On International Women’s Day (IWD) we pause to appreciate the issues affecting women’s lives and the heartfelt gratitude we appreciate for womanhood. We can never say enough thanks to the woman who birthed us—thanks Mom! Plus, there’s my dear social work professor sister and many friends, both erudite and effusive, possessing uplifting intellectual abilities. And to the woman in our romantic lives the same is true – no honest straight man can claim for long that life without a loving woman’s presence is as fulfilling as a life with the buxom and fulsome lady at his side—thanks, darling wife!
Yet regrettably, we’re daily faced with the superficial toxicity of our consumer culture where every aspect of women’s bodies is treated like an object of desire or veneration or both. A perpetual project, yet one as paper-thin as the skin women are in. Too rarely are women’s bodies depicted as merely tangential aspects of the depth and breadth of each lady’s unique and ineffable mind, heart, and soul. But all that can change, starting today!
If you have two X chromosomes and no Y then March 8th is for you; indeed, gender transcends biology as we’ve all been educated lately to understand within the dubious confines of the culture wars. IWD allows us to truly elevate women the world over to a better place of respect and honour—as enlightened equals to be sure but, in many ways if we’re honest, as largely superior specimens to we bumbling lummoxes of masculinity.
The day is also a chance to consider how what counts as women-centred action is contested terrain. Not only do newcomers transitioning into womanhood matter on this day but also there’s debate about which sort of women heroes ought to be celebrated. A toughie if ever there was! The Los Angeles Clippers basketball marketing team, for instance, came in for criticism for referencing Anne Frank (a holocaust survivor) and Ayn Rand (a conservative philosopher) when advertising their support of International Women’s Day. Here’s what one lady pundit stated: “Back when I was on OkCupid, I lived by a single rule: anyone who mentioned ‘Ayn Rand’ in their profile would be immediately removed from consideration. If only more people were like me.”
Being a woman does not, apparently, include solidarity for the wrong sort of ladies. Even something as noble as appreciating womanhood is not immune to those forces who seek to propound a certain version of reality onto others. Ideology, like pavement and streetlights, can be so omnipresent that we fail to remember that biological reality gets along fine without it. While the idea that International Women’s Day doesn’t apply to all women, regardless of their beliefs, appalls some, any open debate is an opportunity to run the gamut of issues on offer and engage in that most pedagogical, or perhaps pedantic, of processes: cultural problem solving.
Universal values of truth, beauty, and kindness carry a unique corollary where gender is concerned. We’re born into this world and given a pink or blue baby bracelet and even before our umbilical cord has been severed, we’re already attached to the cultural conventions of our society. Many of a given culture’s most cherished virtues are often specifically affixed, like a baby in a bassinet, to the purported nature of femininity. Patriarchal cultures (sometimes it’s called the patriarchy but mostly patriarchy seems to be a he) adorn womanhood above all with procreative exigence: in short, sex.
Happily, we in the social sciences learn to bypass ideological dalliances that impart an undeserved fixity to the biological reality of gendered beings. Unlike certain sea turtles, who become their gender based on environmental conditions (including toxic pollutants, that make more turtle babies come out as female), we humans don’t have to fall in with the school of socialization if we choose not to.
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Having said that, and if you’ve ever been around a mixed gender comedy session characterized by the exchange of dubious jokes, the better to lighten the mood of this or that mundane social ritual, there is something to be said for knowing a thing or two about female sexuality down through the ages. Facts are fun! March 8th is international Women’s Day, after all, and so with reverence for all that is female, and for the sometimes-muted benefits of modern methods of birth control, let’s have a quick gander at the sort of prescriptions pre-modern ladies had to endure, lest they fall under the sway of a sneaky stork. Becoming pregnant is, after all, as timeless as the birds and the bees and the auspicious advent of Spring.
Ancient Egypt: As reported by the Museum of Contraception and Abortion, archaeologists have discovered the Papyrus Kahun which claimed that “crocodile dung was supposed to be an effective method of contraception: the pounded excrement was dipped into rotten plant slime and inserted into the vagina. Today we understand that the content of the excrement worked to change the chemical balance of the mucous environment of the vagina, thus inhibiting the mobility of the sperm.”
Damn eh, I’ve attended two live performances of the hilariously-irreverent Vagina Monologues and don’t recall a mention of that family planning method! And you thought alternate harvesting methods of yeast during the pandemic was a bit much!
Ancient Rome: “A little after AD 100, the noted physician Soranus of Ephesus composed his Gynecology”. (Ephesus today is in modern Turkey.) With clarity and precision, Soranus argued “that women’s physical well-being was undermined by her ‘child-production’”, and that “the task was more challenging than the majority of doctors admitted. It required greater attention to looking after the female body itself, to counteract the damage of childbearing.” In other words, Soranus realized that biology was not destiny and the ways or nature were by no means safe or desirable. Soranus wrote of the womb as an object of nesting: “The womb was at its most receptive at this juncture, warm and moist in good measure, turning from evacuation to accumulative mode but not yet congested and overburdened.” Just as in modern times, best exemplified by Toronto’s Sue Johanson who, at the age of 93 sadly left the earthly realm of labias and fallopian tubes, wise Ancients were at pains to improve the lot of those possessing female parts.
Modern Era: Science this century has also uncovered a long-utilized method of birth control: anal sex. While eyes a-roll and mouths agape and verbiage aghast often accompany the introduction of this concept into social discourse, the reality of the facts show that it’s common in assorted cultures to prevent pregnancy. So common, in fact, that India’s Business Insider magazine devoted a whole article to the intricacies of how, gravity intending, pregnancy can result from even the most studious attempts to engage in anal coitus without producing offspring. Dr. Ellen Weibe, in 2012, undertook a thorough questionnaire study of the proceedings within North America. Her findings revealed that “There were 888 women who answered the questions about anal sex and 54 (6.1%) said they had used anal sex for birth control. Of these, 41 (75.9%) had been born in Canada and 36 (66.7%) self-identified as white/Caucasian.” Make of those cold hard facts what you will.
Really, focusing on reproduction can minimize the overall effect of a woman’s life well lived. Yet, history speaks through medical texts, so we went there a bit.
Meanwhile, for many men the reality of our intellectual idiocy and romantic fumblings makes us the subject of a perhaps-deserving barrage, through history, of insults. One memorable moment, in AU’s first year Women’s Studies course, was reading the novel Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In it, an all-women civilization subsisted without problems – until discovery by male explorers, one of whom, unfortunately, behaved so poorly that he had to be caged. A familiar, and sad, tale. Perhaps the culmination of the male you-know-you-were-asking-for-it genre was the erstwhile tutor Peter Abelard who, after having fallen for his young female charge, found himself castrated by angry relatives of his pupil named Heloise du Paraclet. Each thereafter retreated to monasticism and nunhood, respectively, while exchanging beautiful love letters from afar. Like distance education pupils learning to better express themselves in words, the romance of Heloise and Abelard took the symbolic and literary form that, some say, enables the best of humanity to emerge—regardless of gender.