Penises Are Magic! #6
But what about sperm?
Penises Are Magic! A Guide to Patriarchy for Everyone Who Didn’t Consent to It is a subscribers-only serial on Substack. Looking for previous installments? Try the “Penises Are Magic!” heading or the #pam tag.
In my head, the next few sections of Penises Are Magic is called “But What About….???” because that’s how the “how do we explain the existence of patriarchy?” discussion always went when I taught undergraduate women’s and gender studies courses. We’d start the semester talking about patriarchy and sex-based inequality, and then start asking the question we’ve been answering thus far, looking at this whole idea of what it means to have inequalities and privileges be “sex-based” and what that means in terms of the body. If we looked at sexual anatomy, would we find out why this system of sex-based privilege and inequality existed? Did penises maybe explain it somehow?
The answer was no, as you’ve already discovered if you’ve been reading along.
But that discovery led to questions. Even if human beings do, as I’ve mentioned, tend to love a dick check, there’s more to a person’s sex than their genital anatomy. And so the questions began: but what about sperm? But what about DNA? But what about hormones? Could any of those things explain what penises alone couldn’t, when it came to penis magic?
Penises, after all, are really pretty simple. We may glorify them, but there’s nothing going on in the penis department that accounts for penis magic.
So ok, what about sperm?
Historically, some people have suggested that penis magic isn’t really about penises, but about what sometimes comes out of them: semen. Or, to get to the point, sperm, which aren’t the same thing as semen but do tend to lurk in it, wriggling around and trying to swim up into places they may or may not be welcome, squirted willy-nilly via the good old dicknozzle.
Without sperm, the argument goes, no eggs get fertilized, and if no eggs get fertilized, then no fetuses form and no babies get born. Voila, penises are magic!
Like a lot of arguments, this one’s fine as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go very far.
I mean, yes, it’s true that in order to create a new human being, you need at least one sperm cell. Alas, we human beings can’t reproduce via parthenogenesis, which if you’ve never heard of it is a brilliantly efficient process in which a single egg cell can create an embryo, and eventually whole entire offspring, all by itself without any sperm cells being involved anywhere in the process. A lot of the organisms that can reproduce this way aren’t exactly our nearest evolutionary neighbors (lots of insects and worms and such), but there are more complicated critters that can and do sometimes just say no when it comes to using sperm to reproduce.
Komodo dragons, for instance. California condors. Lots of kinds of sharks do it too.
In fact, mammals (animals with vertebra that have hair and produce milk to feed their offspring) are the only kind of animals that can’t perform this particular magic trick at least some of the time.
I mention this because it’s fascinating, and because it implies that reproduction that requires sperm might not be evolution’s first choice. It certainly isn’t the only game in town.
