If Nepenthe was a midwife, another character from Greek mythology also stands by as the woman’s internal anesthetist. Morpheus was the Greek god of sleep, and the opiate morphine was appropriately named after him. Morpheus had a twin brother whose name was Thanatos, the god of death. Natural Selection enlisted the powers of Morpheus to help a woman edge past the most dangerous encounter with his brother that she would routinely experience in the course of her entire life.
The role hormones play in inclining a mother to repeat her pregnancy emerges from the recent discovery that, the moment a newborn begins to nurse, this sucking action activates a reflex that ensures that the mother will fall in love with her baby. Breast-feeding causes nerve impulses to leap away from her nipple and travel to her brain’s limbic system. This stimulus causes the amygdala, a major component of the emotional brain, to release a flood of the hormone oxytocin, which then inundates all the synapses of her nervous system. Oxytocin is the “love hormone,” and high levels are associated with the bliss of profound attachment. It cannot be a coincidence that among oxytocin’s major physiological effects is to cause the uterine muscles to contract sharply following the expulsion of the placenta. Women bond with their babies just as they markedly limit postpartum blood loss. What a cleverly designed system!
I propose that the human female orgasm was an evolutionary prize awarded to women because Gyna sapiens became the first female to learn of copulation’s onerous and even deadly price. The intense pleasure of her orgasm gave her a powerful incentive to keep re-engaging in sex. Also, by enabling women to gain access to an important alternative means of evaluating a man’s character, orgasm provided them with a valuable tool in making better choices among potential mates. A secondary pleasure center evolved deep in the pelvis for the purpose of reducing the agony of childbirth by ingeniously crowding out the pain.
The human female orgasm is, by all accounts, a many-splendored thing. The multifactorial mix of possible reasons for its evolution should not obscure the reality that its presence is a distinguishing trait separating Gyna sapiens from Gyna all-the-others.
Three generations.
Chapter 8
Grandmothers/Circumcision
No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face
—John Donne
There is no greater power in the world than the zest of a post-menopausal woman.
—Margaret Mead1
My own preference, if I had the good fortune to have another son, would be to leave his little penis alone.
—Benjamin Spock, M.D.2
The organs and systems of the human body resemble the interlocking cogs and gears of a well-crafted grandfather (or, for the purposes of this chapter, let us call it a grandmother) clock. Every part is designed at the outset to work in harmony with the others for the duration of the life of the person. Some parts are more susceptible to the impairments of aging than others, but brain, kidney, heart, lung, and colon come with a warranty claiming that, with proper usage, each organ system should approximate the allotted life span of the individual. Not covered are misuse, abuse, and Acts of God. When an organ or a system malfunctions prematurely, specialists in the culture assigned to attend to such matters diagnose the condition as a disease.
One system, however, affecting only one species, and targeting just one sex of that species, always winds down long before the others. That vital function is a woman’s fertility. The paired organs primarily responsible are her ovaries. The directive to shut down operations considerably before closing time comes from her brain’s tiny pituitary gland, and its commands are programmed into a woman’s genes when she is born.
The out-of-sync aging of Gyna sapiens’ ovaries sets in motion the cascade of events known as menopause. Typically beginning in a woman’s late forties or early fifties, the constellation of signs and symptoms are the result of the ovaries’ ceasing to mix, shake, and stir the complex cocktail of hormones that drive the menstrual cycle.
As previously emphasized, evolution creates a variety of living forms each of which must survive long enough to reproduce. Survival and reproduction are so central that some species, like salmon, survive only long enough to reproduce. Adult ocean salmon embark on a long and grueling journey by swimming up rivers, jumping rapids and waterfalls if necessary, all for the purpose of finding the creek where they were born. Upon arriving at this improbable destination, the exhausted adults then spawn the next generation before expiring from their Ulyssean effort. Since reproduction is so basic to all species, the benefit to the human species of Gyna sapiens’ early and abrupt end to her fertile years, when set against the potential of her exceedingly long life, must be explained in Darwinian terms.
The onset of menopause is marked by a series of notable events. Ovaries lose their effervescence. Eggs no longer bubble in slow motion to the surface before bursting forth. Those that remain trapped within slowly disintegrate. The curtain rings down on the womb’s long-running monthly drama, which had featured a compelling story of rebirth, wild youth, ripe maturity, and sudden death punctuated periodically by nature’s grandest showstopping denouement—birth. Menstrual bleeding ceases.
The complex infrastructure enabling a breast to produce milk involutes. The mammary glands, the distinguishing feature that led the eighteenth-century taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus to name our phylum “mammals,” lose their previous resiliency.
Secondary sexual characteristics defining the essence of the feminine rapidly begin to recede. Lips lose their fullness, skin loses its turgor, hair loses its luster, eyelashes lose their length, and the labia majora lose their plumpness. The robust corrugated lining of the vagina thins, and the former ease with which it lubricated under sexual stimulation attenuates.
Highly dependent on estrogen and progesterone, the branch of the autonomic nervous system responsible for regulating the size of the skin’s tiny capillaries goes wobbly. Hot flashes, night sweats, and facial blotches are the involuntary, embarrassing, and discomfiting results.
The rhythm of the menstrual tides washing in and out of a woman’s internal seas affects nearly every organ system in the body. The cessation of the monthly music often produces psychic dissonance, manifested by mood swings and, on occasion, severe depression. Less discernible physiological changes also accelerate. Arteries harden, muscles weaken, bones become more brittle and less calcified. Libido can suddenly drop. Conversely, because the individual response to estrogen and testosterone levels varies considerably, some women experience a rise in their libido following menopause. The evolutionary paradox of a mammal having an increased appetite for sex at a time when conception is impossible and the bloom of youthful beauty has faded makes more poignant Oscar Wilde’s observation that “the tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.”3
The majority of mammalian females maintain reproductive fitness right up to the day they die. A few other large species besides sapients experience menopause.* What distinguishes the human one from the others is its prematurity. The chimpanzee and elephant, for example, experience it when they have reached the age at which they could live just long enough to raise their last offspring. A chimpanzee typically breast-feeds each offspring for five years. Female chimpanzees therefore experience menopause five years before the close of their expected life span. A female chimp’s life expectancy is forty-five; her menopause begins at forty. Should she become pregnant just prior to its onset, she would live just long enough to wean her last baby.
Consider how different the human female is from her mammalian sisters. Gyna sapiens undergoes menopause at a point in her life when she still has many remaining years of health, vitality, and strength. Yet she mysteriously ends her reproductive life at a point between three-fifths to one-half of her entire life span, and at a time when she could perform the duties of motherhood. The puzzling installation of a biological alarm clock set to ring at an ungodly early hour in our species alone is all the more
baffling when compared with the absence of a similar device in men.
Most anthropologists posit that the answer can be found in the prolonged length of childhood. The extraordinary amount of care necessary to feed, protect, educate, and socialize children to the point where they can successfully realize their own reproductive potential is greater than that needed by any other animal. Multiple births spaced over years are the norm in our species. A mother caring for more than one child has her proverbial hands full. A male can help in provisioning and protecting, but his contribution is often inadequate. A harried young mother desperately needs a wife.
The Grandmother Theory, also called the “prudent mother hypothesis,” proposes that early menopause frees a woman from the responsibility of caring for her own children at a point in her life when she still possesses considerable vigor and thus can devote her energy to helping her daughter (or her son’s wife) raise her grandchildren, whose chromosomes carry one-fourth of her DNA.4 Mother Nature had to invent grandmothers because childhoods became excessively long. An older, more experienced, middle-aged woman became an indispensable adjunct for burdened ancestral mothers coping with the round-the-clock job of caring for tykes.
Assuming that fifteen is the age when a human becomes marginally self-reliant, and using sixty-five as the age when a human mother’s vitality begins to flag significantly, then the cessation of menses in a woman’s late forties makes good evolutionary sense. A mother conceiving at this late date can be assured of living to see her last child reach maturity to survive and reproduce. The bonus years beyond sixty-five allow her to spoil her own children’s children.
Anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, using sophisticated time-and-motion studies, has demonstrated that grandmothers are more efficient gatherers than younger women and are able to bring their daughters more total calories than the daughter’s mate.5 As Natalie Angier put it, “Mothers bred what grandmothers fed.”6 Older women can also offer younger women assistance in intangible ways. They are repositories of wisdom and can mediate disputes between offspring. They provide an invaluable cushion to help the young to survive. Childhood is a cultural convention made possible by the invention of grandmothers.
The accumulated wisdom of grandmothers was, I shall propose, a key factor behind the origin of the peculiar rite of male circumcision. At present, much thunder and lightning surround this emotional subject. Traditionalists maintain that, because ancient scripture demands it, and God-fearing Jews and Muslims have always practiced it, circumcision must be correct. Another side claims that Biblical people had excellent hygienic reasons for mandating the sacrifice of every male’s foreskin. A third group considers the custom a barbaric genital-mutilation ritual imposed on young boys at an age when they cannot protest. When pressed to provide an explanation couched in scientific terms for why this tradition has persisted so widely and for so long, most people fall back on the tautology, “It is because it is.” Because we have always done it, therefore we must continue to do it.
Let us examine the practice with new eyes and ponder which group among ancestral people would have benefited the most from male circumcision, and who would have paid the steepest price for the procedure. This risk-benefit analysis assumes that circumcision is a very old and widespread custom. Columbus reported that he encountered many New World indigenous peoples whose males had been circumcised.7 The earliest recorded example clearly demonstrating circumcision’s practice was found in pharaonic Egypt. A graphic depiction of a man clearly circumcising another appears on a mural in the tomb of Ankhmahor, associated with the pyramids of Saqqara dating to 2200 B.C.8
Despite claims to the contrary, the lifetime health benefits to the male are paltry. The minimal advantage of a reduction of under-the-foreskin infections, a medical condition known as “balanitis,” seems minor compared with the risks and pain of the procedure. Numerous highly successful cultures flourished throughout history, such as the Greeks, Romans, and Chinese, without practicing circumcision. So adamant were the Roman authorities on the subject that, during the reign of the Flavian emperors, circumcision became a capital crime.*9
Had balanitis been a factor preventing significant numbers of warriors from marching and fighting while living under the unsanitary conditions of a mobile bivouac, then, surely, authorities would have adopted measures to counter the problem. At the very least, they would have mentioned that a problem existed. Hippocrates and Galen, ancient history’s two most famous physicians, discoursed on a wide variety of human ailments, but neither listed penile infections caused by an overabundant foreskin as a health issue requiring a culture-wide remedy.
Another health benefit claimed for circumcision is that the incidence of penile cancer is higher in males who have not been circumcised than in those who have undergone the procedure. This condition is so rare it vitiates the argument, and since it has been observed only since records began to accumulate in the modern era, factors such as socioeconomic life-styles have not been adequately taken into account.
Proponents argue that women benefited, because they caught fewer sexually transmitted diseases and cervical infections, which in turn would have lowered their rate of cervical cancer. This defense of circumcision is weak for similar reasons. Cervical cancer as a cause of females’ death would be very near the bottom of any list for why women have died throughout history. Other hygienic arguments point to various obscure health benefits for circumcision, but, again, the slight gains do not offset the significant risks to the male who had to undergo surgery in the pre-antisepsis, pre-antibiotic, and pre-anesthesia era.
The most devastating counterargument against any health benefits for circumcision becomes obvious to anyone visiting a zoo. Among the immense variety of animals, nonhuman males have evolved some sort of protective sheath to cover the tip of the penis. Surely, humans are not as clever as Natural Selection, and if a covered penis or its retraction within the body was detrimental to the survival of a species, then there should be a whole raft of male animals running around with pale, naked members flapping in the breeze. Several African primates sport short foreskins that permanently expose a small portion of the tip of their penises, but with the exception of these few, the absence of nonhuman males that flout their tips tends to argue against circumcision’s health benefits.
Let us reflect on the foreskin and the function it serves. The human male’s covers the bulbous glans (tip) and proximal portion of the shaft of the penis when this organ is flaccid. The prepuce’s (foreskin’s) inner lining, especially its base, is exceedingly rich in nerve endings that greatly enhance male sexual arousal. During intercourse, the prepuce is turned back on itself, much like a rolled sleeve. The inner nerves are now on the external surface, and their stimulation by friction contributes to the degree of penile excitability. When the prepuce is in its resting position, mucous glands lining its inner surface secrete a thick protective substance that keeps the glans moist and slightly lubricated, similar to the resting state of a female’s vagina.
A man can easily telescope his loose, elastic foreskin manually when he has to urinate. When the penis is in full erection, the foreskin retracts naturally, exposing the penis’s glans and its proximal shaft. Form follows function. This thick cutaneous holster obviously protects a very sensitive and vulnerable part of the male anatomy. Genital injuries are exceedingly common in the many fights observed by primatologists among male chimpanzees. A bipedal mammal would be the most susceptible animal to this trauma, and would require the most protection. No other creature has so defenseless and exposed a penis as does a human, and the function of the foreskin in humans is therefore all the more important.
There are few superfluous parts of the body. Mother Nature has subjected every component to relentless pruning. Resembling an obsessive-compulsive gardener, She continually snips away at deleterious behavioral, physiological, and anatomical adaptations that have edged into a species’ genome. At the same time, Mother Nature encourages the retention of mutations that further t
he survival of the individual by increasing the probability that the holder of such a lucky gene combination produces surviving offspring in greater numbers than those unfortunate enough not to possess it.
Although the human body appears eminently well suited to do what it has to do to compete with other animals, on rare occasions Mother Nature allows a feature, called a “vestige,” to persist even though it no longer serves the function for which it was originally designed. For example, resembling a dog, we have a full set of muscles surrounding our ears to twitch them in the direction of the source of sound. But this shadow musculature is so vestigial that most people are unaware they have it. A few people remain capable of an attention-getting party trick and can wiggle their ears on request, but these muscles’ original purpose has been lost in time, their function faded with disuse. Many in society have made the assumption that the prepuce is vestigial and of no use. Cutting it away should therefore have no health consequences.*
Besides shielding the penis from injury, the prepuce protects a valuable male sexual asset. The glans has one of the greatest concentrations of nerve endings present in a man’s body. The nerve endings connect to microscopic specialized organelles that lie exposed on the surface, scattered among surrounding skin cells. These tiny pleasure centers are extremely sensitive to trauma and can easily be damaged.
An analogous area of a man’s body, containing nearly as many nerve endings as his glans, are the pads of his fingers. The sensitivity of his digits allow a man (or a woman) to discern the slightest pressure or the most delicate nuances in the texture of any object touched. But fingers, unlike a penis, are nearly constantly in use. Selecting for practicality, Natural Selection did not protect them with a sheath.
Sex, Time, and Power Page 12