Who Is A Woman? In Search of Female Identity – Part 4

The Third Perspective: Woman As A Species

Even today, I am not sure that we have fully let in the radical consequences of contraception for human beings, as half of the species suddenly has the freedom to divert her path away from this reproductive turmoil, putting an end to what De Beauvoir called “the abdication… of her individual abilities”.

Just as we can gain 3^rd-person access to our interior experience, so can we gain 3^rd-person access to our exterior manifestation. This perspective is where we look from the outside at the physical reality of a woman, capturing through biology or behavior her arising as a visible manifestation.

I did not realize the full importance of this perspective until Simone De Beauvoir, who has been experimenting with various perspectives in her writings, surprised me with a long analysis of female anatomy. She points out how through evolution, each higher species is less determined by sex but more individualized, with the human female being the (relatively) least sexed and most individualistically evolved mammal on earth. Yet, with the decrease in physical emphasis on sex and the human body becoming built less for sex and more for individual expression, mammal reproduction has become increasingly risky and difficult, thus rendering females subject to the demanding, destabilizing and at times life-threatening cycle of menstruation, childbirth and menopause.

For many thousands of years, human beings have had little objective knowledge about women’s anatomy, other than the fact that women spent most of their lives giving birth to and caring for babies, not always surviving the dangers attached. Until the Enlightenment, when the science of anatomy took flight, very little was known about the exact workings of reproduction. Philosopher Michel Foucault pointed out that unlike in our own times, there also had been little taboo on it, as it was something that was simply accepted as part of everyday life. But with the beginning of science and the first interest in female anatomy, a surprisingly androcentric view was revealed. It was widely believed that women’s genitals were the same as those of men, just placed differently in order to (passively) accommodate male (active) penetration, the abstract “masculine essence” of which was believed to be the only determining factor in conception. Or, as historian Thomas Laqueur ironically summarized: “Women, in other words, are inverted, and hence less perfect, men. They have exactly the same organs but in exactly the wrong places”.

That same age saw a strong tendency toward type-differentiation on the subtle (non-material) level of feminine and masculine energies, as these were believed to be the main drivers of procreation. So strong were these views, that even at the time of the Enlightenment it took the brilliant proponents of anatomical science about 200 years to recognize that women, after all, were made distinctly different from men!

This is perhaps the clearest example of how a perspective is never a fixed perception of given facts, but an enactment of phenomena arising in all dimensions of our being (or quadrants), across a sliding scale of development. What was glaringly obvious to the genius Aristotle (that women were inverted men, with a womb added) is now recognized to be incomprehensibly misguided.

How did this develop further? Throughout the 19^th Century, in spite of a more accurate scientific perception, the general view of women was still determined by the belief that it is women’s energetic essence that determined her gender, and her genital make up was one of deficiency: the common treatment of countless hysterical women, hormonally imbalanced and traumatized by miscarriages, was the analysis of their “penis envy”. Even as late as 1027 the great Carl Jung wrote, and incredibly re-published in 1952: “The masculinity of the woman and the femininity of the man are inferior, and it is regrettable that the full value of their personalities should be contaminated by something that is less valuable”. He suggested that for a woman, “masculinization, assuredly not true reasonableness!… may even [cause her to] become frigid”.

In the 20^th Century these patterns started to slowly wear down. The hardships and forced absence of men during war in the 20^th Century gave women some rare and brief opportunities to put their physical and mental strength over reproductive destiny and break the spell of “essence”, as, in order to keep the home fires burning, women had to take a much more public place in society. But as soon as the world order had been restored in the fifties, women were back in the maternity ward to produce a new generation of men for a new era. As it turned out, it would not be until the wide distribution of reliable contraception that the position of women could take a radical, irreversible turn.

With the pill, suddenly procreation had become optional, and with it came a freedom that was unprecedented in any time in history. Even today, I am not sure that we have fully let in the radical consequences of contraception for human beings, as half of the species suddenly has the freedom to divert her path away from this reproductive turmoil, putting an end to what De Beauvoir called “the abdication… of her individual abilities”. Of course, this also causes completely new behavior.

Susie Orbach, who has extensively studied the development of our bodies, points out that “the body is turning from the means of production to the production itself”. Reflecting on the change of purpose for women’s sexuality, she writes: “The decision to bypass sexual intercourse as a way of begetting children is argued to be sensible and effective. Simultaneously, that which used to produce children – sexuality – is visible everywhere”. Women may now be less oppressed, but also not protected anymore by the requirement to reproduce. Maureen Dowd wonders in a biting, now-classic New York Times Op-Ed whether the pill liberated women or men, and an increasing number of female cultural critics speak out against rampant sexualization of women and girls. If the vagina has shifted its purpose from reproduction to sexuality, could this lead to more sex-determined behavior, rather than less, and in fact constitute a new form of female oppression born from a reallocation of women’s sexual organs?

This is the fourth of a six-post article. Next week: Part 5: The Fourth Perspective – Feeling Like the Female Species