Like a Virgin (3 page)

It was an obvious case, in Aristotle’s view, of mistaken identity, the external appearances hiding the significant differences in what was going on inside the animals’ bodies. And so
these dissections reinforced in him the belief that the male and the female must play very different roles in reproduction. Why else would they have such very different reproductive organs? The
more important question was: what exactly was the difference between the male and the female role in reproduction?

One of the influential philosophies at the time was
atomism
, the idea that everything in the world is comprised of very small, indivisible, fundamental units – the intellectual
birth of the atom. In terms of making babies, atomism was interpreted to mean that the male and female bodily fluids contained a miniature, perfectly formed version of the adult body of the
respective sex, broken into parts, down to a pair of little arms and little legs, a compact torso, and a tiny head. When the male and female fluids mixed together during sex, these small parts
simply assembled into a small body, which grew larger once it was sown in the fertile ground of a woman’s body – the foetus. Conveniently, atomism explained how a child could resemble
both mother and father, which made the concept quite popular among classical thinkers.

Aristotle did not agree with this atomistic view of the world. This was not, after all, what he saw happening in his
experiments with birds. He had observed that hens would
mate with more than one rooster. Yet, ‘even when the hen is trodden by two males the offspring does not have two such parts, one from each male’ – the only logical reproductive
outcome, if you held to atomism. If the male bird supplied a miniature body part to each female with which it had sex, ‘the offspring should have had a double portion’, Aristotle
argued, ‘but it does not’. When it came to chickens and other birds, this meant the ‘male supplies nothing material’. Likewise, of course, a woman who conceives after having
sex with two men does not normally have a two-headed, four-limbed baby as a result. She isn’t even very likely to have two babies, unless she happened to have twins. These were facts of life
that Aristotle could also observe.

In
On the Generation of Animals
, Aristotle put forward an improvement in the reasoning for why there was a sexual division in reproduction, one that had nothing to do with the male and
the female both providing the offspring’s parts. In his scientific opinion, there were always two sexes in a species, because the male contributes the form and the female contributes the
matter, the physical stuff of which the child would be made, or sculpted from. Form was superior to material. The male semen dictated the shape of the child, like a chisel gives a statue its shape,
without itself becoming part of the product – the master artist at work. Since fathers created not just sons in their own image but daughters, too, daughters must, Aristotle believed, arise
when the father’s semen was weak. If the mother’s reproductive fluid – her menstrual blood, in the philosopher’s accounting – was also weak and could not be mastered
by the semen, then you got neither a perfectly formed son nor a materially inferior daughter, but a monstrosity.

Aristotle’s hypothesis may have been flawed, but it is not surprising that he did not consider a more accurate version of the inner workings of the female form – one
was not available. Though Aristotle discussed the uterus in his book, very little had been revealed about the female reproductive organs at the time he wrote
On the Generation of
Animals
.

The ovaries, referred to as ‘female testicles’, probably were discovered by an anatomist, Herophilos, who performed both animal and human dissections, some of them for public
viewing, from his base in Alexandria, Egypt. But Herophilos was reportedly born in 335
BCE
, just thirteen years before Aristotle’s death. Soranus, a physician from an
area of what is now Turkey, appears to have dissected human subjects as part of his investigation into obstetrics and women’s diseases. He displayed a clear understanding of the various
sections of the uterus, placenta, bladder, and vagina, which he described in great anatomical detail. Soranus’s dissections, however, were conducted in the second century
BCE
– also well after Aristotle’s time. For more than a millennium afterwards, little advance was made in understanding the true nature and function of these mysterious
female parts, because in large part, human dissections were widely proscribed, which meant that cadavers were not openly available for this sort of poking and probing. Instead, physicians had to
rely on the writings of Aelius Galen, the second-century Greek surgeon considered to be the most influential medical writer in all history.

Galen was born in Pergamon, the great cultural centre of Asia Minor under Roman rule. He came from a family of wealth and education, and he followed suit, training in philosophy, mathematics,
and natural sciences. He had probably been influenced by his father in his choice of a career in medicine.
The story goes that the Greek god of healing, Asclepius himself,
appeared to Galen’s father in a dream to offer vocational guidance intended for his son. After this god-given training as a physician, Galen visited Alexandria, where the doctors placed great
emphasis on the study of anatomy. On his return home, he was appointed physician to the gladiatorial games. This gave him the dubious privilege of regularly confronting the horrendous injuries
inflicted in the arena. As ghastly as the job may have been, operating on the wounds allowed him to gain first-hand experience of human anatomy. He supplemented his observations of battered
gladiators with dissections of abandoned corpses.

Galen lived some five hundred years after Aristotle, and medical knowledge had evolved. So he decided to develop his own theory of sex differences, based on his own work. In contrast to
Aristotle’s belief that the sperm was simply the seed that laid out the final form of the foetus, Galen thought the foetus’s development was not just influenced but powered by the
sperm, and that the female was actually a male in reverse. He was notably inspired by Herophilos, whose teachings were still popular in Alexandria and from whom he adopted the idea that a
woman’s ovaries were essentially testes. But Galen went further, positing that the female genitalia are identical to those of the male, only turned inward. According to this
‘reversal’ theory, the uterus was an inverted scrotum. This of course did not explain the function of those female parts that males lack – for example, more developed breasts. And
the uterus did not serve the same purpose as the scrotum, a fact of biology that would have been understood even in Galen’s day. But Galen was silent on these reproductive discrepancies.

When compared with modern views of reproductive evolution, though, Galen’s reversal theory does not seem to have got everything wrong. For instance, in his essay ‘Male Nipples and
Clitoral Ripples’, the renowned evolutionary biologist Stephen
Jay Gould argued that the man’s body is not a basic structure from which a woman’s
diverged:

Likewise, Gould imagined that the clitoris and the penis were ‘one and the same organ’, their size determined by the relative balance of hormones, particularly testosterone, during
foetal development. The same could be said of women’s labia majora and men’s scrotal sacs, though with these organs the presence of testosterone triggered a folding and fusing of the
skin in the males. Gould took his argument a further step into controversy by stating that the clitoris was something like the appendix, an evolutionary artefact that no longer served a purpose.
But on a more basic level, he supposed ‘the external differences between male and female develop gradually’, so much so that, ‘from an early embryo so generalized that its sex
cannot be easily determined’.

Since the early 1950s, when DNA was discovered to be the elusive matter that allows us to inherit traits from our parents, an incredible amount of scientific progress has been made. The complete
genetic make-up, or genome, has now been mapped, or ‘sequenced’ in the jargon, for nearly two hundred organisms, including various kinds of bacteria and yeasts, honey bees, malarial
mosquitoes, flies, worms, mice, rats, puffer fish, chickens, dogs, chimpanzees, and, of course, humans; our first draft of our
genome was revealed in 2000, with the complete
code cracked in 2003. This sequencing has provided a library of essential biological information. In addition, the various genome sequencing projects have determined that humans have around
twenty-five thousand genes, divulged what some of these genes do, and confirmed chimpanzees as our closest kindred species.

DNA tells our cells what to do and when to do it. You can think of it as the genetic equivalent of an instruction manual for flat-packed furniture. It gets read, and the information it gives is
translated into building a new piece of kit. The section of DNA that when read translates into the production of a certain chemical is a gene. Most genes are translated into a series of amino
acids, and amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. Proteins, in turn, are the main constituents of cells, which collect into tissues, which themselves collect into organs.

Genes are made up of what are called nucleotides, which are molecules made up of sugars, phosphates, and chemical bases (referred to by the first letters, A, T, C, and G, of their chemical
names). DNA is a long chain of these units of nucleotides, each built on one of the four bases. Geneticists refer to the chain by the sequence of individual bases of the nucleotides as they appear
(for example, GATTACA, which is where the 1997 science-fiction film got its name). Not all sequences of letters ‘spell out’ genes; many just regulate genes, others seem to do nothing at
all. Usually two chains of nucleotides wrap around each other – this is what gives DNA the double helix, or twisted ladder, look. These long strands of DNA double helices wind round in tight
coils to form the chromosomes. Normal human cells have forty-six chromosomes, wound in two pairs of twenty-three.

Unlike Gould, Galen did not have the benefit of witnessing the minutiae of how human embryos develop, let alone knowledge of hormones or of DNA and chromosomes. So though
the reversal theory might sound something like modern biology, Galen married his theory to assumptions about an unequal division of labour in the work of reproduction, assumptions that
reflect the prejudices of the day. For example, among the ancient Greeks, another of the great differentiators between men and women was temperature. Around the fifth century
BCE
, a doctrine of health had formulated based on the balance in the body of heat and cold, dryness and moistness. It was widely believed that illness would erupt if one of these
qualities dominated over another. Galen, like Aristotle before him, thought that women inherently had a different balance of heat and cold than did men. He started with the principle that women
were colder, a state that influenced their behaviour and contributed to an inferior physiology and limited reproductive power. He even compiled an ‘empirical’ work on bodily heat,
called
De Temperamentis
. And it was empirical: he had drawn his conclusions from experiments in which he had touched a range of different people – the old, youths, children, and
infants – in order to uncover who were more and who were less hot. Throughout his report, Galen used the word
andres
, meaning ‘men’, to describe the participants in his
trials, rather than
anthropoi
, meaning ‘people’. That may be a distinction lost in translation, but it seems to indicate that the storied physician did not actually include any
female subjects in an experiment from which he made the following judgements as to the nature of women:

Though Galen did most certainly ponder, investigate, and experiment, there is no suggestion in any of his written accounts that his trials were ever conducted using women
at all.

To Galen, the female of the species was not just inverted, she was incomplete, a view not substantially different from Aristotle’s ‘materially inferior’ daughter. Consider
Galen’s analysis of the ‘female testes’. As incomplete male testes, the ovaries should be expected to produce semen. But this ‘female semen’ would not be as pure, or
as hot, as the male’s, according to Galen. The ovaries, therefore, performed a function equivalent to the testes, but not as well. And he went ‘one up’ on Aristotle when he chose
to refer to women as
arrostos
, a term most often used to mean a state of disease or morbid weakness. Unfinished, inverted, and in a state of morbid weakness – that’s what women
were made of.