Woman: An Intimate Geography (10 page)

Read Woman: An Intimate Geography Online

Authors: Natalie Angier

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because a signal was missing or because the tissue couldn't respond to androgens, as happens in androgen insensitivity syndrome, but because this factor, whatever it is, had become hyperactive and pushed the androgens out of the way. Eau d'Amazon! But none of this work has been replicated yet, nor explored in any detail, so whether we have found the long-sought girl growth factor, nobody can say.
Assuming, then, that it takes work to generate either a male or a female form and that there are active ovarian initiators out there able to do for gals what testosterone does for our brothers, why does Crews give ancestral primacy to the female while consigning the male to the status of the derivative? In this, his training as a herpetologist colors his worldview. Among mammals, sexual reproduction is obligatory. If a mammal is to have offspring, it must mate with a member of the opposite sex. There is no such thing as a parthenogenetic mammal in nature, a female who can spin out her own clones. But some lizards and fish, and a few other types of vertebrates breed through self-replication, almost always producing daughters only, no sons. Parthenogenesis is not a terribly common strategy, but it occurs. In fact, it tends to appear and disappear over evolutionary time. A species that once was a sexually reproducing one, requiring the existence of males and females, will for any number of reasons lose the male and turn parthenogenetic. In other cases, a parthenogenetic species will discover the benefits of having a fellow around specifically, because sexual reproduction gives rise to enhanced genetic diversity and thus to children with sufficiently varied traits to withstand changing times. Desiring change, the formerly hymeneal females, the cold-blooded madonnas, retreat to the Garden of Eden and start bickering over who is to take on the role of the male and get to be on top. In either evolutionary scenario, males come and males go, but the female remains. There is no species where there is no female. The female, the great Mother, is never lost.
(You may wonder whether it's fair to call a parthenogenetic animal a female rather than a neuter, or even, just for the jazz of it, a male. The short answer is, of course it's fair. It's even accurate. A parthenogenetic lizard produces and lays eggs from which infant lizards eventually emerge, and a female animal, in her purest sense, is the animal with the eggs.)

 

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"Males evolved only after the evolution of self-replicating (=female) organisms," Crews writes. "Males have been gained and lost, but females have remained. The male pattern is derived and imposed upon the ancestral female pattern."
My father was not an unregenerate defender of male privilege. He saw the sense of the goddesshead and the unnatural quality of the unrelievedly patriarchal structure of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic axis. We were in the Metropolitan Museum together once, and we passed by a painting depicting the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I don't remember the artist or the century or the country of provenance. In fact, I remember little about the work except my extreme dislike of it. The three Omnipotences were painted as identical triplets, a troika of brown-bearded men in long robes. My father, the angry lapsed Christian, sneered at the painting. The Holy Trinity, the supposed creators of life on earth and not a female among them, he grumbled. The least the artist could have done, my father said, is to portray the Holy Spirit ambiguously enough that you might mistake it for a woman. We walked away from the painting, the sneer now a shared experience.
Twenty years or so later, I wonder: could the artist have been unconsciously projecting an innate understanding that the male is derived from the ancestral female, as the Roman temple is derived from the Greek basilica? Just as the Romans outflaunted their antecedents down to every detail in the grandeur of the engineering, the elaboration of the architectural orders so the male ups the ante and outbarks the female, becoming stylistic hypertrophy, all flourish and brawn. Crews says that in conceptualizing the ancestral female and the derivative male, "the intriguing possibility emerges that males may be more like females than females are like males." If he is right, then it makes crude sense, in a monotheistic culture that insists on abandoning the pantheon and choosing one god to reign symbolically over a two-sexed species, for the god to be male; for the male incorporates the female, is like the female in a sense, begins as an imitation of the female but the female cannot say the same. The female does not incorporate the male, did not originally need the male. Who knows? She may not in the future need him again.
On his side, the male needs the female, as he needs the basal parts of himself. He cannot escape her, and so he coopts her greatest power, her

 

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generative capabilities. But being male and of a Roman cut, he goes her one better. Remember that a parthenogenetic female can give birth only to daughters. A male god, though, is reinvented as a super-parthenogen, able without assistance to create sons and daughters alike. Imagining, incorrectly but understandably, that he can thenceforth go it alone, he takes it upon himself to be the one god, a fabulist creature whose like can't be found in nature.
Deities have their problems and delusions, we humans have ours. If among gods males are likelier to encroach on female prerogatives than the reverse, among humans women feel more comfortable coopting the male than men do behaving in a manner that may be seen as womanish or, worse, womanly. Freud suggested that men had to individuate by wrenching themselves free of the world of women mothers, grandmothers, aunts, nursemaids the monotonously, claustrophobically feminine habitat in which they spent their infancy and youth. Women threaten because women rule for so long. If men are to find autonomy, they must denounce femininity. Women do not need to pull themselves away to achieve womanhood; they do not need to reject the mother who cared for them and defined them.
Forget Freud. It could well be that men must pull away not from the external world of women but from the internal female template. Maybe men feel driven to emphasize their distinctiveness over their derivation, to escape the ancestral female as though escaping a dynastic hex, the femuncula within. We women therefore may have, at our core, an easier time with fluid sexuality. We can afford to play around with clothes and personas and attitudes, to be as ballsy as we want to be; still we will be women. Men's brief and much-derided foray into the land of sensitivity and Alan Alda suggests that men cannot say the same; to the contrary, their edges blur and their convictions become hesitant if they toy with androgyny too long. Jane Carden said that for this reason, the freedom of role plasticity, she was glad to have been born woman glad, we might say, that her ancestral female template was not overlaid with male appurtenances.
"I wouldn't want to have been born without AIS," she said. "It was the only way for me to go through this lifetime as a woman. Female experiences are richer, I think, and we have a more complete emotional life. The range of personalities that men can exhibit is much narrower. I

 

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have the luxury of being extremely demure, what people associate with being very feminine one day, and being very aggressive and macho the next day. Both are tolerated in women, at least at this point in history. The analogues in men well, we're just not there yet."
When Crews says that the male pattern is derived from and imposed on the ancestral female pattern, he is talking about many things: the pattern of hormone release and activity, the pattern of brain structures, the pattern of behaviors, and of course the pattern of the reproductive systems. It is our genitals that we think of as the clearest difference between male and female; it is our genitals that most fascinate us and inculcate notions of gender in us as children (along, of course, with our divergent styles of using the toilet). The reproductive system is supposedly what most clearly distinguishes a man from a woman.
Except that when you take a close look, you'll see that we're remarkably the same. If you look at a woman in stirrups, for example, you'll see that the plumpness of her labia and the way they fall slightly into the folds of her thighs are reminiscent of a man's scrotum. The ancients knew as much. Hippocrates, Galen, and other early anatomists and body philosophers knew as much. They were not saints. They were not gynophiles. In
Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
, Thomas Laqueur describes the ideas of Galen as "phallocentric," taking the male pattern as primary and describing the female from that reference point. The Greek doctors also made errors in their understanding of anatomy. Nevertheless, they were on to something. They thought that the human body was basically unisexual and that the two sexes were inside-out versions of each other. The ancients emphasized the homology between female and male organs.
"In the one-sex model, dominant in anatomical thinking for two thousand years, woman was understood as man inverted: the uterus was the female scrotum, the ovaries were testicles, the vulva was a foreskin, and the vagina was a penis," Laqueur writes. "Women were essentially men in whom a lack of vital heat of perfection had resulted in the retention, inside, of structures that in the male were visible without." Galen even used the same words to describe male and female structures, calling the ovaries
orcheis
, the Greek word for testes. (Orchid flowers also were named after testicles, because the water bulb

 

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at the base of the plant looks like a little wrinkled scrotum. So when Georgia O'Keeffe used the orchid to represent female genitals, she incidentally committed a minor act of conjoinment of maleness with femaleness.) Sexual parallelism was gospel; a fourth-century bishop said he realized that women had the same equipment as he, except "theirs are inside the body and not outside it."
Nor was it only the genitals that were assumed to be homologous; so too were the body's excretions. Semen was man's version of menstrual blood; milk and tears were as one. The ancients also saw no difference between men's and women's capacity for sexual pleasure and the necessity of mutual orgasm for conception. Galen proclaimed that a woman could not get pregnant unless she had an orgasm, and his view prevailed until the eighteenth century. This is a sweet thought, one of my favorite glaring errors of history, and a roundabout acknowledgment of the importance of the female climax to life as we know it. Unfortunately, the insistence that an expectant woman was a postorgasmic woman spelled tragedy for a number of our foresisters. Women who became pregnant after rape, for example, were accused of licentiousness and adultery, since their swollen bellies were evidence of their acquiescence and their pleasure, and they were routinely put to death. In more recent times, women have been advised that when rape is inevitable, they should just "lie back and enjoy it," and they also have been blamed in any number of ways for their predicament why did you dress that way, why did you invite him back to your apartment, why did you go for a walk in the park after dark?
Galen was wrong about a number of things. The vulva is not a foreskin, though it may be treated as such in countries that practice female genital mutilation; and neither women nor men need to reach orgasm for a woman to conceive (men secrete sperm in their pre-ejaculates, and I knew a woman who became pregnant without having intercourse, when a smear of pre-ejaculate deposited on her thigh during a thrashabout of heavy petting migrated insidiously upward). But about the unisexual quality of the body he was prescient. The female may be the ancestral form, yet in our current bodies we develop bipotentially; the clay can be shaped either way. We are hermaphrodites, legatees of the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, who merged his body with that of the nymph of the Salmacis fountain. Male and female fetuses

 

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look identical until the ninth week of gestation, and our adult organs are analogous structures, male to female. Inside its apricot-sized body, the antesexual two-month-old fetus has a pair of immature seedpods, the primordial gonads, which become testes in males, ovaries in females. It has a set of wolffian and müllerian ducts, one of which will be chosen depending on whether the fetus is to develop a seminal duct system or fallopian tubes. Externally, each begins with an undifferentiated genital ridge, a bump of tissue above a small membrane-shielded slit. Starting in the third month, the nub of flesh either grows gracefully into a clitoris or grows more emphatically into the head of a penis. In girls, the membrane around the primordial slit dissolves, and the slit opens to form the vaginal lips, which will surround the vagina and the urethra, from which urine flows. In boys, androgens prompt the slit to fuse and push forward to generate the shaft of the penis.
As symbols go, the phallus is a yawn. Tubes that point and shoot, and there you have it. The obelisk pierces the heavens, the gun ejaculates bullets, the cigar puffs like a peacock, the hot rod screams, the hot dog is eaten. A phallus doesn't give you much to play with, metaphorically, and it doesn't lend itself to multiple interpretations. A hose is a hose is a hose.
But the vagina, now there's a Rorschach with legs. You can make of it practically anything you want, need, or dread. A vagina in its most simple-minded rendering is an opening, an absence of form, an inert receptacle. It is a four-to five-inch-long tunnel that extends at a forty-five-degree angle from the labia to the doughnut-shaped cervix. It is a pause between the declarative sentence of the outside world and the mutterings of the viscera. Built of skin, muscle, and fibrous tissue, it is the most obliging of passageways, one that will stretch to accommodate travelers of any conceivable dimension, whether they are coming (penises, speculums) or going (infants). I'm sure I'm not the only woman who dreamed during pregnancy that she was about to give birth to a baby whale, in my case an endangered blue whale. Oh, the human vagina in its role as birth canal can stretch, all right, and it must distend in proportion to the rest of us far more than the pelvis of a mother whale. You've heard, or experienced firsthand, how the cervix must dilate to ten centimeters, or four inches, before the laboring woman is given sanction to push. It must become as wide as the vagina is long.

 

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