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Are Men All That Bad or Are Our Small Gametes
to Blame?
Do you remember the Mother Goose nursery rhyme
about little boys and girls? There are a number of
variations. The one I grew up with went:
“Little girls are made of sugar and spice and
everything nice. Little boys are made of snips and
snails and puppy dog tails.” Even as a child I
always remember being uncomfortable with that
rhyme. First, I was uncomfortable with
“snip.” What is a snip anyway? I suspect
that any boy who has been circumcised shivers a bit
when he hears the word snip. I wondered why I
couldn’t be sugar and spice and everything
nice. It seemed a much nicer option.
And what am I supposed to be made of? I’m
made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails. It
sounded yucky to me. And what happened to the cute
puppy dogs? All I get are the snips and the tails.
There seemed to be an implication that I had
something to do with the lost tails. Did I snip
them off?
Even as we’ve eliminated a good deal of
sexist language in our society, those old memories
remain. Sugar and spice still sounds pretty nice.
In fact, there’s a website called Sugar and
Spice that describes the sweet meeting of Kati, a
Finish girl, and Hans, a Dutch boy.
The “sugar and spice” nursery rhyme
was written by Robert Southey around 1800 and has
survived through the centuries in defining the
difference between boys (icky things) and girls
(nice things). Over the course of time and in order
to accommodate other countries, different nasties
were used in place of snips. Some use snakes,
others used frogs.
Whatever the language, the meaning was clear.
There was something inherently good about girls and
something nasty and destructive about boys. The
feminist movement helped women break out of the
constraints of having to be “nice.” Males
still suffer from the belief that there is
something wrong with being male.
A five-year-old boy is prosecuted for sexual
harassment in grade school for kissing a female
playmate. Older boys are mistakenly diagnosed as
having ADD because they don’t want to sit
still in a classroom that does not allow for their
natural male exuberance. Recess and school sports
are being dropped in many schools because they
don’t provide any “real” educational
value.
Some feminists believe that being male is itself
some kind of disease. Natalie Angier, an
influential voice in the public discourse on
gender, wrote a piece in the New York Times called
“The Debilitating Malady Called Boyhood: Is
There A Cure?” Can you imagine what kind of an
uproar would be created if the New York Times
published an article titled “The Debilitating
Malady Called Girlhood: Is There A Cure?.”
Well, if being a male is a disease, guess what
the cure would be. Marilyn French is another
prominent American writer, celebrated for her novel
The Women’s Room.” In a New York Times
interview she said, “I think men would be much
happier if they behaved like women. I think they
would get much more out of life and would have much
more easier selves if they were like women.”
Could anyone in the world today get away with
suggesting that women would be happier if they were
like men, or that Muslims would be happier if they
behaved more like Jews, or Blacks happier if they
behaved more like Whites?
There are some who believe that if men are going
to be alive we should pay the price. June
Stephenson wrote a book called Men Are Not Cost
Effective in which she details the cost of crime to
society and points out that most crime is committed
by men. She proposes a gender tax that all males
would pay to make up for what men cost the society.
Her philosophy seems to be “if you play, you
pay.” She doesn’t seem to recognize that
crime is not just a gender issue, it results from
many factors. For instance, we know that crime goes
up when the unemployment rate increases and goes
down when it drops. Boys who grow up in homes with
single mothers are more likely to be involved in
delinquent activities and crime as they get older
than boys who grow up with both a father and mother
at home.
The Dating and Mating Game: Small Sperm,
Large Egg, Look Out.
Biologists have a very simple and useful
definition of what is male and what is female,
whether we are fish, ferns, or human beings. An
individual can either make many small gametes (sex
cells) or fewer but larger gametes. The individuals
that produce smaller gametes are called "males" and
the ones that produce larger gametes are called
"females." Although the human egg is microscopic,
it is large enough to house 250,000 sperm.
The small gametes are designed to fuse with a
large one, and the large ones are designed to fuse
with a small one. The female strategy produces
gametes that are large, and have a high rate of
survival and fertilization. The male strategy is to
produce as many as possible, to increase the
chances of finding a large one. About 400 eggs are
ovulated in a woman's lifetime. A healthy male
produces 500 million sperm per day.
An individual must either invest in a few large
eggs or in millions of sperm. Thus, there will
always be many times more sperm than there are
eggs. Consequently, sperm must compete for access
to those rare eggs. Although these basic facts of
life may be obvious, the importance and
implications may not be.
In fact, this difference in the size of our sex
cells makes a huge difference in how we act as
males. As we will see, it helps explain why men can
become so irritable, why we die sooner than women,
why we are involved in more violent arguments, and
why we become more depressed. “The cellular
imbalance is at the center of maleness,” says
geneticist Dr. Steve Jones. “It confers on
males a simpler sex life than their partners,
together with a host of incidental idiosyncrasies,
from more suicide, cancer and billionaires to
rather less hair on the top of the head.”
Generally it is easier to move the smaller sperm
to the larger egg than vice versa, and so it is the
male that seeks out the female and the female who
makes the selection from those males that come
courting. “Males are in flux in almost every
way: in how they look and how they behave, of
course,” says Jones, “but, more
important, in how they are made. From the greenest
of algae to the most blue-blooded of aristocrats
their restless state hints at an endless race in
which males pursue but females escape.”
This is one of the reasons that there will
always be more irritable and insecure men than
women. Because they carry the larger, scarcer, and
valuable eggs, women will always be more sought
after than men. Men will always have to take the
initiative and women will always get to choose the
most attractive male from those who present
themselves and reject the others. In the game of
life, women hold more of the evolutionary valuable
cards.
©2010 Jed
Diamond
See Books,
Issues
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* * *
Wealth can't buy health, but health can buy
wealth. - Henry David Thoreau
Jed Diamond
is the internationally best-selling author of seven
books including Male
Menopause, now
translated into 17 foreign languages and his
latest book, The
Irritable Male Syndrome: Managing. The 4 Key Causes
of Depression and
Aggression. For over
38 years he has been a leader in the field of men's
health. He is a member of the International
Scientific Board of the World Congress on
Men’s Health and has been on the Board of
Advisors of the Men’s Health Network since its
founding in 1992. His work has been featured in
major newspapers throughout the United States
including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall
Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and USA
Today. He has been featured on more than 1,000
radio and T.V. programs including The View with
Barbara Walters, Good Morning America, Inside
Edition, CBS, NBC, and Fox News, To Tell the Truth,
Extra, Leeza, Geraldo, and Joan Rivers. He also did
a nationally televised special on Male Menopause
for PBS. He looks forward to your feedback.
E-Mail.
You can visit his website at www.menalive.com
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