Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  The first nude statue to be put on public display in London since Roman times was the monument raised to the Duke of Wellington not long after his victory over Napoleon’s armies at Waterloo. The sculptor Richard Westmacott created a dynamic bronze figure of Achilles so large that it could not be transported into Hyde Park, where it was to be stationed, without knocking down a wall. The artist had taken the precaution of including a fig leaf, but the leaf – and presumably also any genitals that it hid – was comically small. The caricaturist George Cruikshank was not slow to see the potential. His cartoon of the unveiling shows ladies clustered round the statue, which was paid for by a subscription of British women and ‘erected in Hide Park’, as the caption explains in a barrage of puns. ‘My eyes what a size!!’ one lady squeals, while another at last locates the salient detail with the aid of a telescope. ‘I understand it is intended to represent His Grace after bathing in the Serpentine,’ another opines. See, one lady tells the duke himself, ‘what we ladies can raise when we wish to put a man in mind of what he has done & we hope will do again when call’d for!’ And inevitably, a small child points to the leaf: ‘What is that mama’. Immune to such ridicule, the Victorians retrofitted fig leaves to many statues. Even the cast of Michelangelo’s David in the Victoria and Albert Museum sports this extra adornment.

  In the art of the nude, man gains symbolic virtue at the expense of personal identity. After all, Westmacott never would have represented Wellington actually naked. Nor would the British public have expected to see their great leader’s actual private parts or even his body replicated in bronze. Woman also loses her identity: she becomes simply ‘the nude’, the generic of female sexuality and vulnerability. The male nude swaggers through the city streets, keeping public decency with his fig leaf. The female nude is for private consumption, preserving her modesty more coyly in what is known in the trade as the pudica pose – with one hand attempting, more or less vaguely, to cover (or is it directing the eye towards?) the genital area. The specialist word in fact acknowledges this ambiguity, stemming as it does from Latin words for both external genitals and shame.

  In both cases, we remain uncomfortable about honest depiction of the sex. We have even communicated our prudery into outer space. Michelangelo’s David may have a small penis, but the gold-plated representation of woman sent out far beyond our solar system aboard the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 space probes in 1972 and 1973 has no vagina at all. Why are we withholding the story of our true physical appearance from other species? Will they puzzle over how we reproduce?

  The idea that the spacecraft – the first human-made object intended to leave the solar system – should carry some sort of message about the creatures that sent it was enthusiastically taken up by the space scientist and television personality Carl Sagan. At first, only scientific diagrams indicating our location in the universe and one or two other things that we have discovered about it were to be included. But Sagan’s artist wife, Linda Salzman, suggested that the graphic should also show a man and a woman. The figures are supposed to have ‘panracial’ features, to use Sagan’s word, though Salzman based them on Greek ideals and the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. But any fashion-conscious alien would immediately note that their hairstyles alone pinpoint them in the late twentieth century and imply a Caucasian ethnicity. In fact, so provincial do the couple seem, the man waving in greeting, the woman standing demurely at his side, that a satirical magazine in Berkeley ran the image with the caption: ‘Hello. We’re from Orange County.’ As Sagan wrote: ‘The man’s right hand is raised in what I once read in an anthropology book is a “universal” sign of good will – although any literal universality is of course unlikely.’

  The Pioneer plaque excited comment from almost every quarter. Women wanted to know why the woman wasn’t also waving. Homosexuals demanded to know why homosexual partnership wasn’t represented. The art critic Ernst Gombrich pointed out in Scientific American that only aliens with a visual system that operates within the same specific region of the spectrum as our own would be able to see the image.

  But the most heated debate swirled around the nakedness of the humans and their visible or invisible sex organs. The two figures stand slightly apart rather than holding hands as initially conceived, so that they are not misconstrued as a single hermaphroditic organism. But other than this subtlest of clues, there is little to indicate that we are a species reliant upon sexual reproduction, which seems a significant omission considering that this phenomenon remains one of the deepest oddities about life on earth. Reprinted in newspapers, the design drew predictable accusations of pornography. The Philadelphia Inquirer took the precaution of erasing the woman’s nipples and the man’s genitals. The Chicago Sun Times progressively amended the versions they printed in successive editions of the day’s paper to obliterate the man’s genitals, too. On the other hand, the incompleteness of the woman’s drawing also provoked complaints of censorship. Sagan defended the omission of a line representing the vagina on grounds of artistic tradition, although it seems that he and his wife took the decision at least partly to head off any difficulties with puritans among the NASA top brass.

  Sagan pointed to ancient Greek statuary in particular, although the Greeks created few statues of women other than Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty. For the most part, during both the Classical and neoclassical periods, artists preferred to duck the whole issue by the use of the pudica pose or a strategically draped cloth, but it is true that female nudes made without these devices did, like the Pioneer drawings, generally omit any hint of a vagina. As Sagan himself noted, the real value of the whole episode was to raise the issue of how we represent ourselves to ourselves more than to any other species.

  The French twentieth-century philosopher Roland Barthes made much the same complaint of incompleteness when discussing Parisian striptease in his Mythologies. ‘Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked,’ he discovers. (We imagine the poor ecdysiast doing her best as the learned semiotician sits in his pullover and tweed jacket, taking notes.) ‘We may therefore say that we are dealing in a sense with a spectacle based on fear, or rather on the pretence of fear, as if eroticism here went no further than a sort of delicious terror, whose ritual signs have only to be announced to evoke at once the idea of sex and its conjuration.’ The fig leaf presents a vegetable barrier to the fleshy, animal sex. The diamanté g-string that is revealed at the (anti)climax of the striptease, Barthes groans, presents an impenetrable mineral barrier. ‘This ultimate triangle, by its pure and geometrical shape, by its hard and shiny material, bars the way to the sexual parts like a sword of purity.’

  We can’t leave it here. John Donne goes all the way in his elegy, ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’. All such obstacles are removed one by one in this poet’s striptease: ‘Unpin that spangled breast-plate, which you wear, / That th’eyes of busy fools may be stopp’d there.’ Then, ‘busk’ and gown and hose come off, until at last . . .

  O, my America, my new found land,

  My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,

  My mine of precious stones, my empery;

  How blest am I in this discovering thee!

  I am perched on the edge of April Ashley’s bed at her flat in west London, flipping through her personal memorabilia in a cardboard box. There are copious newspaper and magazine cuttings – ‘My Strange Life, by April Ashley’, ‘The Sailor Who Made a Fair Lady’, ‘Sex Op Girl Weds Again’ – as well as modelling photographs and a California car licence plate that reads ‘APRIL’. I’m looking for the identity documents that April has assured me with an imperious wave of her hand must be in there somewhere.

  April Ashley was one of the first people in Britain to undergo a full sex-change operation. (This procedure is now generally described as gender reassignment, which is both more sensitive and more biologically accurate, as we shall see.) She was born a boy – George Jamieson – in Liverpool and grew up there in a large family during the Sec
ond World War. ‘Although I was brought up a strict Roman Catholic boy, I knew from the age dot that I was a girl,’ she wrote later. George joined the merchant navy at the age of fifteen, making his way via a succession of jobs to London and then to Paris and the stage of the Carrousel night club, famous for its female impersonators, where she adopted the stage name Toni April. She began female hormone treatment in order to accentuate her femininity, but believed only surgery would bring about the full alignment between the sex she felt herself to be and the sex she by now appeared to be that would allow her to go on living. In May 1960, aged twenty-five, she travelled to Morocco and had a surgical operation to remove the male genitals that she felt were not hers and to construct a vagina in their place. Returning to Britain, she was required to change her name by deed poll and, as April Ashley, began a long struggle for official recognition as a woman.

  I find the documents I am looking for – cancelled passports, a marriage certificate, a United States resident alien card, and a birth certificate reissued in 2006. There are many ways to tell a person’s story – or, to put it more honestly, to make a story of a person. Photographs and official documents are just the most obvious and conventional way to do it – the one accepted by authority. It occurs to me that you could tell April’s story very well in shoes – the wooden clogs in increments of size that George wore growing up in the slums of Liverpool, the deck shoes of a merchant seaman, sexy heels in Paris, and the more sensible shoes of mature womanhood. That at least would have character. As it is, the official scraps of paper that mark the progress of our lives often seem to miss out what really matters to us. In April’s case, they are hardly up to the task.

  April – George – was male at birth, as the paperwork records. The fact that he did not feel himself to be male as he grew up is nowhere to be found. As we saw when discussing the face, society requires us to actually be what we appear to be, with little regard for all the other things that we might feel ourselves to be. If you have male genitals, you tick the M box on the form. If you have a vagina, tick F. They are the only options. So far as officialdom is concerned, sex and gender are one and the same. Only after she had had her operation was April able to change her name and obtain a passport in her female identity.

  April has been married twice. The first marriage was not a success, and her first husband filed for an annulment on the basis that April had been of the male sex at the time of the marriage, even though the marriage took place after she had had her operation, with a new passport used as proof of identity at the ceremony. The case came to court in November 1969. April underwent physical and psychological examinations by medical teams for both the prosecution and the defence. They showed her to have normal male XY chromosomes, but she scored towards the ‘female’ end of the sexual spectrum in a psychological test. In a controversial ruling with far-reaching implications, the judge disregarded April’s psychological profile and the fact of her surgical alteration, and declared that the ‘true sex of the respondent’ was that indicated by the chromosomal evidence and original anatomy. The case provided a legal precedent for deeming a person’s sex in English law to be that which it was at birth, regardless of their subsequent gender history. Only in 2004 was the law liberalized to allow transsexual people to be recognized in the gender to which they have transitioned. The Gender Recognition Act now provides for the amendment of birth certificates to show the new gender. This enables people who have undergone gender reassignment to keep their former gender confidential from employers and partners.

  There are many ways in which biological sex may not correspond with psychological gender, some of which challenge social norms and cause consternation in law. At the fundamental level, there are chromosomal variations. At conception, it may surprise some to learn, we are all essentially female. Although the woman’s egg contributes an X chromosome and the man’s sperm either an X or a Y chromosome, these do not immediately determine the sex of the embryo. At eight weeks’ gestation, the fertilized egg is implanted in the uterus. If it has a Y chromosome, it then responds to a chemical signal that causes testes to begin to form, and the potential female reproductive system to wither. If not, it continues in its ‘default setting’ until, at thirteen weeks, the foetus gonads begin to transform into ovaries.

  In a small proportion of people, the chromosomes do not pair up properly. An extra chromosome may cause a male to be born XYY, a so-called ‘super male’, or XXY, with low testosterone and a low sex drive. Such people usually look male and think of themselves as male, although they may have small genitals and the beginnings of breasts. Barry (later Carolyn) Cossey was born not XXY, but XXXY, with two extra chromosomes. He later underwent an operation for gender reassignment and appeared briefly as a Bond girl in the film For Your Eyes Only. A female may also be born XXX. An XO person, in which the second sex chromosome never appears, on the other hand, may have female-looking genitals but no ovaries. In addition, environmental stresses on the mother during the early weeks of pregnancy can alter the balance of hormones released in the womb, causing physiological changes in the unborn child. These variations can lead to a wide range of chromosomal, gonad, genital and hormonal anomalies. Overall, so-called intersex conditions of one sort or another may affect as much as 2 per cent of the population. One consequence of April’s operation was to make it impossible to ascertain whether she was born intersex.

  True intersexuality, where a person has clear sexual characteristics of both sexes, such as an ovary on one side of the body and a testicle on the other, is extremely rare. The traditional catchall term for such conditions is hermaphrodite, from the name given to the offspring of the Greek gods Hermes and Aphrodite. Yet the original Hermaphroditos was not born intersex. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Hermaphroditos is a beautiful boy who bathes in the pool of Salmacis. There, a water nymph wraps herself around him, and their bodies are merged into one, ‘which couldn’t fairly be described as male or female. They seemed to be neither and both.’ The simplest explanation for the story may be the disappointing effect of the cool water on the boy’s anatomy. Emerging from the water (perhaps like Wellington from the Serpentine), he sees that ‘the pool which his manhood had entered had left him only half a man’.

  This is one of several sexual transformations in Metamorphoses. Another story concerns Iphis, a girl who has been brought up as a boy because her father has warned her mother that she must kill any girl child she bears. The day comes when Iphis is due to marry, and after a desperate appeal to the gods, she leaves the temple miraculously transformed into a man, ‘with longer strides than she normally took’, a darker complexion, more angular features, and even cropped hair. In another tale, beautiful Caenis is granted her wish to be transformed into a man by Neptune in compensation for his having raped her. Pleased with the effect, Caenis, now Caeneus, thereafter ‘devoted his life to manly pursuits’.

  These ancient stories are a reminder that our sex and our sexual identity have not always been regarded as fixed entities. Before chromosomes were understood, and when examination of internal sex organs was still impossible, the line between biology and psychology was less neatly drawn. It is an irony that the modern possibility of surgical transformation may in fact be reinforcing a social view that these things should stay as they were found to be at birth, or at least firmly where they are subsequently put. Psychologists, meanwhile, often speak of a sexual spectrum. The spectrum view is helpful because it suggests the possibility of intermediate positions along the way, as well as concentrations at opposite ‘male’ and ‘female’ ends. But it may not be quite the right analogy, suggesting as it does that, as you slide towards one end of the scale, you necessarily slide away from the other.

  For, biologically speaking, sex is not a zero sum game. The ‘male’ hormone testosterone and the ‘female’ hormones oestrogen and progesterone are all present in both men and women. They perform a variety of functions in addition to their well-known roles in sexual development. Levels of these hormones typica
lly reinforce the apparent sex of the person, with an average of fifty times more testosterone in men than in women, for example. But the range of concentrations actually overlaps in men and women, so that some men have less testosterone than some women, and some women have less oestrogen or progesterone than some men. Nevertheless, the popular image that there is one chemical essence for men and another for women is hard to dislodge, and we are likely to be stuck with ‘testosterone-driven’ footballers and stock market traders for a long time yet. Strangely, women are never described as ‘oestrogen-driven’, although they may occasionally find themselves labelled broody or mumsy.

  Experiments in which animals are treated with these hormones now show that, contrary to previous belief, ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’ are independent variables. Females of various animal species given testosterone, for example, begin to exhibit typical male behaviour, including attempting to mount other females, but this is not accompanied by a loss of female behaviour. What this seems to indicate in humans is that gay men, for example, may be somewhat female-like, but simultaneously as ‘male’ as straight men. In general, homosexual people may be sexually more like people of the sex they do not belong to, but no less like their own sex than heterosexuals. Bisexual people may be not simply interested in sex with both men and women (or confused, as some heterosexuals would have it), but just more interested in sex, perhaps because they received a larger dose of prenatal hormones. Both aggressively heterosexual and campaigning gay neuroscientists have tried to locate regions in the brain that would ‘explain’ gayness. But these behaviours don’t require exceptional explanation so much as fitting into a picture that encompasses the full range of permutations of biological sex, psychological sexuality and sexual preference.