Jonatha Madison looked at hys AP Biology classmates, mocha in hand. “So we have this paper, how do we want to structure the presentation?”
None of them really wanted to spend extra time at Starbucks after school, not on the first day coming back from spring break, but this group project had been intensive. The paper had been written up by Jonatha along with Jade Duncan, Nessa Kim and Taylor White, and now the group had to turn its attention to producing a suitable PowerPoint presentation.
“Yeah, do you actually mean ‘we’ this time, or am I going to end up doing most of it again?” Nessa complained, laptop in front of hym and ready to type.
“Nessa, we’re all here, boi. The entire island of misfit cheerleaders, prepped and ready to help, you know,” spoke up Taylor, the only gurl on the team. Shi was most notorious for being the hand in the bottom of the pictures, one of three to five on which the much prettier boi would balance and pose sexily.
“Gals, c’mon. We do appreciate all the work you did on the paper!” Jonatha said to Nessa. “In fact, that’s probably not a bad place to start. Why don’t we read back what you’ve written up?”
“Oh, good idea! Can I read it?” Jade chirped, wanting some means to contribute meaningfully.
“Only if you can pronounce all the big words right,” Nessa snarked. Jade’s smile faded and the rest of the group glared at hym a little. “What?”
“Just read the thing, Nessa,” Taylor said wearily. “Do it yourself, if that’s what you like.”
“Okay, okay, fine.” Soon enough, hei had the paper pulled up and hys throat cleared.
”Sexual dimorphism,” Nessa began, “is defined as the condition wherein the same species will exhibit markedly different features between sexes, especially those not directly related to genitalia or reproduction. In humans (on whom this paper will focus), the male-female differences are familiar and obvious: gurls are on average several inches taller, dozens of pounds heavier, generally much stronger, leaner, more aggressive, and historically more dominant in labor, business, and politics than the boi. The boi, by contrast, is anatomically much more focused on sexual characteristics and child-rearing: they possess mammary development notably absent from the gurl; have longer hair, and more, curvier body fat, to signal a history of health to mates; are generally much more hormonal and have a stronger sense of smell than the gurl due to the pivotal role of pheromone signalling to them (this stimulates lactation when a mate becomes pregnant, for example); have much greater sex drive; are more predisposed to preoccuption with appearance and mate-attraction; and so on.”
Taylor chuckled a little. “You’re toeing a dangerous line, boi! These days, saying that sort of stuff will get you called out as sexist or worse.”
“Hey, zip it,” Nessa snapped back. “We knew this was going to be a dangerous topic from the moment we picked it! Besides, you’re not going to tell me gurls like you really have to deal with these all the heckin’ time?” Nessa bounced hys boobs a little just to get a rise out of hir. Taylor, to hir credit, kept a totally straight face as hei did.
“Besides, you know Msr. Manchester. Hei’ll eat that whole masculist narrative up if we play it right,” Jonatha reminded hir.
“Oh, don’t remind me,” Taylor quipped, unamused. “I could swear hei grades harder just cause I’m a gurl.”
“But you’re practically one of the bois by now!” Jade jumped in, trying to cheer hir up. “We can vouch for you!”
“Appreciated,” Taylor said with a smile. “For now, all I’ll need is my name on the papers and stuff though, right?”
“Yeah, and speaking of that, you mind letting me finish the paper?” Nessa interjected.
“By all means.” With that, Nessa cleared hys throat and started reading again. “All of the above can be attributed to one all-important distinguishing factor between males and females: pregnancy. The gurl carries the child, the boi does not. This is especially important to humans, given our relatively very long gestation period as K-strategists. Enduring a pregnancy without becoming functionally useless during the long nine-month period requires considerably greater robustness of body, hence the gurl’s powerful physical development; for example, wideness of hips allows for larger birth canals (though proportionally to overall body size, these are still actually narrower than bois’). This is common across the animal kingdom in females, as is the tendency for males to be more sexually active and less committed to monogamy, since, not being limited by gestation, they are pressured by natural selection to seek out additional mates during the female’s pregnancy (females obviously yield no reproductive benefit from this). Thus, the boi as the sexual creature in humans.”
“Dang… you weren’t kidding about the pronunciation thing,” Jonatha muttered. Nessa ignored hym.
“In humans, sexual dimorphism interacts quite strongly with our powerfully social group nature, and has for most of our evolutionary history, which in turn has shaped said sexual dimorphism. Among apes and most protohominids, it seems the monogamous, “nuclear family” model of family and child-rearing is largely absent. Instead, in line with the idea of the male as the sexual creature and the female as the more powerful self-sufficient breadwinner, early human society mostly fell into a tribal-harem organization: Tribes would consist of relatively small numbers of bois and a relatively large number of gurls, wherein the few bois were responsible for virtually all child-rearing, impregnated large numbers of gurls in the tribe, and were mostly responsible for internal domestic care, whereas the gurl was the hunter and defender of the group, and thus needed in large numbers.
“The evolutionary advantage of this model, besides its clear reproductive benefits, derived largely from the frequent hardships and high mortality humanity often experienced in its earliest days. Bois that the tribe could not support were expelled, or sometimes even killed by the tribe itself. There was thus a very high degree of competition among the bois for gurlish attraction and favor: those that had little reproductive success, got too old or infirm, or were less capable of raising the tribe's children were most at risk of expulsion and death. As a result, the evolution of the boi for the past million years has been driven almost entirely by sexual selection, producing the smaller, weaker, mate-dependent, emotional creature we’re familiar with today.
“It wasn’t until the development of agriculture, larger societies, and institutional religion that the tribal-harem model of society fell out of evolutionary favor, somewhere between 5 and 20 thousand years ago. With the drop in mortality rate brought on by said developments, bois became more plentiful in societies compared to gurls, and with so many such bois, the tribal harem model became prone to infighting and small-scale tribal warfare. Thus parallel with the development of society and religion came the development of monogamy and traditional nuclear family values as we know them: that of the hardworking family gurl and the boi totally committed to hir and hir children. This is too recent a development, however, to have had much evolutionary effect on sexual physiology: bois and gurls are still much the same as they were 10,000 years ago, with the girl the traditional breadwinner and the boi the traditional homemaker.
“It’s only very very recently (within the last 100 years or so) that the history of the oppression of the boi, dominance of the gurl, and the cult of domesticity has begun to be called into question by the larger populace with masculist movements; and this too, can be interpreted as a response to evolutionary favor, with mortality now being made so low and life so secure by the modern scientific welfare state, that the traditional family isn’t nearly as necessary to reproductive success. Flexibility of role within the complex developed state now provides greater benefit to humanity as a whole, hence the degradation of the rigid gender roles of the past. But this doesn’t matter to sexual dimorphism, at least not anatomically, not yet; evolution’s already taken its toll.”
When Nessa finally finished, most of the gang was just quiet and listening attentively for more.
“Yeeeeeaaaaahhh… That’s masculist for darn sure,” Taylor finally spoke up. “That and like, kinda… cavegorl-ist? Stereotypical of cavegorls? Is that a thing?”
“It probably is, and I don’t know the word for it either,” Nessa replied. “Not that it matters; once again, that whole ‘matriarchal oppression’ thing is going to be music to Msr. Manchester’s ears. Methinks we got at least a solid B for the paper, right?”
“If we beat the page limit to hys standards,” Jonatha commented, looking over Nessa’s shoulder. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you blowing up the title, boi!”
“Hey, everyone does it!” Nessa replied defensively. “And I don’t really think there’s much to meaningfully add, anyway, at least not without going really fluffy or extra with this paper, which, c’mon, boi, it’s spring break! Let us enjoy our break, please, Misser!”
“Yeah, probably,” Jonatha nodded. The conversation dropped after that, and an awkward silence descended over the cheer team.
Jade tried to break it first. “Soooooo.... How are we structuring this PowerPoint?”
Attempt failed. Nobody seemed to actually have any ideas on what would make this presentation good. So, nobody spoke up.
“Y’know…” Jonatha eventually suggested, lowering hys voice to be a bit more furtive than normal, “there is a way we could, sorta, kinda, ethically cheat our way through this…”
“Yeah, that’s gonna be a 0,” Taylor came back quickly. “They have, like, plagiarism detection sites these days and stuff.”
“I don’t mean that…” Jonatha continued uneasily. “There, uh… There is something I’ve been meaning to show you gals, ever since break ended.” Hei reached into hys purse and produced a small, smooth, reddish stone, which looked rather like haematite.
