The BodyMy sister's adolescence coincided with Madonna getting into the groove. My father met her one day parading down the street in belly-top, fingerless gloves, belts round hips, backcombed hair, Kohl-ed eyes, and multiple earrings.
She was sent home to change. But had Daddy been Desmond Morris, "Ah," he would have said, "the big hair of the ancien régime; the cat-like eyes of the ancient Egyptians; the elongated earlobes of the Borneans and Trobriand Islanders; the exposed belly and swinging hips of the Hawaiian hula dancers . . ." Not for Morris the stock phrase of parents: "I've never seen the like!" He's seen more than the like, if not in his day, then in some other tribe's, or at some other historical period. His socio-zoological studies have made him as unshockable, unflappable, benign and tolerant as a Zen master crossed with the great sloth.
In this appreciative celebration of the female form, Morris - surrealist artist, TV presenter, curator of London Zoo, bestselling author, Renaissance man - examines women's bodies from hair to toe. He looks at the behavioural attributes - hunched shoulders indicate fear, arms akimbo are antisocial - but primarily the erotic ones. Even seemingly innocent features are sexualised: "during intense arousal the earlobes become swollen and engorged with blood"; "sucking a female toe provides the amorous male with a sensation that he is closing his lips over a giant nipple, a huge clitoris, or even a female tongue" (this, like a lot of Morris' writing, sounds comic and ridiculous, I think intentionally, though it may just be what happens when zoologists submit humans to the species treatment).
Humans, says Morris, are hopelessly randy. For most primates the mating act takes eight seconds, and intercourse only happens when the female is in heat. But human females are always in heat, even at those times when they can't conceive. This is because human survival depends on forming intimate emotional bonds: "The majority of copulations are not procreative but instead serve to tighten the emotional bond. When human beings make love they literally make love". The human female body is wired for pleasure to encourage her to attach a man who will go to the onerous, or at least time-consuming, lengths of satisfying her - it takes more than eight seconds - after which he should feel he has invested too much to leave. So if pumping her lips with collagen is what it takes to get such a man, she's within her evolutionary rights. I imagined that as a zoologist Morris would favour woman in the state of nature - mousy of hair, heavy of brow, pendulous of breast - but no, he's all for artifice.
On botox, the "Brazilian", hair dye, eyebrow plucking, nose reducing, he's as tolerant as a San Franciscan cosmetic surgeon.
He's also come up with the evolutionary justification for depilation. Every Darwinist has a favourite gene - Richard Dawkins heralds the selfish gene; for Morris it's neoteny, the retention of juvenile features in the adult animal. "Other animals are playful when young. Humans remain playful all their lives, though once they become adult, they call play by different names: art or research, sport or philosophy, travel or entertainment". Neoteny kept humans friendly and curious so they could cope with over-crowding, and so take over the world like a plague of locusts.
There's a division of babyishness. Men act babyish (always inventing new toys), women look babyish. They have soft weak babyish bodies, smooth hairless babyish faces, small button babyish noses, pursed jutting babyish lips. Because women have evolved as childish adults, says Morris, they naturally want to enhance their childlike features by making their noses smaller, their eyebrows sparser and their hair blonder.
This argument doesn't run smooth. Women throw out powerful signals at puberty: swelling breasts, long legs, pubic hair, and later often seek to enhance these pubescent features by, for instance, silicone implants and leg extensions (in China anyway).
But surely according to neoteny, women should want short legs and pot bellies? Morris knows there's a conflict - he gets in a twist about pubic hair removal - but concludes cosily, if a bit unhelpfully, that "as with so many aspects of the adult female body, there are highly conflicting viewpoints". Morris only loses his cool when female sexuality comes under attack. He argues powerfully against female circumcision and footbinding (This he rightly calls patriarchal tyranny, but since tiny, staggering bound feet are also babyish, I wonder can they be explained via neoteny? He doesn't get into this).
Morris's politics were formed in the 1960s, the decade when he wowed the world with The Naked Ape. The Naked Woman is very 1960s: a laissez faire, taboo-busting philosophy of freedom, self-expression, feminism, and sexual pleasure. Its enemies, guilty of anti-evolutionary, non-Darwinian behaviour, are today's patriarchal, repressive regimes. Morris mostly keeps clear of the political fray but this book has a clear purpose: it puts natural science at the service of Western civilisation.
Bridget Hourican is a journalist and critic
The Naked Woman: A Study of the Female Form By Desmond Morris Jonathan Cape, 266 pp. £18.99