Are Women Men?

Are Women Men?

The answer is a categorical no, but the question is interesting in itself. Men are women, but women are not men.[1] To establish this, we need to know the essence of men or male organisms generally. The essence of maleness is depositing sperm in the female body and not containing the resulting fetus. The female, by contrast, receives the sperm and contains the fetus. The female does not deposit sperm and keep an empty belly. Therefore, the female does not have the essence of the male and is thus not a male. Women are not men. True, both share reproductive duties and are subject to pregnancy, but that is not the essence of the male, so the woman is not male by sharing this property with the male. Accordingly, men are members of the opposite sex, but women are not. It might be different if women had some characteristic possessed by males that has a specifically male nature, analogous to nipples; but that appears not to be so. Imagine if women had some sort of reduced scrotum between their legs serving no reproductive function, some sort of remnant of an earlier male identity; that might incline us to assign them to the male category in addition to their own. But no such thing appears to be the case—they have no distinctively male characteristics analogous to (functionless) nipples. (The clitoris is not a small penis.)  They don’t even have beards or deep voices. They are all woman. By no stretch of the imagination are women a breed of men. If women contained relics of Adam’s rib, we might spot maleness lurking within them, but that is clearly false. Men are not exclusively men, but women are exclusively women. Men are bisexual but women are unisexual. Womanhood is more universal than manhood, being possessed by men and women alike. A man is a type of woman, but a woman is not a type of man. This is because a man is defined by his sexual physiology whereas a woman is defined by her sexual role—getting pregnant and giving birth. The concept male is a physiological concept whereas the concept female is a functional concept, i.e., what does the job of becoming pregnant and giving birth.  The two sexes have different kinds of essence. The male has the property of getting pregnant and contributing to child-rearing, but this is not his essence, whereas it is the essence of the female. If this entails rewriting our whole conception of the sexes, so be it.[2]

[1] See my “Are Men Women?”

[2] What does this do to feminism?