The Longevity Book: Live stronger. Live better. The art of ageing well.. Cameron Diaz

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      Since all of a woman’s cells have an XX, her eggs can only have an X. Since men have an XY, their sperm can contain either an X or a Y. It’s a toss-up. Will a fertilized egg become a female or a male? It’s all about the sex chromosome carried by the sperm.

      If you are a woman, the sperm that made you carried an X chromosome. As the female zygote divided, all the cells it made were female, and thus, so are you. A zygote divides and replicates and divides and replicates and divides and replicates. And after all that replication, you’ve got a cluster of female embryonic stem cells that will eventually keep dividing to become heart cells and liver cells and skin cells and blood cells and brain cells. And all those resultant organs will be female organs made up of female cells.

      The genes located along the X chromosome are called sex-linked genes; some of them are coded specifically for female anatomical traits, but other genes are responsible for more than three hundred genetic diseases, known as X-linked disorders. The fact that we have two X chromosomes in each of our cells may actually be one reason why women live longer than men – if one of our Xs contains a faulty gene, we have another X to step in. One example of this is red-green colour blindness, a common X-linked disorder. More men than women are colour-blind, because if the gene for colour is disturbed on their X chromosome, they don’t have a second one to use for backup. Having two Xs is like having an extra little black dress in the closet – or even better, having a few extra years of life in which to wear it.

      HYSTERIA AND HAPPY ENDINGS

      For centuries, the medical community viewed women as simply smaller versions of men with different reproductive organs – organs that were thought to make us mentally unstable. You can go to a library and view 1,500 years’ worth of medical journals – from classical Greek texts to Victorian literature – that record “hysteria” as a common diagnosis for women. The word “hysteria” is actually derived from the word hysterikos, Greek for “of the womb.”

      If a woman seemed psychologically stressed, or she started forgetting things, or she seemed emotionally volatile, like she needed too much attention, a physician might diagnose her with hysteria. Remedies ranged from sniffing smelling salts to having sex. A single woman would be advised to marry. Married women were advised to sleep with their husbands or to go horseback riding. Alternatively, in a not uncommon practice, doctors and midwives would use their fingers to stimulate women to orgasm, or “hysterical paroxysms” – basically a happy ending at the doctor’s office.

      As recently as the late nineteenth century, nearly three-quarters of the female population were deemed to be “out of health”, including women with “a tendency to cause trouble”. Since their issues generally couldn’t be resolved in just one visit, these women represented America’s largest therapy services market.

      In 1980, “hysterical neurosis” was finally dropped as an official diagnosis by the American Psychiatric Association.

      Just another reason to be grateful that you’re a lady.

      THE FALL OF BIKINI MEDICINE

      If you ask a female doctor in her fifties about the model for human anatomy she studied in med school, she will tell you about the 70kg (approximately 11 stone) man that was the example for her medical training – and his female companion, the 60kg (approximately 9½ stone) man with boobs and a uterus. Medical students were not trained to treat the male and female bodies as all that different, except when it came to the reproductive organs – the areas covered by a bikini. Hence the nickname for the medical education of the era: bikini medicine.

      Bikini medicine was the product of centuries of misunderstanding about female anatomy that began with all that hysteria about hysteria. The fall of this antiquated model and the rise of our more accurate understanding of female biology is tied in large part to the strides made by a generation of thinkers and speakers and brave, determined individuals who demanded change as a part of the Women’s Rights Movement. The modern view of women’s health we take for granted today only began in the 1960s, as women in Western society sought information about their biology and demanded better-quality medicine, including better reproductive care and uninhibited reproductive rights. They made it clear to lawmakers and medical professionals that women’s legal rights and medical welfare were inextricably linked.

      Here’s one example: the year that I was СКАЧАТЬ