Who Is A Woman? In Search of Female Identity – Part 5

The Fourth Perspective: Feeling Like the Female Species

Classically, a woman’s autopoiesis has been entirely focused on the cycle of attraction, consummation and childbirth. With increased power over all of those, autopoiesis might be shifting its energetic activity to the new purpose we are giving it: that of attractiveness and individualism. What these factors of fear and attraction, supported by automatic chemical and cognitive reflexes, convey is a complex picture in which my own say into the motivations I deem “mine” is put to question.

Our look at the outside of our exterior has naturally brought us to inquire into what is happening inside our physical reality, and how we experience our changing body and behavior. This perspective, of seeing, or feeling into, the exterior reality of woman from the inside, illuminates the unseen 1^st-person experience of our visible 3^rd-person manifestation.

I never had much view on our experience of our bodies beyond the fact that as women we have always been burdened with our fertility, yet also found our purpose and identity in this; that I was privileged to be born into the first generation with a choice; and that consequently our relationship to our body is in flux. But again it was Simone De Beauvoir, although a little gloomy in her descriptions, who brought new depth to these issues. Reading her analysis of women’s anatomy, it is not hard to see that the hormonal patterns, dangers of childbirth, misery of miscarriage, and ever-present possibility of being overwhelmed by the physically stronger half of the species, cannot but have a profound impact on women’s chemical and cognitive processes, which are endlessly thrown off-balance, and equally endlessly trying to restore balance. She describes in detail the chemical processes, circulatory adjustments and hormonal cycles that cause physical and emotional instability for a woman as the price for her ability, by means of reproduction, to secure the stability of the human species. Added to this instability, the reproductive process of human females happens through a physical alienation unparalleled with any other species; at pregnancy, part of herself (the placenta) begins a nine-month autonomous project of hosting a new individual, negotiating between the mother’s vitality and the baby’s attempt to establish itself in the world. And all this is happening to a mammal who is, unlike other mammals, self-conscious and fully aware of the fears, discomfort, and dangers she has to negotiate. De Beauvoir argues that the widely praised hormone oxytocin, responsible for the strong bonding of mother and baby, is as much a beautifully moving expression of the mother-child relationship as it is a necessity to get the mother to attach herself to this invasion into her body. She sums up:

“Woman is of all mammalian females at once the one who is most profoundly alienated… and the one who most violently resists this alienation; in no other is the enslavement of the organism to reproduction more imperious or more unwillingly accepted. It would seem that her lot is heavier than that in other females in just about the same degree that she goes beyond other females in the assertion of her individuality.”

Historically, women have had no choice other than dealing with the brutality of reproduction, and as the physical dangers decreased, their individuality increased, keeping the paradox of the human female firmly in place. According to De Beauvoir, it is no wonder then that woman would fiercely embrace her lot; how else could humanity survive?

It is worth looking at the processes underpinning this constant presence of paradox. Laura Kipnis quotes statistics showing that women are 28% less prone to violent attacks than men, but 87% more afraid. Kipnis says it very plainly: “Yes, custodianship of the vagina really is the female Achilles’ heel… Women got blessed with those wonderfully valuable vaginas but not necessarily with the body strength to defend them, should it prove necessary”.

In line with Simone De Beauvoir and Laura Kipnis, Elizabeth Debold, Marie Wilson and Idelisse Malavé found in a study on adolescent girls that a girl goes through a traumatic period when her body changes from her own into that of a woman destined to reproduce: “Most girls view the physical changes… not as an empowering experience but as a loss of control. The power that girls gain to reproduce life is typically viewed, by boys and girls, as a curse, not as an awesome mystery”.

So if a woman’s fertility is so prized, she does not only have much to fear in carrying it, but equally needs to support its attractiveness. It is known to all of us that a woman displays the most beauty and vitality when she is in the prime of her fertility, and loses that attraction once the menopause has set in; her entire chemical make-up supports this process. In history, this has been an unnegotiable process, but in an age of contraception and plastic surgery, this picture is changing, too. Susie Orbach calls the effect of our newly acquired power but growing anxiety over our bodies “body destabilization”. She cautions: “At a moral level, I am pained and disquieted by the homogeneous visual culture promoted by industries that depend on the breeding of body insecurity and which then create beauty terror in so many people”.

So what is what do they all point to? Added to the fear of being a fertile female, a new fear is born of being physically insufficient. A recent New York Times blog post revealed that there even is a medical name for this phenomenon, as readers are earnestly invited to get themselves assessed on the possibility of body dysmorphic disorder (B.D.D.).

The biological process of self-sustaining creative growth of an organism is called autopoiesis. Classically, woman’s autopoiesis has been entirely focused on the cycle of attraction, consummation and childbirth. With increased power over all of those, autopoiesis might be shifting its energetic activity to the new purpose we are giving it: that of attractiveness and individualism. What these factors of fear and attraction, supported by automatic chemical and cognitive reflexes, convey is a complex picture in which my own say into the motivations I deem “mine” is put to question. If my physical manifestation is one that supports such immensely clever and complex patterns; if it functions in constant reaction and servitude to the demands placed on it; if part of my nature is to override many of my own individualistic needs and wants in order to secure the survival of the species, what is really the essence of me as a woman?

This is the fifth of a six-post article. Next week: Part 6 – So Who IS a Woman?