Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

Francoeur, in Utopian Motherhood: New Trends in Human

Reproduction, admits:

The medical profession and experimental biologists

have always been very skeptical about the existence of

functional hermaphrodites among the higher animals

and man, though the earthworm, the sea hare, and

other lower animals do combine both sexes in the same

individual. 5

We have seen how deep the commitment to human sexual discreteness and polarity goes —that commitment

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Woman Hating

makes the idea of functional hermaphroditism conceptually intolerable. It is interesting here to speculate on the perceptions of men like Lionel Tiger ( Men in

Groups) who in effect project human cultural patterns

of dominance and submission on the animal world. For

instance, Dr. Sherfey tells us that “In many primate

species, the females would be diagnosed hermaphrodites if

they were human” (Italics hers. ) 6 Most probably, we often

simply project our own culturally determined modes of

acting and perceiving onto other animals —we effectively screen information that would challenge the notions of male and female which are holy to us. In

that case, a bias toward androgyny (instead of the current bias toward polarity) would give us significantly different scenarios of animal behavior.

Hermaphroditism is generally defined as “a congenital disorder in which both male and female generative organs exist in the same individual. ” 7 A “true”

hermaphrodite is one who has ovaries, testes, and the

secondary sexual characteristics of both sexes. But

this is, it seems to me, the story of a functional hermaphrodite:

The case involved a sixteen-year-old Arkansas girl

who was being operated on for an ovarian tumor. As

is the custom in such surgery, the tissue removed is

carefully examined by a pathologist. In this instance,

signs of live eggs and live sperm were found in different

regions o f the tumor. With the egg and the sperm situated right next to each other in the same organ, Dr.

Timme claimed “there was a great possibility that they

would combine and make a human being. ”. . . The

unique feature. . . would be that the same person

contributed both germ cells. 8

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

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Parthenogenesis also occurs naturally in women. Fran-

coeur refers to the work o f Dr. Landrum B. Shettles

who

in examining human eggs just after they were removed

from their ovarian follicles. . . found that three out

of four hundred of these eggs had “undergone cleavage in vivo within the