Salon.com > Julia Wallace

You can never have too many mothers

Mon, 11 May 2009 10:45:00 +0000

For as long as she's been a sociobiologist, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has been playfully dismantling traditional notions of motherhood and gender relations. In 1981's "The Woman That Never Evolved," the newly minted Harvard Ph.D. blasted a hole in the dominant model of sexual selection, in which hypersexual males pull out all the stops to impress passive females. Despite the snickers of her male colleagues, Hrdy maintained that women are subject to sexual selection, too: Females apes, it turns out, frequently compete with each other for male attention, trick males into copulating with them, and engage in sexual activity for pure pleasure. Later, Hrdy's monumental "Mother Nature," published in 1999, thoroughly refuted the idea that there is any such thing as maternal instinct: Mothers in nature often abort fetuses, favor healthy babies while nudging runts away, and even commit infanticide so that they can try to breed again under better circumstances.

“Why do these men want to coach little girls?”

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 10:26:00 +0000

In the years between Mary Lou Retton's historic victory at the 1984 Olympics and Kim Zmeskal's dominance in the early 1990s, American gymnastics was in a bad way. Most of our gymnasts lacked the finesse of their counterparts in Eastern Bloc states like Russia and Romania, where children were plucked from their homes almost as soon as they could walk, and U.S. coaches struggled to produce another breakout star. Jennifer Sey was one of their best hopes.

At 15, Sey left her New Jersey home for the Parkettes National Gymnastic Training Center in Allentown, Pa., where she boarded alone in an unheated room in exchange for a chance to become a champion. Under the tutelage of Bill and Donna Strauss, a husband-and-wife coaching team notorious for producing winners by any means necessary, she accomplished just that -- nabbing the U.S. National title in 1986. But Sey was never quite talented or powerful enough to be hailed as the second coming of Retton and eventually, burned out by the pressure to stay skinny and the pain of competing on barely healed broken bones, she retired.

The losers’ circle

Wed, 16 May 2007 10:52:00 +0000

William Banting might be the most important 19th-century London coffin-maker that nobody's ever heard of. In 1862, he was a mess: sick, unhappy and so fat that he had to heave his way downstairs facing backward. He could not tie his shoes without the aid of boot hooks. He tried everything to shed the weight: taking "the waters and climate of Leamington many times," consulting the best doctors in England (including one who, cryptically, tried to "blister" his ears), and even vigorously rowing "a good, heavy, safe boat" for two hours a day. But he could never manage to lose more than 6 pounds. Finally, desperate, he found a doctor who advised him to abstain from foods containing starch or "saccharine matter": bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer and potatoes.

After a year on this proto-Atkins diet, Banting had reduced his weight to 156 pounds. He was so delighted with himself that he wrote and published a pamphlet on his methods, declaring that "I hold the reins of health and comfort in my own hands ... It is simply miraculous." His "Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public" was snatched up by readers eager to find their own miracle, and for the next 50 years or so, "banting" actually became a household word for dieting.