Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

Freud famously wrote that anatomy is destiny. Being born as male or female has traditionally determined many of the most important things about our lives-- how others will treat us, how we will dress, what jobs we will have, where we will live, and what we can say. Some of the external constraints on what men and women may do have weakened since the 1960s. But society still expects men to have masculine personalities-- acting as assertive shapers of their own destinies. And it expects women to behave like women-- caregivers who are sensitive to others' emotions.

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But where do these personality differences come from? Scientists tell us that gender differences arise from a complex interaction between biology and socialization. But that idea hasn't penetrated popular culture, which still clings to the view that somehow our genitals cause to behave in manly or womanly ways.

Will Self's provocative book Cock and Bull is very effective parody of the biological view of gender differences. Cock and Bull asks the questions "What if a woman had a penis? What if a man had a vagina? How would that change them?"

The book is composed of two novellas. In the first, "Cock," a typical young woman, Carol, one day discovers that her clitoris seems to be larger than usual. It continues to grow and grow until it is a full-sized penis. And Carol's reaction is largely one of delight. She enjoys the feeling of rubbing it against things, and of peeing while standing up. But things take an ugly turn when she decides to put her new penis to use. She gets her alcoholic husband Dan drunk, feeds him Spanish fly, and rapes him-her cock was such a big, hot, hard thing; and his anus, although causally lubricated, was still tight with self-repression, bunged up with the enduring legacy of auto-erotic toilet training. She pushed into him and rent his sphincter, tore a crack in one of its muscular segments.

When Dan later dies of acute alcohol poisoning and blows to the head, Carol doesn't hesitate to get his AA friend Dave drunk as well, milk him of his semen, and knock him out. She plants Dave's semen in her dead husband's asshole and Dave, having blacked out is neatly framed for the rape and murder.

In the second novella, "Bull," a muscular young rugby player, John Bull, discovers one day that he has a vagina developing on the back of his left calf. He is (understandably!) concerned, and goes to his doctor, Alan, for an opinion. Despite the doctor's best efforts at medical objectivity, the sight of Bull's cunt so inflames him that he can think of nothing else. He bandages the leg and sends Bull home.

But he cannot overcome the lure. That evening he goes to Bull's flat on the pretense of changing the bandage, and seduces him. And Bull-- heretofore devoutly heterosexual-- meekly submits to his doctor's embrace. Alan impregnates and later abandons Bull. Bull contemplates suicide, but finally leaves England for San Francisco, where he lives along and raises their love-child.

What is hard to believe in each part of the book is how radically the personality of Carol and Bull shift to match the demands of their new genitalia. Carol's penis changes her from a sensitive caregiver to a brutal rapist. And Bull's vagina turns him from an assertive rugby player to a passive, long-suffering mistress and doting mother.

Miss Poubelle believes that the brilliance of Self's book comes from the way it undermines the biological view. The very implausibility of the personality changes that accompany the genital changes should cause readers to examine their buried assumptions about gender and personality. For if we cannot believe that a new penis or vagina would cause a radical personality shift in an adult, then how could we believe that the mere biology of a penis or vagina would have the same effect on a child? Isn't it far more likely that we come to have the male or female personality largely because of the way we are treated as male or female all through our lives? Does a man become a man through having a cock and balls, or is that just a Cock and Bull story?