The sperm fights off hundreds of thousands of rivals to burrow deep inside the enormous ovum.
If it's XY, they make a male; if it's XX, they make a female.
This week sees the Vatican warning the Anglican communion that it's risking inter-church dialogue and the very future of ecumenism because it is not 'XY' enough.
Monday's historic decision to let women priests become bishops is being met by a row from Rome and what a C of E follower says will be a 'bloodbath' at this week's once-in-a-decade Lambeth Congress, where some 800 male bishops meet to discuss events.
Straight up, it's a chance for Rome to poach more disaffected members, an undermining-from-within that began back in 1992 when the first women were ordained.
Dawn French's The Vicar of Dibley has popularised the notion of female ministers, with 1,500 real women now working as fully fledged priests.
After multiple scientific, social and economic changes in the status of women, it looks plain silly for a band of fundamentalists to fight over women priests. Yet the implications run wider than these faith communities.
With the Vatican represented politically at the United Nations, and various faith groups campaigning for a special ear into governmental policy-making, excluding women from priest- and bishop-hoods because of stale theology can negatively affect how ordinary men and women live their lives.
Woody Allen famously (and hilariously) masqueraded as a sperm (with a parachute on his back) in his 1972 movie Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask. Unfunnily, Allen's joke had a long back story.
Early Christianity borrowed much from the ancient Greeks, including a basic scientific error born of limited observation. A little homunculus, a mini-man like Woody, was inside the seminal fluid, they thought. Women didn't show any sign of influencing reproduction: it was concluded that men alone originated human life.
The mistake is easy to understand because the man's emission was the only visible evidence of something happening that went on to generate a pregnancy. So women were understood as mere incubators with a significantly lesser reproductive status -- ovens for buns, so to speak.
The good news was that Christianity thought (white) women had a soul, as well as (white) men.
The bad news was that it spent two millennia figuring out how to respect that soul while keeping the male one on a privileged level.
Thomas Aquinas put his great mind to the question of why God created women at all. "God's image is found in man in a way in which it is not found in woman for man is the beginning and end of woman, just as God is the beginning and end of all creation," he wrote.
He worried whether wind direction or water content could determine if a male or female was conceived -- crucial information because a female was a failed male.
Then he thought he cracked it. "The human group would have lacked the benefit of order had some of its members not been governed by others who were wiser," he concluded. "Such is the subjection in which woman is by nature subordinate to man."
These basic scientific errors weren't remedied until the discovery of the ovum in 1827 but Rome took another 150 years to address them.
Meanwhile, Roman theology spawned an international academic community, of whom Pope Benedict became a leading light.
Their writings and references were tortuously interlinked and complicated, such that the implications of a DNA-bearing ovum could unravel almost all.
It could have been done.
The way was clear to acknowledge that women were due the same status in reproduction as were men, and therefore the same theological status.
After all, being in Christ's image spoke to the spirit, not to the reality of body form, or the mundanity of a penis.
But rather than revise theology, the theologians backtracked. The current Vatican hierarchy is largely composed of winners, academics and their supporters who went one way rather than the other.
With David Blaine-type sleight of hand, the winning theologians decided to make change without changing the status quo. Maleness was not just a cultural prerequisite for priesthood, but it was now as a divine one too. For the first time, maleness was 'Christological' which meant women were excluded now and for ever, amen.
Many theologians considered the new line blasphemous but the official church silenced them. It also added an argument from tradition which ran roughly along the lines of what always was must be, because it always was.
Theologians in the age of Aquinas wouldn't have countenanced a black priest but eventually, the rules changed. Not so for women, whose exclusion from ministry was repeatedly asserted, even in the guise of fake praise such as the claim they had a 'different dignity'.
A cartoon this week showed right wing bishops in flowing robes opposing the ordination of women with the words 'we wear the trousers, dammit!'
Sure they do.
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