Men came from women

Marci made an astute observation the other day. She's been reading Paradise Lost, and not enjoying it mainly because it is riddled with religious bigotry, particularly sexism. Milton is very keen to make it clear that woman is inferior to man, having been created as his companion and specifically placed under the man's jurisdiction and command. In the poem, and the Bible, woman literally 'comes from' man, being created from Adam's rib.

But Marci noted that all foetuses are female until about the 7th week of pregnancy, at which point a surge of testosterone in males causes male-specific differentiation and development. However, the mark that man came from woman is left, for instance in the man's nipples and in intersex babies (commonly known as hermaphrodites).

Before we knew this we knew that men had X and Y chromosomes, whereas women had only X. So all men are 'half' woman in that respect! And now scientists are experimenting with causing an egg to divide without having been fertilised, meaning a woman can procreate and produce female children without the use of men (these children, by the way, would not be clones, because the woman's genes would still have been mixed up, but they would still be very similar to the mother). However, it's difficult to see how the same thing could be possible for a man, since men don't have eggs, or any means of gestating the child.

Anyway, I think it is very poignant how emphatically wrong all the patriarchal (mainly Abrahamic) religions are in respect of the sexes. We may not all be women, but we all once were women.