Are Men Women?

Are Men Women?

I mean this question literally: are men really women? Are they deep down, biologically, women in disguise—and a thin disguise at that? When you meet a man are you actually meeting a woman? I will give a quick proof that they are: men have nipples; anyone with nipples is a woman; therefore, men are women. If you see the point immediately, you need not bother to read on; if you are slow on the uptake, keep reading (and prepare to be surprised). We are told in the Bible that Eve was made from a rib of Adam, so she is a kind of honorary man; well, men have a similar relation to women, so they are really women. The natural kind Woman includes the natural kind Man; or better, there are no men (in the exclusive sense) only women. There aren’t two sexes but one, and it’s female. I am talking here about all species that are conventionally divided into male and female specimens: there are only female animals and subclasses of them. It is a pre-scientific myth that male (non-female) animals exist (like the myth of the unicorn or centaur). This is just not a sound way to carve up the biological universe. If you think I am going to present recondite genetic evidence to this effect, then think again—I am going to establish the point by means of imaginary thought experiments. It follows from basic principles of biological classification.

What is a woman? A woman is a human being that gets pregnant and gives birth; a man doesn’t get pregnant and give birth, though he contributes to procreation in his own secondary way. But is that really true? The woman carries the baby in her womb and it exits her body at birth; these things are not true of the man. But the man is also pregnant in his own way and also gives birth: he carries the burden of the baby, ensuring that it reaches maturity safely, by feeding it (via the mother) and protecting the vessel in which it resides, sometimes with his life; and he also gives birth to it in the sense that he enables this event to happen by providing the necessary aid and comfort. If he does neither of these things, he is not pregnant and not involved in giving birth; but if he does, he is. Indeed, this is the way people have recently come to talk of pregnancy and birth: the couple is said to be pregnant, including the man; the couple is the biological unit of pregnancy. Having the fetus spatially inside you is not the only way of being pregnant. If you are skeptical, consider the following thought experiment: on another planet the so-called male is attached to the female by something like an umbilical cord through which nutrients pass to the fetus. He has no say in this; it just happens by biological necessity. He feeds the fetus just like the mother; indeed, we can suppose that only he feeds the fetus—the mother is not even connected to it by an umbilical cord. The man is thus pregnant with the baby, though it doesn’t live inside his body. But then, by the definition of a woman, he is a woman. We can also suppose that in addition to nipples he has functioning breasts and takes part in feeding the baby post-partum. He has a penis, naturally, but this doesn’t prevent him playing the biological roles in question. If this isn’t enough to prove the point, imagine that after three months the fetus is transferred into a chamber inside the man where it lives for the next three months; surely then he is pregnant! He might even give birth to the baby in due course. He is a woman as well as a man (what with the penis and all). If an animal with a penis could impregnate itself and carry the baby to term, thereupon giving birth, it would be a female according to the standard definition; and what other kind of definition could there be? But this kind of imaginary case is no different conceptually from the ordinary human case, except that the man is not physically conjoined with the baby. We might even say that he is the pregnant one, not the female, if he carries the full responsibility for ensuring the healthy birth of the baby—while the female merely acts as a holding cell for the fetus (it might not even cause her much inconvenience). What if the male of the species has a body very like that of a human female, with breasts and no penis to speak of, passing his sperm to the female body in some other way, which looks just like a human male body, wherein the fetus resides for the next few months and then slips painlessly out? Wouldn’t we say the “man” is really a woman, since he does the lion’s share of the procreative work and looks like a woman? Where the fetus happens to spend its time is beside the point. The man has gotten (in effect) pregnant by inserting sperm into a female helper, so he is really a woman: he is also a woman. An ordinary human father-to-be is a woman in that he plays the biological role played by a woman, viz. donating resources to the baby he has fathered. His life is now one of expecting: he is about to have a baby: he is pregnant. We might say he has an external uterus, or that the mother’s uterus has now extended to include him. He is part of the environment in which the fetus develops—the sustaining biological environment. The mother’s reproductive phenotype is extended in his direction. The couple copulate, get pregnant, and give birth; it’s not solely the job of the mother. But then, the father is also the mother and hence a woman. If an organism had both a penis and a vagina (a not impossible arrangement), it would be both male and female by our usual rough criteria; well, the human male is also a human female, because of his role in reproduction. He is a baby vehicle. And given that every male has the potential to get pregnant in this sense, they are all women too. If surgery could install a womb inside a man, then we would not hesitate to say that he is now a woman (as well as a man); but functionally this has already happened, since the man performs the same function as the womb in respect of keeping the fetus safe and fed. Deep down, a man is a woman.

This is like saying humans are apes: we fall under the same natural zoological kind. The contrastive use of “human” and “ape” should not fool us; it is entirely pragmatic. Similarly, we use “man” and “woman” contrastively in ordinary discourse, but that doesn’t show that the natural kind Woman does not include men—men are simply a subspecies of women. This is something we have discovered by logical reasoning plus elementary biology. It’s a bit like discovering that all white people are brown because every so-called white person is apt to turn a shade of brown in the sun (a browner shade of pale). The labels can be useful, but they don’t map exactly onto biological reality. Let’s add another thought experiment: suppose there were once only female humans and that the so-called males evolved from them (the converse of the Adam and Eve story) by various tweaks and accidents. Then it would be natural to say that the males are just variants on the females and are really a special case of them; they are not some independent natural kind. The male nipples provide evidence for this, but it is clear from many anatomical facts. The primary specimens are the females because they came first and do the main work of reproduction; the females were the prototype, the males merely parvenus. They are females with penises, that’s all. If their psychology and anatomy are very like those of the original females, then we may as well classify them together. The nipples are just the tip of the iceberg taxonomically. Biologically speaking, men and women are of the same basic natural kind: anatomically, psychologically, reproductively. The differences are minor and can be removed in thought experiments—there could in principle be child-bearing penis-wielding hunks of manliness and non-child-bearing vagina-hosting (but sperm-releasing) slices of femininity. The former would qualify as women according to the usual definition, while the latter would count as men. As it is, we humans have the opposite suite of traits; but men still share the trait of fetus-supporting and child-rearing, thus qualifying them as women. In imaginary worlds we could move the two sexes closer together so as to equalize the roles. Male nipples remind us that biologically we are of the same natural kind as women. Under the skin we are all female. Really, we are both of the same sex, since we both participate in the reproductive process in roughly equivalent ways: women get pregnant, but so do men. It is the same with the birds and bees: from a biological perspective the sexes are fundamentally the same—both are offspring-producing machines spending their hard-earned resources. Things are not as objectively binary as our linguistic practices would suggest. Nature doesn’t think in this binary way (the genes don’t care who is male and who is female so long as they get into the next generation).

Imagine if the male and female physically merged during the reproductive process so that only one body moved about the place. Then the male would be indistinguishable from the female and would be rightly described as female for the duration. Imagine too that the male does not survive the merging and perishes once the job is done, leaving the female behind. Wouldn’t we then say that the male had become a female in the process of reproducing? We don’t physically merge with each other when reproducing, but we do get tightly bonded; the man becomes more like a woman when acting as father. Men are women waiting to happen, and nothing wrong with that (it’s not a “sex change”). Men have a feminine side, literally. If men grew breasts during the pregnancy of their partners and used them to feed the baby, wouldn’t this be sufficiently womanly as to demand the label “woman”? But men functionally do much the same thing when they go out hunting for food to feed the baby. So, lads, let’s all agree, we are really women at heart (as well as men); we are just very macho women, or feminine men. Nature is procreative so we all do what women do, create and care for babies. Nature made two types of women: big slobby hairy ones with penises and petite neat smooth ones with vaginas.[1]

[1] Actually, the phenotypic differences are not that marked, with large individual variation; still, the basic point remains. It’s a woman’s world (to paraphrase James Brown).