Yet man and woman are two separate manifestations, and evolution is the cooperation of one manifestation and another. The woman's reproductive system complements the man's, but keeps time to a different schedule. One of the two ovaries produces a mature egg each month, which is released to be gathered into the fallopian tube for its journey through the tube to reach the uterus. If the egg meets healthy sperm on its way, it may become fertilized. When the fertilized egg implants in the uterus, pregnancy has begun.

If you cut out the intellectual and emotional mumbo-jumbos: romance, idealism, obedience, duty, values, education and all other fanfares of humanity, man and woman are nothing more than the life-support systems for sperms and eggs. People come to this world, grow old, raise children and then perish. What lies beneath the veneer of sublime rituals is the thick reality of ridiculous existence. In Christianity, androgyny is believed to be the origin of male and female identity. It is rooted in the first man, whose essential characteristic was male-female unity in the image and likeness of God. In the beginning, Adam was married to Sophia, the Wisdom of God. But Adam's longing for the material world weakened his divine conscience and Eve was made out of his female side. This is how the dichotomy of man took place as he retained his original manifestation in the shape of man who doesn't go through the menstrual cycle. The other half inherited his material side in the shape of woman, who doesn't grow hair on the chest or wear a moustache on the face.

That makes woman a derivative of man, the part, which conceives and perpetuates the whole, the tree, which grows from seed and bears fruit to carry seed again. Thus man and woman forge together a self-sufficient unit, each made complete by the other. He shaves his face, she shaves her legs. He trims his moustache, she plucks her eyebrows. He is the invader and she is the castrator. He is the tenon and she is the mortise.

Hence the gender gap between man and woman, which brings the division of labour between them. Woman is the child bearer, man is the breadwinner. Woman is the homemaker, man is the earthshaker. Woman is the wife and man is the husband. Woman wears perfume, man wears cologne. Woman smokes menthol cigarettes, and man smokes cheroot.

These are divisions for union, divergence for convergence, detractions for attraction. Man deviates from woman, which levitates their passion and brings them together, as each is soaked by other in body and mind. Love is only when that passion reaches an equilibrium, when man and woman become interchangeable in their perception of each other. In true love, every man becomes the ultimate woman, and every woman becomes the ultimate man.

The celebrated observation by Simone de Beauvoir is that woman is an intermediate between man and eunuch. Woman is perhaps one in the psychosomatic range of three products, where psychology is determined by physiology. Woman is delicate, man is tough and eunuch is a wimp. But Beauvoir's observation didn't get the sequence right. The eunuch is when the reproductive organ is disrupted in its evolution, when the genital remains incomplete like an abandoned project. Thus it is the eunuch, who is an intermediate between man and woman, because he/she is neither of the two genders, hanging in the balance of an identity crisis.

Man and woman, therefore, are the manifest identities of their reproductive organs. What education, culture, literature, aesthetics, science accomplish is bringing of sophistication to the crude realism that the mental faculties and the physical finesse were but to procreate and perish only. Man and woman, at their best, represent two halves of the same mystery, which perpetuates itself through their copulation.

A joke has it that man asked God, why he made woman so beautiful. God replied that it was so that she could bring him joy. The man asked again, why god gave woman her long flowing hairs. God replied that it was so that she could bring him pleasure. The man then asked why God made woman so dumb. The angry God bellowed, " So that she could love you stupid!"

Love, therefore, is the nexus between man and woman, the ploy, which keeps them attracted to each other. It motivates them to keep up the drudgery of child bearing and rearing so that the mystery of creation goes on forever. The question is then, what is lust? By definition lust is the appetite of man and woman for each other's body. Until the Middle Ages, love crystallised in the sexual union of the lovers. Falling in love was a means of sexual gratification. Then came the romantic or unconsummated love. That is when love became a mission, the union of lovers to be achieved, if not in this life, in the life after death. The modern love is at once erotic and romantic. If the falling in love doesn't happen within a reasonable time, the sexual union need not wait for it.

Thus love has transformed from lust to love to limited lechery. Freud wrote in his early theory of love that love and desire didn't mix. In the Third Theory of Love, he changed his mind and claimed that love was nothing but the whole current of sexual feelings. Schopenhauer and Stendhal contended that love enhanced sexual experience. What underlies the ebullience of love is the sublimated ecstasy of anticipated sex.

Man and woman, the two pillars of humanity, are the faces of their reproductive organs. Whether a president or a prime minister, priest or priestess, scientist, doctor, intellectual or engineer, profession doesn't change anything. Exception only proves the rule. Homosexual man and lesbian woman make that point all the more.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.