Hunters and Gatherers Read Online Free PDF Page B

compulsive, type-A male behavior.
    The woman in tie-dye said, “Isis doesn’t miss a chance to dump on corporations.”
    Isis said, “Martha, this is Titania. Titania is the founder and CEO of Love’s Body, which, as I’m sure you know, earns a trillion dollars yearly from ecologically sound bubble bath—”
    “Not just bubble bath,” said Titania. “We put out a whole line of—”
    “Martha works for Mode ,” said Isis.
    “You do ?” said Titania. “I think we advertise in Mode . That is, I think we used to before the recession set in. Now we mostly stick with the New Age rags whose rates are a bit less inflated.”
    “I’m just a fact checker, really,” said Martha.
    “I see,” Titania said.
    A silence fell. Then Martha asked Isis if she could please use her phone.
    “Of course,” Isis said. “I’ll show you to my study where you can talk in private.”
    “It doesn’t have to be private,” Martha said. “I’m just calling my friend’s parents.”
    But Isis was already breezing through the white high-ceilinged rooms until she reached a wood-paneled library lined with shelves of books artfully spaced around niches displaying more geodes, skulls, and figurines. Martha skimmed the spines of the books: anthropology, mythology, women’s history, philosophy.
    “Academia.” Isis sighed. “What a teensy little world and everyone viciously defending their progressively teensier little fiefdoms. My former colleagues still can’t get over the fact that a woman with a dual doctorate in social anthropology and philosophy and significant classical Freudian training could have ditched it all for what they imagine as lesbian full-moon orgies, riding naked on a broomstick!
    “I got so sick of having to justify my ideas to those phallocentric Freudian morons who think that female spirituality is a synonym for penis envy. Penis worship, that is. They think we adore their dicks just like they do! Meanwhile the feminists hated me, too, for suggesting that women were anything more than men in drag. Academic feminists have such a warped investment in the sexes being identical except for their reproductive organs. As if the womb was nothing more than a baby incubator, as if it didn’t connect us to a more cyclical life process. It’s not just for lack of opportunity that women don’t rape and start wars.”
    Isis had a confiding manner that assumed you thought just as she did, though from time to time she paused for your opinion, or, more accurately, your concurrence.
    Was Martha’s opinion being asked? She thought men and women were different. Different bodies, different lives—surely that counted for something? Though women were no less intelligent, as men so often seemed to believe, even men who knew perfectly well that they weren’t supposed to believe this. Martha liked and disliked individual women and men, not entire genders, though it was undeniably true that only men broke your heart, unless of course you were lesbian and gave women an equal chance. Martha’s women friends were nicer to her, they seemed to genuinely like her. At worst they were inconsiderate, but never purposely cruel.
    She’d be glad to see women running the world, at least for a change. They could hardly make things worse than they already were! On the other hand, the indignities of daily life at Mode suggested that a world run by women might not be heaven on earth.
    Isis interpreted Martha’s silence as a sign of agreement—perhaps such profound agreement that Martha had lost the power of speech. She said, “It’s such a rarity to be around people who understand your work. Our work.”
    But Martha’s work, fact checking at Mode , was instantly comprehensible. The point was simple clarity, truth in its lowest form, facts, and the first and most obvious fact was that no one liked hearing from Martha: not the librarians she bothered with tedious research questions; not the publicists whose clients a writer had quoted, often