It would seem that we reached an important milestone in
gender equality last week: August 24, 2012 marked the first time that a trite
feminine platitude became important enough to write a New York Times opinion
piece about. Or, at least, it marked the first time I became aware of a New
York Times opinion piece inspired by a trite feminine platitude, which in my
selfish little universe is basically the same thing. I refer, of course, to “Men,who needs them?”, by biology and criminal justice man dude Greg Hampikin: an
intriguing piece of literature sent to me as faux pacification after I went on
a Caitlin Moran related reading strike of all poorly-thought-out woman-related
media* (more on that in a few days). The big controversy raised here is that
the answer to “Who needs men” may in fact be “not babies”, an answer which, as
controversies go, seems a bit surreal given the way gender stereotyping
has traditionally divvied up the whole childcare business anyway. In other
news, it turns out that pears may not be necessary to the process of cider
making! There, I just turned thousands of years of human history and the
brewing traditions of charmingly-accented western folk on their head. I think I’ll
reward myself with some of this new-fangled apple cider.
I am being disingenuous of course. It’s not yet possible to
write an article as glaringly superfluous to the human condition as “Women are better
than men at growing small humans and feeding them milk!” But it does seem like
this, and the existence of sperm banks, and an apparent lack of ideas about
what fathers might do that might complement the whole physical baby-farming
business, is supposed to lead to a sense of futility about the entire male
gender. A large portion of this is based on the absence of men in what must be
the ultimate anti-choice fable about the origins of life: our identity apparently
begins not at conception or even at ovulation, but at the formation of our ovum inside our mother’s foetus. That’s right, you were once inside two reproductive
systems at once, like a little unicellular Matryoshka doll. Then you came out
of one vagina, hung out in an ovary for a while, went on a rocking waterslide for
a couple of days, possibly saw an enormous
penis which is even now the root of many of your subconscious insecurities**
and then you met a sperm which, for the purposes of this story, was not very
relevant because men are not very relevant. After that complete non-event, you
ruined your mother’s body, came out of another vagina, ruined your mother’s
body some more, and that’s the end of all meaningful stories about where babies
come from. I’m so glad a New York Times sanctioned biologist was around to share
this profound origin story with me!
To be fair, I think Hampikin’s only fundamental flaw is that
he fails to situate this narrative of the human condition in its natural home:
in the kind of pseudo-profound metaphysical worries one gets at 3am when you
accidentally make yourself a non-decaf coffee before bed and then discovered
your pillows have, to all intents and purposes, been replaced with sandbags. For instance:
“What is my purpose in life? Should I have been born? What
if I hadn’t been born? Will I find love? Will I be reincarnated? Was I reincarnated
before? Did I find love when I was reincarnated before? What if I am supposed
to find love with the same person I was in love with before I was reincarnated,
but then he was really bad and got reincarnated as a jellyfish? Or a dragonfly?
And then maybe I will be a jellyfish when he’s back to being a man and we’ll never meet again. Or wait- what if he
never got born? Maybe he’s sentient somewhere as a gamete, but unable to find
me! What if the person I am supposed to find eternal reincarnating love with is
trapped in an ovary????”
When I consider that the
likes of Greg Hampikin have to contend with “What if men are less biologically
necessary to the continuation of the human race than women?” on top of all that
nonsense, I do have to wonder how men manage to sleep at all.
A skim of the article’s comments shows that this is serious
threat to certain invidivuals’ masculinity- perhaps the social construction of
male-as-first-sex might not be completely justified from nature? Hampikin doesn’t offer any alternatives to sperm in
terms of fertilisation, thus saving the male organism from complete obsolescence,
but it seems it genuinely is jarring for anybody who isn't accustomed to being referred to as
“the weaker sex” or “the second sex” or “the fairer sex” to suddenly confront even the theoretical notion that they might be… “The extra sex”. “The
questionably relevant sex.” “The sex which just needs to wank in a cup (and
technically not even that but let’s not push this too far).” Suddenly, thanks to the night time worries of a biologist with a Y Chromosome (and True Feminist Ally) the
really obvious truth that men don’t grow babies inside them has become a deeply
subversive issue at the heart of gender relations! Again, I am blown away by
this novel and profound conclusion. I can just hear the machine of gender discrimination grinding
into reverse with this bombshell- we’ll be writing World Bank reports on male
infanticide and missing men before the decade’s out.
Mocking male egos is a cheap shot, however, especially when
the egos in question are those of people who habitually comment on online news opinion
pieces. The interesting thing about the whole thing is, for an article that is
ostensibly about child-rearing, this article has nothing whatsoever to do with child-rearing. It’s true that babies
have to come from somewhere in order to be reared, and the storks are probably
all busy catching fish and sitting on stork eggs or whatever it is storks do
when they’re not posing for “you just had a baby!” greeting cards. I can’t help
but note, however, that I’ve got two parents who are both very important in my
life, who have done a little more in the past twenty-four years than just contribute
genetic material and ensure I got born. My memory is a little hazy on some of
the details, but I distinctly remember some passing on of important life skills
happening there. Learning to walk and talk and read and ride bicycles and do
cross stitch and scuba dive, for instance. Some assistance in getting nutrients
and resources. General love and encouragement as well, that sort of thing. In
fact, the only thing not provided by a parent is practically the only post-womb
activity the article mentions- a long-running supply of breast milk. I’m sure
this oversight was second only to the pre-conception penis exposure in
irrevocably scarring my poor infant psyche. I have been, in both the traditional
and the important senses, very lucky- traditionally because I was raised by my
two direct antecedents, who still spend a statistically significant amount of
time living under the same roof and have been married 26 years today (go
parents!), and importantly because I got to spend my childhood being looked
after by loving adults, who were interested in raising children, in a secure
environment.
And that’s where this whole 3am-male-irrelevance-nightmare
seems to miss the point in quite an important way. Sure, the production of
babies requires more direct involvement from females than males, but as a
conception of parental responsibility that’s a starting point at best. Human
reproduction needs men because human children are rubbish an incapable and need
responsible adults to stop them from falling off mountains or getting eaten by
wolves. And aside from the semi-necessary involvement of women in breastfeeding
there is nothing to stop these all-important caretakers from being men. In
fact, As A Feminist I’d say it’d be positively encouraged! Perhaps it could even help us poor woman people to collectively move on from the whole work/child/”supermum”/double burden business
that keeps popping up and confusing us and making stupid people question if "feminism has gone too far?" now that women have to make life choices. Which then keeps me and my X chromosomes up at night: not worrying if feminism has gone too far, but worrying about how exactly I am going to be able to convey to the people talking about it just how stupid and misguided and utterly ridiculous they are.
Of course, there’s far more to this whole child-having business than I can
realistically cover here (which is probably why it's consumed rather a lot of humanity's collective energy for a very long time). For instance, I am dimly aware of (and Hampikin
briefly alludes to) swathes of sociological research on whether one’s caretaker
humans should indeed be those all important direct antecedents, or whether
being raised by four men, a non-binary femme and a talking mongoose would have
the same impact. There’s also the matter of how society differentiates between
mothers and fathers: paternity leave and custody laws and a whole host of
issues which, bizarrely, are a prime stomping ground for that wonderful beast,
the Men’s Rights Activist- the kind of charming gentlemen who tend to concern
themselves more with finding submissive women to give them blowjobs without
expecting reciprocation than fighting for the right to blow noses and change
nappies. I’m going to leave ideal family structure to the experts and MRAs for
another time, however, and finish with a plea for us all to think about the
real victims in all this: unfertilised ova people. Having to live for 10-50
years in a cramped ovary, seeing two vaginas but both of women related to you and from the wrong side, and they don’t even get to be a fully chromosomed person
at the end of it! Now there’s a thought that can truly cross gender boundaries and keep us all awake at night.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
*The astute reader will note this is an excellent
justification of my lack of proofreading. It’s always good when one can
disguise ones laziness with “principles”.
** NOTE FOR BIOLOGICAL ACCURACY: You never saw
this penis. It was on the other side of the cervix to you. But Freud never let
little problems like realistic female biology get in the way of his psychological
theories, and neither shall I.
