The Summer Without Men

male researchers at the table concurred with Dr. Brooder. We two-leggers could do it but no other animals. In males, of course, prowess went all the way down the mammalian ladder. Male arousal has deep biological roots; in women it’s just a fluke, an accident. From a purely physiological point of view, this struck me as absurd. My primate sisters, who shared so much of my equipment, upstairs and downstairs, had no fun during sex! What did that mean? Among our four-legged cousins, only the males experienced joy? While I argued my point, Boris glowered at me from across the table (I had been admitted as a special guest). A couple of books and several papers later, I discovered that the smug six were dead wrong, which meant, of course, that I was dead right. In 1971 Frances Burton verified orgasm in four out of five of the female rhesus monkeys in her lab. Female stump-tailed macaque monkeys experience orgasms regularly but most often with other females, not with males, and when they come, the simian ladies cry out just as we do. Alan F. Dixson, the author of Primate Sexuality: Comparative Studies of Prosimians, Monkeys, Apes, and Human Beings, writes that they express their rapture in sounds reminiscent of Mrs. Claus: “Ho, ho, ho!” I used those three verbal ejaculations when I confronted the old man with my evidence. “Ho! Ho! Ho!” I said, slapping down two tomes and six articles, all marked with Post-its.
    Why, you may ask, did the no-fun theory for girl apes become so well known that all six guys at the table had swallowed it as a matter of course, even though the primates in question have clitorises, as do ALL female mammals? Onan, if you recall from page 66, was punished for wasting his seed. He was supposed not to cast it on the ground but to put it somewhere—inside a woman. This is the waste-not-want-not-for-children argument. But unlike Onan, who can’t inseminate anybody without orgasm, Onan’s hypothetical woman (the woman he should have been inside) can conceive without having the big O, a fact recognized by Aristotle but forgotten for centuries. In 1559 Columbus discovered the clitoris ( dulcedo amoris )—Renaldus Columbus, that is. He sailed into it during one of his anatomical voyages, although Gabriele Fallopius disputed this, insisting that he had seen the hillock first. Permit me to draw an analogy between the two exploring Columbuses, Christopher and Renaldus. Their disclosures, less than a hundred years apart, the former of a body of land, the latter of a body part, share a familiar hubris, one of hierarchical perspective. In the case of the new world, the viewer looking down is European. In the clitoral case, he is a man. Both the peoples who had been living on “New World” soil for thousands of years and, I dare say, most women would have been stupefied by these “discoveries.” That said, the clitoris remains a Darwinian puzzle. If it’s not needed for conception, WHY is it there? Is it adaptive or nonadaptive? The shriveled-up little penis (nonadaptive) view has a long history. Gould and Lewontin argue that clits are like tits in men, an anatomical leftover. Others say no; the pleasure pea serves an evolutionary purpose. The battles are bloody. But, I ask you, what matters adaptation or size if the blessed little member does the job? Before we return to our story, I leave you with the immortal words of Jane arp, a seventeenth-century Englishwoman and practicing midwife, who wrote of the clitoris, “It will stand and fall as a yard doth and makes women lustful and take delight in copulation.” (Women, I contend, their simian sisters, and, awaiting further research, probably other mammals, too. Further subcommentary: Doesn’t the seventeenth-century use of the measurement yard for penis strike you as a bit of an exaggeration, unless the yard then was not the yard now?)
     
When Columbus spied the Mount of bliss,
He stopped and asked himself, “What is this?”
A button, a pea?
An anomaly?
No, silly man, it’s a clitoris!
    *   *   *
     
    Alice’s confession was not coherent, but it was possible to piece together a narrative after it was over. She spoke to me and to her mother, Ellen, who was admitted not long after the bean-spilling began. My eyes moved from child to mother as the girl shifted from barely audible whispers to choked admissions to hoarse gasping sobs. I noted that the mother’s face functioned as a vague mirror of her child’s. When Alice spoke softly,