There is a very long tradition of men regarding the male body and male bodily functions as the norm, and the female body and its functions as therefore abnormal or deviant. Exactly how this abnormality of the female has been conceptualised has differed over time. While Laqueur’s Making Sex posits a rather too sharp and definite historical shift around 1800 from perceptions of the female as lesser, defective male to a new construction of the female as opposite and different (the ‘other’, in fact), ¹ both these approaches operated from an assumption that the standard of measurement was the male and that female difference required explanation and analysis.