Woman

I have been inspired by this post to have a think about what it means to be a woman, to various different people. A number of years ago my family was sitting down to dinner, and my brother and I were discussing the situation in Sweden, where either parent can take paid leave to look after their infant child(ren). On hearing this, my mum commented that she didn’t agree with this because, “Women were made to have babies.” Obviously my own view is pretty different. I believe gender is societally determined, and, as such, a women is, basically, anyone who has not been in a privileged position in society, because of their gender.

My research for this post isn’t going to be the most substantial thing ever – the first thing I’ve done, pretty much, is googled ‘Woman’. The first thing that came up was three image searches: the first of these was a photo of a woman wearing a sheer black shirt, a black thong and fishnet tights. When I clicked on the image I could see her nipples. The second image was the oil painting “The Pregnant Woman” by Alice Neel. Neel has apparently said of this, “I thought the whole picture of woman without pregnancy was . . . trivial. It’s treating woman as sex object. But you know, sex results in something.” The third was a slightly bizarre image. It was a Muslim woman in a headscarf, but at the same time sexual. When I clicked on the photo it said it came from this site (by the way – take a look, there’s some stuff there that I just don’t think we are aware of as much as we should be), but I couldn’t find the photo on that page.

The next item on my google search was the Wikipedia entry for woman. I know wiki has it’s flaws, but if you’re looking for a basic overview of public thought, there’s not much better. This defines woman as an ‘adult female human being’.

I am interested, and to be honest quite surprised, that the first thing that came up were images. Also, when I type in ‘man’ there are no image results that are shown at the beginning; in fact the first 4 entries weren’t even about man, the male adult human being. And what do the images mean about how women are viewed? The first two are simple: woman as sexual being/sex object (interestingly the image came from a site which just had loads of photos – as such I’m inclined to say sex object) and woman as mother. The comment made by Neel shows this as well. Sex does, sometimes, result in children – but that doesn’t only affect women, it makes men into fathers as well. The third image is obviously a lot more complex. Apart from anything, I couldn’t actually find the image directly, so it’s hard to comment without context specific to that. The one thing I will say is that, from conversations I have had with Muslim friends, in a similar way to the modesty that is required is Christianity, the headscarf is there because, basically, it is a woman’s responsibility not to, I guess, ‘tempt’ a man. I know this is a simplification. I know as a white woman I can’t really understand this and I don’t want to offend anyone with what I am going to say, but I am going to say it. From that, I think this is about sex too.

Onto the wiki entry. To a large extent, as you would expect from Wikipedia, it was reasonbly balanced. However they frequently made reference to womanhood as beginning when a girl starts her period. There were also references to a woman after her period has ended. To me, once again, this speaks of motherhood, or at least fertility, which is certainly linked.

I remember another conversation I had with a couple of male feminist friends a couple of years ago. We were talking about gender being fluid, and stuff like that. I, along with one of the men felt that, as feminists, we were aiming for a society where people weren’t defined by their bodies. The other person disagreed, saying that he thought there was something special about the ability to bear children. At the time, I disagreed, and as time goes on, the more I think about it, the more I disagree with this. Where would this leave post-menopausal women? Infertile women? Or even women who just don’t want children? To be honest, also, where does this leave men? As incomplete human beings? There are big problems with presuming anything about somebody on the basis of their body. Obviously, with womenhood being equivalent to motherhood, women are natural mothers, and men are just best leaving them to it!! Apart from the obvious issue that this leaves men with a perfect excuse about looking after their own children, I think it probably puts a lot of pressure on women to be perfect mothers, straight after an incredibly physically traumatic experience. That’s not so fair.

I’m going to quickly leave you with this, from the post that originally encouraged me to write this:

So alright, you need ovaries and a uterus and a vulva for having a baby. Breast-feeding is a pretty awesome thing to do. But anybody can change nappies. Or sing a baby to sleep. Or take a kid to school and to the piano courses. Genitals and chromosomes don’t have anything to do with making a kid feeling good and safe and loved and teaching it everything it needs to know.

NB. I know I haven’t really covered the sex-object part of ‘woman’. But I guess I blog about that a lot, and motherhood is something that is expected of most women, and also affects a lot of women.

Masculinity and suicide

I’ve been a bit behind on reading some of the longer posts on my blogroll, but had a look today. This feature is just awesome. We really need more mothers who are willing to let their sons do what they want, however “feminine” that might be. I seriously recommend you take a look.

Penni (the author of the feature) has implied a really important point, too: given that society teaches that “masculinity” (whatever that is) is more valuable, any boy or man who displays any feminine characteristics is going to be looked down upon. The patriarchy hurts everyone: men and women are expected to live up to certain gender roles, which is, quite simply, limiting. And it is true, I believe, most definitely, that men are expected not to express emotions, or whatever. Obviously there are certain times and places where this isn’t the case – but these are far more limited than those times and places for women, who are, let’s face it, walking balls of hormones.

However, it is sometimes said that men are worse off than women, which is shown by the often quoted fact that men are more likely to commit suicide than women. I think a lot of the time this is used to dismiss the claim of feminists that women have it bad! Penni didn’t suggest this one bit, but she did say the following:

I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that it is teenage boys who have the highest suicide rate. They’re conditioned to believe that they can’t ask for help because it is ‘unmanly’.

I’ve said above that I totally agree with the second sentence of this quote. However I’d like to offer an alternative explanation for the fact that more young men (and in fact men in general) commit suicide: quite simply, men are more likely to succeed. More young men commit suicide, but more young women attempt it. This is not only true for young people, but at all age groups. There are a number of explanations for this. Firstly, men tend to use more violent methods. A woman is more likely to take an overdose or similar, which is actually incredibly ineffective. This might well be due to the fact that men are conditioned to be more violent.

There are other considerations, of course. It’s possible that a woman might take an overdose as a “cry for help,” whereas you’re a lot less likely to shoot yourself, or hang yourself for that purpose. And of course, that does tie in with Penni’s comment that I quoted above: men can’t ask for help. Although, I would like to make this point. The first time I took an overdose, I wasn’t certain I would die, I wasn’t even certain that I wanted to – but I thought it was a possibility, and I thought that it would definitely cause problems. I really did not understand how ineffective overdoses were.

Penni’s post deals with a really important issue. As I said above, the patriarchy hurts everyone. I can’t emphasise that enough! But the issue of suicide is often oversimplified.