Author Cat Bohannon discussed her new book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, on the Daily Show with guest host Sarah Silverman.
Bohannon’s book, published last month by Knopf, is a history of the evolution of cisgender women’s bodies. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus wrote of the book, “Prodigious research informs a spirited history of humanity.”
Silverman asked Bohannon what she discovered while researching and writing the book.
“One of the central things I discovered was that we are garbage at making babies, just the entire species,” Bohannon said. Gesturing to her body, she continued, “This is actually a flaming garbage pile. This is the technical term.…Our pregnancies and postpartum recoveries are harder and longer, and more prone to dangerous and crippling and sometimes murder-y complications than they are in most any other primate. Well, except for a squirrel monkey, and we feel real bad for her.”
Silverman noted that Bohannon had found, during her research, that medical science has been traditionally based on cisgender male bodies.
“It’s just dicks all the way down,” Bohannon replied. “This is true in biological research, this is true in biomedical research: We are only studying males. And it’s basically because this thing we call a menstrual cycle…is just so messy and complicated. So you have this slope of hormones that’s doing all kinds of things in a female body if you’re studying mammals, so maybe just don’t, then?”
“Don’t what?” Silverman asked.
“Study them,” Bohannon said. “That seemed to be the solution.…There was kind of an unspoken agreement in biology: Oh, we’ll solve this problem, this messy, messy chick problem…by not studying the female.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
