>to 55, when having a baby at 55
meant to type 45 as that's when my mother went through menopause. most women i know go through it about 50ish
would put you on the front page of the
>Times, especially if you did it without hugely expensive fertility
>interventions. (and this is leaving out whether you would want to be the
>mother of a fifteen year old when you were 70!). For men, you decrease
>the age of possible paternity by talking about LOWERED sperm production,
>but it only takes one, and there's med science to help, also.
yes, which makes it no different than women then really. i see absolutely no significant differences. and further, one thing that should be pointed out, when it comes to fertility during peak childbearing years it's usually men who are infertile! but for years no one bothered to do that research because of how we organized gender and thus how we organized biology, how we acted on it, shaped it, performed it, thought about, talked about it, researched it.
so, what is interesting *to me* is that we are placing such importance on men's ability to father children and women's in ability to mother children as they age. what is that all about. and funny that ! you can say father a child and have it mean something quite specific--but you can't say mother a child and have it mean the same thing. lord god but that's the first time this occurred to me. kewl.
We all
>know "start over dads" who father second sets of kids in their fifties.
> Sure there are going to be exceptions, but IN GENERAL the chances of a
>55 yr old man being fertile are about a thousand times greater than for
>a female (not a scientific estimate).
but again, the point is, that has very little relevance today as to how we organize the economy or childrearing or education or anything. gender is about all that and biological sex traits have little determination in how we think of gender because gender involves so much more and so there's a huge gap that is completely underdetermined by biological sex traits.
how we think of gender, it is important to point out, has a lot to do with how we think of biology. that no one has done much research on male contraception is a result of that kind of thinking. that only til recently have they realized that older men also contribute to down syndrome and other diseases is the result of the way we organize gender conceptually [and how we perform it--that is act on it] it's only been in the last two decades that we've finally learned that *most* cases of infertility result from male biology, not female and that is because of how we organize our thinking about biology. doctors are always policing pregnant mother's behavior. now they're realizing that the father's intake of drugs and alcohol affect his sperm production and the production of malfunctioning sperm that, they say, has some influence on birth defects.
that men don't breast feed is the result of a social organization that has rendered it difficult for men's bodies to to do so. men have all the physical infrastructure to do so and there is anthro evidence and current evidence to suggest that men could breast feed. men with pituitary cancer lactate because the cancer stimulates the production of pitocin. my mother heard some papers at a conference not too long ago that revealed that introducing the breast milk into a man's body is enough to stimulate lactation combined with a few days of suckling and upping the estrogen levels if he needs it since he already has estrogen . but this is no different than what it takes to stimulate lactation in a woman who has not been pregnant or is menopausal.
of course, the research is very new so problem highly unreliable. but isn't it thrilling to think that men can lactate right now?? isn't it wild that no one ever much thought about it til recently, despite evidence otherwise?
in any event, there's a very real example in which biology has shaped by the social organization of human lives--by not use a male biological trait--it atrophied.
kelley
for info on male lactation see: "Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality " Jared Diamond [Why don't men breastfeed their babies. The non-evolution of male lactation] 1997 "Breast Feeding and Human Lactation,": Jan Riordan & Kathy Auerbach 1993 "Breastfeeding: a Guide for the Medical Profession," Ruth Lawrence 1989
the papers on using breast milk to stimulate lactation i'm not sure where to find those. i'll ask my mother though.
And that does structure how each
>sex feels about the timing of reproduction. It's just like death: you
>might live to be 110, but you can't count on it.
>
> Katha
>
>