You can't mistake my biology
Biology. I keep writing about it without actually writing about it.
In feminist discourse, biology is often the elephant in the room. Mainly because there’s not much we can do about it (especially not 150 years ago when feminism kicked off). It’s generally easier to pretend that biology isn’t a big deal; culture is the problem.
This may be true, but biology is still a problem, for female people (hereafter referred to as “women”) in particular.
We bleed from a young age, our hormones are different every week and that affects our moods. We have to constantly avoid getting pregnant unless getting pregnant is a thing we want to do—then we have to be aware of that ticking clock, walk around with a giant belly, push a massive baby head out of our vaginas and commit to months or years of breastfeeding. As for the menopause, I’m saving that content for a Vanilla in approximately 25 years time, but it is rumoured to involve night sweats, vaginal dryness, low mood, difficulty sleeping and a bunch of other perks.
All these things happen regardless of whether the culture we live in is supportive of them or not. But if women had admitted to any of them, back in the days when we weren’t allowed to do shit, men might not have let us do any of the shit. Not because these things make women weaker—it’s pretty badass to give birth, produce milk and have a yo-yo inner life—they just make women less suited to the world of men. Institutions like schools and workplaces weren’t designed for women. There was no maternity leave, no bins in toilets for bloody menstrual products, no understanding about PMS or acknowledgement of crippling period pain as a real phenomenon.
Women had to man up culturally, and pretend to do so biologically. No wonder the language of feminism prefers to blame culture for all inequality. It was that language that eventually got women access to shit: education, bank accounts, owning property, workplaces, politics, etc. But it also reduced women’s actual, biological experiences to unmentionables.
Today, feminist activists campaign for the normalisation of things like bleeding and breastfeeding, but the stigma around female biology in education and at work persists. Women are still afraid to admit to anything that might, according to some, reveal that we are less capable than our male counterparts. The Danish prime minister posts a picture of her rye bread lunch on Instagram to show how normal she is, but she’s never going to snap herself snuggling up in bed with a hot water bottle and a chocolate bar, trying to ease her period pain.
Nor do I suggest she does. It is mostly futile to complain about biology, given our relative inability to alter it.
I sit on the toilet, waiting for the sperm to fall out of me. Every time I think it has and I stand up to wash off, lo and behold there is more, so I sit on the toilet again. Eventually, tiring of this routine, I step into the shower and shoot water up my vagina. I will blast it out! Then I sit on the toilet again and wait for the last bits of sperm to fall out. Not to mention the period blood, freshly dislodged by all the penetration. Many wipes later and a wiggle and rummage to get my menstrual cup back up there so it can collect the last of the sperm and blood—although sperm has a cunning way of working it’s way around the sides of the cup and into the clothes I’m wearing—I am finally done with my post-sex cleanup. Meanwhile, he has splashed some water on his penis, dressed, sat himself on the balcony, smoked half a joint and read several chapters of his book.
A tiny incident, not worth mentioning in a larger political debate, but indicative of the biological time cost of being female. Time spent with periods, fluctuating hormones, cumbersome breasts, pregnancy scares, pregnancy itself, breastfeeding and menopause, is time that could be spent on leisure, enlightenment or work—you know, getting ahead in life.
It’s bleak to consider the idea that biology is what keeps men on top (of the cultural hierarchy, I mean) but sometimes, I need a reminder of the unfairs hedged against me at birth, so I know what I’m working with. Then, I guess, a good feminist can campaign for all those unfairs to be acknowledged and offset by culture.
Here are some ideas:
free menstrual products;
better funded research into male contraception;
compulsory paternity leave the same length as maternity leave;
blind hiring processes that don’t reveal the sex of a person until the contract is signed.
Optional toppings
👶 Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari gives the perspective I have long craved on how we evolved into what we are today
🐄 What makes a woman’s body in Aeon presents some of the research of Mallory Feldman and Kristen Lindquist, about how women’s bodies are simultaneously shaped by biology and culture
🧨 @paulinaporizkov on Instagram
With love, from the toilet where I wrote most of this.
— H. E.