It’s more than a little disheartening to walk through a bookstore and be confronted with the nearly endless rows of books proselytizing one or another system of redressing the gender gap. As if male-female relations weren’t muddled enough, we go and confuse things further by dedicating an entire literary subgenre to the problem. By Dylan Young The Rules, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, He’s Just Not That Into You, you name it, these glib pamphlets claim to have the answers. Is your wife being peevish? Does she disapprove of your favourite shirt? Well, don’t read too much into it. She’s from Venus after all. She may just want to snuggle. Or maybe you’re just not that into her. Forgetting for a moment the rude exhortations and veiled threats of such literary gems as Why Men Marry Bitches: A Woman’s Guide to Winning Her Man’s Heart and Men Who Can’t Love: How to Recognize a Commitmentphobic Man Before He Breaks Your Heart, let’s address what is not being said here. I’m really not sure which is more galling: the notion that, by virtue of maleness, my behaviour could be so abhorrent to the opposite sex as to require a manual to give it context or that my manly behaviour could be deemed so basic, unreasoned and Pavlovian that the opposite sex
82 Sharp September 2008 SHARPFORMEN.COM
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would actually believe an operating manual could help. It’s a tough one. But maybe a million dewey-eyed pop psychology addicts aren’t wrong – or at least, not entirely wrong. Maybe there’s something tangible at the root of all this. Author Matt Ridley certainly thought so when he wrote Genome, his modern classic of genetic lay-science. In it he dedicates an entire chapter to the rather dismaying sparring between the X and Y chromosomes. For those who have, quite reasonably, forgotten their high school biology – a quick review. The X and Y chromosomes are known as the sex chromosomes because, with a fair degree of certainty, they determine the sex of the body. Everybody inherits an X from their mother. If you inherit a Y from your father, you are a man. If you inherit an X from your father, you’re a woman. Pretty basic, right? When we inherit these chromosomes from our parents we inherit a whole set of determining genes. Certain traits, like colourblindness and hemophilia, are more likely to be inherited by men because those disorders are on the X chromosome. And since men have no spare X to fill in the gaps on the one they do have, men are more susceptible to recessive traits. Are you still with me? Because this is where it gets interesting. Recent research concerning the X and Y chromosomes has yielded some very unusual results – namely, that they don’t like each other very much. One of the first proofs that something funny was going on between X and Y was when a scientist noticed that the sex determining gene – the Y – was in Ridley’s words, attracting “to its side other genes that benefitted males,” things like big muscles and aggressiveness. These genes, while advantageous to one sex, disadvantaged the other. As it would be if there were a gene that made men leave the toilet seat up (there isn’t) and another that allowed women to train them not to. These are known as sexually antagonist genes. Genes on the X or Y can also develop proficiencies for eliciting desired responses from genes on the opposite chromosome. This is illustrated by a study done with two different species of wolf spider. In one group, males had evolved tufts on their forelegs that they used in courtship. When female spiders were shown videos of male spiders with no tufts, they would occasionally show their arousal (yes, we are talking about spider porn). When the same female spiders were shown videos of the males with tufts, they were ten times more likely to get sexy. The females had evolved gradually to be turned off, not on, by the males, and the males were gradually evolving to increase their appeal. This perpetual game of genetic tug-o-war is called antagonistic seduction. So, maybe you aren’t having trouble communicating with your girlfriend because you tried to “solve” the problem she only wanted to “share” with you. Maybe it’s just that 50,000 years of biological evolution has made you just about the perfect organisms for really getting at each other. If the lessons of genetics and chromosomal conflict have anything to teach us it’s that when men and women do manage to get together, we should definitely not take it for granted – because it’s a goddamn miracle of science.
ILLUSTRATION: ROCCO COMMISSO
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