[The central point, crudely put, is this: There is EQUAL 'scientific' basis for considering all humans as a single sex with internal gradations and for considering all humans as divided into two sexes. Neither position can claim biological warrant.]
Volume 38, Number 11 · June 13, 1991 Review The Birth of the Two-Sex World By Stephen Jay Gould
Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud by Thomas Laqueur Harvard University Press, 313 pp., $27.95
Laqueur's Making Sex gains primary importance from this duality-that sex is both so important in itself, and also a sign, symbol, or reflection of nearly everything in our culture. This book has the great virtue, in a genre of academic writing not celebrated for clarity of prose or purpose, of presenting a simple theme with broad and cascading implications. (And remember that the word virtue, from the Latin vir for "male person," presents just one tiny example of gender-biased pervasiveness.) Laqueur ostensibly writes about one major (and largely forgotten) transition in the history of Western attitudes toward body and gender, but his actual subject is as broad as the bases of culture and epistemology. A largely unheralded but stunning transition in attitude occurred during the century spanning Newton's revolution in thought and America's in politics. In classical to Renaissance anatomy, from Aristotle and Galen to Paracelsus and Paré, human bodies were ranged on a continuum of excellence-the "one-sex model" in Laqueur's terms. Overt morphological expression among human beings might clump in two major groups called male and female, but only one archetypal body existed and all incarnations could only occupy a station along a continuum of metaphysical advance. Needless to say, the usual form of maleness, by virtue of a greater quantity of vital heat, stood near the apex of this sequence, while the characteristic female form, through relative weakness of the same generating forces, ranked far down on the ladder.
This unfamiliar world of the one-sex model expressed its view of sex and gender primarily by the implied notion that only one set of sexual organs exists, with the male facies as a higher form of expression. A woman, in this view, is merely a potential man-more accurately perhaps, an inverted man, bottled in by lack of vital heat. Laqueur writes: "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."
The "two-sex model" replaced this concept of woman and man as two clumps on a graded continuum with a notion of two fundamentally distinct entities, bearing different organs that imply divergent behaviors and aptitudes; (divergent perhaps, but still eminently rankable, for sexism is the one invariant in this history of transition). Laqueur writes:
Thus the old model, in which men and women were arrayed according to their degree of metaphysical perfection, their vital heat, along an axis whose telos was male, gave way by the late eighteenth century to a new model of radical dimorphism, of biological divergence. An anatomy and physiology of incommensurability replaced a metaphysics of hierarchy in the representation of woman in relation to man.
Why did this transition occur, and why over a broad stretch of time centered on the early eighteenth century? The answer cannot lie in any simplistic notion of empirical discovery wrested from nature by triumphant science (quite a set of male images). I shall return to the role of empirics among other causes of transition later in this review, but a simple reason suffices to debar factual adequacy as a primary agent of the switch: neither model is "correct" by any morphological standard; both capture elements of anatomical reality.
Galen and the single-sexers were wrong (and obviously motivated by an androcentric view of life) in their fanciful identification of a vagina as a penis turned inside out. But true homologies do exist between our external genitalia. The male scrotum and the female labia majora are the same organ, formed from a common embryological precursor. At a high concentration of androgenic hormones, usually reached only by males, the two lips grow longer, fold over, and fuse in the midline to form a scrotal sac during embryological development. The male penis and the female clitoris are also the same structure-again folded over, fused, and enlarged under androgenic influence. This homology explains the primarily clitoral site of orgasm in females-and underscores the cruelty in Freud's absurd theory that "mature" female sexuality must shift the site of orgasm from clitoris to the relatively insensitive vagina. Freud was trained as an anatomist, and he both knew and recorded the proper homology. But his social attempt at an unachievable biological reconstruction of women (redefined in functional terms more closely linked to male pleasures) sowed incalculable distress among millions of educated women who were taught that their sexual maturity depended upon a biological impossibility.
On the other hand, our internal genitalia are different from the start. The human embryo contains precursors of both sexes-the Müllerian ducts (which form the Fallopian tubes and ovaries of women), and the Wolffian ducts (which form the vas deferens of men). In females, the Wolffian ducts degenerate and the Müllerian ducts differentiate; males develop on the opposite pathway.
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Incidentally, this Theory & Butler threads gave additional evidence for my off-list correspondent's pont of the intellectual loss to lbo-talk from the the harrassment of Yoshie. See her posts from some years back advocating a "One-Sex Many Genders" perspective on sex & gender.
Carrol