Attribute ascribed to men and women may vary across cultures, such as men being seen as nurturing, or women as fierce warriors (Mead, 1949) but the basic correspondence of biological male to man and biological female to woman holds, even in cultures where biology is not the only basis of attributing gender. (The complexities of other ways of distinguishing will be dealt with later in this chapter.) It has long been assumed that the purpose of the biological two-sex system, and by extension, the two-gendered social system, is to further human reproduction, although the inevitability of this construct is now being called into question (Butler, 1990; Herdt, 1996; Yanagisako & Collier, 1987).