The Long-Legged Beauty & the Moruga Scorpion

Modern homo sapiens have walked the earth for over 150,000 years; from the beginning, human beings with the same brain system and possibilities, maybe even the same dreams, as we.

But apparently, the vision of a male universe dates back only a few thousand of those years — male gods, male archangels, male priests, male rulers and their attendant Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — with the female human existing only to produce, ideally, more males.

When America achieved independence from England — independence won by both men and women — and Congress set out to write a new body of laws befitting the new republic, Abigail Adams entreated her husband John to “remember the ladies.”* Even then, everything was done to advantage males and was benignly called the law of coverture. For example, on marrying a man, everything the woman owned became her husband’s property — not theirs, but his — and he could dispose of it in any way that he liked.

The American woman lost ownership even of herself — she could not marry whom she pleased if the responsible male in the family pleased otherwise. She could not vote.

Around the world, women are most likely to be killed by their husbands or boyfriends; so-called “honor” killings of women and girls are carried out by male family members affronted by any behavior that wounds their egos; little girls around the world are denied education and trapped in brothels at the service of wealthy tourists and military men who would kill for their daughters; witch burnings and bride burnings; women’s bodies regulated by male jurists and legislators; and women raped and blamed when men cannot control their own sex drives.

This privileging of one sex over the other, that essentially posits that the male is the Mother of All, is in my view, a little bit off; and the cause of the existential crisis that is now upon us, the wise humans. You cannot degrade half a species and consider the other half better for it.

If you look at a photo of the human X and Y chromosomes, the X chromosome could be construed as a long-legged beauty; but the vaunted Y chromosome does not look like the letter Y at all. Rather, it looks more like a hot Moruga Scorpion chili pepper. If its size is so little in relation to the X chromosome, perhaps its influence was also meant to be so. It only takes a little bit of pepper to give a dish zing; but if the pepper takes over, the world is on fire; the dish is ruined.

The World Is On Fire!