‘Joe,’ an Oops in Y Minor

Father’s Day, sun was out and I was over at a park with a book. A little boy sat on the blanket laid out on the grass underneath a tree my back was against. I was beginning to realize that he was sitting on the same blanket I was sitting on with toys that rolled and other stuff that made funny cheery noises when his playmates called on him and called him Oops. "Gosh, the little boy is named Oops," I thought to myself. Then he turned to me and called me "Mommy." As if an electro-convulsive shock was sent to my brain, I woke up. Great, I dreamt I had a son – a little boy, and he was named "Oops." Some Y chromosome had been let on the loose without my consent. Of course, I woke up and after scratching my head over some really strange reactions from friends to whom I had made the dream known, I decided to take reasonable action. Not that, silly. I am a writer, hence this column.

While understanding women may involve a path that is an arduous maze that often come at crossroads between the arts and sciences, I have always suspected that maleness is simply a scientific matter – a fairly straightforward, or if they get lucky, a catapulting trajectory that really just all boils down to some kind of plumbing ornately disguised in self-described architectural grandeur. I am not an expert so I consulted with the learned ones and guess what? A bearer of a Y himself decided to squeal on his Y-mates. Steve Jones, a genetics professor and biologist whose book Y. Descent of Men. Revealing the Mysteries of Maleness (Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York, 2003) laid out the case for us. While for the faint of heart, I do not recommend parts of the book where Jones writes about the extreme Ys of other species – from the great encore performances of some reptilian Don Juans to the heart-wrenching cuckold fates of some kinds of fish – I think it would do well for the male of the human species to face themselves in their scientific splendor. And for the ladies, the book I think will set you off saying to yourself "I knew it!" despite the overarching maleness in the predominant and political, social and economic history, not to mention the major religions, telling you that you did not.

First of all, Jones clarified, the "Y" chromosome is not what determines the male sex of the offspring in all creatures. It is only a part of it, in fact at the tip of it and it is called the SRY, the Sex-determining Region of the Y and it is believed to be a genetic accident. SRY is the extra length of DNA that somehow breaks off from a carrier-father’s Y chromosome which the sperm cluelessly carries with their X chromosome to fertilize an egg. It was only in 1990 that this zone was pinned down, after we had geneticists sorting through, in Jones’ words, the "nomadic fragment." So far, it is known that the SRY gene in humans does its job four weeks after the egg is fertilized by the male ferry which is the sperm, setting out the embryo into a path of masculine gene adventures, communicating with other genes to mold the "man." As you can see, many genetic misprints and typos are rendered possible by this rather fragile process, with a thousand base pairs of SRY, communicating with the rest of the human genome – three billion base pairs (minus the thousand or so SRY gene) – to come up with Joe. Also, no one knows yet how SRY sets off to doing this yet. To equate Y as a documented "genetic accident" with being a "mistake" is tempting but not scientifically accurate so I will reserve judgment till evidence becomes more solid. Although in the interest of scholarship (yeah, really), I am obliged to tell you that Jones did encase this central idea in a chapter he entitled "Nature’s Sole Mistake."

Second, the entire cascade of male "exuberance," or plainly, semen output in the planet, is not, I repeat, is not, despite all the sound and fury that accompany it, even remotely close to the Big Bang, a metaphor my physicist-friends flatter themselves with. The Big Bang refers to the mind-boggling amount of energy that burst forth to give rise to the Universe. In its totality, the male population’s semen output equals the flow of the River Thames at London Bridge (yes, the very same one in the song that often, well, "falls down"). Jones had an expert at the UK Environment Agency ascertain the accuracy of this comparison. Okay, forget the universal scale, think planetary. I am aware of documented claims by some Viagra-takers they literally see blue after they take the drug. Sorry, guys, the Earth is a blue planet because it is 2/3 water, not because it is 2/3 testosterone. But I am sure that there are grateful rhinoceros and tigers that have finally breathed a deep sigh of relief when Viagra assumed the job that humans insist those wildlife testicles can do for the male sex apparatus. And of course, why should fainting, nausea and other complications that may lead to death from taking these male potency medications deter the knight from performing what he thinks his role is in the universe’s expansion?

Third is architecture. Despite the raging, impassioned literature on how the male weapon works, Jones said it is really hydraulics, in other words, plumbing. And ladies, those of us who have worked some toilet plumbing in our houses know that despite how complicated plumbing looks, it is not all that complex a job. First, we have to get our measurements right. The world average for the celebrated thing is about five-and-a-half inches. So go figure why men, probably in the guise of self-deprecation, even cite the blue whale’s 10-foot majesty! Next, the pressure. Jones cites the 50-fold increase in the blood-rush to the male organ during times of perpendicular cheer filling those reservoirs with the "priming of the pump" requiring a teaspoon of such every five seconds, as it signals a swelling of the testes as well. But when desired angle has been achieved, the teaspoon requirement is halved.

Fourth is command. Dependable performance seems not to lie only in a central command as in "Apollo, this is Houston" and the green and orange buttons in Houston are pushed and then the male "shuttle" is launched or later a strip is cleared for landing. The brain apparently has no one path it counts on to deliver the message below. This explains the evidence in scientific literature that three out of the 24 hours, the male organ is erect but in most of the three hours, the male brain barely initiated it or is hardly even in control of the perpendicular situation. It is also known in scientific literature that the faintest anathema to the perpendicular splendor, be it emotional or physical, causes the shuttle to land, without warning, like in an emergency. Michel de Montaigne, considered the foremost genius in the art of essays, wrote of it as "importunately unruly in its timidity… unseasonably disobedient when we stand most in need of it… and with so much haughty obstinacy denying all solicitation, both of hand and mind."

I blush at Monsieur Montagne’s candidness but this X chromosome is admittedly more forgiving to a genius.

I had to stop reading Jones’ book for a while because I was beginning to feel it necessary that I write some words of reassurances to family members and good friends of mine, who in varied flavors, bear the SRY gene. And so I thought since men are uniformly given to humor, I will just inject some here. I picked out a book called The Darwin Awards (Wendy Northcutt, Plume Book, NY 2000). It is a book "commemorating those individuals who ensure the long-term survival of our species by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion." Halfway in stitches into the book, I could not ignore what I was beginning to suspect once more. I counted the episodes and 167 out of the 177 or so Darwin episodes (including honorable mentions etc.) involved mainly men. One of them involved a guy in New Zealand who set his penis aflame to win $250 from a contest sponsored by a beer company. Sheesh. I rest my case.