people's lived experiences too, like the way that we acculturate boys and men, that they're not as feeling we privilege the heart over the soft and the masculine over the feminine, and the thinking over the feeling, and then suggest that men think and women feel this definitely has implications culturally, and I think I loved the part at the end about longevity and the durability of women compared to men, and you're very clear that we don't understand whether women's bodies are built in a way that they endure, but that the research is clear. I would say that, of course, there's a social factor there, which is that men are lonely. Men are not conditioned for relationship building and caring and culture, and I think this kill them, or they don't have the systems that they need in order to survive, and they're more dependent. There's research that bereaved men tend to die much, much faster than women,

CAT:

And some of that is social, and some of that is long evolved physiological stuff where you see the male body sing aging in certain tissues at a much faster rate. And you do see that in the cardiovascular system especially, but in many, many systems, you see these average, again, under the hump, the curve, there are always exceptions, but these average male bodies, look, we are more complicated as a species than just two sexes. We're talking a bit that these gross binaries, because gross meaning the mathematical term, gross averages, because they're still a useful tool to understanding if sex is driving a difference here. And it's absolutely the case that the average male dies sooner, and it's absolutely the case that the average male's cardiovascular system is aging faster. Some of that's explained by habit. Don't smoke, just don't smoke tobacco. Please don't do that to your body.

If you're addicted, you'll be happy to know that your lungs can heal really fast if you quit. Don't think of it as a lifetime sentence. Actually, lungs are amazingly good at clearing damage from smoke. Moving on, there's your PSA, but it's also true. It's also true that, okay, it's not just smoke. There are things that are physiological there, but weirdly, the thing about women living longer average women, average female bodies is that we might actually live even longer healthier lives if it weren't for medical inequity. That's a social thing that we don't actually often account for in these big demographic studies. For example, we know that there's this thing called the mortality morbidity paradox. We live longer, but we're sicker after we pass menopause, especially our bodies give us more aches and pains, more problems, more autoimmune stuff. There's so many things about very much being alive, but not enjoying it as much if you like about being female, especially as we age.

But we don't know how much of that is driven by health inequities in our medical systems and sexism versus the body itself. Autoimmunity in general, we think is definitely a physiological sex thing, but the fact that we're diagnosed later on average than male patients for many different things means that many different conditions have more time to cause damage over time, and that can lead to chronic pain, to chronic lifelong things into that morbidity problem that plays into that health inequity problem. So it's actually not so easy to disentangle what of this is the basic sex difference, and what of this is some bullshit about sexism, about the patriarchy, about medical inequities, some of which is also driven not simply by sexism, but by a lack of models, a lack of studying female bodies, which means that the best intended medical professional who's wanting to do best by you isn't given the tools they need. So it's all of it. It's all of it. But weirdly, the cool or terrible thing is that if we solved all of that, if we solved all of the medical inequity things, we might live a lot longer than males with much better health. And we don't know, and I don't necessarily want that either. So I think we should save it. We should solve it for both of us.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, and maybe there's always the potential that this is such a tasty tidbit that women who suffer from traumatic brain injury do much better in recovery because of the presence of, is it estrogen and other hormones, and now they're trying to isolate that and to give it to men.

CAT:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's very much in clinical trials. So all these things take time to figure out in studies, but I can tell you that any ER doc will tell you that if you have a female patient come in with a traumatic brain injury and a male patient come in same age, same general health with the same injury, that female patient is going to have a better prognosis, and we don't entirely know why that is. So some think maybe it's the estrogens and progesterone that that is protective in some way. For example, for people who are menstruating, you can see and are on birth control, you see along those hormone shifts that they also fall more at certain points in their menstrual cycle. Our balance is messed up by our hormones and our recovery from certain kinds of brain injuries are also shaped then by our hormones even over the course of a month. So we need to untangle all that. But the cool thing, which I do talk about in the book is that maybe we can also use this to save men, because

Now there are studies saying, okay, if we give that traumatized brain a kind of bolus of female sex hormones, can we make them less damaged over time? Can that help protect them? Can that help them recover? And do we need to do that through an IV or does it need to be right in the tissue? And they're trying to figure all of that out, and it's hard to study, but it's really important to figure that out because maybe we could make those patients who do more poorly, suffer less by just in this specific way, making them more female.

ELISE:

Well, and then to go back to longevity, I sure know a lot of men who are obsessed with longevity and

CAT:

Good and bad in that. Yes.

ELISE:

Yep. They could spend that energy trying to understand what it is that makes women live longer and then transplant that into their own lives.

CAT:

Yes, yes. Talk about buy-in, right? It's important to figure out how to have universal buy-in to the idea that we should study sex differences, right? It's not just a matter of pity. It's not just a matter of reducing the suffering of females, though that should be enough, but it's not just about, it's also that weirdly, we're going to save a lot of male lives by figuring out why they die so much, why they suck at healing. So obviously, and so often why they get more infections across their lifespan, literally from birth. A male baby gets more infections across that kid's lifespan into adulthood, and often their prognosis are worse, but not always, but often, yeah, we need to solve that. I'm married into tech as an industry, so I can tell you I know a lot of people obsessed with longevity. It's very much in that culture here on the West Coast.

Good and bad of that in the tech bros. A lot of bad Mars isn't going to solve it, and living forever isn't going to solve it. Turns out, guys just putting that out there as a truth. No, it's true. It's true. I do think that the majority of people who actually research this stuff though, are much more interested in your health span than your lifespan. It really comes back to reducing suffering. You don't want to live forever in pain. You want to live as much life as you can with less pain. That's the actual goal.

ELISE:

Yep. No, a hundred percent. Well, and are you going to write, is there another book coming? There

CAT:

Is. It will have to do with sex differences. It's going to have to do with the health of female folk across the lifespan and all of the cool new stuff. We are finally learning about health differences and what we're supposed to do with all of that. So not an evolutionary story, but a human story.

ELISE:

Fun. Yeah. Well, I look forward to it. These are some really interesting stats about longevity. This was even shocking to me. So she writes about how centenarians used to be unicorns. Now, the United States has more than 53,000 of them. Canada has nearly 11,000. Japan has more than 80,000 Italy, 19,000, the UK just over 15,000, and by and large, they're not men. More than 80% of today's centenarians are female. So that's really interesting to me just because it suggests that yes, there's something perhaps, I mean, I think it's probably a social biological combo as most things are, but what's happening here and how do we extend those benefits to everyone?

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