We don't understand human reproduction
Once in a while, if you read enough about how science has developed over centuries, you come to realize that, from time to time, a basic ignorance or misunderstanding of one simple thing has wreaked all sorts of chaos and destruction in people's lives, or ended them entirely.
I'll offer a simple, should-not-be-controversial example: Germ theory. Because for a long time we didn't know where infectious disease comes from, people would do things that spread it without knowing any better. It was bad enough when the people who didn't know better were all ordinary layfolk, but then doctors began meddling in normal human life processes without washing their hands from handling cadavers prior to. That didn't work out so well for women giving birth.
(Germ theory should not be controversial, but apparently some doofuses nowadays don't know how to read for comprehension and have completely thrown out germ theory in favor of conspiracy-theory batshittery: see also the general public's response to the COVID pandemic. Oh well.)
Well, here's another example that has fucked us up: Not understanding how human reproduction works.
"But Dana, wait!" you're thinking. "Of course we understand how human reproduction works. Remember your recent rant about IVF? We couldn't do IVF if we didn't know how human reproduction works."
That's fair, but I've got something shocking to tell you. You don't have to actually understand everything that is going on with human reproduction in order to be successful at IVF. You only have to walk in the same neighborhood as understanding everything that is going on. Maybe five blocks away from it. Maybe fewer. Doesn't matter. You haven't gotten there, is my point.
We understand more about making human babies than we did five hundred years ago, but we still don't understand enough, and that lack of understanding is still fucking things up.
It's fascinating tracking how this situation has evolved.
If you are interested in ancient literature and in world literature, you probably know that referring to semen as "seed" is a near-universal practice in cultures which have developed horticulture or agriculture. Until very recently this was not just a metaphor to these people. There are at least a few examples in medieval European literature where textbooks on the subject contained illustrations depicting human semen as containing tiny embryos. If you know your horticulture, you know an actual seed is actually an embryo. Probably where those illustrators got the idea. At some point you know some monk somewhere opened a seed and realized he was seeing a tiny plant inside and then had an "a-ha" moment. I'm sure people made similar discoveries back in ancient Mesopotamia, where one euphemism for the sex act referred to the man as "plowing [the woman's] furrow."
No, I am not kidding.
Feminists often blame patriarchy for men treating women like farm animals. I think they skipped a stage.
The term "barren" was, I think, originally an agricultural term too. It referred to land on which one could not successfully grow a crop. So when people called a woman barren, they were saying her womb would not accept a man planting one of his teensy embryos in it. The woman was not seen as playing a direct role in reproduction at all. How they explained those children who were born looking like their mothers, I could not tell you.
(Interestingly, it is the norm for human newborns to look like their fathers. Doesn't always happen -- my in-laws were at first suspicious that my son was conceived on the wrong side of the sheet because in the beginning he looked like my family -- but a baby looking like Dad happens so often that infanticide was probably depressingly common thousands of years ago when the baby didn't have the expected looks, thus weeding out most babies who resembled Mom. As commonly as infanticide occurs in the other great apes, I'm not far off the mark here.)
Eventually we invented the microscope and then discovered first sperm and then ova ("egg" cells), and I'm sure that threw society into a tizzy. I'm not well-versed in the societal effects of these discoveries but if today's typical responses to new discoveries favoring women are any indication, probably there was a lot of outraged arguing and a lot of silly "theories" (not really) pieced together. Most of those silly "theories" must have disappeared pretty quickly because it's hard to argue against the existence of actual cells when you have actually seen them with your own actual eyeballs. But a few of those silly ideas persisted from then until now.
The socially and culturally important one is the idea that a mother and a father each contribute exactly fifty percent to a child's existence.
Well, guess what.
Another thing we have discovered about human reproduction is something to do with cell biology. You know how the human body has organs? Well, most cells in animals and plants (there are a few exceptions) have bits inside them that we call organelles. One organelle you may have heard of is the nucleus, which is what holds our chromosomes and genes. (If you don't know what a chromosome is... oy.) There's another one called the mitochondrion, plural mitochondria, that makes energy for our cells. If you do some digging you find all sorts of fascinating stuff. Some scientists think the mitochondria were originally bacteria and then got captured by bigger cells to use as tiny little power stations. And the reason this idea hasn't been dismissed by the scientific community is MITOCHONDRIA HAVE THEIR OWN DNA. Which is different from the DNA in our chromosomes.
Guess who we inherit mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from?
Mom.
It was a long time after I learned this before I understood the implications.
That's how hard patriarchy fucks you. Knocks your brains right outta your head.
So. LITERAL DECADES after I learned about mitochondria in biology class (my biology teacher did not, by the way, inform us of their mother-line inheritance -- I learned about that later), I'm thinking about this and I'm thinking about that and my mind's wandering around all over the fucking place and then it hits me.
Ever wondered what happens to the sperm cell after it fertilizes an ovum?
I hadn't really thought about it. Most of us in my generation saw that opening scene in <em>Look Who's Talking</em> where the sperm enters the ovum and just sort of drills all the way in. I think I've seen another depiction where it goes in head-first and the tail breaks off. People are pretty vague about this.
I did a little more pondering and looking around. Turns out there isn’t much to a sperm cell, really. It has a nucleus to carry its chromosome payload but otherwise it’s basically a head and a tail. It has a few mitochondria, but those are in the tail and don’t make it into the ovum. When the sperm dives into an ovum it heads straight for the nucleus, delivers its payload, and then... poof. Gone. There's no organelle in your cells that corresponds to the original sperm cell, as far as we know. I mean, it's possible we'll find something eventually, but I doubt it.
The mtDNA that our mothers pass on to us is in that ovum. The sperm didn't contribute any.
It took me a little bit longer (a few more years?) to understand why that is.
The ovum is a complete cell. It was your first cell.
If you add together mtDNA and chromosomal DNA then mothers contribute quite a bit more than fifty percent to a child's existence. If you consider that the ovum IS the child's existence, mothers actually contribute one hundred percent to a child's existence, especially when you factor in gestation. Because if y'all bozos think fifteen seconds and squirt is fifty percent and forty weeks of pregnancy and twelve hours of labor are the other fifty percent, someone needs to slap you. Shame I'm not next to you right now. You might wake up later. You probably wouldn't.
But what about those other 23 chromosomes? The ones in the DNA packet with the tail?
Here's what I think, and this is completely based in my reading on human biology and my pondering of what possible use it could all have in the big picture. Leaving feminism out of it for a minute.
Okay. First off, the human body is too big and complex to just bud off to make babies, and the bit that makes the babies is too deep inside women's bodies. If we just created growing human beings in our bodies at random for no apparent reason, reproduction would be even more dangerous for us than it is now, especially if the little buggers started growing while still in our ovaries. Ouch. So the whole creation of a ovum is a failsafe against offspring development occurring at an inopportune time. It is not a perfect system, but it at least gets that ovum out of the ovary (the process of ovulation involves splitting the original "germ cell" so it comes out with 23 chromosomes instead of 46; that process sort of expels it into the Fallopian tube) where it's got a chance to get where it's supposed to go for those forty weeks of gestation.
What I think happens at fertilization is not only completing the whole set so the resulting offspring has 46 chromosomes like it's supposed to, but also that act of fertilization kicks off the developmental process. You're reading that and going "duh." I know. But I know at least a few scientists are either pondering or actually trying to cause embryonic development to kick off with some other trigger besides a sperm, and I suspect they're going to be struggling at it for a long time. Maybe the sperm contains some kind of chemical trigger -- so maybe I was wrong and it has that one more thing than just the DNA packet and the tail. Who knows.
The other reason it's important to start out with 23 chromosomes and have 23 added by another organism is this: not all the genes you pass on are good ones. We know from research and observation that except in males with their one and a half (actually less than a half) sex chromosomes, every gene in a human's chromosomes is doubled. Two copies. As I understand it, for each gene pair, only one expresses and the other is always shut down. This is protective against you winding up with dud genes that could kill you. It's not perfect. The egg doesn't actually think through this process and only ever pick the good genes. But the system gets it right more often than not.
Realizing all this -- and almost none of this is original to me; I kind of synthesized all this based on other people's findings -- made me understand what guys are doing in the reproductive act.
They're not reproducing.
They're triggering reproduction. Also adding that extra layer of genetic protection for the offspring.
Now, hear me out. I'm not saying that a man who triggers reproduction is not the baby's father. You're still Dad. You are still a relative to that child. But you do not produce cells that develop into people. You produce cells that trigger the cells that turn into people, so that they WILL develop into people.
Basically, patriarchy got it backwards on human reproduction.
(Patriarchy gets a LOT of things backwards. Why's the men's bicycle the one with the bar? I like to call that thing The Nutcracker.)
No one who has studied plant reproduction should be surprised. Where do seeds come from? Originally they were ova in a plant ovary. Semen or sperm are not "seed" or "seeds" -- they're pollen!
I would say "I don't understand how we kept getting this wrong after discovering all this other stuff"... but it's us. Anything to keep men in a place they haven't earned. Are we that scared of them? I suppose we are.
And of course, if enough people caught on to this... well, first off it would start a war. I am not sure whether that would be a literal war, but that is not off the table. I don't think most of us understand how fierce men are about maintaining supremacy even WITH us being scared of them, and if you throw in the possibility of doubt about how important they are in babymaking, that's REALLY going to fuck with their heads. It won't be pretty.
The other option, and the far more likely one, is that everyone who reads this will fall into two camps: those who pretend not to understand what I am saying and then argue with me, and those who choose to ignore it because if no one engages with my ideas, those ideas will die when I do and shit will go on being shit like it's been for ten thousand years. I suspect we'll see more of the second camp than the first one and then Second Camp will get exactly what it wants. I mean, death is kind of inevitable for all of us.
But I want you to think about how these different views of reproduction have affected women's fortunes.
When we thought semen was seed, women were land, and fucking was "plowing her furrow," men turned women into literal farm animals for growing sons and... poof. Patriarchy.
When we found out men and women each contributed a cell to create a baby, we grudgingly loosened things up so that sometimes women had rights to our own damn kids, and then used the fifty-fifty custody concept to abuse women in a different way. Do not even get me started about fifty-fifty visitation and breastfeeding. That'll be three hours of your life you will never get back. And of course there's that odious argument that men should have a say in abortion because "it's my reproductive rights too." Kinda falls short when you realize they're not actually reproducing, innit.
And that's the stage we're at. I haven't seen anyone else offering the argument I've offered here.
I don't know what the societal fallout would be from everyone accepting my argument. Unless we shut down patriarchy first, it could get ugly. My argument fits in nicely with the matrilineal pattern of human culture, which has largely disappeared except for the Dinéh (Navajo) and the Mosuo and a few other groups. Unless we go back to something like that as a society before we legally recognize women's actual role in reproduction, what could happen is men could keep stealing our labor and shorting our wages and hobbling our ability to obtain and keep property, but also wash their hands of any parental responsibility. You know what's happening with single mothers on welfare now? Imagine that on a much larger scale.
So I don't know that I want to legislate based on this model of human reproduction right now. I think what I want is for individuals and groups trying to align with feminism or women's liberation to keep this model of human reproduction in mind when they try to visualize how they want to change society. Maybe it will finally break that "equality" logjam that's been bunging us up as a movement. I don't know.
And if you thought this was nuts? You should see what I've been thinking about the connections between male biology and male social behaviors. The evo-psychos only think they know what's up.
But this is too long already. Maybe later.