by Sara Pascoe
* Delete as appropriate for your political leaning.
† If the whole world was me, who would be in the audience, hmmm? Another reason I decided against it.
‡ You may well have heard that the clitoris has the same amount of nerve endings as a penis, and now you can understand exactly how. Biologically, a penis is a ballooned, blown-up clit. Or if you prefer, the clit is a minuscule, diddy penis. Either way, they respond very differently to touch and heterosexual people must remember to be gentle/grip it harder.
The Penis in Our Mind
Parents don’t like to have their baby wrong-sexed. They correct you if you ‘he’ a ‘she’, get insulted. People adorn their babies with signifiers to avoid embarrassment. Bald, Churchillesque girls get pink bows velcroed round their skull. Pretty baby boys are dressed in manly sky blue, their soft blankets illustrated with sharks and dinosaurs to show that this sleepy idiot means business. He might drink from boobies and cry all the time, but he’s a predator.
This initially seems illogical. If we have two sexes for reproductive purposes, to mix up genes, why would we care about the maleness or femaleness of a person so many years before they’re fit for breeding? Parents shouldn’t give a toss about the perceived gender of their babies – they’re not putting them on Tinder.
There are a variety of studies demonstrating that parents, teachers, caregivers and strangers all change their treatment of children – even using different language towards them – based on perceived gender. My favourite one involves an adjustable ramp and babies just shy of a year old. Mothers were asked to estimate how steep a ramp their child would be able to crawl down. The ramp was then cranked to that position and the kid either proved their mother correct or rolled to their death didn’t. The results of the experiment showed that mothers tended to overestimate their sons’ ability – ‘Oh yeah, make it vertical, he’s Spider-Man’ – and underestimate their daughters’ – ‘Let’s leave it flat – she’ll still fall off!’ In both instances the mothers’ gender bias was found to have no basis in fact. There was no sex difference in the ramp-crawling ability of babies at this age. How do we process this? Does it mean that from the word go parents are subconsciously pushing their sons to achieve more than their daughters? Or could it be that parents are subconsciously more coddling and protective of girls?
Either way, what I’m trying to convince you is that the genitalia you were born with affects more than your reproductive potential. There are ramifications in every area of your life. Let’s have a little Darwin refresher to help us dissect why.
Charles Darwin was a Victorian scientist who loved finches and hated the idea of getting married. He was an Aquarius, his middle name was Robert and, more significantly, he was the first person to officially propose the theory of evolution. While we call it a ‘theory’, evolution has been accepted as fact by the scientific community for 150 years. You’ll be familiar with ‘natural selection’ and ‘sexual selection’ as forces within evolution that shape all the beasties on our planet. Natural selection refers to how certain aspects of body or behaviour aid a creature’s survival, and sexual selection signifies the aspects of body or behaviour that make him or her more fuckable sexually attractive. Both are important for the passing on of genes: to breed you must, firstly, be alive, and, secondly, desired.*
The relationship between natural selection and parenting is instantly clear. Mummies and daddies teach their children about the dangers of the world so that they don’t drown or set themselves on fire. Childhood is a learning stage, from eating and hygiene to sharing with others, crossing the road, keeping fit and not getting into strangers’ cars. Parents protect and nurture their offspring when they are very small, then later bestow the skills and survival tools they’ll need to look after themselves.
Parents are conscious of this process. They’re aware of wanting their children to be safe; more than that, to flourish. We’ve all heard our breeding friends† exclaim how they ‘want the best’ for their kids. A phrase reeking of survival of the fittest: it is THE BEST they want. Life is competitive and people can’t help but want their children to win. This makes sound evolutionary sense, but I believe it’s also why a child’s sex dictates how they’re spoken to, how they’re treated and what is expected of them.
A good way of surviving, aka not dying, is to avoid being killed by one of your own species. You’ll be aware from GCSE history and the News at Ten that human beings kill each other. Are you also aware that this is gendered behaviour? Men are much more likely to be killed than women.‡ In every country in the world men make up over 80 per cent of murder victims, even without including the casualties of war. But men are also the aggressors, making up 88 per cent of murderers and a whopping 98 per cent of mass murderers. It’s a completely male-dominated industry. Whenever a woman does break through she’s referred to as a ‘female murderer’, which she finds very patronising. Makes her want to work even harder at killing people, until she gets some respect.
If you want to passionately argue that this male-on-male killing is created by culture then I will watch your TED talk, but I’m unlikely to be convinced. Throughout our evolution males have competed brutally with each other for resources and mates, and only the successful shared the genes for physical dominance with their sons and grandsons. This (mostly) historical violence remains crucially relevant to modern parenting.
While most mums and dads don’t encourage aggression in their sons – don’t pack hammers in their lunch boxes or practise bare-knuckle boxing in the garden – male children are still to some extent conditioned to be ‘strong’. Boys are taught and told to toughen up and suppress emotion, dissuaded from playing with ‘effeminate’ toys. It has been proven in studies that children themselves police this behaviour from a surprisingly young age, three or four.
One of my cousins was born camp. He was the kitschiest, queenliest, most brilliantly gay baby and boy, and continues to be now that he’s an out young man. As he grew up, all the adults around him, teachers, parents and other relatives, attempted to kind of push the gay back in. They confiscated prized items, banned dressing up and tried, and failed, to coerce him into masculinity. I have to stress, I come from an arty family. We are not military officers and lumberjacks, we’re painters and cruise ship entertainers. I want to say, ‘We’re not homophobic,’ but there is an element of homophobia to that kind of behaviour, isn’t there?
What I didn’t understand, as a child myself, was that the grown-ups believed they were protecting my cousin by encouraging him to conform. I’m not saying they were right, but from childhood onwards, a male’s safety requires social respect. Softness can lead to vulnerability. Standing out from the crowd can make a boy a target. I KNOW THIS IS NOT POLITICALLY CORRECT OR NICE. I know we’re all beautiful, unique individuals shining like diamonds. I’m not attempting to excuse the behaviour described above. I’m trying to comprehend where it comes from.
The way I see it, if natural selection is about survival traits, and if being perceived as STRONG increases a male’s chance of survival by making him less vulnerable to attack from other males, then thousands of generations will have compounded our expectations for a set of masculine behaviours that are virtually irrelevant now that most of us are not hunter–gathering. Strength protects men from other men. This is why we see boys yanked away from gentleness and communicating their emotions. Experiments have found that male children are less nurtured than girls, read to less, cuddled less after they hurt themselves. I would say how sad this makes me, except I’m a tough guy: rugby, bashing stuff, Jeremy Clarkson.
Enough of this girly gossiping, let’s return to the biological ramifications of the penis.
* THIRDLY, there is a third way to continue genes and that is forced copulation in animals (rape in humans). This is a mating strategy and I have subconsciously omitted it.
† An oxymoron, we all know you lose your friends when they breed.
‡ I should specify cis women here. Trans
women are experiencing a very, very high murder rate.
Invention of Daddy
Here is an incontestable fact: the biological possibilities of our body have ramifications.
Mothering and fathering require different skills and advertisements. All of our ancestors, before there were any constructs of gender or condoms, had to behave in certain ways for their genes to be carried into the future. We are the proof that they did so. Here we all are with their survivor genetics. And the hangover of sexed behaviour expectations.
So once upon a time, between five and seven million years ago, our species diverged from chimpanzees. Over millennia several Homo sapiens species responded to environmental challenges with physical adaptations. They moved away from tree-dwelling onto the flat plain and began walking upright. Then over hundreds of generations our skeletons developed and became better at travelling long distances and running to escape or hunt. Our hips became smaller and more robust to support the upper body helping to conserve energy and regulate body temperature.* And here is where it gets precarious. While the selective pressure for effective and cost-efficient movement was drastically narrowing our bipedal birth canal, sapiens females still had the excruciating job of pushing children through it.
To clarify, the hips of human women were shaped by conflicting evolutionary pressures: on the one hand the need for movement and thermo-regulation; on the other childbirth. The genes of uncatchable, calorie-conserving mega-hunters cannot be shared with future generations if there’s nowhere for their babies to come out. A human female’s hips needed to be small, yet expansive, like some bony Mary Poppins bag.
Tragically for the female perineum, as human hips got smaller, our brains got bigger. In fact, over the last five million years our brains TREBLED in size. Correspondingly our skulls got much bigger too. This caused a drastic alteration in human gestation time. If the Homo sapiens female gestated to the same point in development as other apes, she would be pregnant for two and a half years. If a human female gave birth to a two-and-a-half-year-old, she … well … that’d be like a Range Rover getting off a bus.† It would take the doors off, and half the side. Every birth would be murderous. And even if the child managed to survive their matricide nativity, without a mother to care for them they’d be unlikely to live very long.
What about their dad?
As parents, as caregivers, fathers haven’t been invented yet.
Why didn’t women evolve big enough hips?
Let’s imagine a woman, Veronica. Her pelvis is strong enough to support the top half of her body but now wide enough to pass a baby human whose brain has developed to the same stage as a baby chimp’s. She doesn’t worry about dying in childbirth! She looks great in Levis’ 501s! She can’t walk! Veronica loves being a new mum but because she cannot forage or hunt or stand without falling over, she will starve and so will her son. Unless the predators get them first! Plus her boyfriend’s dead because she sat on him, what a sad story.
The female body has a conundrum, so like any sensible person she writes in to a magazine problem page:
Dear Passage of Time,
I feel so trapped – my species’ survival is increasingly dependent on our ability to run about and catch things to eat. This would be fine if we weren’t also growing these head-computers that allow us to remember lots of things and socialise. How do I give birth without dying?
Yours sincerely, Slim Hips of Romford
The agony aunt that is evolution responds by having women give birth to smaller babies. As you’ll be aware, modern humans gestate inside their mothers for nine months. The baby is then born before it’s finished developing, while the bones of its skull are soft and holey to protect the mother. This evolutionary compromise is the result of trial and error – we’re balancing on the edge of maximum survival potential for babies and mothers.
The brain is a very expensive attribute – not just in terms of the lives lost in difficult births‡ but in the number of calories needed to power it. About 20 per cent of our metabolic energy is used by our brain tissue. To justify that consumption the brain must have been hugely advantageous for locating food. Its very existence proves it must have paid for itself. In fact scientists have found that increased social learning correlates with larger brain size in primates. This leads to the conclusion that our cerebral organ created the bonds, communication, memory and planning necessary to successfully hunt and forage on the African savannah.
Human babies are born well before their brain has finished developing. In their first weeks of life the brain grows by 1 per cent every day, slowing to 0.4 per cent a day by the age of three months. In total infants’ brains grow by over 60 per cent in the first ninety days. Let’s see what that looks like:§
It’s tremendous growth, and something that our species is unique in doing outside of the safe warm womb.
You know what they say about people with big brains?
They hunt in groups, they can follow signs to water, they are able to intuit patterns that aid foraging and tracking animals …
You can’t trust them!
Actually, you have to. Giving birth to babies that are so utterly dependent has moulded everything about our species. Unlike the young of other mammals, who are born ready to toddle around, ours can’t even lift their silly, soft-boned heads up. Babies need regular feeding and constant protection; 24/7 supervision too or they’ll choke or fall off something. They need regular cleaning because they can’t control when they piss and shit.¶
If you’ve had a child or been around someone with young children you’ll already be aware of what a huge amount of energy, time and resources are required in preventing its unwitting suicide. Now imagine child-rearing four million years ago. There are no supermarkets or bottle sterilisers. You’re a hunter–gatherer living with a tribe of around a hundred people. You’ll have the necessary shelter – because you’ve built it or found it – but it’s not safe to leave a baby in. There are animals that would eat it, another human might hurt it. It might smother itself in hay or something. The whole world is dangerous to a baby left alone even for a moment, that’s why they cry all the time, as an alarm system.
They cry when they realise they’re unattended, they cry if they wake up alone, they cry to demand the regular feeding necessary for growing their brain.
Let’s consider the post-birth mother. She needs to eat a lot of calorific food to make breast milk, and she needs to hold and defend her child – all while she is healing. Have you seen what childbirth can do to a woman’s body? She’ll have tears, bleeding. She might have a fistula, that’s where the vaginal wall tears and—
Please stop.
As our physical evolution (big brain + small hips = earlier baby) made child-rearing increasingly difficult, our species evolved stronger familial bonds in response. A closely knit, helpful, supportive family increased our offspring’s survival chances – hence the genes for putting up with caring about relations were selected for. When my sisters had my nieces, I was shocked by the force with which I loved them, how invested I felt. How defensive – the clichéd ‘I would kill for them’.|| That’s how powerful the bonding emotions have to be, especially as babies are loud and covered in piss without immediately redeeming features.
As the brain grew and our species became more familial, our diets also changed. Six million years ago we are thought to have eaten like chimpanzees, mostly vegetation, with the occasional small animal. Meat comprises a very small amount, 2–3 per cent, of a chimp’s diet. The increase in our brain’s size and abilities meant we caught more meat, which in turn gave us more nutrients and fats for our cognitive equipment. The improvement in our communication made us deadly. We could talk to each other: ‘Steve, catch it – it’s over there,’ or ‘It’s too late, Steve, I ate it.’
I mention the meat thing because alongside the teamwork necessary to catch animals, we learned to co-operate in their consumption. With no means of preserving meat it gets maggoty and poisonous quite quick
ly. Family groups would’ve shared diligently with each other and the extended tribe to the benefit of everyone. Human beings’ social ties improve the quality of life for everyone in the group. Which brings us to the notion of paternity.
IT’S NOT A NOTION, SARA.
No need to scale a building in a Batman costume. Listen, the survival rate of human babies is directly correlated to how much care is taken of them. The more they are ‘loved’, the more likely they are to survive. Hence natural selection has favoured the most dutiful and attentive mothers, and the most closely bonded family groups. Alongside this, natural selection has favoured having an extra caregiver – a father.
Let’s consider birds for a moment. Around 90 per cent of avian species are monogamous, and that’s not due to cultural influence. It’s not because the Bird Bible told them to marry and be faithful. It’s simply because of their method of producing young.
Eggs must be incubated for chicks to grow and hatch. Birds use their body heat to do this. This means someone has to stay egg-sitting in the nest at all times. But riddle me this: how does the sitting, warming bird feed herself? She must have a partner to fetch her worms. If she starves and dies, her body warmth quickly disperses. A male bird’s own genetic survival depends on his input; he can’t replicate his genes if his progeny are in cold shells under the corpse of their mother.
