If there’s one feminist lesson I wish my younger self had understood sooner, it’s this: the female body is not the problem. It’s amazing how many of us get this wrong. We decry sexism while absorbing the idea that femaleness equates to limitation, weakness and inferiority. Be less female, and all will be well.
Resistance to femaleness takes multiple forms. We wage war on our own bodies, and disidentify from other members of the same sex. We persuade ourselves that the word ‘woman’ needs liberating from its association with our own female selves. We play dumb, conflating the exploitation of female bodies with the mere fact of noticing they exist. If all of this sounds stupid — which it is — it is no less powerful for it. Indeed, we have an “academic” feminism that has backed itself into a corner whereby “biological sex? Never heard of such a thing!” counts as a serious response to the oppression of half the human race.
If media-led, mainstream “feminism” preaches body acceptance, it does so on strictly limited terms. Namely, you’re encouraged to accept anything about it — don’t let the Man tell you otherwise! — apart from femaleness itself. “The body,” writes Kate Manne in Unshrinking, her study of fatphobia, “is not an object for correction or colonization or consumption.” Apart, that is, from when you don’t want a body that is female. Then that body can be bound and drugged and cut into submission. Don’t change yourself to suit patriarchal norms, unless they’re the most fundamental ones of all.
Once you notice this misunderstanding — the way in which scapegoating the female body is missold as changing the world — you start to see it everywhere. This week I read an article in the Times in which a young woman described how “freezing my eggs makes me feel more in control of my life”. In it, she claims that “even as teenagers my friends and I would discuss this option in a blasé manner, saying things like, ‘Yeah, I’ll probably just freeze my eggs, so I can focus on my *insert career* empire before settling down”. She goes on to explain that, having reached the age of twenty-nine she “decided the time had come” so underwent the painful, expensive procedure. “So now,” she writes, “thanks to 23 eggs floating around in a freezer in central London, I can feel slightly more in control of my destiny.”
Take that, Mother Nature and your biological clock of oppression! Only how much more “in control” is this really? The success rate quoted in the article is “a live birth rate of 26 per cent in women who froze [their eggs] aged 35 and under”. This does not sound particularly reassuring to me (a different Times article from the year before warns prospective egg-freezers not to “expect miracles”). As a practice, freezing your eggs for social or lifestyle reasons — as opposed to because one is facing specific medical issues — may not seem morally questionable in and of itself. Nonetheless, the pitching of this as a way of increasing women’s choices — alongside the rise in companies offering “egg freezing benefits” to young female employees — rings alarm bells for me. If, as Naomi Wolf wrote in 2001’s Misconceptions, workplaces “have covertly coerced working women to delegate the details of pregnancy, birth and early motherhood to some offstage setting — as if all this were some messy, slightly alarming private hobby, like taxidermy or beekeeping, to be dealt with strictly in one’s off hours and kept politely out of the field of vision”, who exactly is gaining from the promise of endless deferral?
I am not suggesting that all women who want babies should aim to have them by the age of 25 (I had my last child at 40). It has become very hard to write about valuing the female reproductive body — not wanting to change it, but to change the institutions which fail to accommodate it — without being accused of forming some dark alliance with right-wing pronatalism. Such an accusation, however, falls prey to the belief that the only way to resist the exploitation of female bodies is to deny their specificities (god forbid that we celebrate them). In the rise of lifestyle egg freezing, I see another branch of alienation from femaleness, another way in which we are encouraged to see being female as an embarrassing design flaw, another way in which that which is sold as a choice — you don’t have to inject your face with poison, you don’t have to bind your breasts, you don’t have to put your fertility on hold — swiftly becomes an obligation, at least should you wish to maintain anything like the status of the default human, a man.
The more female fertility is itself treated as a thing to be manipulated … the more we legitimise the exploitation of women
Like other supposed opportunities to flee femaleness, it plays into the deliberate conflation of limitations which are socially constructed and those which are a necessary consequence of being a human being in a sexed body. Having children at any age closes doors. There is never a perfect moment, but there is a difference between actual biological essentialism – the idea that because female people get pregnant, that is all we are for – and that fact that none of us have endless time and opportunities. There was and is a feminism that is creative and demanding, one which seeks to improve options for young and single mothers, and which seeks to make pregnancy and mothering choices that are celebrated rather than viewed as inconveniences or interruptions to the “normal” flow of things. The more female fertility is itself treated as a thing to be manipulated in order to make it less disruptive, the further away we move from these possibilities, and the more we legitimise the exploitation of women who, when it comes to creating their own families, have always had the fewest choices of all.
The alternative to the much-feared barefoot-and-pregnant feminine ideal should not be one in which the ideal female body meets patriarchal fuckability / capitalist workplace standards for a while, before either disappearing or outsourcing reproductive labour to other, less privileged women. Progress towards equality is so slow that I do not expect any woman in my lifetime to have babies in a world which fully values female reproduction or has made the necessary social and economic changes to minimise the costs. It is one of those decisions you have to make anyways, on the basis that you only get one life and one body, and yours happens to be female. Pretending it isn’t, or holding out for something better, could leave you with nothing at all.
