In fact, in 1993 scientists presented preliminary evidence that they had found an active ovarian initiator, that the construction of ovaries wasn't merely a question of a passive unfolding. They had identified a genetic signal that could aggressively override testosterone's actions and turn primordial fetal genitals into the female format—in this case, not 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.)
"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 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 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 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 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 m¨llerian 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. But those ten centimeters, O grunting, flailing lady, are not the width of the baby's head. No, the average seven-pound baby has a head five inches across, and some fat-headed infants have skulls nearly six inches wide. While the baby's head does compress into something the shape of a keel as it rams and glides its way to the light—thank Ishtar for the sutures, fontanel, and ductile plates of the newborn's skull—nonetheless you can count on your vagina's stretching during delivery to proportions unimagined when you had trouble negotiating your first tampon insertion. So the vagina is a balloon, a turtleneck sweater, a model for the universe itself, which, after all, is expanding in all directions even as we sit here and weep.
Yet mouths are expandable clefts too, and who would think of the mouth as a passive receptacle? So it is that the vagina is sometimes thought of as a toothed organ, by analogy with the mouth: a hungry, sucking, masticating, devouring orifice, capable of depleting a man's resources fatally if he gives in to its allure too often. Or the vagina is the moist, soothing, kissing mouth; the word labia means lips, of course, and human ethologists such as Desmond Morris have proposed that women wear lipstick to emphasize the resemblance between upper and lower labia, to recapitulate the lines of the hidden genitals on the poster of the face.
Nor is the vagina limited to metaphors of opening. It can be thought of as a closed system, hands pressed together in prayer, the Big Crunch rather than the expanding universe of the Big Bang. Most of the time, a woman's vagina is not a tube or a hole; instead, the walls drape inward and firmly touch each other. The vagina thus can switch states between protected and exposed, introverted and inviting. And so it gives rise to the imagery of flowering, of bursting open: lotuses, lilies, leaves, split pecans, split avocados, the wings of a damselfly. The artist Judy Chicago took the notion of the blooming, procreative vagina and fairly hoisted it up a flagpole in one of her most famous works, The Dinner Party, in which such feminist heroines of history and mythology as Mary Wollstonecraft, Kali, and Sappho are seated at a table, preparing to eat from dinner plates shaped like female genitals. Some criticized Chicago's work for its piousness and vulgarity (a neat trick, combining the two), while others attacked it as "reinforcing womb-cente
red, biologically deterministic ways of thinking," as Jane Ussher recounts in The Psychology of the Female Body. Whatever the abstract artistic worthiness of The Dinner Party may be, Chicago had an excellent germ of an idea: a woman's genitals are a force of nature, and they do have a life, or lives, of their own. I'm not talking about their role in procreation; I refer instead to a very different sort of imagery, that of the niche, the habitat, the ecosystem. The vagina is its own ecosystem, a land of unsung symbiosis and tart vigor. Sure, the traditional concept of the vagina is "It's a swamp down there!" but "tidal pool" would be more accurate: aqueous, stable, yet in perpetual flux.
Beginning on the border of the vaginal environment, we come to a small mountain, the mons pubis, also called the mons veneris, which means "mountain of Venus," the Love Mount. But let's not get carried away with woozy romance; veneris also gives rise to the term venereal disease. The mons veneris is made mons by a thick pad of fatty tissue that cushions the pubic symphysis, the slightly movable joint between your left and right pubic bones. The joint, which is relatively delicate and easily bruised by a bad jolt on a bicycle, is further cushioned at adolescence when the carpet of pubic hair grows in (assuming that you have requisite responsiveness to androgens). The pubic hair serves other purposes as well. It traps and concentrates pelvic odors, which can be quite attractive to a mate if they are the odors of health, as I will discuss below. Moreover, the pubic hair is a useful visual cue for us primates, who are, after all, a visually oriented species. The hair showcases the genital area and allows it to stand out from the less significant landscape around it. If women wear lipstick as a subconscious way of evoking their pudenda in public, perhaps they are only following in men's footsteps. By growing a beard, a man turns his face into an echo of his crotch; and the capacity to grow a beard very likely predates the use of cosmetics by a few hundred thousand years.
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