As far as the clitoris and female orgasm are concerned, we already have a biological explanation: there is a clitoris in a woman's body for the same structural reason that there are nipples and mammary glands in a man's body. As Stephen Jay Gould put it in his essay "Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples," "Males and females are not separate entities, shaped independently by natural selection. Both sexes are variants upon a single ground plan, elaborated in later embryology" (_Bully for Brontosaurus_, p. 127). Against this clear and elegant biological explanation, sociobiology seeks to introduce superfluous speculations based on a cultural (not biological) prejudice that men and women are different kinds (rather than being mostly the same and different only in degrees) and that women must have a special adoptive reason for their capacity for orgasm, aside from the fact that the penis and the clitoris are developmentally rooted in the same organ in an embryo.
Just as women can have orgasm because men can, men can lactate because women can -- if only men work on it:
<blockquote>Male humans look pretty unhelpful next to pigeons. Newborn babies, still pumped full of maternal hormones, usually lactate slightly, producing a few drops of "witch's milk." Medical conditions like acromegaly (excess growth hormone) can induce male lactation.
Dr. Miriam Stoppard, author of "The Breast Book," agrees with Darwin that male nipples are more than rudimentary, cheerfully suggesting that "men could develop fully functional breasts given the right hormonal conditions."
That's right. If men would just submit themselves to an intense barrage of hormone therapy, affecting every organ system of the body in unknown ways, maybe they would be able to suckle their young and throw off the charge of reptilianism once and for all. But where is the research? Where is the funding? Where is the will?
(Susan McCarthy, "Why Do Men Have Nipples?" <http://www.salon.com/health/feature/1999/06/08/nipples/print.html>, 9 Jun. 1999)</blockquote>
Male lactation isn't as common as female orgasm, for the simple reason that orgasm is always fun but breast-feeding is often thought of as a chore. If lactation had been as intensely pleasurable as orgasm, men would be lactating all over the place, shelling out big bucks for hormone therapy instead of Viagra, penis pills, and the like. That it isn't shows that there is no Intelligent Designer of nature. :-> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Monthly Review: <http://monthlyreview.org/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>