Like a Virgin (2 page)

I began to wonder about these paradoxes, ironies, misnomers, interpretations, and reinterpretations of the reproductive role of women. Are the ideas of the ancients all myth, and all those of
modern biology fact? What does the future hold in store? What will we face if we start making babies like a virgin? Will we ever be able to return to sex, and do we even have the choice?

PART I

THE MYTH OF THE NATURAL BIRTH

On 28 October 1533, the fourteen-year-old Catherine de Medici married the fourteen-year-old Henry, the Duke of Orléans. Catherine brought a substantial chunk of the
Medici family fortune to France as her dowry, but as soon as it became clear that her husband would rise to become King Henry II, her true value was seen to be in her womb, in which she would
produce the nation’s heirs.

Over the following ten years, however, Catherine failed to become pregnant. This was not for want of trying. A dispatch to the Milanese government reported that her father-in-law, Francis I, had
made a point of watching the royal couple in their bed to make sure the union was consummated – and was pleased to observe that each ‘jousted valiantly’. As attempt after attempt
failed, rumours of an imminent divorce spread through the court. Catherine promptly surrounded herself with doctors, diviners, and magicians. She refused to travel by mule, believing
that the infertile beast would transmit its sterility to anyone who rode one. She consulted tarot cards, charms, and alchemy. She drank the urine of pregnant animals; ate the powdered
testicles of boars, stags, and cats; dutifully swallowed cocktails of mare’s milk, rabbit’s blood, and sheep’s urine. Catherine’s sterility was torture to her.

But the young queen was not alone. Henry’s lifelong mistress, Diane de Poitiers, never bore him a child, even though she was already a mother of two. Though she remained an exceptional
beauty throughout her life, Diane was nineteen years Henry’s senior, well past peak fertility at the time their love affair began. She knew Henry better than anyone, even Catherine, who was
atrociously envious of the king’s mistress. Diane’s advice was that Henry and Catherine should make love
à levrette
, in the style of a greyhound bitch. She likely
suspected that Catherine was perfectly capable of getting pregnant, and her advice was not unfounded: she knew that Henry’s genitalia were misshapen, from a condition known to doctors as
hypospadias, in which the urethra develops abnormally. But then, Diane was not the only person to know of Henry’s affliction. As one seventeenth-century biographer put it:

The odd position of the opening of Henry’s urethra appears to have twisted his penis into a downward curve. Chances are that he simply couldn’t get the royal semen to where it needed
to be. Yet, Catherine got the blame.

Throughout human history, our understanding of how babies are made has been draped in layers of myth and assumptions, many quite heavily stained by the politics of gender. Human
dissection was taboo for most of recorded history, and effective microscopes would not be fabricated until the seventeenth century. For millennia, it was not easy to figure out what was really
going on inside a pregnant woman’s body, which made it much easier to assume that what was happening there was either miraculous or meaningless.

Fertility appears to have been among the earliest concerns of the earliest humans. In Bronze Age societies, these reproductive affairs were viewed simply: by some form of magic, a woman grew
large, and out of her body came a child. It was women, not men, who were worshipped as the givers of life; women who were placed on a pedestal for their seemingly miraculous powers. Some of the
very earliest objects of worship found by archaeologists working around the Mediterranean are wide-hipped, corpulent-bellied, ample-breasted figures: unmistakably female. In some cases, these
figures appear to have once held opium-rich poppy heads – an invaluable panacea, often used to ease the excruciating pains of childbirth. One such statue, carved from mammoth ivory, has been
dubbed the Venus of Hohle Fels; discovered in 2008, it is thirty-five thousand years old, the oldest known figurine representing any human form. These early artworks, and the Venus of Hohle Fels in
particular, emphasize our external sexual organs, that is, how sex works, superficially.

The next great breakthroughs in exploring the mechanics of sex are found housed in the archives of Tehran University. There, the catalogue lists one of the few remaining manuscripts
of the
Kitab al-Hayawan
, or
Book of Animals
, by the ninth-century Muslim scholar al-Jahiz – a document too delicate for any but the most circumspect of scholars to
handle. In this great work describing hundreds of animal species, al-Jahiz included a volume, then only recently translated into Arabic, entitled
On the Generation of Animals
by the
philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle’s tract had been salvaged from near oblivion by the physician Thabit ibn Qurra, who wrote widely on medicine, astronomy, and mathematics. Al-Jahiz and Thabit
were part of a group of medieval Islamic thinkers who, through the darkest ages of European science, preserved, utilized, and developed the medical ideas that had been elaborated centuries earlier
by the Greek masters – Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Galen. Thus, when in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Western Europe emerged into the Renaissance, the biological concepts
they resurrected belonged squarely in the third century
BCE
– including the belief that reproduction was predominantly a male affair.

This idea was not a completely new one, even in the third century. The Egyptians and the Indians as far back as the fourteenth century
BCE
described a man’s
contribution as the seed sown in the fertile ground of a woman’s body. The great Greek dramatist Aeschylus, in his tragedy
The Eumenides
from 485
BCE
, defines a
parent as ‘he who plants the seed. The mother is not the parent of that which is called her child but only nurtures the new planted seed that grows.’ Even following that line of
thought, men and women should have held the same reproductive value, because women were, in theory, still required. But a parent was the person who planted the seed, which meant a woman could only
play the role of nurse.

Aristotle was the son of a doctor, so he may have been familiar with these common conceptions long before he attended Plato’s Academy in Athens to study philosophy and science. Around
the time of his teacher’s death, in 347
BCE
, Aristotle moved to Assos, in Turkey, to set up his own school, and then moved on to the neighbouring
island of Lesbos, where he became tutor to the son of King Philip II of Macedon, later Alexander the Great. Inspired by Aristotle’s teachings, Alexander was inclined towards medicine, but he
eventually preferred conquering the world. Once his teaching assignment was fulfilled, the master returned to Athens and sat down to complete his book on the animals. In it, he covered a massive
amount of ground, including the origin of sperm, the causes of pregnancy and infertility, and the purposes of menstruation and lactation.

From the outset it was clear to Aristotle that semen was the male contribution to making a baby. In trying to pinpoint the female equivalent, he landed on menstrual blood. In Aristotle’s
well-honed reasoning, both ejaculation and menstruation appeared during adolescence. He also observed, perhaps from home experiments, that after repeated ejaculation semen became bloody; thus, like
a woman’s monthly period, semen, too, must be made out of blood. As far as Aristotle was concerned, each animal could only have one kind of bodily fluid from which to make babies. Because the
female had bleeding, she could not have semen – or something else that contributed to the creation of children.

However it was that Aristotle conducted his research, he was aware that a woman didn’t just bleed; she could at times also release a clear fluid during sex. He resisted the idea that this
fluid might contribute to reproduction in the way that semen did, since the part of the woman that experienced pleasure from sexual contact was not the part from which this fluid was released. In
any case, if a woman had her own semen, then she really should be able to make babies without a man, a hypothesis for which he had no evidence – at least not in humans.

He suspected some female animals could have babies without
males, and noticed some animals had no males or females, that is, no sexes at all. But Aristotle may have worked
out this theory by observing animals in which it is extremely difficult to tell the males and females apart, just by eye. For instance, some vultures, where the males and females have identically
coloured feathers so that the sexes appear exactly the same, as opposed, say, to peacocks and peahens, where the sex is very evident.

While living on Lesbos, Aristotle had made sure to include hyenas in his animal studies. His great interest in the animal had been piqued by the rumour that ‘every hyena is furnished with
the organ both of the male and the female’ – that they were hermaphrodites. Today, the reason for the rumour is plain: the female hyena has a clitoris so grossly enlarged that it looks,
to the casual observer, much like a penis, especially when the clitoris is fully erect, when it can protrude to seven inches. Spotted hyenas are, in fact, the only female mammals that urinate,
mate, and give birth through the tip of a clitoris. (Keep in mind that the hyenas give birth to infants that weigh between 1 and 1.5 kilograms – and sometimes to two infants at once.) The
female hyena lacks an external vagina; in place of the labia majora, the fleshy folds that normally flank the vagina, it has a fused sac of skin, something like a scrotum. If you were to look
inside the female’s ‘penis’, however, you would find a urinary and genital system far more typical of any other female mammal.

Aristotle studied his hyenas carefully. His were not the spotted variety, but striped, as were found throughout the Mediterranean region of his day. And like their spotted cousins, male and
female striped hyenas look remarkably similar. Both have manes that are erected when the animal is threatened – manes so large that Aristotle described them as running ‘all along the
spine’. The females had the same enlarged, penis-like clitoris as the spotted hyena, and the males appeared to have a large opening near the anus, looking much like a vagina. When
it came time to dissect the specimens of hyena that he had collected, Aristotle soon realized that the rumour that the animals were hermaphrodites was untrue. In addition to noting the
differences between the clitoris in the female and the penis in the male, he identified the opening in the male’s anus as a sweat gland. By virtue of its position, this structure, he
explained, could easily be confused with a vagina. Behind the opening, however, he did not observe any plumbing that might allow it to be used as a passage through which fertilization might
happen.