History sssxxxxxxxx

History The one sex theory According to Laqueur, prior to the eighteenth century it was acknowledged that there were physical differences between the sex organs of men and women, but these differences were never made to be of significance; "no one was much interested in looking for evidence of two distinct sexes, at the anatomical and concrete physiological differences between men and women, until such differences became politically important."[3] Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, Laqueur claims, the one sex model dominated medical and philosophical literature and there was a web of knowledge to support it. Laqueur uses examples from ancient thinkers to help support his claim to the dominance of the one sex model prior to the eighteenth century. He mentions Galen who asks us to "think first, please, of the man's [external genitalia] turned in and extending inward between the rectum and the bladder. If this should happen, the scrotum would necessarily take the place of the uterus with the testes lying outside, next to it on either side."[4] For Galen, "women have exactly the same organs as men, but in exactly the wrong places"[5] Women are seen as less perfect versions of men, albeit still a version of them. Laqueur provides us with Galen's comparison between the eyes of a mole and the genitals of a woman. For Galen "the eyes of the mole have the same structures as the eyes of other animals except that they will not allow the mole to see. They do not open…so to do the female genitalia 'do not open' and remain an imperfect version of what they would be were they thrust out."[6] There were very few specific words associated with either male or female anatomy at the time of Galen. The ancients "regarded organs and their placement as epiphenomena of a greater world order".[6] The absence of words associated with female anatomy shows that people did not want to see a difference between the male and female body.[7] Laqueur argues that philosophers like Aristotle share Galen's views about the one sex model. Aristotle was committed to the idea of there being two different sexes, but he saw males and females as having certain roles in society, and these roles were not necessarily tied to their bodies. Aristotle said that "all of the male organs are similar in the female except that she has a womb, which presumably, the male does not."[8] Laqueur believes that men and women were seen as comparable variations of one type of sex; that there were many genders at this time, but there was only one sex. The two sex theory The "One Sex Two Sex Theory" claims that the switch from the one sex model to the two sex model created the foundations of gender as we know them today.[9] The explanations for this shift are both epistemological and political. In terms of the epistemological, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, experts with authority were determining what was natural and what was not. Michel de Montaigne, a writer during the French Renaissance, writes in his Travel Journal, about a group of young girls who dressed up like males and led their lives as males. For him, this was seen as perfectly normal and that "there is no ontological sex, only organs assigned legal and social status".[10] In the two sex model though, these experts wanted to create a link between biological sex and theoretical gender and anything transgressing these boundaries was seen as being abnormal. Although it was thought in the one sex model that feminine men may lactate and that "almost all the men have a great quantity of milk in their breasts",[11] the notion of interconvertibility of fluids among men and women was thrown out the window in the two sex model. Sex became related to physical facts and the uterus became a justification for the status of women. Gender roles became institutionalized and what was meant to be male or female was based on what the experts thought was natural.[12] Philosophers like Rousseau supported this view and he saw women as being relegated to the private sphere as wives and mothers while men dominated the public sphere.[13]