I started out on this essay writing thing in January ‘24 thinking I could write forever about new stuff. Interesting stuff (to me only as it turned out … obviously.) And for a time, it seemed that I was doing just that. Then sixteen essays later, and, as irony would have it just after I had said ‘I’m now more than a quarter of the way through the year and finding no shortage of subjects to write about.’ I suddenly dried up. Ran out of things to write about. No. That’s wrong; rather I felt that I had said everything I had to say. But that isn’t quite right either. I usually put a book to bed by writing a review on Goodreads. Maybe that habit let the steam escape, so my creative boiler didn’t have enough oomph left to keep the old essay flywheel spinning. And now here we are, two years after my icebreaker essay and I have had my new one welling up inside me for a month or six. It was daughters of course that pushed me over the weir. My firstborn, the forty-something, suggested that with the new chapter starting in my personal life during Summer 25, perhaps I should write something (she actually suggested a song) something more personal, more vulnerable, sounding less lecturaceous (my word not hers.) And with a not-immediately-obvious synchronicity, one of the fifteen year olds asked me whether the word ‘phallic’ was always about shape. We were in Shrewsbury Castle grounds. It was during the 2025 Shrewsbury Summer Festival. They had a pair of vaguely flame shaped carved sculptures on the lawn. Clearly not at all phallic in any way. She had a second question lurking in her secret agenda of course, but I didn’t know that, so I just blundered on, answering the first one straight – ‘ Hmm, not shape so much, I think. It’s more about representation of the masculinity of the member rather than just about its shape.’ Then I remembered the scene from How I Met Your Mother where a ‘Seventy eight storey pink marble tower with a rounded top and two spherical entry-ways at the front’ rose from ‘wild brunette’ bushes and I thought ‘… but yeah it probably is always about shape.’ But before I had the chance to enlarge (!) on that, she continued … ‘So what is the female equivalent?’ The word ‘Yoni’ flashed through my mind from a discussion over a book with ex-wife No1, about three and a half decades earlier, but you know, I’m a man and I didn’t know exactly what the word meant. More to the point I didn’t want to embarrass myself by sticking my neck out into the mysterious arcane world of feminine pudendal detail with my adolescent daughter. So I just lied and said ‘I didn’t know, maybe there wasn’t one.’ Funny that ‘mysterious arcane’ thing, and the masculine guilt I felt, more than half a century after it was instilled in me by my mother who would habitually use her arsenal of taboo and innuendo to suppress my curiosity. A mere male could never understand the complex secrets of women’s bodies. Peculiar then that I was still humiliated into the inability to speak more than half a century later – by which time I had surely experienced (and probably discussed with their owners) a significantly greater variety of women’s bodies than my mother had known in her sexually repressed lifetime. Anyway, hobbled by that ancient stigma I was, and the word remained unuttered. By that time we were on the sculpture lawn itself. Zoe pointed to the flame shaped sculptures, now visible from a different angle. With an instant laugh of realisation, it was suddenly clear what her train of thought had been. My first reaction then (also not stated out loud) was that the smartphone has a lot to answer for. I recall learning in that book discussion 35 years ago, that most women then had no idea what a ‘man’s eye view’ would be, and they were advised by the (female) author to use a mirror and be prepared for a big surprise. Yes that was in about 1990, not 1890: 1990. Hmm must have been the smartphone that had educated my teenager then. It took a few weeks for me to look up that word ‘Yoni’ or maybe the quasi-phallic equivalent should have been ‘Yonic?’ Did it exist or was the whole discussion part of my imaginative memory? And yes, it exists, and yoni of course IS more than just about shape. As we might expect, the feminine has a subtler and more layered depth to it than the masculine. I’m quoting Emma Wilkin here: ‘‘Yonic’ is derived from a Sanskrit word, ‘yoni’ (योनि), which means ‘womb’, ‘uterus’ or ‘vulva’, as well as ‘source’. In various Eastern religions and spiritual traditions, the yoni is revered as a symbol of divine feminine energy and fertility, and the origin of life. The concept of the yoni is often associated with the goddess Shakti in Hinduism, representing the creative and nurturing aspects of the universe. ‘ Hold that thought, because I’m going to take a big sidestep here. I buy Dawkins. Pretty much a hundred percent. Smug bugger that he is, I believe he’s got evolution absolutely right. I have no difficulty believing his thesis that we phenotypes, from fungus to sapiens, are simply supercomplex shells that give ‘our’ genes the mechanism of potential immortality – or at least, the closest that Planet Earth can offer by way of immortality. So I always look for evolutionary mechanisms for just about anything complex, from psychoses to social culture. For example, I believe (with Randolph Nesse) that psychoses emerge under the control of genes that make us more likely to create the next generation and raise them to reproductive age, whether or not that success gives us pain and grief in the process. And I believe that cultures emerge, as described by Joseph Henrich, from an exactly parallel process from the memes (Dawkins’ word) that survive and propagate themselves best by the simple circular metric of survival and propagation. Now the crucial mechanism of mammalian evolution comprises mating and gestation, and considering humans, we have a situation where women carry a child for about a year before they are physically ready to start making a new one, whereas men are capable of siring a few hundred (at least) in the same span of time. Now that gender-differentiated mechanism is a simple truth that has been used (almost always by men) to justify polygamy and male sexual unrestraint. The argument for asymmetrical sexual behaviour goes like this: ‘That’s the way we were designed, so that’s what we should do’ – in an absolutely indefensible male-centred logic. Philosophically we can throw it out immediately. Hume’s law says that you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’ And we can think immediately of other ways that human design is obviously not worthy of generating normative argument. Our eyes for example are similar to the convergently evolved eyes of cephalopods, and logically enough, their optic nerves sit behind and therefore out of the light-path of their photoreceptors. Our optic neurons form a layer sitting in front, obscuring our light sensitive cells and making our retinas functionally inferior since we come from a different ancestor. No one suggests that this means that our arrangement is superior because nature designed us that way, or that octopuses should be placed in more highly paying jobs that require visual skills.We can also throw out the ‘men should be less sexually continent than women’ idea mathematically by pointing out that any actual living carrier of genes has two parents, one male one female. So the actual amount of progenerative mating is exactly the same on average between men and women. That means that if some men could or should sire five or six hundred children a year, then five or six hundred men aren’t going to father any. That’s an oversimplification of how statistics works, but it’s the seed of a sound counterargument against drawing out a justification of socially bad behaviour from the numerical differences of human gender. And I am nailing my opinion to the mast here. I do believe that judging people belonging to one gender or the other for their sexual habits is wrong. I would rather look at this physical sexual inequality from a completely different perspective. The way that our genes alter our behaviour is by altering our desires and our mindset. Our genes make us succeed not by forcing us to ‘succeed’. That is technically impossible. The way evolution works in humans is by giving us emotional feelings which lead to the behaviour patterns that work empirically. I mentioned in another essay Nesse’s example that we will typically get bored with picking fruit from a gooseberry bush, not when it is bare, but when the effort of finding another shrub becomes less than that of finding more berries on this one. The emotional feeling of boredom leads to success in nourishment and thus procreation. There’s an old joke – Not only women have feelings, men have feelings too. For example, they can feel hungry. Yep I’m a man, and at the most basic level I have just two feelings. Hunger, and here I’m adding Wonder. Maybe Wonder will be another essay, but I think that most feelings that evolution has given both genders in order to optimise our successful reproductive behaviour are actually hungers. Hunger for food (because then we are more likely to survive to sexual maturity), hunger for sex (because then we are more likely to reproduce), and hunger for love (to encourage people to optimise the survival of our incapable infants.) Now let’s focus specifically on woman – what does genetic evolution want her to use her one precious year for? (you know the word ‘want’ there, doesn’t mean that evolution has desires, right? It’s just a convenient form of words.) Absolutely more than anything, she should be choosy. And here contrary to Hume, I will derive a ‘should’ from an ‘is’, because this isn’t philosophy, this i
