The picture above, of the melancholy-looking pregnant woman, is of my wife Jessica, who’s due with our first child, a girl-child, on May 23. I’m posting it for two reasons. The first is that I think it’s cute. She hasn’t had the easiest pregnancy—a lot of nausea in the first trimester, a pretty decent second trimester, and an anemia-stricken third trimester—but she’s remained cute throughout the whole thing. She’d probably (maybe) trade the cuteness for a higher red blood cell count, but since that’s not an option, I’ve decided to be grateful on her behalf (or is it on my behalf?) for her continuing physical attractiveness.
The second reason I’m posting her picture is that I’ve been struggling, since we started this blog, to figure out a way to talk about the ways that men and women are different, and I think I’ve finally hit on a decent place to start.
As the old nursery rhyme goes, men have penises and women have vaginas. More to the point, for me personally right at this moment, is that women have ovaries and uteruses (uterusi?) and fallopian tubes and so on, and they can have babies—and men can’t.
Our bodies are very different, us men and women.
Before I go too far with this, let me clarify what I don’t mean. I don’t mean that the essence of womanhood is motherhood. I don’t mean that most of the qualities that we stereotypically ascribe to women are a direct consequence of their biology. I don’t even mean to defend what seem to be common sense links between the genders and their biology (e.g. men, with their testosterone, are more likely to be violent; women, with their maternal apparatus, are more likely to be nurturing).
What I do mean to say, and this is both staggeringly obvious and deceptively hard to wrap one’s mind around, is that biology—embodiedness—is inescapable. We’re not condemned to be the unwitting victims of our bodies, but nor are we disembodied consciousnesses. We don’t exist apart from our bodies.
So, for instance, in the bad old days we used to think that girls threw like girls—in that awkward, inefficient, loosy-goosey kind of way. Now it turns out that girls used to throw like girls because they didn’t practice throwing as much as a lot of boys did, and when they do practice that much, and when they start practicing as early as boys do, then they throw the ball as smoothly and as efficiently (if not quite as hard). I’m reminded of this every time Jess and I happen to walk the trail around Town Lake, in downtown Austin, at the same time in the late afternoon when a particular little league softball team is practicing at the diamond by the entrance to the trail. Those girls, who are probably around 12 or 13, are really fucking good—much better than I was at that age, and in most ways better at throwing the ball than I am now.
So the old notion turns out to be bunk. But ? it’s still the case that, while these girls are playing softball, they have breasts. It’s still the case that they’d lose a best-of-seven series against a boys’ team that’s as good, relative to other boys’ teams, as they are relative to other girls’ teams, because the boys are bigger, stronger and faster. It’s still the case that these girls, or most of them at least, will menstruate, and be able to give birth to children, and experience orgasm in a different way than men do, and be recognizably different-looking than men.
I can’t work where I do, in the College of Natural Sciences—where the female students are proving on a daily basis the ridiculousness of the old notions that men are more scientific-minded than women—and not recognize both that a lot of the notions about how men and women are different have no basis in biology, and also that biology is a powerful determinant of human behavior, and it’s wrong to think that the profound biological differences between men and women don’t condition how we experience life.
The subjective, rather than just the biological, experience of life is different for men as men than it is for women as women. I walk to the store with a penis between my legs. I’ll never be pregnant and feel my daughter kicking me from the inside. I read Jamie’s post about proposing to Anja and I experience it as a man who’s proposed to a woman. I’m stronger than 90-some percent of the women I encounter.
I don’t know precisely what that all means, and the minute I begin to generalize about it I run into so many exceptions and qualifications that I quickly stop generalizing. It means something, though, and any feminism or meminism that hopes to persuade the misguided masses of the reality of their patrairchy-induced misguidedness will have to offer a vision of life that includes, though doesn’t necessarily fetishize, the specific biology of man-hood and woman-hood.
