Men, Who Needs Them?
By GREG HAMPIKIAN, Boise, Idaho
Illustration: Kelsey Dake
MAMMALS are named after their defining characteristic, the glands
capable of sustaining a life for years after birth — glands that are
functional only in the female. And yet while the term “mammal” is based
on an objective analysis of shared traits, the genus name for human
beings, Homo, reflects an 18th-century masculine bias in science.
That bias, however, is becoming harder to sustain, as men become less
relevant to both reproduction and parenting. Women aren’t just becoming
men’s equals. It’s increasingly clear that “mankind” itself is a gross
misnomer: an uninterrupted, intimate and essential maternal connection
defines our species.
The central behaviors of mammals revolve around how we bear and raise
our young, and humans are the parenting champions of the class. In the
United States, for nearly 20 percent of our life span we are considered
the legal responsibility of our parents.
With expanding reproductive choices, we can expect to see more women
choose to reproduce without men entirely. Fortunately, the data for
children raised by only females is encouraging. As the Princeton
sociologist Sara S. McLanahan has shown, poverty is what hurts children,
not the number or gender of parents.
That’s good, since women are both necessary and sufficient for
reproduction, and men are neither. From the production of the first cell
(egg) to the development of the fetus and the birth and breast-feeding
of the child, fathers can be absent. They can be at work, at home, in
prison or at war, living or dead.
Think about your own history. Your life as an egg actually started in
your mother’s developing ovary, before she was born; you were wrapped in
your mother’s fetal body as it developed within your grandmother.
After the two of you left Grandma’s womb, you enjoyed the protection of
your mother’s prepubescent ovary. Then, sometime between 12 and 50 years
after the two of you left your grandmother, you burst forth and were
sucked by her fimbriae into the fallopian tube. You glided along the
oviduct, surviving happily on the stored nutrients and genetic messages
that Mom packed for you.
Then, at some point, your father spent a few minutes close by, but then
left. A little while later, you encountered some very odd tiny cells
that he had shed. They did not merge with you, or give you any cell
membranes or nutrients — just an infinitesimally small packet of DNA,
less than one-millionth of your mass.
Over the next nine months, you stole minerals from your mother’s bones
and oxygen from her blood, and you received all your nutrition, energy
and immune protection from her. By the time you were born your mother
had contributed six to eight pounds of your weight. Then as a parting
gift, she swathed you in billions of bacteria from her birth canal and
groin that continue to protect your skin, digestive system and general
health. In contrast, your father’s 3.3 picograms of DNA comes out to
less than one pound of male contribution since the beginning of Homo
sapiens 107 billion babies ago.
And while birth seems like a separation, for us mammals it’s just a new
form of attachment to our female parent. If your mother breast-fed you,
as our species has done for nearly our entire existence, then you
suckled from her all your water, protein, sugar, fats and even immune
protection. She sampled your diseases by holding you close and kissing
you, just as your father might have done; but unlike your father, she
responded to your infections by making antibodies that she passed to you
in breast milk.
I don’t dismiss the years I put in as a doting father, or my year at
home as a house husband with two young kids. And I credit my own father
as the more influential parent in my life. Fathers are of great benefit.
But that is a far cry from “necessary and sufficient” for reproduction.
If a woman wants to have a baby without a man, she just needs to secure
sperm (fresh or frozen) from a donor (living or dead). The only
technology the self-impregnating woman needs is a straw or turkey
baster, and the basic technique hasn’t changed much since Talmudic
scholars debated the religious implications of insemination without sex
in the fifth century. If all the men on earth died tonight, the species
could continue on frozen sperm. If the women disappear, it’s extinction.
Ultimately the question is, does “mankind” really need men? With human
cloning technology just around the corner and enough frozen sperm in the
world to already populate many generations, perhaps we should perform a
cost-benefit analysis.
It’s true that men have traditionally been the breadwinners. But women have been a majority of college graduates since the 1980s,
and their numbers are growing. It’s also true that men have, on
average, a bit more muscle mass than women. But in the age of ubiquitous
weapons, the one with the better firepower (and knowledge of the law)
triumphs.
Meanwhile women live longer, are healthier and are far less likely to
commit a violent offense. If men were cars, who would buy the model that
doesn’t last as long, is given to lethal incidents and ends up
impounded more often?
Recently, the geneticist J. Craig Venter showed that the entire genetic
material of an organism can be synthesized by a machine and then put
into what he called an “artificial cell.” This was actually a bit of
press-release hyperbole: Mr. Venter started with a fully functional
cell, then swapped out its DNA. In doing so, he unwittingly demonstrated
that the female component of sexual reproduction, the egg cell, cannot
be manufactured, but the male can.
When I explained this to a female colleague and asked her if she thought
that there was yet anything irreplaceable about men, she answered,
“They’re entertaining.”
Gentlemen, let’s hope that’s enough.
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