Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body

Normal' is a concept formed by averages but it changes with education and tolerance.

Any time you see the word ‘detox’ someone is trying to sell you absolute waste-of-time crap. Your

So you’re unique and unusual, well done, now pop off and eat your banana.

What strikes me now is why did they send the boys away? Why don’t boys get educated about menstruation? Is it because the teachers think girls will be embarrassed? I feel like the secrecy of it, the action of segregating us, sends the message that we should be ashamed. That our periods are something to hide from the opposite sex.

Our culture has trained us all to interpret males as active and females as passive, but in almost every species I have read about it is the female that initiates sex. They do this with pheromones and scents and behaviours and they get males excited and then yes, sometimes she’ll have him follow her around for hours or kick and bite him, but that’s to ensure that he is fit for purpose.

These ‘historical’ texts made us angry because they didn’t feel like a reflection of some other time, but of our own.

women’s bodies respond to all kinds of sexual stimuli not always because they want to have sex, but because sex might ensue anyway. That lubrication is not an ‘I’m turned on’ signal so much as an ‘I don’t want to be damaged’ response. And we evolved it because we had to.

It’s perverse that the finest compliment given to a woman who has just made a person is that she looks like she hasn’t.

What I find most troubling is the recent expectation for sudden weight loss after pregnancy. It’s perverse that the finest compliment given to a woman who has just made a person is that she looks like she hasn’t.

we ensure our own survival at all costs, but survival has always involved each other. Empathy is a muscle that can be improved if you work at it.

But maybe all of us understanding more about why bad things happen can help us stop them?

But I can remember how grown-up I felt then, and earlier, since about nine. Because we age one way, in one direction, every age we are is the most grown-up we’ve ever been.

Do you think it is better to be punched in the face by someone you like?

Things like drinking and smoking make it worse – I had always known this but not understood why; your liver balances the hormones in your blood (or tries to) and when it’s working on stored alcohol (which it has to if you drink more than one unit per hour) then the hormones can become more unbalanced. Interesting, huh? And annoying, because downing wine and hoping it will make everything better is one of my favourite nonsensical behaviours.

I am a modern lady, a cutting-edge, very recent woman. And yet the only menstrual blood I have ever seen is my own. Is that weird? I can see sex on all the movies and TV programmes, I can watch murders being enacted and people pretending to shit themselves in the street, yet no periods.

a meta-study of developing and developed world nations found that the presence of a maternal grandmother was more beneficial for the survival and health of children than any other relative except a mother – that, statistically, kids are better off with a grandma around than a father.

women who’ve had breast enlargements are two to three times more likely to commit suicide than women who haven’t.

…imagine if the people who ended up being together for fifty years were like, 'How weird, it was just a fling that went wrong!' If we admired the people who created and kept lifelong partnerships, but considered them a wonderful anomaly… I'm imagining myself giving this speech to Sylvia Plath and she is smiling through her tears and getting back into bed. Simone de Beauvoir is texting Sartre that it's over. Queen Victoria is removing her widow's weeds and now she's nude and making a pass at Simone, Eve walks in with a bowl of fruit and we all laugh. Ha ha ha ha ha. The musical finishes with a brilliant finale, I'm singing 'Endings Aren't Failures' and when I get to the rap bit, all the women in the world do the robot dance and we all feel okay about everything. We all agree that pair bonding is the most powerful influence that affects our bodies.

You cannot give somebody permission to force you to do things, any more than you can allow yourself to be overpowered.

but for me, my very definition of sex is a meeting of equals. When it is not that, it is something else.

I guess this combination of ‘birth is the most natural thing in the world’ and ‘birth is agonising and dangerous and can kill everyone involved’ is difficult for us to absorb.

There is no fate, there are no souls or stars crossing or ‘The Ones’. Our powerful emotion is an inbuilt survival tactic. It’s a primordial glue, sticking us together to continue the species.

Just like a male’s large size being a strength in polygynous species, the ability to bond with sexual partners and their offspring is a strength in ours. And the more our ancestors bonded, the better they did. The more they loved each other, the harder they worked to provide and keep everyone alive and stop baby falling in the river and things like that.

in the future, the theory of evolution is proved to be a massive prank by the Christian God to test our faith I’ll be the first to apologise and beg to get into heaven. I want to live forever