Laqueur argues that philosophers like Aristotle share Galen's views about the one-sex model. The absence of words associated with female anatomy shows that people did not want to see a difference between the male and female body. The ancients "regarded organs and their placement as epiphenomena of a greater world order". They do not open…so to do the female genitalia 'do not open' and remain an imperfect version of what they would be were they thrust out." There were very few specific words associated with either male or female anatomy at the time of Galen. For Galen "the eyes of the mole have the same structures as the eyes of other animals except that they will not allow the mole to see. Laqueur cites Galen's comparison between the eyes of a mole and the genitals of a woman. If this should happen, the scrotum would necessarily take the place of the uterus with the testes lying outside, next to it on either side." For Galen, "women have exactly the same organs as men, but in exactly the wrong places" Women are seen as less perfect versions of men, albeit still a version of them. He mentions Galen who asks readers to "think first, please, of the man's turned in and extending inward between the rectum and the bladder. Laqueur uses examples from ancient thinkers to help support his claim to the dominance of the one-sex model prior to the eighteenth century. History The one-sex theory Īccording to Laqueur, prior to the eighteenth century it was acknowledged that there were physical differences between the sex organs of men and women, but these differences were never made to be of significance "no one was much interested in looking for evidence of two distinct sexes, at the anatomical and concrete physiological differences between men and women, until such differences became politically important." Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, Laqueur claims, the one-sex model dominated medical and philosophical literature and there was a web of knowledge to support it. Laqueur's theories have been subject to criticism by scholars including Katharine Park, Robert Nye, Helen King, Joan Cadden, and Michael Stolberg for misrepresenting and omitting evidence by earlier scholars, as well as for drawing an overly concrete portrayal of the shift from one-sex to two-sex models. Freud's work further perpetuated the sexual socialization of women by dictating how they should feel pleasure. Women and men began to be seen as opposites and each sex was compared in relation to the other. One result of this was the emerging view of the female orgasm as nonessential to conception after the eighteenth century. In his view, the departure from a one-sex model is largely because of political shifts which challenged the way women's sexuality came to be seen. However, he claims that around the 18th century, the dominant view became that of two sexes directly opposite to each other. Laqueur uses the theory of interconvertible bodily fluids as evidence for the one-sex model. Anatomists saw the vagina as an interior penis, the labia as foreskin, the uterus as scrotum, and the ovaries as testicles. He draws from scholars such as Aristotle and Galen to argue that prior to the eighteenth century, women and men were viewed as two different forms of one essential sex: that is, women were seen to possess the same fundamental reproductive structure as men, the only difference being that female genitalia was inside the body, not outside of it. Laqueur theorizes that a fundamental change in attitudes toward human sexual anatomy occurred in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. The one-sex and two-sex theories are two models of human anatomy or fetal development discussed in Thomas Laqueur's book Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) ( December 2019) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Please help improve it by rewriting it in a balanced fashion that contextualizes different points of view. This article may lend undue weight to certain ideas, incidents, or controversies.
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