The battle of the sexes

The science section of The New York Times had an interesting article last Tuesday (Nov. 11) on a new theory about mental disorders. It suggested that there is a struggle between a mother and a father’s genes for control of the brain. If the mother’s side wins too decisively, the brain can end up with schizophrenia or a related mental illness. If the father's side wins too decisively, the child can have autism. Now, there is still a lot of evidence needed to validate this model. But it does fit with a number of other things I have read.

For example, it turns out that the fetus is not some harmless passenger in the mother’s body. In many ways, it is like an internal parasite, and the mother’s body is in a constant struggle to keep the fetus from wreaking havoc with the mother’s health (a lot of pregnancy problems, such as gestational diabetes, stem from this struggle).

What all this suggests is that many things we assume are harmonious are actually better described as a kind of stalemate between fiercely warring factions. And I want to suggest that male-female relationships also fall into this category. Take conception. Researchers have discovered a host of measures that men’s bodies naturally perform to try to ensure that they are the father of a child, while women’s bodies have developed their own counter-measures to try to ensure that they are selecting the fathers. The most wild example of this? Female orgasm, which some scientists have suggested is a “cryptic selection device.”

Of course, this sort of information is no help to people in relationships, so for them, it’s probably better to forget about this post and just think of their couplings as a beautiful expression of what happens when a man and a woman love each other very much…