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).
That’s why I’ve always thought that in the myth, where the garden of Eden story is the point of origin, the first being could just as well have been called “Adama” (a female name, which I guess is not much used in the European world). At that point there is no category, no “male” or “female”, just a creature. Male and female come with the differentiation; but that event of differentiation also creates the category that includes them, which didn’t exist before that point.
I don’t agree with that–it is a kind of anti-realism or nominalism about natural kinds. Animals were male or female before language and thought came along.
Well. I agree with that one (the second sentence). I was going to say as much: on the biological level the male/female distinction (sexual reproduction) long preceded the appearance of humans and language. I was referring in my comment (second sentence) to the myth and the process of the construction of categories (the categories that were used in the creation of the myth) on the “logical level of analysis”, where we find human language and meaning. Seeing the myth as a metaphor for the construction of the relevant categories (a term I use only to refer to the logical level of analysis, e.g., the (semantic) categories of linguistic systems. I assume the term ‘natural kinds’ refers to a phenomenon in the biological or physical world, like the individuals generated by a given genotype, where the logical structure of the genotype-individual relation is similar to (if not isomorphic with) the relation between category and instance in the construction of the category.) Is there a problem with that for philosophy? I was trying to keep the comments as brief as possible; I saw that there might be a problem there.
These things are difficult to formulate clearly and precisely.
“… in the myth, where the garden of Eden story is the point of origin, the first being …”
I thought it would be clear here that I was talking about the myth, the story, not the reality. It takes at least two referents to make a category. (The following is just terminology, not an argument.) The sense of the English lexeme ‘moon’ is a category; “the moon” is an expression, not a category. The sense of the English lexeme ‘bug’ is a category, but it is a natural kind only if you’re talking about the category, as opposed to the denotata of the category. Biologists have tried to recognize (what philosophers call) a “natural kind”, consisting of a genotype and all the instances generated by that genotype, that meets the requirements for what they call a “species”, including the causal and logical relations involved in the process called “generate”. They have apparently recognized such a structure, for one set of referents for what people call “bugs”, that they call “Hemiptera”. The sense of the term ‘Hemiptera’ is a category. The set of all possible referents of uses of the category is the denotata of the category, which hopefully corresponds to the set of individuals generated by the relevant genotype (if not, adjustments are in order). The set of all possible referents of uses of the English lexeme ‘bug’ is the denotata of the lexeme ‘bug’. In normal English usage a lot of objects referred to by the lexeme ‘bug’ are not Hemiptera, but some are. The set of all instances generated by the category ‘bug’ is the extension of the category; here the word “extension” is referring to what people call (provisionally) the “meaning” expressed by uses of the lexeme, not referring to the whole expression (the word). But it’s important to distinguish reference to the denotata from reference to the extension. The extension of a category is part of the category; the denotata of a category is not a part of the category. Both the genotype (natural kind, I guess) and the category necessarily have an open-ended structure. Both genotypes and categories can change over time.
It took me just a few minutes to write this down, so thank you for providing the spur that made me do it. I find this blog quite useful, because, unlike some other people, you always give replies to comments. But I’ve never written the above down before (I don’t think it’s conventional wisdom or the “received view” of any field; I would regard it as an attempt at revision), and I would like to know if philosophy has a problem with any of this. (I hope it’s expressed clearly enough for someone to answer that question. (The way I describe the usage of the terms may seem strange, because I’m not doing it using definitions, and it’s not expressed in the usual manner of philosophy, or of linguistics, for that matter.)) I’m always eager to try to express my formulations more clearly and precisely.
I find it hard to follow and I don’t see why it is necessary. It sounds like the same thing as sense and reference, intension and extension. In any case, I see no relevance to what I am discussing.
The terminological distinctions I proposed are definitely not “the same as sense and reference, intension and extension”, but I guess I’ll have to leave it at that. (The relevance is taken from the post’s “Are men women?” question and the “Adama and Evan” story, where the construction of the category by differentiation occurs wholly in the realm of meaning expressed in language (and within the myth, where the categories ‘woman’ and ‘man’, and thereby the inclusive category ‘woman’ (where expressions like “the sisterhood of woman” include men) also exist in the myth’s world, and not in the natural world outside the myth, where the construction of the natural kind takes place. Totally different processes. I would have thought (I’m no expert in the terminology for philosophical positions) that what I suggested was not “a kind of anti-realism or nominalism”, but a kind of realism and anti-nominalism.)
Do you think men are women in reality, as I argued?
I do agree, in the sense that “the natural kind woman includes the natural kind man.” (I don’t know how to get the italics in the little box.) If procreation is the basic property, I assume that reproduction preceded the distinction between sexual and non-sexual reproduction. “Biologically speaking, men and women are of the same natural kind”. Yes, that would be completely factual. “The couple [who are also in some sense unified] is the biological unit of pregnancy”. And it’s so sad and unnatural that couples break up before the child is capable of independence. You also relate the question to the Adam and Eve story. You mainly imagine an alternative reality; I was imagining an alternative myth. Sexual reproduction caught on perhaps because it was a useful source of variation and flexibility.
So you think that men were women even before language and thought existed and that this fact in no way depends on them? If so, you are a realist and an anti-nominalist.
Yeah, I think that; but I think I might phrase the thesis a bit differently. You have said in this blog that non-human animals, like cats, are capable of thought, and I would definitely agree with that. Looking back into evolutionary history to a time before the appearance of homo sapiens (and not even that far back, because presumably homo sapiens existed before they developed the capacity for language), the application of the modern English lexemes ‘woman’ and ‘man’ to females and males would only go so far; eventually individuals would be called, not “men” and “women”, but “males” and “females”. (Do we refer to gorillas as “men” and “women”?) But, as we were saying, the basis for the natural kinds males and females were participating in goes back all the way to the appearance of sexual, as opposed to asexual, reproduction. So the genomic mechanism that determines the difference between the development of a female individual versus a male individual developed completely independently of the categories, such as the senses of lexemes, like ‘female’ or ‘woman’, modern humans would eventually use to describe, among other things, these historical biological developments. The mechanism that produced the “natural kinds” is a part of the causal structure of the biological world, with consequences that are totally independent of whether humans ever made it into the picture at all. So, given the above discussion, the preeminence of the female over the male goes all the way back to the beginning of sexual reproduction. To all this, biologists would probably say, “I guess you could say that.”
Now, I’ve never thought of these things before. Linguists never seem to have cause to consider the notion of ‘natural kinds’, but it seems like an interesting area for further thought. I suspect that there may also be other grounds for saying I’m a realist and an anti-nominalist.
That is all eminently correct, though many taxonomic anti-realists would question it. Females and males were naturally distinct once sexual reproduction began, well before humans ever came along to recognize the distinction. .
It’s interesting to see the different responses, semantic and morphological, different languages make wrt the categories they construct to make sense of the differences and inclusions among women, men, persons, and more (including pronoun systems).
Is the category N of natural numbers, as generated by the Peano axioms or an equivalent system, a natural kind (or is it considered as such by any subset of philosophers), where the statements of the axioms are taken as an attempted description of a preexisting fact, as opposed to being freely posited by mathematicians as part of a purely formal (analytic?) system?
There is no consensus among philosophers on these matters. There are different philosophies of mathematics. Platonists would describe the natural numbers as a natural kind. However, the concept of a natural kind has not been extended to mathematics. I tend to use the concept quite broadly.
Thanks. Platonism, Structuralism, Naturalism look like promising candidates for further exploration, for a start. The question arose (in my mind, and was made possible by the discussion above) in response to a phrase in an account of Frege’s (well-known) conception of number: “… the explicit definition of number he goes on to give in terms of extensions of concepts (classes).” I found that expression ambiguous, since there are at least two interpretations of what it is referring to. (Personally, I don’t think Frege’s idea of cardinal numbers as categorical entities of some sort holds up to scrutiny. If you’re talking about the English lexemes ‘four’ or ‘five’ (or the corresponding German lexemes), those are categorical entities; but not the numbers as generated by the Peano axioms.)