Warning: Today’s post has not been approved by the Family Research Council.
There’s a puzzle about evolution that’s been bothering me for years. The most vivid way to state it is as follows: why don’t vaginas have retractable teeth?
Think about it. If vaginas had teeth, rape would be difficult if not impossible. Females would have much greater control over which males could impregnate them. Wouldn’t a biting vagina be a useful Darwinian adaptation?
Of course, the question applies not only to humans, but to any species where the females can be impregnated against their will. (I guess seahorses and black widow spiders don’t count.)
I realize that feminists, psychoanalysts, and comedians could all have a field day with my puzzle, but let’s set that aside and see if we can actually answer it. I can think of five hypotheses, but none of them completely satisfy me.
The first is the boring “spandrels” hypothesis: that putting teeth in vaginas would be too difficult embryologically to be worth the Darwinian payoff. This hypothesis would only convince me if accompanied by an explanation of why a biting vagina would be so much harder to build than a bee stinger, or an elephant tusk, or any of evolution’s other strange inventions.
The second hypothesis is that, if vaginas had teeth, then rapists would just threaten their victims with injury or death if they resisted (as, alas, they often do anyway). But this hypothesis can be made irrelevant by changing the thought experiment a little. Instead of a biting vagina, imagine a flap between the vagina and uterus that could be open or closed at will. If a woman had such a flap, then she could consciously decide whether to let a sex partner impregnate her, without the partner knowing her decision until possibly months later. In other words, she would have built-in birth control.
The third hypothesis is that, even without the teeth or flap, women already have lots of control over which sex partners can impregnate them. As we all know, women in developed countries gained such control in the 20th century — and despite the best efforts of the Republicans, they’ve fortunately retained it, more or less, in every US state except South Dakota. But I’m asking whether women had such control for most of evolutionary history, and also whether females elsewhere in the animal kingdom have it.
In particular, you might have heard the controversial theory that a woman can “choose” to retain more of her partner’s sperm (thereby increasing the chance of conception) by having an orgasm — and indeed, that that’s why the female orgasm evolved in the first place. This theory, if true, would be one example of what I’m talking about, but not the only possible example. Do any of you know how far back in human history abortions were performed — and also, whether any non-human animals perform abortions?
The fourth hypothesis is what I’ll call “genetic paternalism.” This is the idea that, while giving birth to a rapist’s child is an unimaginable trauma from the woman’s perspective, her genes’ perspective might differ from hers. From the genes’ standpoint, maybe the child will grow up to become a rapist himself, thereby spreading his mother’s genes to yet more victims.
(Here I should state an obvious ground rule: when engaging in Darwinian speculation, you have to wear the distinction between “is” and “ought” like a radiation suit. There’s no scientific discovery that could possibly justify violence against women, since the wrongness of such violence isn’t based on science to begin with.)
Of course, the genetic paternalism hypothesis begs the question of why a woman’s genes would build a brain so opposed to the genes’ own interests. But that question shows up all over the place in human evolution.
The fifth hypothesis is that vaginas lack teeth for the same reason many women wear high heels and the Chinese used to mutilate girls’ feet. As Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan point out in their superb book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, men have always fetishized female helplessness. For most of human history, marriage wasn’t a union of soulmates; it was a deal between the groom and the bride’s parents. If a man “invested” in a wife, he’d want to be sure she would bear him children, just like if he invested in a cow, he’d want to be sure it would give him milk. (In Fiddler on the Roof, there’s a hilarious exchange between Tevye the dairyman and Lazar Wolf the butcher playing on that similarity.) So, if most women had teeth in their vaginas, then a woman who was known not to have such teeth might be a hot commodity on the marriage market. Of course, that leaves open the question of how she would advertise her toothlessness to prospective suitors (“Hi, I’m Alice, and my vagina doesn’t bite!”).
Surprisingly, I’ve never seen my “biting vagina puzzle” discussed in any book or article on evolutionary biology. (I’d be grateful for a reference.) I have seen plenty of other sex-related puzzles. For example, why are there homosexuals? Why don’t women just clone themselves, instead of “diluting” their genetic contribution by 50% by mixing their genes with a man’s? For that matter, why is there sex in the first place? To me, all these questions are so perplexing that it’s a wonder the creationists never harp on them. I guess that to harp on them, they’d first have to understand them.