According to this logic, most women are redundant as well. The average woman produces hundreds of eggs in her lifetime, but only one or two eggs become children. All this proves is that there is plenty of biological redundancy built into the human reproductive system. Neither women or men are just their physical reproductive organs though, or as Mary Woolstoncraft put it, the nature of woman is not to be confused with their biology.
Memo to Greer: what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
>This unimaginably enormous disproportion between the huge investment
>demanded of females and the piffling contribution of males is reflected
>across terrestrial species where the male is often jettisoned as too costly
>and too useless to be allowed to survive once he has contributed his sperm.
>The genus Antechinus comprises several Australian species of marsupial
>mouse, the males of which are remarkable for the extraordinary vigour and
>intensity of their mounting behaviour. Immediately after their orgy of
>violently athletic intercourse, the males die, leaving the females to raise
>their young alone. Yet these marsupial mice are among the most successful of
>Australian species at a time when other indigenous small mammal species are
>being wiped out at the rate of one a month. If survival is your game, you
>need many more females than males.
Though obviously a species that survives by creating a society will adopt a quite different strategy. For some species, the majority of the population are not capable of breeding. For others, only a small percentage of the females which are capable of reproduction will do so. The others contribute to rearing the offspring of other females. It isn't the quantity of off-spring that can be created, but the number and more particularly to humans, the quality that can be reared.
Mary Shelley had something to say about that too.
>It is supposed to be in the female animal's interest to mate with superior
>males; by combining her genes with those of a winner male, she endows her
>offspring with a better chance of survival, provided her co-parent does not
>decide to eat them, as tomcats have been known to do, or trample on them in
>the course of fighting rival males, as sea-elephants often do. Female deer
>are apparently happy to breed by a single stag and stay close to him in the
>herd, while the unmated males wander disconsolately around in the
>wilderness, awaiting a chance to fight and defeat an alpha stag and inherit
>his herd. Up to five lionesses will cluster together in the pride of a
>single lion, hunting for him and breeding by him, leaving four unmated
>inferior lions to scratch a living as best they can. The system has great
>benefits for the lionesses, who can hunt more effectively in a group and can
>share the cub-minding, taking it in turns so that they can catch up on their
>sleep.
Lions are somewhat unusual for social animals. Many cooperative animal societies, such as mongooses and wolf packs, are despotic, reproduction is the exclusive prerogative of a single, domineering female.
It isn't about gender.
> The lion is a mere toyboy, who takes no part in cub-rearing or
>hunting. Once he has impregnated them, they don't need him, so why do they
>keep him?
Because a new male would probably kill the young cubs? He will fight off new males, protecting the cubs.
> Because need has nothing to do with it. He needs to believe that
>he is needed, and they let him believe it because they love him.
Wow! This sounds like one hell of an insecure lion! I suspect he hangs around mainly because they serve his meals for him. Greer doesn't seem to have been told that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, but take my word for it. Male lions and male humans don't have much else in common though.
> But they
>don't love him so much that they will not be unfaithful to him on occasion.
>Not all the cubs are his, but as they resemble their mothers, there is no
>way he could single out and kill the ones who carry the wrong genes.
>
>In many mammal species, reproductive opportunity is available only to the
>alpha male who spends a good deal of his time beating up junior males who
>try to usurp his right. We daily observe symbolic versions of this
>leader-fucks-all behaviour when we see Blair accompanied by his receptive
>female at all times, while the henchmen he is grooming for future office
>trot beside him spouseless. The implication is that they're all expendable,
>and so with each cabinet shuffle do all but a few shrewd campaigners prove
>to be. Male hierarchies are built on conflict and competition not between
>man and women but between man and man; all the winners are eventually
>losers, unseated by younger, hungrier, leaner males.
Obviously Greer has no idea what she's talking about. Unless there is some subtle message hidden in the text which I'm just too thick to understand. Entirely possible, I'm only a simple male.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas