Men are from York. Women are from Swindon. (Not really.)

I hear they're trying to bring back the Great Auk.

I was not, it turns out, a child when the Great Auk became extinct, but I might as well have been. I mean, even if I had been a child in 1844, I wouldn't have actually seen one, probably. But as it is, I spent many, many hours in my childhood thinking about them. I liked, more than words could say, the fact that they were called "garefowl", and lived in a place called Funk Island. Auks were truly part of my goldenest infancy. So bringing them back seemed, to me, the other day when I read about it, like a good idea, for a kick-off: that's until I thought it through a bit more.

Imagine a world where Great Auks were a bit bigger, and a bit niftier, and humans were a bit smaller, and less skilled at shooting and strangling things. In such a world, one might expect Great Auks to be the dominant species, and humans to have been hunted to extinction by these remorseless, harpoon-happy, penguin-like seabirds. Finally, the last cowering human male is tracked down by a pair of bounty-hunting Auks to its lair (an antique bookshop in Kettering), and duly dispatched. Homo sapiens joins the ever lengthening list of extinct mammals. A century and a half later, the Association of Auks for the Revival of Extinct Species announces that it has figured out a way to bring humans back to life in a controlled experiment. All you need is a bit of preserved human DNA. This is decoded and stored in a database. Then you take some living relative of humans. It turns out the closest living relative of this species is the dugong (all the anthropoid apes and a lot of other terrestrial mammals having joined us on the extinct list ages ago): well, it will have to do. You get a dugong embryo and edit its DNA using information from the database. You then implant it into the womb of a giraffe, and Bob's your uncle: a human (more or less, perchance with flippers) baby is born to the world with an audible bump. You then rinse and repeat to get one of the other sex, wait till they grow up, and hey presto, a breeding pair. Humans are a viable species once more, and a thriving little population can be permanently established in some safe, out of the way little place that no self-respecting seabird would want to go, for example Chalfont St Giles.

What's the problem?

Well, the problem as I see it is where you're getting your human DNA from. I mean, to the eyes of a Great Auk all humans looked pretty much identical - comical, featherless, with those adorable cute little mouths - but I only have to consult the pages of El Telegrafo, the government-owned daily in my adopted country of residence, to learn that humans are emphatically not basically all the same. At a first approximation, there are "good" ones and "bad" ones. The good ones wear snotgreen, scrotumtightening tee-shirts (yes, I know) and gaptoothed smiles, believe everything they are told, and list their top two spare-time hobbies as "paying taxes" and "listening to the President". The bad ones... well, you wouldn't want to hear about the wicked things they get up to. Let's just say that they - we - steadfastly refuse to own convection cookers. And that's just for starters.

Let's face it, not all human DNA is born equal. Some of it has things wrong with it. I'm thinking in particular of something called a "Habsburg lip", that found its way into European royalty centuries ago and, once there, did its damnedest to make itself part of the official human genome. There are also genes that, as Larkin would put it, "fuck you up" in all sorts of unexpected and picturesque ways; I find myself to be possessed of a goodly number of them. So I get to wondering: what if the DNA that was used to revive humans, by the purest stroke of ill-fortune, was, say, mine?

Or what if the Auk DNA used in the above mentioned experiment happened to belong to a similarly tragically flawed member of the species?

I mean, if all you have is one set of DNA to go on, homozygosity is a given, and if the Falkland Islands are anything to go by, in a few generations of furious inbreeding you're going to get a whole population of identically woolly-hatted Bennies. What a sad outro for a formerly promising species. Repeat and fade.

Point is, you can't derive a species from a single individual without something getting lost in translation. I don't think you can, anyway. For a species, whether auk or human, to consist of happy, healthy individuals who do interesting things, you need a few million years of random mutation, at least, leading to a diverse population, with all sorts of different eye and skin colours, propensities to haemophilia and lack of, abundances of subcutaneous adiposity around the hips, degrees of interest in statistical methodology, likings for beetroot, and so forth. You also, probably, need for this diverse population to be on board with the idea of being diverse, and for individual members of the species to want to get it together with other individuals who are quite unlike themselves in certain hypnotically alluring ways.

Which brings me neatly to men and women.

I'll put my cards on the table here. I find this whole business of there being two distinct sexes of people quite fascinating. I like the fact that there are men and women. Not only does it make the world (i.e., increasingly, the Internet) a more interesting place, it also seems (at times) to make my mind a more interesting place. And this is at least in part because I habitually find it impossible to look at women the same way as I did five minutes ago, or even (at times) five seconds ago. Let me see if I can explain this properly.

When I was a kid and later, a teenager, I sort of took it for granted that women were Different. How different, it was hard to tell: I went to a boys' school, and if I ruled out my mother and sisters, on the basis that they were my mother and sisters and therefore constituted a non-random and fatally biased sample, there were few if any opportunities to talk to women and find out what they were like. (It didn't help that I was already pretty much a social phobic by then.) But they certainly looked different, and one tended to assume they were probably as different from e.g. oneself as they looked, and maybe a bit more. So I had to wait until I was at university before actually making contact with a member of the opposite sex. But when I did, and started "going out" (i.e. staying in) with her, I was soon apprised of the urgent need for me to espouse Radical Feminism, which as it was explained to me at the time, consisted of the steadfast conviction that men and women were exactly the same, barring a few trivial biological details, and that treating them as somehow different, barring a few trivial biological details, was about the evillest thing a person could do, on a par with sending people to gas chambers, or worse.

So I dutifully determined to be as non-sexist as possible, and to treat men and women exactly the same. For a social phobic, this is relatively easy: you simply treat everyone, men and women, as equally terrifying, and keep both at the same cautious, courteous and considerable distance.

The only difficulty I encountered in this was that I found women, but not men, to be rather physically attractive.

Well, this isn't exactly true. First of all, it wasn't all women I found physically attractive, only some, and to varying degree: generally, let's say, the more pneumatic ones, or the more mysterious ones. And secondly, the word "physically" strikes me as a gross oversimplification, for reasons I shall now tease out with pedantic exactitude (because I think it's important to go into these things. Plus, it's fun).

I never found it easy to be a philosophical Dualist, and hence the distinction between physical and non-physical was something I could never entirely grok. Admittedly, whenever I happened to want to feel turned on by the presence of femininity (more often than not, in pictorial form) the quickest and easiest way to achieve this goal was to contemplate a woman's physical face and body (ideally, suitably coiffed and partially unclothed in that cunning way that the female form seems to lend itself to quite nicely). However, it was always pretty plain to me that the route between stimulus and response was not quite as simple and direct as, say, a B.F. Skinner would no doubt have preferred. There seemed to be a part of me that was willing to be turned on to some degree by the requisite curves, pretty much instantly and uncomplicatedly and no questions asked, but at the same time, there were at least two other things going on that strongly influenced the degree of arousal that might be experienced. First of all, the visual stimulus was being routed not only directly southwards, but also to that part of my brain which detects and responds to symbolism. There, the image would be decoded, in a markedly fetishistic way and with due attention to pose, props, make-up and apparel, as a collection of symbols which in turn represented abstract notions, such as, e.g., "artifice", "fragility", "vulnerability", "delicacy", "captivity", "passivity", "innocence", "concealment", "coyness", "restriction", "softness", "submission", etc: let's say that if you can name a French perfume after it, chances are it will figure in the list of Pregnant And Appealing Notions somewhere. The degree to which whichever of these notions was sparked turned out to be associated in my mind with some abstract concept, let's call it an archetype, of femininity, functioned as a kind of rheostat, reliably determining the degree of amplification of the arousal experienced, to several orders of magnitude. At the same time, a completely different part of my brain would be routinely trying to empathise with the woman seen or depicted, i.e. to figure out what she might be thinking or feeling. In rare cases, the guessed-at mental and emotional activity behind the face might in itself prove (if belatedly) to be sexually arousing, for example, if she could be assumed to be feeling some degree of arousal herself; more often, one tended to suspect that she was probably solving quadratic equations in her head, or trying to remember the publication order of Dickens' novels or the atomic weight of selenium, or wondering how much she was going to get paid, in which case, while one might sympathise with her predicament (not remembering the atomic weight of selenium oneself), it was hardly germane to the purpose, and one was therefore thankful that photographs, on the whole, tend not to mind too much when one deliberately and consciously dismisses whatever thoughts and feelings our better judgment attributes to the original model and replaces them with fantasy-thoughts and fantasy-feelings instead, in an act of deliberate and calculated (though fleeting) self-deception.

It might be wondered, at this point, whether it is perhaps a little eccentric of me to assume, as I have always tended to do, that women who are stark naked, pouting seductively, and pointing bits of themselves at a camera are in fact not thinking about sex, and likely feeling nothing more than a mild sense of irritation over their own lack of familiarity with the minutiae of the Periodic Table. Perhaps it is eccentric of me. I often suspect that other blokes who look at porn are far more easily taken in than I am, and take most of the pouts and gasps and squeaks and smiles and fluttering of eyelashes at face value - a trustfulness which I find quite touching, even moving. All I can say is that my upbringing, and the subset of cultural influences I was exposed to, predisposed me to believe that most women, unlike most men, are not all that interested in sex most of the time, save as a means to a multiplicity of generally unavowed ends: a few years ago I came across a metastudy of psychology questionnaires on the Internet that seemed to confirm this view (and of course, questionable anecdotal confirmation is vast). At any rate, I don't have any axe to grind on this score. Maybe most women are in fact far more interested in sex than they appear or pretend to be: I'm delighted to entertain that possibility. As to why they would pretend at all, well, there is scarcely any mystery there, since we all, men and women, perforce pretend the same thing, in the interests of civilization and of not looking like complete plonkers. I, for one, have spent a lifetime pretending to be far less interested in sex than I actually am. (Actually, I sometimes suspect I take this whole "pretending not to be interested" business to ridiculous extremes, but that's another story.)

Now, there are a number of obvious issues that this brief introspective sketch of the process of sexual arousal throws up, which are presumably more or less important depending on whether you think that the model I have described is generalizable or not (it might, for aught I know, be applicable only to a tiny minority of terminally cerebral, emotionally damaged fetishists, rather than to men in general or people in general). I want to come back to those issues, in particular the question of so-called "objectification": but right now, there's a rather different and less polemical point I want to get to.

According to the dubiously generalizable model I have described, men at least, and possibly women as well, feel a desire to be sexually turned on with extreme and depressing regularity. Depending on circumstances, and perhaps on individual temperament and a host of other factors, they will therefore seek to be stimulated either by the physical presence of real members of the appropriate sex, or facsimiles of same in magazines or on computer screens. Either way, when such an opportunity presents itself, two curious mental phenomena may occur, not always consciously and with widely varying degrees of strength and relevance. One is that various aspects of the situation, of the relationship, of the surroundings, or of the person's posture or expression or garb, are matched against a pre-existing matrix or mental archetype indirectly describing a kind of ideal sexual goddess and/or ideal sexual narrative. It is important to clarify that this archetype is not a direct physical image, but a web of interconnected, emotionally tinged and sexually charged abstract notions which might be realized or instantiated physically in a variety of ways: e.g. a strangely seductive notion which might be tentatively described as "restrictedness" would be read into a variety of things such as a corset, a pair of high heels or even a hair clip, whereas the same high heels might be read by another person, or by the same person on a different occasion, as representing power or danger (due to the sharpness of the heels) or even as sublimity or elevation. Thus, the subject is, in a sense, projecting a private image onto the chosen sexual object (object here in the grammatical sense), albeit not the sort of image that could be represented in conventional visual media: projecting, and picking up matching echoes like sonar. That's one thing.

The other phenomenon is what might be called "suppressed empathy" (no doubt there's a better term, but I haven't come across it in my reading yet). Let's start by saying that outside sex, most of us, unless extremely self-centered, spend a healthy amount of time trying to get inside other people's heads, i.e. trying to deduce their thoughts and emotional states from their behaviour. Whether we want to make those people happy, or merely more accepting of ourselves, it's in our interests to interpret that behaviour correctly and draw accurate conclusions as a prelude to possible intervention on our part, and there is no reason why we might want to deceive ourselves. Sex, however, is one area, perhaps the only area, where we may find that an accurate (or at least realistically sceptical) reading of the other is not in our interests. It suddenly becomes less important to know what she is really thinking, and more important (for the sake of maximum arousal) to imagine her thinking what we want her to be thinking: especially if we have been culturally conditioned to assume that whatever behavioural cues we are offered are almost certainly unreliable, in short, faked. Social and cultural taboos together with the pressure of wishful thinking (a pressure which is uncannily like the buttocks of a very fat woman edging you off the seat of a London bus) combine to make us keenly aware, first of all of the unknowability of the other's mental processes, and secondly, of the urgency of our desire for her to think and feel something akin, or complementary, to what we are thinking and feeling. Sex thus becomes an exercise in dampened self-distrust and in more or less conscious projection of fantasy. Sometimes it feels like a wandering into schizophrenia. You have sold your nether regions a cock-and-bull story about how turned on she is, one which she actively encouraged and which they apparently fell for: however, the rational part of you continues to suspect very strongly that she is just going through the motions, for private reasons of her own, since the likelihood of anyone in this universe being actually turned on by someone like you, as opposed to turned on by the prospect of several years' rent-free accommodation at your expense, is, let's be honest, achingly close to zero. So one part of your brain is watching a porn film and the other, a comedy of errors, and each angrily gesticulates at the other at regular intervals. No wonder there's generally very little processing power left over for coherent verbal discourse, or indeed anything beyond grunting. For anyone who, like me, gave up on maths after O level, sex with a real person is arguably the most mentally exhausting activity there is. (Wanking is a lot easier, and a lot more fun. You should try it sometime.)

OK, I admit this last part is probably just me. Though most guys are conditioned to project a greater degree of confidence in relationships than they actually feel, I'm sure that many will find my own extreme lack of self confidence in bed somewhat bizarre. There are reasons for it, and they're not germane. Let's just stick with the two basic phenomena: projection onto the Other of a mental matrix made up at least partly of certain very politically incorrect notions of "femininity" (reword where applicable), and a certain amount of confused and wishfully tinged second-guessing re: the other's mental processes. After all, you'd have to be a knuckle-dragging Cro-Magnon to not even consider the possibility that there's a whole lotta fakin' goin' on on her side, at least sometimes. On a bad day, in your case, if it makes you feel better.

Anyway. What I am getting to is that, when it comes to the mental matrix, the archetype of extremely simplified, idealized, socially unpalatable and I suppose you might say ritualized sexuality that we project consciously or unconsciously in order to elevate sexual need above the level of the reptilian (yes, I'm referencing the Triune Brain hypothesis here, but only as a metaphor: I know it's technically bollocks), I'm not going to argue about where this archetype comes from or how amenable it might be to social reprogramming (I suspect not much), but I will say from my own experience that if you consciously assimilate this as a model of how you, and probably others, think about sex, it proves extraordinarily fertile, enlightening and above all, liberating.

Why? Well, as I say, from my student days onward for a number of years I had to lug around this mental conflict between, on the one hand, the feminist dogma (which I more or less swallowed whole as a student) to the effect that gender roles and the primitive notions that seemed to underlie them were "socially constructed", i.e. entirely artificial, corresponded to nothing in nature, were nobbut a pain in the arse and were therefore ripe for dismantling: and on the other hand, the inescapable fact that the only way I could work myself into such a frenzy of desire as to summon up the courage to actually approach a prospective mate was by deliberately viewing her through a somewhat smoky prism made of a tenebrous amalgam of extremely sexist notions and prejudices. This contradiction seemed to me extremely unsatisfactory, and caused me much vexation. Not any more, though.

The liberation comes when you realize that the human mind is actually sophisticated enough to see through its own make believe, and sensible enough (if you leave it be, and stop nagging) to know when and how much the make believe is called for, and when it isn't. More encouragingly still, it seems able to superimpose, in a sort of internal binocular vision, the fantasy representation of the Other, and the tentatively constructed "realistic" one. In fact, I strongly suspect that this is precisely what we've been doing off and on, with varying degrees of success and imaginative panache, since the dawn of civilisation.

See, it only takes a very modest degree of introspectiveness to figure out that we are not what we appear to be on the surface: that human beings come in layers, and the layering does not stop when the clothes come off. This is especially true of someone like myself, whose sexual identity is about three parts WYSIWYG to seven parts Guilty Secrets. If oneself is like this, it stands to reason that others may be.

So if someone says to you, as my first girlfriend at University did, "men and women are the same: same concerns, same neuroses, same vulnerabilities, same aspirations, same limited intuitive grasp of the Other, same fantasies, etc", you might reasonably, while flinching at what appears to be a rather sweeping generalization, accept this as a valid default model, or as a useful corrective lens or first approximation with which to approach people of the opposite sex: when in doubt, assume like-mindedness, assume like-souledness, assume what might be called common humanity. This will take you far. Especially given that many people, of both sexes, are not exactly accustomed to being treated as people, and will tend to be pleasantly surprised when they are so treated, especially by someone who palpably thinks that every good person deserves favour.

If you start from this default value of assumed similarity, and then notice that the object of your devoted attention displays some rather surprising behaviour patterns, thoughts or emotions, don't be too ready to generalize and to attribute those to sexual or gender differences. There may be a connection, or there may not. They may simply be individual traits. As a critical thinker, your job is to maintain an attitude of default scepticism. However, there is enough statistical evidence on the table for any tentative identification of possible innate gender differences in behaviour to deserve at least a polite hearing (rather than cries of "sexism! biological determinism!" and a fit of the vapours). It should go without saying that any such presumed difference cannot, from a liberal and individualist standpoint, be used to justify any kind of discriminatory policy, whether on an individual or state level, for the simple reason that what may be true of the collective need not be true of any individual member of same. But in any case, this kind of large scale statistical enquiry is not what is at issue here.

What is at issue is that moment when you realize that there is a part of you that does not want the object of your devoted attention to be "just like you". OK, in some respects perhaps yes. If you are up for it, it's rather nice to learn that she is up for it too. If you have a guilty secret, it is immensely encouraging to discover that she, too, has a guilty secret of her own. Et quite a lot of cetera. But beyond this, there is something in you that needs her to be "other". And it seems to me that the function of the shadowy, politically incorrect mental archetype I have mentioned above is to provide that dimension of Otherness by, as I say, mapping certain perceived qualities, attributes and behaviours of the real person (or real photograph) in front of you onto an internal matrix of highly charged, primitive concepts which, in turn, generates a desired emotional and sexual response. And while it is possible to confuse this fantasy-idealization with reality, there is absolutely no need for us to do so at a fully conscious level. Instead, you simply say: I choose to look at you/at her in this way, because it pleases me to do so. I do not need to justify to anyone the selectiveness of my gaze, or its contrived rearrangement of light and shadow, any more than a painter needs to justify omitting a telegraph pole from the finished work. I look where I want, and read what I want into what I see. I do not confuse this vision with the truth, nor do I allow it to influence my behaviour. I merely enjoy it, not just for itself, but because the aesthetic vision, the vision that chooses and reshapes, is fundamental to the never-ending process of recreating and asserting our own individual identity as humans.

And if we are not even ourselves, then we are of no earthly use to anyone.

Meanwhile, back in Chalfont St Giles...

Experiment in Humanity No. 13415 wakes up to another boring day as a teacher at St Aelred's School for the Formerly Extinct. It wouldn't be so bad, she muses, if only some of her charges were, well, different in some way. If only, I dunno, some of them had different colour hair, or a different number of limbs, or, well, anything individual and surprising. Rather than all seeming to be, apparently, an exact replica of her, barring a few trivial biological details.

We may hound the Other to extinction, but she lives on in our dreams.

Or we may meet her when we are forty, and it is too late.