Man and Woman, Part One: The Sexes: a Mystery Solved?

announcing

part one

When in the whole of human history have men and women had so many experts telling them who they are and why? A vast army of sociologists, psychologists, statisticians and market researchers has been let loose upon us and is now prowling through our offices and kitchens and bedrooms and nurseries, eager for some revelation that will bring the next grant, the next book contract, the next satisfied advertiser, the next startling financial figure. Sex is important stuff, everyone agrees. The relations between the sexes are what make our society what it is. So no gender behavior is beneath notice, no sexual stone is worth leaving unturned. We are captive subscribers to a Sexual-Truth-of-the-Month Club.

Everyone, it seems, has the last word--or the last word but one. The divorce rate is climbing because men won't let women into the corridors of power and/or because women are already there and prefer them to home. Women are unhappy because men are becoming more aggressive and/or because they are becoming more effeminate. Men, women and their offspring are the prisoners of sexual stereotypes, says one researcher--which have little effect on what they're actually like, says another. The family is in trouble for the very first time, writes one social scientist--exactly as it was 50 years ago, writes another. The age of enlightenment is upon us, claims one book. Here comes the sad end of men and women as we know them, insists the next. "Seventy-two percent of males..." "Sixty-three percent of females..." "Are stressed." "Are unfaithful." "Dislike the idea of a woman President." "Do or don't do the laundry."

This welter of conflicting information is the child of a new orthodoxy that science delivered up to us in the Sixties and Seventies. A hundred years ago, scientists in Europe and America produced a pecking order of intelligence based on a careful weighing of human brains and a meticulous evaluation of the hat sizes of dead geniuses, and that pecking order perfectly expressed the orthodoxy of its day.

White males led the field, followed at a laggard distance by white females. And far behind them straggled the rest of humanity--yellow, red, brown and black. In terms of the then-new evolutionary theories, this clearly meant that white males were the most highly evolved specimens of all mankind. And they dominated continents, businesses and households by the divine right of their genes. We are who we are, pronounced scientists, because we were born that way. End of story.

That conventional wisdom, in one form or another, ruled virtually all thinking about men and women until the Sixties. It was scientifically respectable and it was built into the language--"Boys will be boys"; "Girls are made of sugar and spice"; "Not bad for a girl"; "The little woman"; "A man's man, a he-man, a real man." By these lights, career women were regarded as deviants. Tomboys--a word that originally meant harlots--were frowned upon. And male homosexuals were seen as a diminished form of humanity, the inheritors of "bad blood." These things were "against nature." And nature was all.

All that served the status quo pretty well, of course. Blacks were excluded from the mainstream of society. White males were waited on. And there was no trouble from homosexuals. But then two things happened. First, science, with its presumptions about nature, made its greatest discovery of the 20th Century: that it was almost completely ignorant, especially about what human nature really was. So hard science--the science of measurement and experiment--went back to its laboratories, leaving the field of human behavior to the so-called soft sciences: sociology and psychology. These sciences had nothing to say about any inborn nature--indeed, they weren't interested in it. They were interested only in what happened to the human organism after it was born. For them, it was nurture--as expressed in families, educational systems and social institutions--that shaped and misshaped the human being. Nature had nothing to do with it.

There was, in other words, a massive swing of the scientific pendulum from nature to nurture, from the prison of evolution to a complete freedom from it. All we had to do to become who and what we wanted was to change the society, science now seemed to be (continued on page 286)Man and Woman(continued from page 205) saying. And this was the second thing that happened. For suddenly, in the Sixties, there was a whole generation that appeared to take this lesson of science to heart. It saw itself as smothered and misled from birth onward. And so it attacked every institution that had directed its fate: the family, the schools, the universities, the Government and the military-industrial complex. It took up the cause of those who had been left out of the social dispensation--the poor and the black. And when this revolution dwindled down to the soft, sweet swan song of the hippies, it gave us the sexual revolution.

This was the final revolt against nature. Women refused to be immured any longer in socially imposed definitions that kept them at home. Homosexuals refused to be locked up in closet and caricature. Men attempted to avoid the excesses of a machismo they'd been brought up into. And sex between all of us became a theater in which we tried to express a new freedom and a new equality.

All this rested on what seemed at the time to be a perfectly good and liberating assumption, one rooted in a popular science that was as democratic and available as we ourselves wanted to be. Gender differences could at last be forgotten--beyond the way we reproduced and took our pleasure, they were acquired and incidental to who we were. Male and female roles and behaviors were simply the result of a differential upbringing and a biased educational system. And the jobs and expectations characteristic of the sexes were things that were dinned into us and forced on us. In a just and equitable society, they would be eliminated.

These tenets spelled out the new orthodoxy, and it is with us to this day. It is liberal. It is the ideological cornerstone of the various liberation movements--including men's. And in the past 20 years, it has permeated every stratum of our society. We now try to bring up our children in a nonbiased way. We aim for a nonsexist education. We scrutinize ourselves for the slightest sign of the old Adam and the old compliant Eve. And we spend a great deal of time reading confusing dispatches from the front about sex, about the sexes and about what we are or are not doing right. We have swallowed whole, that is to say, this new orthodoxy, just as our great-grandparents swallowed whole the orthodoxy delivered up by science to them. And we never stop to think that this may ultimately be just as divisive and self-serving as it was 100 years ago.

For it has cut us off from the past, from nature and from the possibility of finding out any large truths about who we really are as a species made up of two sexes. Instead, it has confined us to a sort of permanent here and now, as if we were brand-new men and women. It has encouraged us to think that the newest, latest, best-publicized revelation might tell us something that we need to know. It has made us, as individuals, self-conscious. It has forced us to be acute observers of human un happiness--since sociology and psychology find it very difficult to analyze happiness and those relationships that work. And it has made it difficult to see the wood of ourselves for the trees of all the daily arriving studies, statistics and theories. "Forty-seven percent of men..." "Fifty-one percent of women..." "Are unhappy with their partner." "Have friends of the opposite sex." "Disapprove of homosexuality." "Are jealous." "Want marriage." "Make or don't make big decisions." Never in human history have we had so much information about one another. And we seem none the wiser.

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The great Danish writer Isak Dinesen wrote shortly before her death: "The mutual inspiration of man and woman has been the most powerful force in the history of the race." In 1982, then, Playboy will be taking a long, hard look at everything that can be known about the source of that inspiration, the complementary nature of male and female. We will go far beyond the confusion of the polls and percentages to something much deeper. We will travel beyond orthodoxy and try to find where wisdom lies. Men and women, as Dinesen knew, are part of a great mystery, a destiny that has tied them together from their beginning eons ago and continues to tie them to a human nature far older than they are. We have been a long time coming to this place, and we have a long way to go.

Over the next few months, a special Playboy report will be looking at the past, present and future of the partnership between the sexes. And it will help announce the arrival of a new human science that is working to unravel the essentials of our nature. In the past five or six years, virtually unbeknown to the general public, a whole gaggle of different scientific disciplines has come together and is fast becoming a broad science of man--of men and women--a science that is trying to find answers to the riddles that lie at the heart of who we are. Why are there two sexes? Why do males exist? What is the separate biological inheritance that makes us male and female? And how is it expressed in our emotions, our skills, our abilities and our couplings? Why did sexual pleasure evolve? And why is monogamy almost universal? Are we prisoners of our gender? Or can we, without stress, change our sexually related institutions and structural relations at will?

It is a long and absorbing road that we'll be taking, and we hope that you'll take it with us. It will take us deep into the brain, the womb, the glands. It will take us through time and space, from the American suburbs to the Trobriand Islands to our living ancestors, the !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari Desert; from the dating practices of San Francisco's homosexuals to the man who fathered and then breast-fed his own child--and on to the children of the Dominican Republic who are born, it seems, as girls and become boys at puberty.

It will take us from monkey colonies in Wisconsin to female singing birds in California to the sex-changing fish of the coral reefs; from the laboratory in England where the first human pheromone is being isolated to the university hospital in Ontario where gender was found to make a difference in stroke recovery; from Twenties sex books to perfume manuals in Sanskrit to the practices of the American advertising industry; from the images produced by our culture to the images produced by the CAT scan. This road will take us into our future, a future, perhaps, of contraceptive sprays and pills for pleasure. But it will always lead us back to our present, to this present point of conflict between our biological evolution and our cultural evolution, between what we are and what we want to be.

It is for this reason that included in this issue of the magazine is a brand-new Playboy questionnaire. For in a few months' time, when the results of the poll are published and this journey through the sexes is over, we hope to be able to see more clearly not only what is going on in our society but why.

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As we were gathering material for this report, we went to see Richard Alexander, a professor of biology at the University of Michigan. He told us, with some amazement, of a class he had recently given. "I asked them," he said, "to name some of the differences between males and females. And after a while, they came to two conclusions. Besides making sperm and making eggs, the two organisms of the species have only one difference--women can make babies and nurse them. Well, there was quite a ruckus about this. The females in the class were angry and offended. And I was puzzled, until someone pointed out to me that they must have thought this denied them power. Well, it's unfortunate that they saw power--selfish power--as the point. Because males and females are different, variously different, much more different than the class believed. They are two forms of life, indispensable to each other. And that--surely--is the point."

Alexander's students would no doubt be equally offended by this proposition. And there is no doubt that much of the science we'll be talking about is extremely controversial. For it often challenges modern, fondly held beliefs. It is denounced as sexist and antiliberal. It is attacked as militantly feminist and as virulently antifeminist, even though a good deal of the research is conducted by women. One internationally known woman researcher even told us of a grant proposal's having been turned down, not on the grounds that it was a poor proposal--it was highly rated--but on the grounds, in the words of just one referee, that "This work ought not to be done." It was seen as antihumanist.

We disagree. We believe that truth is of fundamental importance. And it is of a struggle toward truth, in the end--toward a new understanding of ourselves--that we'll be writing in the coming months. As a man and a woman, we have been endlessly fascinated by what the various sciences have been able to tell us about ourselves and our inheritance. Some of these sciences will be familiar, no doubt; some of them will not. But when their findings and conclusions are put together, we believe that you will find them as fascinating and as revealing as we have:

• The natural form of the human is female.

• Motherhood, but not fatherhood, is innate.

• In nature, promiscuous males die young.

• Monogamy may be the most important evolutionary step mankind has taken.

• Concealed ovulation is a piece of evolutionary hoodwinkery by which a woman keeps a man around the house.

• The brain is a gland: a thinking gland, even a sex gland.

• In no human society are all sexual relations casual and impersonal.

• So-called female intuition may be a real ability, the result of a distinct biological inheritance.

• Male homosexuals may have a feminized brain in a masculinized body.

• Human males are much less different from other primates than human females.

• The brains of men and women are, in important respects, differently organized--including, perhaps, for pleasure.

• The average time it takes man to reach orgasm in coitus is two to three minutes; woman, eight to ten minutes.

• Males and females may communicate with one another via a system that influences menstruation, hair growth, aggression, attraction, mood and mother-child bonding.

• Males and females are prone to different disorders: males to dyslexia, stuttering, hyperactivity and perhaps to schizophrenia; females to math disability, anorexia, depression and psychosomatic illness.

• Of 849 human societies studied, men were permitted to take more than one wife in 708, women to take more than one husband in only four.

We hope that you will take time to fill out the questionnaire and will join us during the coming months for the Playboy report. In the next issue, we will begin at the beginning: Why do males and females exist, and--given that males are comparatively useless in nature and the most successful organisms on earth use sex very little--why do we have sex at all? We promise you an interesting story.

Man and Woman from the frontiers of sex and science, an unprecedented playboy series on what makes man man and woman woman

"Sex between us became a theater in which we tried to express a new freedom and a new equality."