5. What You Waiting For? – Gwen Stefani 2004

 

You know you're only known
'Cause of your sex chromosome
I know it's so messed up how our society all thinks (for sure)
Life is short, you're capable (uh huh)

 

As an adult and therefore wiser - though only moderately so - to why things are different for the sexes, I often ponder the memory of my mum telling Tarnya and I that ‘It’s different for boys’ (refer to Post 4).

At the bare basic chromosome level Y is the sex-determining chromosome in many species. It is the presence or absence of Y that determines male or female sex. The X chromosome is the other sex-determining chromosome in many animal species, including mammals, and is found in both males and females. The X chromosome was named for its unique properties by early researchers, which resulted in the naming of its counterpart Y chromosome, for the next letter in the alphabet, as it was discovered after the X chromosome.

So, if we all have a X chromosome does this mean that we are all female (‘Oh my God! A woman!’) unless we happen to have a Y chromosome? Sounds reasonable to me, but it goes against the convention of female terms in the English language being a feminisation of masculine terms (e.g.: man-woman, prince-princess) with the female being the first term (X) and the male term (Y) merely being the next letter in the alphabet.

Unfortunately, widow-widower are the only terms I can think of where the masculine appears to be an extension of the feminine term. Is this anomaly because, on average, wives outlive their husbands, thus reducing the instances of widowers? Is it because men were historically free to remarry if their wife died, but women were meant to faithfully mourn their husbands until they joined them in the afterlife?

So, what came first - the chicken or the egg? You need a hen to lay an egg, but chickens come from eggs. Assuming that the egg comes first, what if it produces a rooster and there isn’t another egg to produce a hen and continue this conundrum?

Then we’ve got the whole religious take that Eve was made from Adam’s rib. While the contemporary feminist saying is that ‘You have to do a rough draft before the final product’.

The biological concept that those that invest less into reproduction (males in Homo sapiens, but not all species) compete and posture, while those that invest more into reproduction (females) choose. Yet, modern society turns it around with women being the one’s dressing to the nines in the hope of attracting a guy. Similarly, let’s face it, males are more inclined to cheat on their partners than females, presumably because basic biological theory says that males have to get their seeds out there because their reproductive opportunities are primarily limited by the number of times they have sex, while females are limited by the number of eggs they’re born with and time being of reproductive age and not being pregnant. So, just because they ‘compete and posture’ for you doesn’t mean they’ll be faithful to you.

Personally, I prefer to follow the biological theory that probably neither sex came first because the concept of sex evolved over time with the separate sexes being an evolutionary by product.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5qICl3Fr3w