Posts Tagged ‘Sex at Dawn’

Six Tips for Strong Writing That Have Nothing to Do With Word Choice

December 21, 2012
Some of my notebooks from the last few years.

Some of my notebooks from the last few years.

You’ve heard them all, right? Ban adverbs. Show, don’t tell. Be concise. Avoid the passive voice.

After last week’s Freshly Pressed bonanza on my tips for building your freelance writing career, I thought I should follow up with some practical, non-threadbare tips on the actual writing – without telling you how you should put your words together.

(A warm welcome, by the way, to all the new subscribers. I loved your comments. It’s great to have you on board.)

1)   Mingle with the Mortals.

Enjoying life up there in your ivory tower?

I didn’t think so. Because real writers are collaborators.

Of course writing will always require a lot of focused solo work: my long-suffering husband knows I’m checking out for a few hours whenever I say, “Babe, I have to write.”

The writer protagonists in Stephen King novels are always departing for deserted cabins in Maine or secluded hotels to pen their works with no distractions – but look what happens to them.

Good writing needs good cooperation.

A quality editor is not trouncing all over your toils when he or she requests changes. They are working with you to bring your piece in line with the publication’s needs.

Collaboration over ego is also essential when you’re working as a copywriter – not only must you tailor the content to the client’s often unpredictable feedback, you are just one member of a team that may include other writers, designers, and creative directors.

As an added bonus, you can enjoy controversies like the one that came up last month, while I was writing copy about a ritzy farmers market and became embroiled in a discussion with a designer and an account executive about the correct spelling of “pierogi.”

Whenever you see your words as the sole province of your own mind, you’re not working as well as you could be. Don’t see others’ suggestions as infringements. See it as playtime for the brain and an opportunity for you to strengthen your work.

It’s not criticism. It’s a brain park.

Holier-than-thou Example:

Last spring, I wrote about a production of “The Island,” an Athol Fugard play. Because my in-laws are from South Africa, I added a hint of their experience to my perspective on the production, but not too much – a review shouldn’t be about the critic.  However, when I turned the piece in, my editor made an unusual request.  He wanted me to increase the personal perspective.  So I re-worked the piece, adding in some of my in-laws’ experiences to demonstrate real life under Apartheid. The final article was much better for my editor’s suggestion.

2)  Get good at gab.

You might think putting together a first-class story or profile is all about your writing skills.

Wrong.

If you want to write a good story, you need to do a good interview.

This is especially true if you’re dealing with someone who’s already a public figure, or who is used to giving media interviews. Be prepared to get past responses that have been vetted or canned by PR handlers, or just ossified in lots of other interviews – unless you want to write a story with the same stuff that every other writer got.

But your interpersonal skills also apply to the other end of the spectrum – ordinary folks who are not accustomed to talking to press. It’s nerve-wracking, giving your words to a stranger and trusting her to understand your story and tell it with accuracy and professionalism.

When I have time, I start with small talk in the interest of tuning into my subjects and mirroring their mood and demeanor. If they’re effervescent and friendly, I match their energy. If they razz me, I zing them right back. If they’re formal and serious, I take a similar tone. When the subject feels comfortable with me, they’re more likely to share.

If you can’t strike up an engaging conversation with a stranger, how can you get the information that will make a great story?  And the beauty of this skill is that you don’t have to wait until you have an assignment to practice it. Go out of your way to speak with strangers at parties or events, because everyone has a story. Practice asking questions and listening in a way that draws others out.

I don’t care what kind of writer you are. Any time life gives you an opportunity to practice interacting effectively with other people, you are building the skills that make you a good communicator on the page as well as off.

Holier-than-thou Example:

It might sound strange, but a lot of my interview skills were actually built during my years at my former day job, as a tour guide at a large historic site. Interacting with hundreds of people every day, and giving tours with the goal of having an hour-long conversation with tour groups, instead of talking at them, was the best possible practice for building quick and effective rapport with strangers, and encouraging them to speak up.

If you want an example of an interview that I particularly enjoyed doing and that I think turned out well, check out my chat with Christopher Ryan, author of the controversial bestseller Sex at Dawn.

3)  Bury “yes” and “no.”

Part of giving a good interview (and therefore writing a good story) is adequate research and preparation of your questions in advance.

But don’t just bombard your subject with concrete questions. In most interviews I do, just as the person thinks we’re finishing, I make a completely open-ended inquiry.

I ask if there is anything important we haven’t talked about, or anything extra they want to tell me. For people accustomed to speaking with the press, I ask if there’s something reporters never ask about.

Be patient and don’t be afraid of a few moments of dead air while your subjects think. You wouldn’t believe the stuff you can get when you open the floor like that, including great anecdotes for your lede.

Holier-than-thou Example:

Earlier this year, I worked on a feature about the growth of entrepreneurship in my home state of Pennsylvania. I went into my interviews assuming that a lot of that growth has to do with the visibility of icons like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs, but a flexible approach in my questions let one expert give me a whole other perspective on the topic that turned out to be the uniting theme of the whole piece.

4)  Quit Writing.

You heard me. Knock it off.

How many times have I been slogging through a complicated feature telling myself that the world is going to end if I don’t finish this @#$%er today?

When you can’t seem to tap those ideas, tell a good story or integrate your research with your interviews, and you’re considering telling your editor that you were insane to accept this assignment, walk away for awhile. Preferably overnight.

Often, the key to writing a good piece is knowing when to give yourself a break.

Holier-than-thou Example:

Last winter I sat down to write a magazine feature about Canadian innovations in helicopter safety. But it was all too much. I couldn’t tell the pilots’ stories, describe my flights, incorporate the statistics and explain the regulations. No writer alive could do it. It was ridiculous.

So I put the horrible thing aside and messed around for the rest of the day, cooking and blogging.

Then I got up the next morning and wrote it easily.

That’s why I almost always work at least one day ahead of my deadlines on major features. I am amazed at the number of times a story has seemed impossible to finish one day, and a breeze the next.

5)  Listen to what you’ve written.

If you want to see if you’ve written a good piece, make sure to experience it with your ears instead of just your eyes.

Some of my writer pals love to work in coffee shops. I can’t do it, because before I send a piece in to an editor, any editor, I read it aloud to myself beforehand, and damned if I’m going to do that in a crowded Starbucks.

Hearing the words, instead of simply reading them, will do wonders for catching repetitive phrases, choppy transitions and awkward sentences that slide right past your brain when you don’t try your work out on your vocal cords.

Holier-than-thou Example:

Since I do this to every single piece I publish, I have nothing for you except the assurance that reading my pieces out loud to myself has caught truckloads of groan-inducing missteps. Of course the work still isn’t perfect. But it’s a hell of a lot better.

6)  Polish Your Armor.

Keep your attitude strong and your writing will follow suit.

Did you think being a published writer would be all warm fuzzies for your genius? If so, feel free to leave something snippy in the comments and bounce.

Put on your thick skin.

I’m not just talking about the inevitable rejection slips from literary magazines (maybe your work has been accepted – if so, you have my grudging congratulations).

I’ve had a cornucopia of criticisms from my editors. My lede doesn’t make sense. My argument is unoriginal. There’s no compelling narrative. My stuff is boring.

Editors are not always correct because they’re editors. Sometimes you brush off the criticism and try a different market.  Other times, you admit they’re right and get to work. Either way, you can’t let the negative comments sap your inspiration.

And that’s even before you get to your audience.

Through online comments, letters to the editor and social media, I’ve heard from readers who think that pieces I’ve written are foolish, pointless or outright lies. Others are simply out to insult me personally.

After I wrote a blog post about the question of restaurant bans on young children, I got this:

“You can’t draw. Your drawings are awful. Either try harder or stop trying. Actually, your writing is also terrible, your attitude is so self-congratulatory and smug it almost defies belief. Get off the internet and as far away from the rest of the human race as you can manage. We don’t want you and we sure as hell don’t need you.”

Hm.

Holier-than-thou Example:

During last year’s Philadelphia Fringe Festival, I gave a positive review to an unconventional art/theater mash-up called the Art Anti-Gallery that questioned the genesis and ownership of art itself. The piece garnered two letters to the editor.

One said “Gosh, this was fun to read! And provocative: ‘whose art is it, anyway?’ What is it we writers/artists need to protect?”

Another wrote, “The trouble with Modernism’s free license for any or everything is that it appeals to the lowest possible denoms.” He went on to call me a “mindless” critic encouraging “inanities.”

Who is right?

I have no idea. I will be over here, writing some more.

What are your tips for strong writing?

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Posted in Pompous Philosophizing, Writing | 24 Comments »

The Ultrasound Wars, a Better Use for McMansions, and the Surprising Truth About Group Sex: an Interview with Christopher Ryan, co-author of “Sex at Dawn”.

June 21, 2012

The first thing Christopher Ryan, Ph.D., co-author of the New York Times bestselling book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, wants you to know is that he hates being called Dr. Ryan. Secondly, he’ll let you know that everything you thought about human sexuality is probably wrong.

The authors in Cambodia, 2003. Courtesy of SexatDawn.com.

Ryan and his wife, Dr. Cacilda Jethá, published Sex at Dawn in 2010. In it, they argue that even though my Facebook feed is all weddings, all the time, monogamy is not natural to Homo Sapiens. Based on a host of evolutionary, physiological, anthropological and sociological scholarship, Ryan and Jethá maintain that we evolved in large social groups that shared shelter, food, child-rearing, and yes, sex, for millions of years. The monogamous family unit of a husband, wife and their children trumpeted in western society today is no more than an invention of the last few thousand years, when the advent of agriculture led to new economic patterns that emphasized social hierarchies, paternalism, and possessions over cooperation and sexual freedom. Now, the invention of marriage is failing us.

It’s a challenging topic, to say the least. Best of all, Ryan and Jethá do not presume to give advice to their readers about how they should live their lives in light of this information.

Recently, Christopher Ryan was kind enough to have an in-depth chat with me via Skype about his book’s themes.

Alaina Mabaso: Your book is challenging some cherished notions of modern marriage. Do you think being husband and wife co-authors affects acceptance of your research? Does working with your spouse mean it’s easier for people to give credence to your joint conclusions? Or does presenting this thesis as a married couple make for a bigger challenge in getting your message across?

Christopher Ryan: I think it’s probably been helpful in making people willing to open the book. Whether or not we were married, having both a man’s and a woman’s perspective incorporated into the book at least makes people more willing to take a look at it. Once they get into the book, it doesn’t matter who wrote it. But that initial acceptance is affected by the fact that we co-authored it.

AM: One of your book’s core messages is that attitudes about sexual monogamy did not evolve in early human beings, but that they’re the result of changes in our society over the last few thousand years versus the last few million years of our evolution. Do you think we would be able to incorporate what you call “a more flexible approach to sexual fidelity” into modern life without changing the economic factors that give rise to the modern nuclear family in the first place?

CR: Yeah, I think so, without changing modern life fundamentally, but maybe just changing it around the edges a little bit. For example, Portland Oregon is still very much part of the capitalist western world, but there’s a much higher rate of polyamory and other unconventional types of romantic configurations. You can see the same sort of thing in places like Sweden, where it’s a socialist government, but still part of the western capitalistic money-based world. In Sweden, Holland and Scandinavian countries, you have much higher levels of non-typical marital structures.  Single women are more willing to face motherhood knowing that they’re getting economic assistance from the state, as opposed to getting a man to commit to providing that assistance. So I think there are very minor adjustments we can make in the economic system that make these more convergent family structures possible.

AM: This reminds me of how some Republican politicians say that the root of our economic problem in this country is single mothers – that’s why we have poverty. Sounds like you’d say they’re off-track.

CR: Well, I think they’ve got the causality backwards. I think that you’re going to have single mothers in pretty much every society. I don’t think that per capita there are more single mothers in Sweden, but what I mean to say is that single mothers don’t face the same sorts of economic challenges they face in the US. The US has a much higher rate of teen pregnancy and single motherhood, but also we have a much higher rate of children living in poverty. I think what when you force mothers into a situation where they have to fend for themselves economically, or where they try to fend for themselves by getting an economic commitment from a man, that falls through a lot of the time. So you end up with a lot of single mothers living in poverty. If you provide a safety net, I don’t think you’ll end up with more single mothers. You’ll just end up with far fewer single mothers living in poverty.

It’s like people on the Right arguing that tolerance of gay rights makes more gay people. That’s ridiculous.

AM: I was looking through the reader comments on your website, and one in particular caught my eye. It reads, “I suspect there is an element of evolutional change occurring in women directly related to the social norms that enforce monogamy and denial of the female sex drive.” I was really interested in the part of your book that posits declining sperm counts in modern man could be because human testicles didn’t evolve for monogamy, so in your opinion, are women affected in any measurable physiological way by modern mores that regard them as male property? Could this evolution in sexual practice ultimately be physical as well as social and economic?

CR: That’s an interesting possibility. I don’t think there’s any way to measure that at this point. If there are physiological changes taking place, it’d happen very slowly, so they would barely perceptible at this point. The thing about the testicular change is that the DNA controlling testicular tissue is the fastest-reacting DNA in the body to evolutionary pressures.

As far as female reproduction, I could imagine that there would be changes in the bacterial content of the reproductive tract for a woman who only has sex with one man as opposed to several. In fact – and I’m just talking off the top of my head right now – it would be interesting to know if that has any affect on susceptibility to STDs. Because there is some evidence showing that the immunological response against STDs in promiscuous primates is much stronger than it is in monogamous or polygamous primates. What I’m basically doing is extrapolating from the hygiene hypothesis, which says that the reason more kids have asthma and allergies and things is that they’re not exposed to as many pathogens when they’re babies. They don’t develop the immune response: it’s compromised by the cleanliness of the modern world.

AM: All the hand sanitizer.

CR: Exactly. So applying that to sexuality, we could say, well, if women evolved to have several ongoing sexual partners throughout their lives, and in fact they only have one, maybe they’re not being exposed to certain bacteria and other foreign bodies that they really need, that confer immunological benefits on their children.

AM:  Are you familiar with this study that just came out of the University of Tennessee last month? From the article on their website, it’s asking, “Why did we stop being promiscuous and decide to settle down and start families?”

[This study has used a “mathematical model” to posit that monogamous human families evolved when females began choosing low-status males that were good providers instead of high-status males who were always fighting to keep their harems.]

CR: Is this the mathematical model about the low-status males?

AM: Yes, the media has branded it as this sort of evolutionary triumph of the nerd.

CR: You know, Time Magazine sent that article to me a few days before it was published, asking me for comment, and I took a look and wrote back to them and said, I’m not going to have any comment on this; it seems like pure bullshit to me. To me, when you end up with these “mathematical models” that have no basis whatsoever in any sort of observed behavior, my eyes just glaze over. And as I said to Time, I’m not enough of a statistician to be able to comment on the methodology.

AM: I watched your interview on The Point in March about the whole Rush Limbaugh slut-shaming brouhaha and the current political movement to restrict access to contraceptives. And you said, “Some idiots are proclaiming it, and the rest of us are shaking our heads in disbelief.” You also say on that program that these debates are the “last gasp” of the religious Right before they “go over the waterfall”. But I feel like I’m not so sure about that. It seems like things are getting more intense. And I liked what your co-panelist, Ana Kasparian, had to say. She points out that American women are being arrested and prosecuted for miscarriages. This doesn’t feel like a declining last gasp for me. So what makes you so sure this is on the wane and not getting worse?

CR: Well, first of all I’m not sure about anything, so I don’t want to come across like I know what the future holds. But the basis for my statement is that I think what’s happening in the United States is clearly happening on two opposing tracks. On the one side you’ve got these Republicans in Virginia that have the state mandate for the vaginal probe for women who want to have an abortion and all sorts of ridiculous things.

[The illustration above is from my November post, Mississippi's Amendment #26: Personhood for All (Unless You're Female).]

 CR: But at the same time, you have people like Dan Savage becoming main-stream. Dan hasn’t changed. The stream has changed. You’ve got acceptance for the right of same-sex marriage swinging 15 points in ten years or less. So the reason I think it’s the last gasp is that people who really get excited about that stuff are old white people. And they’re going to be gone soon. And the country is going to be much less white. As the current under-30 crowd takes positions of power, we’re going to find that these sorts of things aren’t interesting to them. They don’t give a damn. They’re not that concerned with these reactionary ideals.

Also I think people from your generation are going to have a lot of serious shit to deal with, and they’re not going to have the luxury to get upset about this stuff.

AM: No kidding. If we’re dealing with a climate meltdown and the end of social security, we’ll have a lot on our plates.

CR: Exactly. A lot of these social issues are the result of people having too much time and money on their hands.

AM: But don’t you think that, in general, when you look back at our history, that these things are pendulum swings? Even if my generation is much more socially progressive and not so concerned with those ideas, do you think there could be a swing back again?

CR: It does happen. But I think the pendulum is swinging more toward acceptance and sexual freedom at this point. Here we are, two years after this book came out, and I’m still doing two or three interviews every day. But I’m not famous. I don’t have a TV show. Whatever’s holding the interest is just the idea of the book. To me, that’s a pretty strong indication that there’s a lot of hunger; people know the current model doesn’t work. So they’re looking for a replacement. So to me, that’s evidence that changes happen very quickly in the US on these issues. And I think that the more failure that there is of the current paradigm, the more willing people are to look at other paradigms or other systems. Which can be extremely dangerous – I’m not saying that’s always a good thing – that’s how the Nazis came to power in Germany. The current system breaks down, and then the options are considered. That’s when we have to be really careful. I do think we’re in that kind of a period now.

AM: Obviously you’re hoping to shift people’s perceptions and knowledge in a major way with this book. So what I’m curious about is if there’s a particular fact or point of view you uncovered in your research that was especially challenging to you, or that made for a major shift in your own thinking?

CR: Ok…The first time I was ever in a group sex situation, it was completely unlike what I was expecting. It was with a woman and a friend. The woman wanted to be with two men. I talked to my friend, and he said, ok, why not, and the three of us ended up in this situation. And at one point I went over to change the music…I think it was so long ago I was turning over a cassette – can you believe that?

AM: I’ve heard that those existed.

CR: It may even have been an 8-track. But anyway, they were having sex and I was messing with the music, and I poured myself a glass of wine, and I remember thinking, this is nothing like what I thought. I thought it’d be like this super-porn situation. Like really wild and hot. But I was just sitting there, and they were having sex right in front of me, and it just felt like they really trusted me. And I’m sitting there naked, drinking wine, and I trusted them. The sense of friendship was overwhelming to me. And that made me stop and rethink everything.

I guess in a lot of ways, that’s what the book is about: that for human beings, sex isn’t about reproduction. Reproduction is a byproduct. It’s really about establishing trust, and intimacy, and friendship, and maintaining these complex social networks where you really have to trust one another, where survival is based on sharing. So if you can share your sexual partners and you can share these erotic experiences, it’s a hell of a lot easier to share food and to take care of the kids together and to share a big shelter together, which is the way our ancestors lived.

AM: It strikes me again, listening to you now, how much it seems like sexuality has been sequestered off from everything else in our lives, and it’s so interesting to think about sex as something that was a resource that everyone shared, allowing for friendship and social bonds other than that romantic bond that we’ve wedged it into nowadays.

CR: It makes sense because nowadays just about everything is sequestered. We have our own kids and our own house and our own washing machine, so it’s all about individual ownership, and breaking our social unit down to the smallest possible size. You could look at it as a consumerism conspiracy, so we’ll all buy our own stuff. Or it could be an unintended consequence of the way we live. I read recently that there are more people living alone in the US right now than ever before, as a percentage of the population. Which is strange and unnatural for our species.

AM: The thing that strikes me too, in all our recent economic woes, is that you hear all these reports about how many adult kids are living with their parents, or how many elderly parents are living with their children, as if it’s a current ill of our society, a result of terrible economics, that we’re having these multigenerational families. And part of me is saying, shouldn’t that be more like the model that is more natural to us? That families would naturally congregate that way?

CR: Yeah, sometimes people ask me if I see ways that these ideas [from Sex at Dawn] could play out in the future. And one of the things I often think about are these McMansions – big houses in the suburbs that are sitting empty and probably going to get torn down. Yes, wanting to live apart from your parents is an important psychological state. But think about how cool it would be, in these big houses with five bedrooms and four-car garages, if several different women got together with their kids and the men they’re involved with, and all lived together in the house, and shared the washing machine and shared a few cars. It would be economically much better for them – take care of each other’s kids, cooperate. So I think you’re right that sometimes bad economics push us into taking care of each other in ways that leave us feeling much happier than we would have been if everyone had plenty of money and we could isolate ourselves.

AM: A lot of my readers are writers themselves, and one thing that struck me so much about your book is how wonderfully it’s written. I read a lot of nonfiction, and a lot of it is dry, dry, dry. So do you have any advice for other science or nonfiction writers on how to make their prose engaging?

CR: Well, thank you. First of all, not everyone would agree with you about the writing style. I would say, of the negative responses to the book, one of the major themes is that a lot of people don’t like the style because they think it’s too conversational. A lot of people, particularly in science, think that serious ideas can only be discussed in a serious tone. And I personally believe that’s bullshit.

AM: it’s like when scholars would write in Latin so regular folks couldn’t read their stuff.

CR: Exactly. They want to be able to look down their nose at everybody. I think for me, good writing sounds like someone talking. It sounds conversational. I’m in a somewhat different situation than most nonfiction writers, and particularly science writers, because most science writers are scientists who decided to write. And I’m a writer who decided to study science.

AM: You have a BA in English.

CR: Yeah. I was a writer long before I was interested in sexuality. But as far as advice for writers, the problem is that a lot of people who are doing this are worried about what their colleagues are thinking. I’ve got the luxury of not worrying about any of that. So that makes it easier to just write whatever the hell I want to.

AM: I think obviously the subject matter of your book really grabs people, because human beings are obsessed with sex no matter who we are, but I think part of your book’s popularity really is owed to the style of your writing. Have you received any responses to the book that were particularly surprising to you? Anything you would not expect?

CR: The positive responses I didn’t expect. I expected a lot more anger and rejection. First of all, I didn’t even expect anything. I didn’t expect it to be published. The whole thing was a big surprise. But once it became clear that it was going to be published, I expected a lot more angry responses from conservative sources, but I haven’t heard anything much from them.

AM: Maybe they haven’t read it.

CR: Part of it is that they haven’t read it, and part of it is that the Christian Right has been completely discredited in their statements about sexuality from their ongoing scandals, from priests’ sex-abuse cases to various right-wing politicians being caught in all sorts of strange situations.

The overwhelmingly positive response to the book has been a surprise. I’m surprised that it won two awards from organizations of sex therapists and relationship counselors. I was really happy to see them embrace the book rather than feel defensive, because we do criticize the marital-industrial complex. Some of the most touching reviews I read have been from sex therapists who said, Wow, this explains what I’ve been seeing for twenty years. Now it all makes sense. It’s been wonderful.

AM: Are there any more books in your future?

CR: I’ve got a contract to publish another book which is going to be more of a holistic examination of some of the difficulties of modern life in the context of evolution – examining the questions of how biology and culture are in conflict. That will be out in 2013. And we’re putting together a community website for people who are interested in these ideas to meet each other and discuss, and there is a dating component to it as well.

AM: well, with all that, huge thanks for taking the time to chat with us.

CR: It’s my pleasure.

Further reading: Christopher Ryan recommends A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons, By Robert Sapolsky.

For another helping of scintillating nonfiction interview action, check out my chat with author Mary Roach. 

Find me on Twitter @AlainaMabaso.


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Posted in Interviews | 23 Comments »

Read At Your Own Risk: Five Books That Rocked My Brain

April 16, 2012

Bearer of great ideas...or so I've heard.

A few years ago, when I still had what the world calls a “real” job, I crossed paths on my worksite with a new hire.

She gave me a beautiful smile and said, “Do you like Kierkegaard?”

The short, out loud answer was “I don’t know.” The longer, internal answer was holy crap, I was just pegged as the kind of girl who can talk early European existential philosophers when really I’m a total ignoramus.

It’s not to my credit that I still haven’t read Kierkegaard.

But right now, I’d like to share five books published within the last twenty years that, in addition to being extremely well-written, have really stretched my brain. And when I say I “read” these books, it might be more accurate to say that they hacked my skull wide open and poured coals on the comfortable mass of my brains.

The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability (2009)
By Lierre Keith

Keith’s detractors rail that she’s out to destroy the world with a heartless, ill-founded attack on eco-friendly eating and living. I wonder if they’ve read her book. Keith forces the reader to consider the truths of our food system, and it’s not what you’d expect from someone who’s trying to save the world from the over-consumption of factory-farmed meat.

Her basic premise, packed with knowledge and heart, is that those who promote vegetarianism or veganism as healthy, natural or eco-friendly – despite their excellent intentions – are wrong. A pillar of her book is what she calls “adult knowledge”: the fact that death is essential to life, and anyone who tries to live (or eat) without causing death is denying the real nature of life. She promotes a diet of sustainably-raised plants and animals, and argues that whether it’s foraged or grown, food can’t be sustainably produced without a symbiosis of animals and plants.

She dares us to consider that the modern vegetarian or vegan diet (often founded on grain or soy-based products or massive vegetable mono-crops) may engender more death and tragic illness than any other diet in the history of the world. She points out the damage of modern industrial agriculture to our planet and its species, including the disappearance of entire habitats as more and more of the earth’s surface becomes dedicated to rigorously maintained, genetically-engineered monocultures that must be doused with chemicals to survive. By daring to emphasize the deaths that keep our world in balance, she takes a holistic view of planet-wide food sources, asking us why we’ll refuse to eat a cow or a chicken, but allow the wholesale destruction of eco-systems in favor of fields of wheat and soybeans.

Her book examines veganism or vegetarianism for moral, political, ecological or nutritional reasons, and lest you think she’s shilling for the meat industry, she rails against the atrocities of modern factory-farming. There isn’t room for all her revelations, research or proposed solutions here. I urge you to pick up The Vegetarian Myth for yourself. I’m not even a vegetarian and the book left me quaking inside – but eminently glad to have read it.

Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us (1995)
By Kate Bornstein

I was a wife well into my twenties before I managed to grapple with questions of human sexuality and gender. This book was the first one to really open my mind on the topics.

Many of my former teachers at the Christian academies I attended as a child and teenager would find this a wholly dangerous title. It’s written by a transsexual woman (Bornstein was born a man).

The most charitable handling I can recall of deviations from the standard marital narrative of gender and sexuality, according to my upbringing, went like this: it may be ok to offer friendship to people who are homosexual, as long as those people are truly doing their best to fight their disorder.

I never truly bought into this mindset and was glad to leave it behind when I got to college outside of my religious community, and decided that it wasn’t my job to judge people’s sexuality.

So Gender Outlaw didn’t only interest me because it was an introduction to something beyond the idealized vision of man and wife and the cloistered, condemning lessons I’d had as a young person. The book’s real punch came when I considered that I had still failed to realize that human sexuality and gender are a vast spectrum.

I used to think there were basically two options: gay and straight (bisexuality was a fuzzy third). There were two genders: men and women. I assumed that sexuality had consistent implications for gender or gender expression: i.e., loving men meant that you identified as feminine, and loving women meant you identified as masculine.

I had grown up with such rigidly enforced norms of gender – not only that real men love women and real women love men, but that men and women always have easily defined characteristics and roles – that it took me many years to see the world for how it was.

Bornstein’s fascinating book helped me realize that your sexuality can have little or nothing to do with your gender, and that definitions of gender, for all the surety of many religious institutions, are surprisingly slippery (read what she has to say about it).

Loving women doesn’t mean you conform to traditionally masculine preferences or roles, and loving men doesn’t mean you act in traditionally feminine ways. Your gender is not necessarily determined by your genitals at birth, and who you’re attracted to is a separate proposition entirely.

Bornstein is at her most challenging when she asks why we put so much stock in identifying people by a traditional concept of gender, and how these norms control us in dehumanizing ways.

Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion and the Battle for America’s Soul (2007)
By Edward Humes

 Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Religion (2000)
By Kenneth R. Miller

 Ok, I know I cheated and this is two books, but they hammered my mind in similar ways, so I’m lumping them together. Humes’s book details a 2005 Pennsylvania court case that erupted when a public school board voted to require its teachers to put Intelligent Design on the syllabus. Miller’s book asks if the concepts of evolution and God are mutually exclusive, and decides that they are not.

I’m fascinated by the concept of evolution, and I will read books about everything from bacteria to dogs to dinosaurs if there are wild evolutionary conjectures involved. I think my interest began in a high school comparative religions course, during a field trip to a local Baptist church. The clergyman there told us that evolution was a lie and dinosaur bones were a trick of the Devil. He said the fact that there are “no transitional forms” in the fossil record proved that the Bible was scientifically as well as spiritually correct.

I asked him about archaeopteryx or the coelacanth, but he showed little interest.

I’m a Creationist-ist. My family, friends and neighbors and Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, agnostic, atheist and whatever else, but I don’t know any Creationists and I don’t want to know any.

That’s why these books were so challenging. Yes, they scrupulously debunk the fallacies of the evolution-deniers and I ate it up, patting myself on the back for being on the side of truth. But these books also dared to humanize the proponents of Creationism, and they forced me to admit what I’d never admitted before.

At heart, religious people who deny evolution don’t do so because the evidence is insufficient or because they’re too stupid to process the science.  This has nothing to do with the value of facts and everything to do with gut belief. How can religious fundamentalists accept evolution if they believe it means denying the basis of their whole life, i.e., that they’ve been specially and directly formed by God and not by millennia of natural selection among the animal world?

It must feel as if someone wants them to learn the physics of a tornado while it’s bearing down on their house, insisting that if they can just accept the scientific facts of how the storm formed, their house won’t be torn apart.

Some books, like Bornstein’s, have challenged me by nudging me outside the original parameters of my family’s faith. And some books, like Humes’s and Miller’s, challenge me by nudging me back in again. In this case, I realized that the fundamental problem facing the “debate” about evolution in America isn’t about making the facts more accessible or breaking them down into smaller words. Instead, it’s about exploring the ways in which God and science can go hand-in-hand.  It’s a tough concept for a secularized biology-junkie like me. But my mind’s been feasting on it for years now.

Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (2010)
 By Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá


Ryan and Jethá, a husband-and-wife author team, take on scientists and writers from Dawkins to Pinker to Goodall to turn the standard narrative of human evolution on its head. This book is not for the faint of heart.

What are the real origins of humans’ sexual behavior? Is the nuclear family unit (a monogamous man and woman and their children) truly the natural basis of our species? Ryan and Jethá argue that most anthropological, sociological and evolutionary models of human sexuality explaining monogamous pair-bonds are based on the faulty science of projecting the patriarchal, agricultural, and hierarchical society of the last few thousand years onto our real genetic and social roots, which are actually millions of years old.

For centuries, we’ve learned that men’s sexual aggressiveness and women’s relative sexual reserve are due to opposing evolutionary strategies. It all boils down to a difference in biological resources: men have plenty of sperm and don’t have to invest in pregnancy or child-care, while women have a finite number of ova and must give years to motherhood. Therefore, men want to have sex indiscriminately while women are rarely tempted, only having sex when they’re convinced that the man is lifelong Daddy material.

Ryan and Jethá think there’s no truth to any of that. And they’ve got compelling genetic, sociological, evolutionary, anatomical and anthropological evidence. Do women have a lesser sex drive than men do? Are men and women’s evolutionary strategies in conflict? How do matriarchal societies affect men? Why do so many religious traditions threaten adultery with death? Why do humans have what is proportionally one of the longest penises in the animal kingdom?  I bet none of these writers’ answers are what you think they’re going to be.

Here’s a fun tidbit. While other scientists are arguing that human males compete to win and keep a mate who will remain sexually faithful and therefore ensure the man’s genetic legacy, Ryan and Jethá point to compelling evidence for the theory of sperm competition. What if the battle between men’s genes takes place not on a socially observable level, as we’ve been assuming – i.e., which woman belongs to which man – but on a microscopic level: women aren’t as passively non-sexual as the standard narrative indicates, and may the best sperm win.

Best of all, the authors don’t pretend that their theories must influence readers’ life choices. They present their research in the name of more open and loving communication between partners – including the ones who have chosen monogamous single-family life. Just because we don’t know what to do with the information, or because it threatens an established mode of life, doesn’t make it any less true.

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (1995)
By Nelson Mandela

You might guess that this book makes the list because there’s no story more integral to the modern history of South Africa, my husband’s home, than the story of Nelson Mandela as told in his own words.

I knew it would be a rich and inspiring story that was necessary to have under my belt as a citizen of the modern world. What part of the book is most exciting? Mandela’s life in hiding, before his arrest? The extraordinary legal, political, and humanitarian landmarks of his public career?

No.

The most eventful and intellectually riveting piece of the whole book, to me, was the 27 years that Mandela spent in prison, eighteen of them on the infamous Robben Island. You wouldn’t think that almost thirty years behind bars would be the most interesting part of the book that includes Mandela’s early life, his education and political rise, harrowing adventures eluding the police, and his becoming the country’s first democratically elected president.

But it is astounding to read about how Mandela and his fellow political prisoners banded together, often during their backbreaking work in a rock quarry, not just for emotional support but to avail each other of their intellectual powers. For years, Mandela and his imprisoned contemporaries pooled the knowledge of their respective fields and experience to share it with each other by any means possible, whether whispered across bars or scribbled in the margins of books. Under the eyes of their prison guards, they determined to emerge from exile enriched by the others’ knowledge.

Sometimes it seems like education is for the classroom, a detour from the rest of our lives. Mastering knowledge is a matter of syllabi, textbooks, exams and papers. Proof of that learning is a diploma that costs thousands of dollars but promises to improve your salary. But if Mandela and his contemporaries could turn Robben Island into a clandestine university at the height of apartheid rule, is there anywhere in the world where we can’t engage in new ideas if we so choose?

My Kierkegaard-reading friend, having reached her mid-twenties, is well into the studies of her PhD. I have no plans to follow her into academia, but I still like to think that I’m learning in my own way. I recommend reading any of the books above, but only if you’re up for some challenging notions.

Do you have a book that’s changed your own intellectual outlook?

 

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