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Evolution wants women to live a wholesome life

By Bella Bathurst
THE GUARDIAN, LONDON
Monday, Jun 09, 2003, Page 9

`If you want to avoid getting cervical cancer, you should forget abortion, contraception, smoking, drugs, sleeping with anyone other than your husband, having sex too young ... and obesity.'

God, it seems, is a woman after all. Only trouble is, She turns out to be a celestial version of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. This week, Cancer Research UK announced that the number of women getting breast cancer is rising year by year -- last year, 40,000 British women contracted the disease. The bad news was relieved by a decline in mortality -- in 2001, 13,000 women died of the disease, a fall of 21 percent since 1991. There has been much searching for the reasons behind the rise in cases, but -- it was suggested -- one factor might be the increase in the number of women either postponing motherhood, or not having children at all.

What's really depressing about sex-specific cancers is that, for women at least, the list of contributory factors sounds as if it has been drawn up by a particularly censorious meeting of the Pope, a right-wing newspaper and an ambassador from the moral majority.

Basically, if you want to avoid getting cervical cancer, you should forget abortion, contraception, smoking, drugs, sleeping with anyone other than your husband, having sex too young, hormone-replacement therapy and obesity. Your chances of contracting ovarian cancer are increased if you don't breastfeed, if you don't have children and if you hang around long enough to get old.

It would seem that evolution, or genetics, or (for those Americans who don't do Darwin) God, is not at all keen on the idea of women having fun. Evolution would prefer it if we were all still wearing pie-crust collars buttoned to the neck and iron chastity belts, and lying back thinking of home-bakes. And evolution -- along with the Pope -- wants us to give up these foolish notions of work and selfish pleasure in order to get back to where we belong: barefoot in the kitchen.

In other words, our current physiology gives us a choice -- we can either have a life (and die a miserable, drawn-out, lingering death) or we can have children (and live a miserable, drawn-out, lingering life). But we can't do both.

Men, meanwhile, have no such worries. The only known contributory factors to prostate cancer are a fatty diet, and for testicular cancer, heredity. There are two possible conclusions from this.

Either a) Mother Nature, far from being a fluffy, warm, all-seeing, all-healing Gaia-figure, is actually a rancid, puritanical, anti-feminist neo-conservative, or b) social change is faster than evolution and, perhaps, in three or four generations' time, we'll all be able to smoke, drink, take drugs, sleep with 20 men a night, and start having children about the same time as we take up an interest in tea towels and stately homes, without necessarily being given some hideous disease as a payback.

Most of the time, when a new set of social statistics comes out either proving or disproving the suggestion that older women make worse mothers or divorce leads to overproduction of crazed monosyllabic skater-boy scum, there is an argument between the liberal and the not-at-all liberal camps. One side will point out that if all women were to give up work and return to the home, the economy would collapse, while the other will suggest that if all women were to give up home and return to work, the family would collapse.

But nurture is different from nature; for one thing, you can argue with nurture, but nature won't even see you in court. If nature says abortion or smoking is a bad idea, then it is a bad idea, and that's that.

Which leaves today's smoking, drinking, promiscuous, childless 20/30/40somethings in something of a dilemma. Since it is now far too late for us to organize our way back into sober, youthful innocence, what are we supposed to do? Should we now start to regard men not as equals but as cheap mobile anticarcinogens? Announce ourselves, like those born-again virgins in America, to be newly without sin? Or should we just acknowledge that Darwin and moralizers have it in for us, and get on with things?

There's a good case to be made for the idea that guilt does as much damage as our various vices do. Maintaining a state of perpetual low-level guilt about smoking, or drinking, or working is probably as corrosive as the cigarettes or the wine or the work itself. And it seems far better to get on with this life -- whether or not it meets religious and governmental guidelines -- than to spend it wishing we had settled down with our pimply17-year-old male classmate just in case of cancer. Live fast, die young, stuff Darwin.
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