THE OBJECT OF DESIRE
In The symposium, Plato gives Aristophanes a speech to account for the origin of sexual desire. There once were, Aristophanes says – he is speaking of some mythical past epoch – three human genders: male, female and hermaphrodite. These humans were not as humans are now, but rather fused together in pairs: male to male, female to female and, the hemaphrodite majority, male to female. His description suggests that these Ür-humans looked something like cephalothoracoileopagus conjoined twins. Able to cartwheel on their eight limbs, they were troublesome, vigorous and proud, and Zeus was puzzled what to do about them. His solution was to cut them in half. Since then, every human has sought to be reunited with his or her other half. This explains why some of us are drawn to our own sex, but most of us are drawn to the other.
The causes of our various sexual orientations are so obscure that Aristophanes’ explanation is about as good as many others current today. Perhaps this is why many people resist the search for a biological explanation of sexual orientation. But unless we are Cartesian dualists (and no biologist is), the distinction between body and mind is merely a matter of the degree of our ignorance – bodies being things we understand, minds being all that we do not. And there is no doubt that the complex chain of molecular events that controls the devices of desire, our genitals, also influences its object – whom we choose when we give away our hearts.
What makes the case of Alexina/Abel so fascinating is that, raised as a girl, she fell in love with girls – that is, her loves were those appropriate to her sex, but her true, hidden, sex rather than her apparent one. This may seem reasonable enough, but many physicians and anthropologists think otherwise. For them, sexual orientation is made by social influences, by how a child is raised, especially early in life. In their view, Alexina/Abel having been raised as a girl among girls should have grown up to love men. Physicians take this idea from 1950s sexology; anthropologists from the writings of Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. Whatever the source, such social constructivist notions of gender are swiftly losing ground to the molecular genetic study of sexual behaviour.
Even in 1979, a study of the sexuality of the Dominican Republic guevedoche made a convincing case that hormones must count for something. Like Alexina/Abel, the guevedoche have traditionally been raised as girls and yet, almost invariably, take on a male identity as adults. They may not have had enough DHT to make good male genitals, but it seems that they received enough testosterone, either in the womb or at puberty, to make them feel like men and to make them desire and marry women. Yet they do not have it easy. As youths, they are often diffident lovers, fearing that women will ridicule them for the shape of their genitals. The label ‘guevedoche‘ is, for the villagers of Salinas, a term used in unkindness rather than anything else.
The kwolu-aatmwol of Papua New Guinea have it no easier. There, only a minority of male pseudohermaphrodites are mistaken for girls; the rest are seen as boys, albeit somehow incomplete. To become men, Sambian boys must pass through an elaborate and secret set of initiation ceremonies, six in all. As in so many New Guinea cultures, these ceremonies are overtly homoerotic: young initiates must fellate older ones so that they may acquire, as the Sambia believe, a source of future semen. To the Western mind, the Sambia seem to heap cultural sexual confusion upon biological, but the boys who go through these homoerotic ceremonies mostly end up as heterosexual married men. Not the kwolu-aatmwol, however. They, it seems, are admitted to the lowest rungs of this ladder of initiation but not the higher ones; they may fellate, but not be fellated – indeed, their genitals would hardly permit it. And so though they may mature in body and mind, they come to be socially stranded in late adolescence, a twilight world in which they can be neither boys nor men.
VIII
A FRAGILE BUBBLE
[ON SKIN]
OUR SPECIES HAS, SINCE 1758, borne the flattering, if not always accurate, name Homo sapiens – thinking Man. At least that is what the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus called us in the tenth edition of his Systema naturae, the work which tax-onomists even now accept as the first authoritative source of the names which they have given the world’s creatures. It was nearly otherwise. In Linnaeus’ text, directly adjacent to the word ‘sapiens‘ is another designation, an apparent synonym for ourselves, yet one that is somehow never explained: ‘H. diurnus’ – Man of the day. It is a name that seems to have had particular resonance for Linnaeus. His notebooks show that he toyed with sapiens vs. diurnus for much of his life, and it is only in the tenth edition that the latter is firmly relegated to second place. On the face of it, Linnaeus’ belief that diurnality captured something special about our species is puzzling. Although we are undoubtedly daylight-loving creatures, so too are many others. It is only when one pages through the staggered typography and compressed Latin of Linnaeus’ text that one finds the explanation for his diurnal dreams. Linnaeus, godfather to humanity, believed that we were not alone.
Long before palaeontologists unearthed from Serengeti dongas the bones of our extinct Hominid cousins, Linnaeus believed that the remoter parts of the world were peopled by other species of humans. He was not thinking about the humans who lived in Asia, Africa or the New World; they clearly belonged to the same species as himself. He was thinking of something altogether more exotic: a species of human that was bowed and shrunken in form, that had short curly hair rather like an African’s, only fair, that had skin as white as chalk and slanted golden eyes. With eyesight as poor by day as it was acute by night, they were crepuscular, cavern-dwelling creatures who emerged at dusk to raid the farms of their more intelligent cousins. They were ancient; perhaps they had even ruled the earth before Man, but now they were on the retreat. This species, Linnaeus said, was ‘a child of darkness which turns day into night and night into day and appears to be our closest relative’. True, he had never seen one, but had not Pliny and Ptolemy written of the Leucaethopes? And had they not been seen more recently, not least by his own students, in Ethiopia, Java, the Ternate Islands and Mount Ophir of Malacca? The reports seemed vivid and precise: in Ceylon they were called Chacrelats; in Amboina, Kakurlakos – from the Dutch for ‘cockroach’; and everywhere they were despised. This was enough for Linnaeus, and true to his classifier’s instinct, he gave them a name: Homo troglodytes – cave-dwelling Man. And next to that he wrote ‘H. nocturnus’ – Man of the night.
What was Linnaeus thinking of? As the founder of modern biological classification, his name is second only to that of Darwin in the naturalist’s pantheon. But no one reads Systema naturae any more, much less his many other works, and we forget that his mind was as much the mind of a medieval mystic as of an Enlightenment savant. Linnaeus was frankly credulous. He believed that swallows hibernate at the bottom of lakes; that if the back of a puppy were rubbed with acquavit it would grow up dwarfed; and that Lapland was the home of a creature called the Furia infernalis, the Fury of Hell, that flew through the air without the aid of wings and fell upon men and cattle, fatally running them through.