Sex and the Unity of Opposites (Part One): Men and Women Are Made for Each Other

It is in our sexual counterparts that we may find the fullest expressions of our humanity.

Thus would I have man and woman: fit for war, the one; fit for maternity, the other; both, however, fit for dancing with head and legs.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Imagine you arrive on a planet with only womanoids. That is, the humanoid beings on this planet evolved the primary and secondary sex characteristics of Earth women, only with a small but significant difference in their biological makeup.

These beings, though apparently like human women in nearly every respect, have an additional gland that attaches to the uterus via a special duct.

At certain periods, these humanoids secrete sperm-filled semen into their uteruses through the duct. The sperm cells swim and compete to stimulate any ova, allowing genetic material, usually from a single sperm cell, to enter the wall of an ovum. On Earth, we call that moment conception.

Womanoids have baby womanoids through this process.

These woman-like beings thus reproduce through autogamy. No sexual counterparts or complements are necessary. So, the small-but-significant difference between womanoids and women means the former cannot be women, despite the similarities in all the other respects.

Thus, these beings have no concept of a man or a woman.

Now, we can acknowledge that there might have to be other rather subtle differences between womanoids and women, such as the endocrine reaction an Earth woman might have to sensing pheromones, as well as her ability to produce pheromones. There is a cascade of subjective experiences that might arise as a woman’s picks up a man’s subtle scent, which can lead to arousal. A womanoid would not share a woman’s subjective experiences, given a womanoid’s world and her biology. So, we might have to admit that the purported small-but-significant difference between women and womanoids extends far beyond a sperm duct.

Still, the groundwork is laid.

Unity of Opposites

The unity of opposites conception goes back at least to Heraclitus. With these special pairs, it is nigh impossible to define one without the other. In other words, the very idea of night makes no sense without the very idea of day, and the reverse. When opposites stand in a certain relation, it creates a unity—a fusion concept.

Notwithstanding the various sexual orientations, the statistically abnormal existence of intersex people, and the postmodern ideological currents that inspire all manner of fanciful gender identities, men are not men without women. Women are not women without men. The complementarity of our gametes and their extended biosystems provides a substrate for us to conceptualize our common humanity while retaining a sexual binary within our species.

Now, let’s take our minds off procreation for a moment.

Forgive the imperfect example, but a nail and nail hole might well qualify for the unity of opposites. We can try to imagine a pointy object that penetrates nothing, but even the quality of being pointy implies penetration. One might use a nail-like object as a decoration in a hole-less world, but in such a world, the conceptual referent would be for a different thing altogether. For in our world, to be a nail is to be a thing that makes nail holes.

Anticipating Objections

Listen out for the cries of “essentialism!” and “heteronormativity!” from the furies of social justice fundamentalism. A half-century of neo-gnostic intellectual onanism is no concern to us. We have a million years of Mother Nature and Daddy Darwin backing our positions, and these stern parents have no time for the language games of androgynes or ideologues.

Still, we can be thoroughgoing Humean regarding the idea that one cannot derive a value from a fact. In other words, there is no ironclad moral logic that flows from even the most detailed scientific understanding. Such is not to argue that standing in right relation to reality can’t or shouldn’t shape our values. After all, to wish that another would behave in an impossible way is just a wish fathering a lie. So facts can constrain our values, but they cannot produce them for us.

So, we can dispense with both the neo-Marxists of the left who think we can spin genders from Judith Butler’s gnosis, and the Neo-Aristoteleans of the right who think one must pray away the gay to fulfill some preordained sexual telos.

Penetrative and Receptive

Still, the masculine mien, in its archetypal form, is penetrative—not merely in the physical sense but as a disposition toward initiative, direction, and the projection of will into the world. It seeks to move forward, shape, challenge, and forge paths through uncertainty.

By contrast, the feminine mien is fundamentally receptive, not passive but attuned—a mode of presence that absorbs, enfolds, and transforms. It is the space in which the thrust of the masculine finds meaning, the vessel that gives form to force. This complementarity reveals itself in every domain: the masculine offers clarity, the feminine offers depth; one disrupts, the other harmonizes; one pushes out, the other draws in.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
—C. G. Jung

Together, they create a generative tension—a dance of difference that does not diminish either but allows each to become more fully itself through the presence of the other. Their union, when aligned, is not a conquest or a submission but a mutual unfolding, where creation and understanding arise in tandem.

Stay tuned for Part Two.

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