About Emily Willingham
From Emily Willingham’s website:
The business of my life has been writing and science. My work as a research scientist has led me to many cool things, including ultrasound and surgery on a spotted hyena, the plastic casting of the inside of the mammalian penis, chasing tiny blazing-fast lizards around in the desert, and innumerable activities involving gonads.
My work as a writer has done the same, from stories about the black bears of Big Bend to one of my all-time favorites, a piece on zombie grasshoppers. There are hundreds of adventures in between, and I wouldn’t trade in science or writing for anything else.
I have been a dedicated writer since about 1972 and engaged in doing science since 1996. My background, as I say in cover letters, includes a bachelor’s degree in English and a Ph.D. in biological sciences, both from The University of Texas at Austin, with a completed postdoctoral fellowship in pediatric urology at the University of California, San Francisco. Throughout, my focus was vertebrate development, physiology, and genetics, specifically how gonads and penises develop and work and how the brain might be involved. Talking about my work has always carried a frisson of the risque.
Once upon a time, I was on the tenure track as a biologist, which is certainly a journey if you’re a woman. I have hidden in dark places in my own lab to pump, dumped milk at an airport because the Iraq War started, and given up academia for my family, something I would do again under the same circumstances. I have gone into labor on Wednesday afternoon while teaching, gone home, given birth, and been back teaching again on the following Monday because as an adjunct, I had no other choice.
I have always combined my degrees by writing about science or editing science writing. For 15 years, I also was a university instructor and have taught biology (developmental bio, physiology, genetics, general bio, physics, and chemistry) to thousands of university students in Texas and California.
Now, I am a committed journalist, my original ambition, my early career, and a job I’ve never let go of. I’ve worked the health, science, and medicine news beats for a local paper and online health sites, writing hundreds of pieces, and written features for newspapers and magazines. You can find my work at places like the New York Times, Scientific American, Spectrum, Forbes, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Slate, Discover, and others.
My deep past includes serving as a public affairs officer, writer, editor, and media campaign manager at a large state agency for four years, where we produced a 16-page tabloid newspaper for the department’s 26,000 employees, and interning at Texas Monthly Magazine. You can find the books that feature my writing listed here, some of my writing samples here, and my ongoing writing and editing gigs here.
I have minors in German, history, and philosophy, speak and write Spanish, and play the piano and violin. I love the Gray Man series and just about anything written in the Victorian era and am a huge fan of action movies.
All writing here represents my opinion and is in no way a reflection of the opinions or influence of any of my clients, employers, or associates.
You can follow me on Twitter @ejwillingham, and see my LinkedIn profile here, and my Google scholar profile here.
Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis
A wry look at what the astonishing world of animal penises can tell us about how we use our own.
The fallacy sold to many of us is that the penis signals dominance and power. But this wry and penetrating book reveals that in fact, nature did not shape the penis–or the human attached to it–to have the upper…hand.
Phallacy looks closely at some of nature’s more remarkable examples of penises and the many lessons to learn from them. In tracing how we ended up positioning our nondescript penis as a pulsing, awe-inspiring shaft of all masculinity and human dominance, Phallacy also shows what can we do to put that penis back where it belongs.
Emphasizing our human capacities for impulse control, Phallacy ultimately challenges the toxic message that the penis makes the man and the man can’t control himself. With instructive illustrations of unusual genitalia and tales of animal mating rituals that will make you particularly happy you are not a bedbug, Phallacy shows where humans fit on the continuum from fun to fatal phalli and why the human penis is an implement for intimacy, not intimidation.
Science has diligently studied the male organ. The female? Not so much.
Biologically speaking, you’d expect a penis to be pretty simple, says science writer Emily Willingham. “There’s no obvious reason to think,” she writes in “Phallacy: Life Lessons From the Animal Penis,” “that animals need anything more complicated than a tube that allows passage of semen and enters a partner. Yet yowie zowie, do they do so much more than that.”
In “Phallacy” Emily Willingham, a biology Ph.D. provides an eye-popping survey of the animal penis in its many, many manifestations—bifurcated and armored, prehensile and detachable. But she examines the human penis in particular, which is pretty plain-Jane anatomically but has centuries of political baggage as the supposed “throbbing obelisk of all masculinity.” This penis obsession is the fallacy referred to in the title, and Ms. Willingham wants to know how the organ rose to such cultural prominence and what the consequences are for us today.
First up, the animal survey—if you like did-you-know books, and your tastes run a little outré, then “Phallacy” is worth a look. Did you know that the penis of a barnacle can stretch nine times its body length? Did you know that some snails can grow penises in the middle of their faces? Did you know that some spider penises can taste and smell and even make music? This litany is enlivened by Ms. Willingham’s sense of humor, which she admits runs a bit juvenile. Still, there’s plenty of serious biology, too—which in some cases is an inevitable element of the social controversies she goes on to discuss.
Emily Willingham rues the fact that, historically, scientists have spent far more time studying penises than vaginas—a disparity that is not only unfair, she feels, but skews our understanding of the natural world. For instance, duck penises are infamous among biologists for their corkscrew anatomy and instantaneous deployment—all the better, alas, to rape female ducks with. But until recently, Ms. Willingham tells us, no one bothered to investigate whether female ducks had evolved defense mechanisms; their vaginas were tossed aside on dissecting tables. It turns out that duck vaginas are every bit as intricate as male sex organs, with dead ends and labyrinthine twists and turns to divert the intruding organ. By focusing on males alone, biologists missed half the story.
Not surprisingly, it was a female scientist who first studied duck vaginas. Emily Willingham notes that a lack of female perspective can distort work on human beings as well. Take the notorious “stripper study”: A group of male researchers set out to determine how erotic dancers’ tips varied during their menstrual cycles. It seemed that dancers earned lower tips during their periods and fared much better when they were fertile. From this observation, the researchers took a speculative leap and concluded that women were somehow emitting cryptic biological signals to advertise their fertility—and that those signals appealed to male patrons subconsciously, causing them to shovel money at the dancers. In essence, the study equated fertility with an economic transaction. Emily Willingham tears the study apart. It involved just 18 women, who took a self-reported online survey, and it had a glaring blind spot. Cramps, bloating and discomfort often accompany menstruation; such symptoms certainly might have curtailed a dancer’s inclination to dance in skimpy clothing—and therefore reduced her tips. To a female this possibility was obvious, but the guys running the study never seem to have considered it.
In the book’s final chapter (“The Rise and Fall of the Phallus”), Emily Willingham expands her scope from science to the outsize role that the penis plays in Western culture, from priapic Roman gods to the phallocentric fantasies of Freud’s psychoanalysis. The author concludes that penis obsession demeans women but is punishing for men, too, pushing them to conform to rigid stereotypes just to seem masculine. Such pressures “reduce men to a penis . . . and women to a receptacle for it.”
This final material can seem a bit too familiar, and “Phallacy” has a few other flaws. As the penile anecdotes pile up in the middle chapters, they start to blur together. Emily Willingham also seems dismissive of the entire field of evolutionary psychology, which, despite some seriously flawed work (like the stripper study) and some seriously flawed champions (Jeffrey Epstein, among others), is more than a mere “toxic brew” of selfishness and self-serving research.
Yet Emily Willingham has written an amusing book, willing to tackle pressing issues. “It’s not the penis’s fault that it’s freighted with this cultural baggage,” she writes. “Our brains did this, and our brains can undo it.”
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