Death it happens
to everyone, but this is about after
death—the body.
Having spent most of my
childhood dreaming and most of my adult life
doing, I find it amusing that in the end my body
will betray me one final time.
Not that I will be in
any position to do anything about it.
If a Forensic
Anthropologist, a person who studies osteology
(literally “bone science” the study of
bones) were to excavate Valentine Michael Smith
in say fifty years from his passing, the
anthropologist would state the deceased was a
well-nourished, Caucasoid female. This despite
all my queuing up for passports, birth
certificates, my ability to grow a full beard
and hands like a rottweiler pup that are with me
in life.
Why would this be so,
after all my hard work,’ flesh decays; bone
endures’.
Let's start with the
betrayal of my skull; a modern male skull looks
a whole lot more like a Neanderthal’s skull
than a modern female skull does.
At the base of the
skull, named the occipital bone, males have a
bony bump called the external occipital
protuberance, where as females do
not.
Females have a smaller
skull with narrow mouth and chin pointed, sharp
edges where the eye orbits or sockets are set
beneath the forehead with no massive ridge on
the forehead above the eyebrows as with the
male.
Moving down my body of
more betrayal, we come to the hips.
Before puberty each
innominate bone consists of three separate bones
- the iluim, the ischium and the pubis. The
iluim is the highest, broadest part of the hip
bone, its crest is what flares out like Mickey
Mouse ears just below the waist.
The ischuim is the bony
structure you can feel yourself sitting on, if
you wiggle your butt on a hard seat or bike
seat.
The pubis is the bone
that spans the front of the abdomen about four
inches or so below the navel. At puberty the
female’s hipbone gradually broadens and the
pubic bone gets longer, angling farther forward
to form more of an arch.
Because the male’s
pelvis is markedly narrower, his femurs hang
roughly straight down below his hip bones
whereas the adult female’s femurs incline
slightly inward beneath the hips. The difference
between males and females hips and femurs, makes
the difference in the way each sex sits, stand,
and walks, scientifically. In an adult male the
femoral head usually measures 45 millimeters or
more in diameter, in females less.
Lastly on hips, the
sciatic notch, the gap in the hip bone through
which the sciatic nerve passes when it emerges
from the lower spine, is wider in females than
in males.
And I am not going with
ribs, because I am an individual.
— Valentine
Michael Smith, Australia
