Male Free Zone

Maureen Dowd

Sydney Morning Herald

Are men on the verge of extinction? With recent research showing that the Y chromosome is shrinking, their future certainly looks bleak, says New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. In this extract from her controversial new book, she looks towards a distinctly female-friendly future.

Men have a perfect right to be insecure. They're doomed, poor darlings. It won't be next Thursday or anything but men, says Bryan Sykes, a leading British researcher on sex chromosomes, "are now on notice".

Some are resigned to it. Tough guy Norman Mailer said that his "terror theory" was that "women are going to take over the world... You know, men, no matter how bad they were to women over the years, over the centuries, needed women for the race to continue. But all women needed were about a hundred semen slaves that they could milk every day, you see, and they could keep the race going.

So they don't need us. And there's a real possibility in my mind, about one in 10, that a hundred years from now there will be a hundred men left on earth and the women will have it all to themselves."

Are men necessary? I ask Dr Sykes. "Clearly not," he replies.

Are men necessary? I ask British geneticist Steve Jones. "You don't even need the sex slaves," Dr Jones assures me. "You just need their cells in a freezer. You'd have to have a very good electricity supply."

Some guys I know have been fretting for years that they may be rendered obsolete if women get biological and financial independence, learning how to reproduce and refinance without them. The latest research on the Y chromosome shows that my jittery male friends are not paranoid. They are in an evolutionary pratfall.

In a wry twist of fate, Mother Nature appears to have decided to demote men to the weaker sex. It's only a matter of time before we will be judging guys by their hourglass figures, pliability and talent for gazing raptly at their dates, no matter how bored.

The Y chromosome has been shedding genes willy-nilly for millions of years and is now a fraction of the size of its partner, the X chromosome. Size matters and experts are suggesting that in the next 100,000 to 10 million years, men could disappear, taking their men's magazines and cold pizza in the morning with them.

The Y chromosome is "a mere remnant of its once mighty structure", wrote Jones, a professor of genetics at University College in London and the author of Y: The Descent Of Men. "Men are wilting away. From sperm count to social status and from fertilisation to death, as civilisation advances, those who bear Y chromosomes are in relative decline."

Males have always been a genetic "parasite", he says, marvelling that if Simone de Beauvoir or anybody else were writing The Second Sex today, they'd have to make it, biologically speaking, about men. "There are elements of The Picture Of Dorian Gray," he says ominously. "The Y's picture is fading away."

It is degenerating at such a fast rate that men face an "inevitable eventual extinction" and steadily falling male fertility, with nearly all men completely sterile in about 125,000 years, warns Sykes, a science adviser to the British House of Commons, in Adam's Curse: A Future Without Men.

A healthy, fit man still pumps out 150 million sperm a day but the global potency of the Y may have peaked back with Genghis Khan. The news that Dolly the sheep had been cloned without a ram ramming and the South Korean cloning factory's success in making a dozen human embryos and duplicate puppies sent frissons through the Y populace, geneticists say, because men began to fear that science would cause nature to return to its original, feminine state and men would fade from view.

"Japanese scientists last year created a perfectly normal female mouse without using a male at all,"

Dr Sykes tells me. "It's not cloning. They took the egg from one mouse and then instead of mouse sperm, they took the DNA from another egg. Bingo!"

Perhaps that's why some men in Western societies are adapting, becoming more feminised and turning into over-therapied, over-sharing, over-emoting "emo boys" and metrosexuals who get facials and buy wrinkle cream and wear pink flowered shirts.

Better to be an X chromosome than an ex-chromosome.

The New York Times Styles section, with its exquisite gaydar, declared a "gay vague" vogue, noting it's harder and harder to tell who is gay. Straight men, it said, "are adopting looks - muscle shirts, fitted jeans, sandals and shoulder bags - that as recently as a year ago might have read as, well, gay... What's happening is that many men have migrated to a middle ground where the clues traditionally used to pigeonhole sexual ­orientation - hair, clothing, voice, body language - are more and more ambiguous."

My friend Frank Bruni, The New York Times restaurant critic, provides me with the gay (as opposed to gay vague) point of view: "It used to be that if you saw an unwrinkled, well-moisturised guy prowling the Clinique counter or Clarins counter, you could safely assume three things - he was vain, he appreciated a hypo-allergenic cleansing lotion and he was on your team. Now you assume only the first two."

French sociologists unveiled a study earlier this year that found that American and European men are no longer so macho, although Chinese men still are. "The masculine ideal is being completely modified," says Pierre Francois Le Louet of the French marketing and style consultant group Nelly Rodi. "All the traditional male values of authority, infallibility, virility and strength are being completely overturned." Instead, he says, in fashion and life, men are turning more toward "creativity, sensitivity and multiplicity".

To save the Y chromosome, Dr Sykes suggests, scientists may need to transfer its contents onto another gene. He said that if the Y vaporises, reproduction would need to be assisted in some way. "What I think'll happen within my lifetime," he said, "is that some lesbian couples will have children and they will both be parents - an egg from one and a fertilised egg from the other will produce a perfectly normal girl. You could have a new species of human reproduced without men at all."

He fantasises about "a world without men", a version of the mythological "cult of Diana" hunter-gatherer societies where women were in charge and men were just there for entertainment, where there would be "no Y chromosomes to enslave the feminine, the destructive spiral of greed and ambition fuelled by sexual ambition diminishes and, as a direct result, the sickness of our planet eases. The world no longer reverberates to the sound of men's clashing antlers and the grim repercussions of private and public warfare."

But Dr Huntington Willard, the director of the Institute For Genome Sciences & Policy at Duke University, doubts that a planet without men - and with women leaders festooned with testosterone patches, hailed by some doctors as female Viagra - would be so peaceful. "Remember all those B movies that end up with Amazons developing all those aggressive traits?" he asks. "There's always a subgroup that becomes the aggressors."

Whether or not the predicted demise of the well-hung Y is correct, there's no point in idealising a world composed exclusively of women. Reading about the amoral cruelty of female guards and interrogators in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram, it's easy to believe it wouldn't be that different. And anybody who's attended an all-girls Catholic high school knows that Xs can act as territorially, brutally and thoughtlessly as Ys. "Historically, men have made most of the political errors," agrees Sykes. "But look at Mrs Thatcher.

She was pretty bloody awful."

He speculates that Adam will end up causing his own curse by accumulating wealth and property and toys and polluting the planet. "It would be very ironic," he says, "if the polluted planet exacted revenge by hitting back at sperm production and making all those men sterile."

The scientists predicting the demise of the Y get furious emails from men denouncing them as "man-haters". One website that pelts Jones, AngryHarry.com, rants that men will prevail over women, who are described as Marxists and Nazis.

Willard recommends to flustered men that they take the long view because "most species eventually mutate themselves out of existence. Sex determination as we know it is only a couple of hundred million years old so if the Y chromosome degrades itself out of existence, some other mechanism will turn up. Worms reproduce with females and hermaphrodites. They've gotten rid of the stand-alone male."

Jones, an expert on the sex life of slugs, agrees, calling hermaphrodite sex, like Woody Allen onanism, "sex with somebody you really love". "Plenty of creatures don't bother with sex at all," he says. "Sea anemones just cut themselves in half indefinitely and make copies again and again and again." He says bananas - despite their suggestive shape - and potatoes are entirely female. And alligator eggs become male if they're warmed and female if they're cooled and turtles the other way around.

"There are many, many ways to make males," he says, citing the mole vole, which has males with no Y chromosome, and the North American ­blue-­finned wrasse. "If you take the male wrasse out of the aquarium, after a few days, one of the females begins to look a bit shifty and more brightly coloured and she turns into a male and makes sperm and fertilises her female partners. Social pressure changes the hormonal balance, just as it can with humans. Men in extreme pressure in battle, females training for a marathon, the sex hormone patterns change."

(I wonder if it works the same way if you take the female out of the fish tank. When I took a leave from my column at the Times, I noticed that some male columnists were suddenly writing on women's issues.)

Men may save themselves simply through "the healing power of lust", says Jones. "People carry on having sex because it's ­fun - ­insofar as I remember. Even if women make men sex slaves, ­they'll find some conscience-­stricken women to bring them out of slavery, as happened with slavery. ­I'd be very, very surprised if technology takes over the ­old-­fashioned methods ­we're so used to. People only turn to the test tube when the double bed has failed. I ­can't think of anybody who goes to the lab first."

As a confirmed pessimist, Jones concludes that men are more likely to be wiped out in a devastating ­SARS-­like epidemic or in a nuclear war they start, clashing antlers, long before the Y gets around to degenerating. And that conjures up the image of the Y as Slim Pickens in Dr Strangelove, straddling the hydrogen bomb as though it were a rodeo steer and waving his cowboy hat, yelling, "YEE-HAW!" as he sets off the destruction of mankind. Why, oh Y, am I not surprised that the Y is not going gently into that good evolutionary night?

And not only is the Y shrinking, the X is excelling. Research published in the journal Nature in 2005 revealed that women are genetically more complex than scientists ever imagined, while men remain the simple creatures they appear.

"Alas," says Huntington Willard, a co-author of the study, "genetically speaking, if you've met one man, you've met them all. We are, I hate to say it, predictable. You can't say that about women. Men and women are farther apart than we ever knew.

It's not Mars or Venus. It's Mars or Venus, Pluto, Jupiter and who knows what other planets?"

Women are not only more different from men than we knew, women are more different from each other than we knew. "We poor men only have 45 chromosomes to do our work with because our 46th is a second X that is working at levels greater than we knew," says Willard, who adds that their discovery may help explain why the behaviour and traits of men and women are so different. They may be hardwired in the brain, in addition to being hormonal and cultural.

The researchers learned that a whopping 15 per cent - 200 to 300 - of the genes on the second X chromosome in women, thought to be submissive and inert, lolling about on an evolutionary Victorian fainting couch, are active, giving women a significant increase in gene expression over men.

As the Times's Nicholas Wade, who is writing a book about human evolution and genetics, explains, "Women are mosaics, one could even say chimeras, in the sense that they are made up of two different kinds of cell. Whereas men are pure and uncomplicated, being made of just a single kind of cell throughout."

So maybe that Seinfeld episode is right, where George Costanza tries to prove that man's passions can all be fulfilled at the same time if he can watch a handheld TV while "pleasuring" a woman while eating a pastrami on rye with spicy mustard.

This means men's generalisations about women are correct, too, to extend the metaphorical approach to a chromosomal reality. Women are inscrutable, changeable, crafty, idiosyncratic - a different species.

"Women's chromosomes have more complexity, which men view as unpredictability," says David Page, an expert on sex evolution at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Known as Mr Y, Page calls himself "the defender of the rotting Y chromosome". "I prefer to think of the Y as persevering and noble," he says.

He drolly conjures up a picture of the Y chromosome as "a slovenly beast", sitting in his favourite armchair, surrounded by a litter of old fast-food take-out boxes and curled pizza crusts. "The Y wants to maintain himself but doesn't know how. He's falling apart, like the guy who can't manage to get a doctor's appointment or clean up the house or apartment unless his wife or girlfriend does it."

Page says that the Y - a refuge throughout evolution for any gene that is good for males and/or bad for females - has become "a mirror, a metaphor, a blank slate on which you can write anything you want to think about males". It has inspired cartoon gene maps that show the belching gene, the inability-to-remember-birthdays-and-anniversaries gene, the fascination-with-spiders-and-reptiles gene, the selective-hearing-loss-"Huh?" gene, the inability-to-express-affection-on-the-phone gene.

"The Y married up," Page concludes. "The X married down."

The discovery about women's superior gene expression may answer the age-old question about why men have trouble expressing themselves: because their genes do.