MoDo, in a column called “A Flawed Feminist Test,” says as a possible first Madame President, Hillary Clinton is a flawed science experiment because you can’t take Bill Clinton out of the equation. She’s the only columnist today, but as a bonus I’ve tossed in “A Tyrannical Romance” by Olivia Judson who celebrates Charles Darwin’s birthday and Valentine’s Day by uncovering the secret sex life of the Tyrannosaurus rex. Here’s MoDo:
Russell Berman, a young reporter for The New York Sun, trailed Bill Clinton around Maryland all day Sunday. The former president was on his best behavior, irritating the smattering of press.
After Bill’s last speech at Leisure World retirement community in Silver Spring, Berman interviewed two women in the audience.
Elaine Sirkis, 77, an Obama supporter, confided that she just isn’t sure she’s ready for a woman president. Betty Conway, 83, a Hillary supporter, confided that she just isn’t sure she’s ready for a black president.
As Conway walked away, Sirkis smiled sheepishly. “I’m sorry,” she told Berman sweetly about her friend. “She’s a bigot.”
We’re not just in the most vertiginous election of our lives. We’re in another national seminar on gender and race that is teaching us about who we are as we figure out what we want America to be.
It’s not yet clear which prejudice will infect the presidential contest more — misogyny or racism.
Many women I talk to, even those who aren’t particularly fond of Hillary, feel empathy for her, knowing that any woman in a world dominated by men has to walk a tightrope between femininity and masculinity, strength and vulnerability.
They see double standards they hate — when male reporters described Hillary’s laugh as “a cackle” or her voice as “grating,” when Rush Limbaugh goes off on her wrinkles or when male pundits seem gleeful to write her political obituary. Several women I know, who argue with their husbands about Hillary, refer with a shudder to the “Kill the Witch” syndrome.
In a webcast, prestidigitator Penn Jillette talks about a joke he has begun telling in his show. He thinks the thunderous reaction it gets from audiences shows that Hillary no longer has a shot.
The joke goes: “Obama is just creaming Hillary. You know, all these primaries, you know. And Hillary says it’s not fair, because they’re being held in February, and February is Black History Month. And unfortunately for Hillary, there’s no White Bitch Month.”
Of course, jokes like that — even Jillette admits it’s offensive — are exactly what may give Hillary a shot. When the usually invulnerable Hillary seems vulnerable, many women, even ones who don’t want her to win, cringe at the idea of seeing her publicly humiliated — again.
And since women — and some men — tend to be more protective when she is down, it is impossible to rule out a rally, especially if voters start to see Obama, after his eight-contest rout, as that maddening archetypal figure: the glib golden boy who slides through on charm and a smile.
Those close to Hillary say she’s feeling blue. It’s an unbearable twist of fate to spend all those years in the shadow of one Secretariat, only to have another gallop past while you’re plodding toward the finish line.
I know that the attacks against powerful women can be harsh and personal and unfair, enough to make anyone cry.
But Hillary is not the best test case for women. We’ll never know how much of the backlash is because she’s a woman or because she’s this woman or because of the ick factor of returning to the old Clinton dysfunction.
While Obama aims to transcend race, Hillary often aims to use gender to her advantage, or to excuse mistakes. In 1994, after her intransigence and secrecy-doomed health care plan, she told The Wall Street Journal that she was “a gender Rorschach test.”
“If somebody has a female boss for the first time, and they’ve never experienced that,” she said, “well, maybe they can’t take out their hostility against her so they turn it on me.”
As a possible first Madame President, Hillary is a flawed science experiment because you can’t take Bill out of the equation. Her story is wrapped up in her marriage, and her marriage is wrapped up in a series of unappetizing compromises, arrangements and dependencies.
Instead of carving out a separate identity for herself, she has become more entwined with Bill. She is running bolstered by his record and his muscle. She touts her experience as first lady, even though her judgment during those years on issue after issue was poor. She says she’s learned from her mistakes, but that’s not a compelling pitch.
As a senator, she was not a leading voice on important issues, and her Iraq vote was about her political viability.
She told New York magazine’s John Heilemann that before Iowa taught her that she had to show her soft side, “I really believed I had to prove in this race from the very beginning that a woman could be president and a woman could be commander in chief. I thought that was my primary mission.”
If Hillary fails, it will be her failure, not ours.
Here’s the skinny on T. Rex:
If Charles Darwin were alive today, he’d be turning 199: like Abraham Lincoln, he was born on Feb. 12 1809.
I considered observing their joint birthday with a discussion of slave making in ants, but rejected that idea in favor of another. For later this week is another Big Day: the feast of St. Valentine. With apologies to Lincoln, I’ve decided to hold a Darwin-Valentine celebration by revealing one of my more tyrannical romantic fantasies.
I should say, by way of preamble, that Darwin contributed far more to biology than the “Origin of Species,” in which he laid out how evolution by natural selection works, and the evidence for it at the time. He also wrote (and this list is not complete): a treatise on the formation of coral reefs, which is still held to be correct; a landmark work on carnivorous plants; a definitive treatise on barnacles, extinct and extant; a study of how earthworms plow and aerate soil; and a fascinating speculation on the evolution of emotion in humans and other animals.
And that’s not all. One of his other major works, “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex,” includes a huge compilation of the sexual decorations and displays of animals, from the jaws of stag-beetles to the tail of the Argus pheasant, which far exceeds that of the peacock in absurd magnificence. From his study of all this, Darwin began to elucidate systematic patterns and principles of the evolution of courtship and sexual behavior. In particular, he developed the concept of sexual selection, which is the idea that cumbersome ornaments like big tails can evolve, even if they make the bearer less likely to survive, if the opposite sex (usually the female) finds them attractive.
In doing so, he founded one of the most important and successful branches of evolutionary research. We now have a robust understanding of how sexual pressures — the pressures to find, impress, and seduce a mate — influence the evolution of males and females. So much so that if you tell me a fact, such as the average size difference between males and females in a species, or the proportion of a male’s body taken up by his testes, I can tell you what the mating system is likely to be. For example, where males are much bigger than females, fighting between males has been important — which often means that the biggest males maintain a harem. If testes are relatively large, females probably have sex with several males in the course of a single breeding episode.
These forces are so reliable that, if only we could determine the sex of dinosaur fossils, we could begin to infer their mating habits. But alas. Unless the animal died while heavy with eggs, as one oviraptor obligingly did, determining the sex of a dinosaur is close to impossible. At one point, it was thought that the shape of a particular bone at the base of the tail might indicate sex; but a recent analysis has shown it does not. Now the best guesses come from subtle differences in structure of the bone in the hind legs. For the time being, then, fossils are stonily silent about the dinosaurs’ private lives, their methods of wooing, the exuberance of their song-and-dance routines.
Which brings me to my tyrannical fantasy. I want to take a journey 68 million years back in time to see a Tyrannosaurus rex couple mating. What was it like? Did they trumpet and bellow and stamp their feet? Did they thrash their enormous tails? Did he bite her neck in rapture and exude a musky scent? Somehow, I imagine that when two T. rex got it on, the earth shook for miles around.
And if I could only take this journey, I could answer a question that sometimes bothers me. Did T. rex have a penis? Did he even, as lizards do, have two?
I ask the question not out of prurience, but because it’s a matter of scientific interest. There are a couple of reasons why. First, the penis is another important indicator of the mating system. In species where females usually mate with a single male during a breeding episode, penises tend to be small and uninteresting. In those where females mate with several males (whether by choice or by force), penises are typically larger, and come with fancy decorations such as grooves, nobbles, and spikes. Second, the question of the dinosaur penis provides an exercise in evolutionary inference.
The reason we don’t know whether T. rex had one is that the organ is generally too soft to leave a fossil trace. (There’s an exception to this: some mammals have a bone in their penis, the os penis or baculum. This can fossilize. Humans are unusual among primates in not having one; in case you’re wondering, it’s not clear whether the bone plays a role in maintaining erections.)
Moreover, whether a male has a penis at all varies from one group to the next. Male salamanders, for instance, don’t: they deposit sperm on the ground and the female collects it. Among birds, penises are rare: ostriches, emus, ducks, geese and swans are among the few. The rest just have a cloaca — an all-purpose opening also used for urination, defecation and, in the female, laying eggs. To copulate, two birds bring their cloacae together in what’s called a cloacal kiss.
So what can we say about dinosaurs? My guess is that the males had members — but it’s an educated guess. It’s based on an analysis of dinosaur relations.
Two living groups are most closely related to dinosaurs. One is the crocodiles. Male crocodiles have a penis — just one — which, most of the time, they keep tucked inside their cloacae. (In most species of crocodile, it’s hard to determine the sex of living animals without an intimate exam, never mind dead ones.) Compared with the mammalian penis, the crocodile’s has an oddity: sperm is transported along an external groove, rather than through an internal tube.
The other group related to dinosaurs is the birds. Indeed, to be strict about it, birds are dinosaurs. If you look at a family tree of dinosaurs, birds, and other reptiles, you see that the lineage that evolved into dinosaurs split off from the lineage that evolved into crocodiles. Birds, in contrast, evolved directly from a dinosaur lineage. Birds are more closely related to T. rex than they are to any living form.
Birds themselves divide into two main groups, formally known as the palaeognathous and the neognathous. The palaeos comprises the big flightless birds such as ostriches, emus, rheas, and cassowaries, as well as kiwis and an obscure (but flying) group of south American birds, the tinamous; the neos covers everything else. The palaeos have penises; like crocodiles, they keep them tucked into their cloacae. Again like crocodiles, the organ has an external groove for sperm. What’s more, the lineage leading to the other endowed birds, the ducks, geese, and swans, appears to have split off from that of the other neos relatively early.
This strongly suggests that the ancestor of all birds had a penis, and that at some point early in the evolution of the neognathous birds, the penis got lost. Since crocodiles have one, and ancestral birds almost certainly did, and since the two groups have such similar genital morphology, I think it’s a safe bet that the lineages between crocodiles and birds — that is, dinosaurs — had one, too.
Now, the next question — what did it look like? Was it large or small? Fancy or plain? I wouldn’t like to guess. The blue-billed duck (Oxyura australis) is just a little fellow — he weighs less than one kilogram (two pounds) — but his penis measures 28.5 centimeters (11 inches), and it’s covered with knobs. In contrast, the mighty ostrich (Struthio camelus), which can weigh as much as 160 kilograms (350 pounds), has a penis that’s a mere 20 centimeters (8 inches) long. But at least it’s bright red.
If I only had that time machine . . .
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NOTES:The text of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, along with many of Darwin’s other works, is available from Project Gutenberg.
The relationship between male body size and fighting, and between relative testes size, penis morphology, and female mating patterns, is well known and can be found in any recent book on animal sexual behaviour, including my own (see chapters 1, 2 and 4, and the references therein).
For difficulties in sexing dinosaurs, and for the uselessness of the bones at the base of the tail, see Erickson, G. M., Lappin, A. K., and Larson, P. 2005. “Androgynous rex — the utility of chevrons for determining the sex of crocodilians and non-avian dinosaurs.” Zoology 108: 277-286. For a female dinosaur heavy with eggs, see Sato, T., Cheng, Y-N., Wu, X-C., Zelenitsky, D. K., and Hsiao, Y-F. 2005. “A pair of shelled eggs inside a female dinosaur.” Science 308: 375. For a method of sexing dinosaurs through differences in legbone structure, see Schweitzer, M. H., Wittmeyer, J. L., and Horner, J. R. 2005. “Gender-specific reproductive tissue in ratites and Tyrannosaurus rex.” Science 308: 1456-1460.
The relationships between crocodiles, birds, and dinosaurs are well known; but see, for example, Padian, K., de Ricqlès, A. J., and Horner, J. R. 2001. “Dinosaurian growth rates and bird origins.” Nature 412: 405-408. For ducks, geese, and swans having an early split from the other neognathous birds, see Livezey, B. C., and Zusi, R. L. 2007. “Higher-order phylogeny of modern birds (Theropoda, Aves: Neornithes) based on comparative anatomy. II. Analysis and Discussion.” Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 149: 1-95.
For the penis of crocodiles see the extended version of: Ziegler, T. and Olbort, S. 2007. “Genital Structures and Sex Identification in Crocodiles.” Crocodile Specialist Group Newsletter 26:16-17. For the distribution of the penis in birds, for a description of its structure, and for the measurements of various ducks, see Coker, C. R., McKinney, F., Hays, H., Briggs, S., and Cheng, K. M. 2002. “Intromittent organ morphology and testis size in relation to mating system in waterfowl.” The Auk 119: 403-413.
