Andrea Dworkin - Woman Hating - A Radical Look at Sexuality

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

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mined. T here are cultures in which there are no great

differences in somatotype o f men and women:

In one small-scale (“primitive”) society for which there

are good photographic records —the Manus of the

Admiralty Islands — there is apparently no difference at

all in somatotype between males and females as children, and as adults both men and women tend to the same high degree of mesomorphy (broad shoulders

and chest, heavily muscled limbs, little subcutaneous

fat).. . . In Bali, too, males and females lack the sort

of differentiation of the physique that is a visible difference in our culture. Geoffrey Gorer once described them as a “hermaphroditic” people; they have little

sex differential in height and both sexes have broad

shoulders and narrow hips. They do not run to curves

and muscles, to body hair or to breasts of any size.

(Gorer once remarked that you could not tell male and

female apart, even from the front. ) Another source

informs us that babies suck their fathers' breasts as

well as their mothers'. 4

14.

There are hermaphrodites in nature. Robert T.

Francoeur, in Utopian Motherhood: New Trends in Human

Reproduction , admits:

The medical profession and experimental biologists

have always been very skeptical about the existence of

functional hermaphrodites among the higher animals

and man, though the earthworm, the sea hare, and

other lower animals do combine both sexes in the same

individual. 5

We have seen how deep the commitment to human sexual discreteness and polarity goes —that commitment

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makes the idea of functional hermaphroditism conceptually intolerable. It is interesting here to speculate on the perceptions of men like Lionel Tiger ( Men in

Groups) who in effect project human cultural patterns

of dominance and submission on the animal world. For

instance, Dr. Sherfey tells us that “In many primate

species , the females would be diagnosed hermaphrodites if

they were human” (Italics hers. ) 6 Most probably, we often

simply project our own culturally determined modes of

acting and perceiving onto other animals —we effectively screen information that would challenge the notions of male and female which are holy to us. In

that case, a bias toward androgyny (instead of the current bias toward polarity) would give us significantly different scenarios of animal behavior.

Hermaphroditism is generally defined as “a congenital disorder in which both male and female generative organs exist in the same individual. ” 7 A “true”

hermaphrodite is one who has ovaries, testes, and the

secondary sexual characteristics of both sexes. But

this is, it seems to me, the story of a functional hermaphrodite:

The case involved a sixteen-year-old Arkansas girl

who was being operated on for an ovarian tumor. As

is the custom in such surgery, the tissue removed is

carefully examined by a pathologist. In this instance,

signs of live eggs and live sperm were found in different

regions o f the tumor. With the egg and the sperm situated right next to each other in the same organ, Dr.

Timme claimed “there was a great possibility that they

would combine and make a human being. ”. . . The

unique feature. . . would be that the same person

contributed both germ cells. 8

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Parthenogenesis also occurs naturally in women. Fran-

coeur refers to the work o f Dr. Landrum B. Shettles

who

in examining human eggs just after they were removed

from their ovarian follicles. . . found that three out

of four hundred of these eggs had “undergone cleavage in vivo within the intact follicle, without any possible contact with spermatozoa. ” 9

On the basis o f Shettles’ work, Francoeur estimates

that virgin births are a rather common occurrence,

in about the same frequency as fraternal twins and

twice as often as identical twins occur among white

Americans. 10

Seemingly a conservative, Dr. Sherwood Taylor, a

British scientist, “has suggested a much lower frequency

for human parthenogenesis, estimating one case in ten

thousand births. ” 11 However much, however little, it

does occur.

We can presume then that there is a great deal about

human sexuality to be discovered, and that our notion

o f two discrete biological sexes cannot remain intact. We

can presume then that we will discover cross-sexed

phenomena in proportion to our ability to see them. In

addition, we can account for the relative rarity o f hermaphrodites in the general population, for the consistency o f male-female somatotypes that we do find, and for the relative rarity o f cross-sexed characteristics in the general population (though they occur with more frequency than we are now willing to imagine)

by recognizing that there is a process o f cultural selec ­

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tion which, for people, supersedes natural selection in

importance. Cultural selection, as opposed to natural

selection, does not necessarily serve to improve the

species or to ensure survival. It does necessarily serve

to uphold cultural norms and to ensure that deviant

somatotypes and cross-sexed characteristics are systematically bred out of the population.

However we look at it, whatever we choose to make

out of the data of what is frequently called Intersex, it

is clear that sex determination is not always clearcut

and simple. Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins University has basically isolated these six aspects of sex identity:

1. Genetic or nuclear sexuality as revealed by indicators

like the sex-chromatin or Barr-body, a full chromosomal count and the leucocytic drumstick; *

2. Hormonal sexuality which results from a balance that

is predominantly androgenic or estrogenic;

3. Gonadal sexuality which may be clearly ovarian or

testicular, but occasionally also mixed;

4. Internal sexuality as disclosed in the structure of

the internal reproductive system;

5. External genital sexuality as revealed in the external

anatomy, and finally;

6. Psychosexual development which through the external