Aristotle affirmed the essential difference between the sexes: men’s brains were bigger, women were more inconstant, emotional and compassionate, at least in part because they do not produce semen – whence men’s and women’s different behaviour and place in the social order.
Symbolically, at least, biology’s long, continuing and often lamentable history of using its authority to define woman’s nature, in order to justify attributing her with inferior status, begins here.
According to naturalists, the origin of gender differences lay in men’s genitals and women’s menstrual cycle. That the testes produced masculinity was apparent from the effeminate nature of eunuchs; ingesting extracts of animal testes has long been assumed to enhance a man’s potency, bellicosity and intellectual pre-eminence. By the end of the 19th century the physiologist Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard was injecting himself with extracts of dog and guinea-pig testicles to restore his youth. (It failed.)
In popular culture the scientist’s elixir was transformed into ‘monkey glands’, which had a long, if much satirised, vogue, still extant in the host of testes-related products sold as rejuvenators on the net and in health food stores. Similarly, it was the ovaries and their juices that conveyed a woman’s essential womanhood and accounted for her naturally nurturing role, while making her a stranger to such activities as war or science.
Symbolically, at least, biology’s long, continuing and often lamentable history of using its authority to define woman’s nature, in order to justify attributing her with inferior status, begins here.
According to naturalists, the origin of gender differences lay in men’s genitals and women’s menstrual cycle. That the testes produced masculinity was apparent from the effeminate nature of eunuchs; ingesting extracts of animal testes has long been assumed to enhance a man’s potency, bellicosity and intellectual pre-eminence. By the end of the 19th century the physiologist Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard was injecting himself with extracts of dog and guinea-pig testicles to restore his youth. (It failed.)
In popular culture the scientist’s elixir was transformed into ‘monkey glands’, which had a long, if much satirised, vogue, still extant in the host of testes-related products sold as rejuvenators on the net and in health food stores. Similarly, it was the ovaries and their juices that conveyed a woman’s essential womanhood and accounted for her naturally nurturing role, while making her a stranger to such activities as war or science.
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