The Summer Without Men

will be boys: rambunctious, wild, kicking, hanging from the trees. But girls will be girls? Gentle, nurturing, sweet, passive, conniving, stealthy, mean?
    We all start out the same in our mothers’ wombs. We, all of us, when floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion, have gonads. If the Y chromosome didn’t swoop in to act on the gonads of some of us and make testes, we would all become women. In biology, the Genesis story is reversed: Adam becomes Adam out of Eve, not the other way around. Men are the metaphorical ribs of women, not women of men. Most of the time, it’s XX = ovaries, XY = testes. The renowned Greek physician Galen believed that female genitalia were the inversion of the male’s and vice versa, a view that held for centuries: “Turn outward the woman’s, turn inward, so to speak, and fold double the man’s and you will find the same in both in every respect.” Of course, outward trumped inward every time. Inward was definitely worse. Exactly why, I can’t say. Outward is pretty vulnerable, if you ask me. In fact, castration anxiety makes a lot of sense. If I were carrying my reproductive organs on the outside, I’d be pretty damned nervous about that delicate little package, too. As with the human navel, the ancient sex model had innies and outies, which meant that an innie might just surprise you by becoming an outie, especially if you went around behaving like someone who already had an outie. That hidden, folded-over yard might just make a sudden appearance. Montaigne, great literary peak of the sixteenth century that he was, subscribed to the innie/outie thesis: “Males and females are cast in the same mold, and, education and usage excepted, the difference is not great.” He repeats a well-known story about Marie-Germain, who was just plain Marie until the age of twenty-two in Montaigne’s version (fifteen in other versions), but one day, due to strenuous exercise ( jumping over a ditch while chasing pigs), the male rod popped out of her, and Germain was born. Incredible, you say. Impossible, you say. But there is a particular family in Puerto Rico and another in Texas with a genetic condition in which XY looks for all the world exactly like XX. In other words, phenotype disguises genotype, until puberty that is, when late in the game the little girls become little boys and grow up to be men. Carla turns into Carlos! Darling daughter becomes darling son without a surgical instrument in sight. What is certain is that in utero, the sex differentiation story is fragile. Things can and do get all mixed up.
    Mia, you are saying, get to the point. Relax, breathe deeply, and I will make my rhetorical turn shortly. This is a question of sameness and difference, of what Socrates in the Republic calls a “word controversy.” He tells his interlocutor, Glaucon, that they find themselves in “eristic wrangling” because they hadn’t bothered to inquire “what was the sense of ‘different nature’ and what was the sense of ‘same nature’ and what we were aiming at in our definition when we allotted to a different nature different practices and to the same nature the same.” The Great Father of Western Philosophy is working out the man/woman problem for his utopia and comes to rest (uneasily, I think, but he rests nevertheless) on this: “But if the only difference is that the female bears and the male begets, we shall not admit that it is a difference relevant for our purpose.” The purpose: whether women should be given the same education as men and then allowed to rule beside them in the Republic.
    Mostly the same, but different in parts, mostly in those lower begetting and bearing parts Or different in kind ? Thomas Laqueur, bless his heart, has written a whole book on the subject. Once the innie-outie theory collapsed, sometime in the eighteenth century, women were no longer inverted men; we were wholly OTHER: our bones, nerves, muscles, organs, tissues, all different, another machinery altogether, and this biological alien was ever so delicate. “While it is true that the mind is common to all human beings,” wrote Paul-Victor de Sèze in 1786, “the active employment thereof is not conducive to all. For women, in fact, this activity can be quite harmful. Because of their natural weakness, greater brain activity in women would exhaust all the other organs and thus disrupt their proper functioning. Above all, however, it would be the generative organs which would