Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

Cat Bohannon begins with a personal anecdote about seeing the Alien prequel film Prometheus in theaters in 2012. She remembers seeing the protagonist, Elizabeth Shaw, seek an abortion after being impregnated by an alien and finding, to her frustration and horror, that the medpod only provides procedures for males. Bohannon and the other female audience members, she notes, felt the character’s anger and even expressed their frustration. She then says that like in the film, so much of science and medicine treats men as the default. She also explains that the notion of the default human has also limited studies on transgender and non-binary people and, in her footnotes, explains that most scientists recognize sex and gender as different and dismisses gender essentialism. Bohannon notes that scientists and doctors mostly do studies on male patients, even in animal studies, and that the progression of female human biology is far behind male human biology. She then says that there have been minimal studies on the female body and that this is due not only to sexism but also to the erroneous logic that female bodies are simply like male bodies, except with extra and different parts.