[Marxism] The Penis and the Clitoris, or Gould against Functionalism

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Carrol wrote:
> > Interestingly, the penis and the clitoris are the same organ! From
> > New York Review of Books
> >
> > Volume 38, Number 11 · June 13, 1991 Review The Birth of the
> > Two-Sex World By Stephen Jay Gould
> >
> > Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud  by Thomas
> > Laqueur Harvard University Press, 313 pp., $27.95
> <snip>
> The male penis and the female clitoris are also the same
> structure-again folded over, fused, and enlarged under androgenic
> influence.

As Stephen Jay Gould put it in his essay "Male Nipples and Clitoral
Ripples," "Males and females are not separate entities, shaped
independently by natural selection.  Both sexes are variants upon a
single ground plan, elaborated in later embryology" (_Bully for
Brontosaurus_, p. 127).

Ben wrote:
> The argument Gould put was that since men and women are the same
> species we share the vast majority of our genetic material. Hence
> even though women only have the genetic code (for production of
> hormones, subsequent growth, etc) to use their nipples (by
> lactacting) men also carry the genetic material -- resulting in
> small, non-functional nipples.
>
> The same argument would seem to apply to the clitoris and its function.

The main scientific point that Gould sought to illustrate in "Male
Nipples and Clitoral Ripples" (as well as many other essays) is the
poverty of "a severely restrictive functionalist view of life" (which
assigns purposes to all biological components of the body of a
species [and sometimes even social behaviors of it], arbitrarily
broken down and compartmentalized for the sake of analysis) in
explaining natural history.  Gould wrote: "we must first establish
'how' [a structure is built] in order to know whether or not we
should be asking 'why' at all" (_Bully for Brontosaurus_, p. 137).
The same goes for social history.
--
Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
* Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/>
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
* OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/>
* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
<http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>,
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>

_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism