Celebrating being female

I am a woman. I am capable of menstruation (but found it inconvenient and therefore have always used the pill to prevent myself having periods). I am - or was - likely capable of getting pregnant and giving birth. But I don't like children and have never felt vaguely interested in having one. (I'm mid-40s now.) I have a vagina, but I haven't engaged in PIV sex with men for many, many years. It really wasn't for me.

I have lived the life of the mind, giving all of my energy to my writing and research career. I have focused on getting to the top of my profession, on financial independence, on spending time with people who interest me, on spending my money on things I enjoy.

When women use the line: "you can't know real love until you've had a child", I totally believe them. I don't doubt for a minute that I'm missing out on an experience of intense love and empathy and connectedness, and all the rest of it; but I have no desire whatsoever for those experiences. I don't even have a pet, despite liking animals, as I don't want to be responsible for anyone other than myself. The thought of someone/thing being 100% dependent on me feels suffocating and oppressive. (None of this means I look down in any way on women who do want things I can't even imagine. It is just other to me.)

So I am afraid I can genuinely come up with no positive things about being a woman, only a few bodily inconveniences that I do my best to minimize. All my dearest memories and greatest achievements could have been lived with any genital / hormonal configuration!

But I don't for a minute deny I am a woman. I do not buy into genderism and assume that my selfishness, competitiveness, lack of interest in children, lack of empathy, and lack of willingness to be a caregiver mean that I am really a "man trapped in a woman's body"! I will campaign alongside mothers for the rights of those of us with female biology as I am fully aware that the patriarchy sees me as a member of the sex class and that I am as vulnerable as any other woman to female-specific harm. But I think there is a slight risk that other women who have lived like me will not feel similarly. I can see how transgender ideology (especially the non-binary, agender versions) might speak to women like me (especially younger women), as the narratives of feelings of power through female bodily experiences and the tendency to elide the woman-mother distinction in so much feminist discourse are, personally speaking, not relatable.

This is a wonderful thread - thank you to the posters who wrote such beautiful messages.

I can't write anything as eloquent. I also felt incredibly powerful after the birth of both my children. I remember holding my first, my son, close to my face and he breathed on me. It was a totally surreal moment - it hit me that this was a real life person, that his life on earth had just begun, that he was breathing and that he had just come out of my body - it was so odd and amazing I couldn't really compute it. I felt exactly the same way when my DD was born - amazed all over again at this new person that had grown in me and that I had endured hours of agony to bring into the world.

Related to that feeling is another aspect of femaleness that others have mentioned - the mindblowing resilience that women have, the ability to just get on with things, to keep stepping forward, often with a smile and a kind word, even in incredibly difficult circumstances.

What has struck me since becoming a mother is the way in which men view so many aspects of life as optional - if they are tired, not interested, don't particularly value it, they just won't do it. That includes things like keeping a home habitable, taking good care of children, maintaining strong family relationships - things that make life comfortable, enjoyable and meaningful. They will just opt out of them and expect other people to do them on their behalf or just let their lives/social relationships fall apart. Women, in the meantime, juggle three million things and make sure everything is done no matter what. They'll be there washing uniform at 11pm having not sat down for 12 hours because they will not under any circumstances see their children go to school in dirty clothes, no matter how tired they are, no matter how much they'd like a rest. They'll then do a meal plan because they want to stick to the budget so they can all have a holiday and they want the children to eat well. Then they'll make the packed lunches so the morning will go more smoothly. Then they'll write a note to respond to that party invitation. All while a man has just checked out and is ignoring all those details.

Exhausting as all that is, and difficult as it is for women at the time I genuinely think, as another poster has mentioned, women reap the rewards of their hard work later in life. While men get more isolated, more disgruntled and purposeless as they get older, women benefit from the years and years of groundwork they've put in to building strong relationships with their children, friends and family, years of being able to cope and organise and get on with things. Some men get to 50 not being able to run a house at all while women have not only run a house for the last 20 years but also worked and raised children. In many of the older couples that I know the woman is a truly impressive person who has achieved a monumental amount (very little of it valued monetarily or otherwise by soceity) while the man has earned a lot of money but is essentially a burden to everyone around him. Men lose out in the end. Big time.

Equally, professionally, I think a lot of women end up dropping out of careers not just because of the double load of childcare/housework and paid work, but because they can't see the value in continuing to play the game that many men play in business, which is to try to big yourself up while doing the minimum amount of actual valuable work. Many women in banking, for example, get to a certain point and think 'what the fuck am I wasting my life on this shit for'? because being top dog and stomping on competitors holds no intrinsic value for them - they just don't see the point in spend 12 hours a day doing such meaningless 'work.' I think men often don't like having women in the workplace because women come along and say 'what the fuck are you actually achieving. Women get things done, real things, things that matter, like tending to that screaming baby 10 times in a night. In comparison, polluting oceans and getting people in debt seems a pretty poor offer in terms of legacy.

glittery.

I too wasn't that keen on pregnancy - very much a somewhat uncomfortable means to an end. But I remember part way through catching a bit of a radio programme about computing, and how researchers were hoping to simulate one lobe of a monkey brain using the latest huge supercomputer for however many scores of millions of quid and thinking "I am making a whole human brain on approximately the extra calories of one Mars Bar a day!" and just being blown away by that thought.

Beautiful post glittery

glittery
This is another good point. That women who have stillbirths, neonatal death or late miscarriages feel they aren't really mothers. It does a huge disservice to them and to their babies.
And also it annoys me that when women have been through something as traumatic as that, the societal pressure is to view it as taboo, don't talk about It, you weren't really a mother
I have family and very close friends who have been through it and I have seen those women try to rationalise why they shouldn't be upset. Fuck that. Really. Just fuck it.

glittery, that was very moving. Thank you for sharing it.

Great thread.

My daughter is doing a research paper for her history class and is thinking of doing it about the role of women in the abolitionist movement in the US. One of the things that struck me was how these women - both in US and UK - lacked the vote, had no political power and yet devoted themselves to righting a terrible wrong.

The slogan/logo of the female abolitionists "Am I Not A Woman and A Sister?" sums it up for me. Women, perhaps because of their near-universal historical oppression, have reserves of empathy, striving toward justice, and fellow-feeling that are truly inspirational.

glittery That was an incredibly moving post, I'm sorry for your loss, thank you for sharing that with us

I totally agree about the "psychic roar" thing immediately following childbirth. It was like: holy shit, I can't believe my body just did that! All by itself!

I knew in theory how female biology worked to birth a baby. (I'm a scientist, so I knew the theory in some obscure biological detail and was mildly alarmed about the gaps in medical knowledge of how childbirth works...!) but until I experienced my body doing these things, I didn't really get it.

I didn't understand how truly powerful contractions are: how magnificently strong are the uterine muscles, how their action is all-consuming so the whole body works to optimise them, and how yet how delicately they manage to push and turn and push a baby out safely.

I didn't understand what maternal instinct was in humans: how such a primeval urge could apply to a modern woman, how a brand-new mother could be utterly and fiercely protective of her offspring from the moment of giving birth, to the point where it feels a bit wrong to hand the baby over to anyone (even the father or the midwife for checkup).

I didn't understand what it was for my body to do something well: after a lifetime of asthma and not being good at sport, after difficulties conceiving, after a tough pregnancy with awful hyperemesis, how much awe I would feel that my body could successfully open itself up, deliver a new human into the outside world, and close itself up again.

The world flipped on its axis for me when I gave birth. I now regard female biology with awe.

Brilliant post, Glittery

That’s a lovely post glittery, I’m sorry for your losses

Boldly, yy to the bit about breastfeeding. And it ties into Lang’s bit about capitalist society - women are expected to get back to work ASAP as that’s what “successful” people do. Except that “success” is judged on what the patriarchy views as successful, it undermines women’s natural biology.

There was an interesting discussion on Twitter yesterday tangential to this between 4th Wave Now and Penny White. They were talking about population averages and that women tend to choose working with people more than working with things. But professions in which you work with people pay less and have less social cachet than professions in which you work with things.

The overall topic is really why a patriarchal society would value certain things - not just pregnancy and childbirth, but certain jobs and lots of other stuff - above other things.

As I said earlier, I don't think this debate is about individual choices by individual women or even about infertility of some women. The point is that gestating a child is something women as a class can do, which men as a class cannot do. So why do we often put down women who assert that pregnancy and childbirth is the defining achievement in their lives by telling them there's so much more to life than that? Because society is patriarchal and capitalist and it values successful careers and wealth above the thing that only women as a class can do.

I mean, I've had two children. But I didn't find pregnancy empowering or delightful at all. I hated it for the entire 9 months and, had anyone told me I should be full of joy and spiritual power, I'd probably have thrown something at them. And I didn't do the early childcare either - my husband was a SAHD for 6 years, until the youngest started school. That happened to work for us a couple. But the fact remains that my body, as a woman's body, was capable of something my husband's body, as a male body, was not. Gestating a fully-formed human being is - whether any particular individual enjoys it or not, or has fertility issues or not - something rather amazing and something that should confer status and empowerment on all women, as a class, whether or not they actually do it. A non-patriarchal society would do that.

What a wonderful post glittery so moving

The 'It's wrong to make me feel lesser/excluded just because I haven't had or done x/my experiences are just as equal as yours' line of thought is very topical in our culture and needs unpacking.

I was always told in late teens/early 20s especially at work 'until you're a parent you will never really get it.' Hated hearing that. Hated it. It felt patronising and exclusive and belittling, although it was never meant that way. Then I had multiple mmcs, including one late one. Never succeeded in having a pregnancy to term, but I had those few weeks of sharing my body with someone else whose heart was beating, and was socked in the face by the visceral, primal emotion connected with it. I never in my life realised it was possible to feel so powerfully, to be willing to do anything at all for that little life. Or how it would feel being separated even when the baby had died, when everything in me was screaming that I had to be where the baby was. Not logical, not rational, not a whole lot of thought involved, just physical pull and instinct.

I have zero desire to silence other women about pregnancy or motherhood, or to separate myself from women whether they are mothers or infertile, because of them being 'triggering'. Any feelings I have of exclusion because of my infertility are my responsibility to process and manage, not for others to protect me from. Of course I'm not 'lesser' as a woman for not having successfully given birth (that's the patriarchy calling, only women churning out perfect, able bodied sons to inherit are worth anything) but my experience as a woman does not include motherhood. That's the reality, there is loss and disappointment in that which is mine to process and live with, and my respect for other people's experiences and sharing of them can't be conditional on them managing my reality to be more comfortable for me. And the people who supported me through the losses, the grief, the medical procedures, shared their own experiences of how to move on, held my hand in an operating theatre, wrote my son's name in a children's chapel book when I couldn't, all of them were women. Because infertility is also a women's experience and only really understood by women who have lived it.

The women who told me I wouldn't get it until I had a child were absolutely right, they were sharing a life experience I couldn't understand on a rational, informational level from other people's experiences. Those few weeks were enough for me to realise I barely had a taste of what a woman must feel when a pregnancy comes to term, experienced birth, fed and raised that child - I don't have a clue. I can't possibly. I just know enough to know that I really don't know.

I do think that talking positively about female biology seems to attract more negativity. I was never really aware of it until I became a mother.

One aspect which I've found completely polarised is breastfeeding. For context, I had a difficult birth which ended in an emergency c-section and had a tricky start to breastfeeding (including an abscess). However, once it was up and running, I really enjoyed it. I was totally amazed at the process and the response of my DD to it. However, I feel like I can never discuss it positively because other people perceive you as a member of the 'breastapo' (horrible term!) and that you are implicitly criticising bottle feeding. It feels like walking on eggshells and it made me feel quite isolated as a new mum.

I really get the 'psychic' roar mentioned upthread too. There was an article in the guardian a while ago about how women are the 'stronger' sex in terms of survival.

Agreed.
My analogy would be this:
Just because some people don't choose to run or some people can't run, doesn't mean that people who are really into sprinting and feel that its the ultimate buzz - where living in the human body comes into its own, should be made to feel bad or like they are not being inclusive enough for celebrating what they love. Yes some people don't choose to run or have a health condition that means they can't do it, but that doesn't mean they are less human for it, or less capable of personal fulfilment.

And to get back to women and motherhood I think the confidence and power it gives women is something patriarchy goes to lengths to suppress. All the 'unspeakable female biology' bs is an attempt to block women from owning it.
I want to own it and celebrate it.
Women rock - mother or not!

Quentin That's it, there are plenty of things in my life that are positive, but these are the only ones that are due to me being a woman.

Well it's difficult. OP asked for all the things that make you pleased to be female. Mostly I don't really think about being female, I'm just a person. I notice my femaleness through my biology. Im not pleased to have periods. Or boobs or curves that make me immediately obviously female and treated as such. The aspects of my biology I am pleased about is that I grew, birthed and fed my children.

My other thing I'm pleased about is that I have such strong female friendships.

I'm not trying to be mother centric or dismissive of women who aren't mothers, just saying those are really the only two positive things my femaleness specifically brings to my life.

I have found that as my children have grown, it is not only the giving birth, but it is the living. Giving birth has been my path as a women and I have had disappointment in my career which went down the pan, and things have not been as plain sailing as I expected with the DC. My friend who did not have DC had to deal with disappointment with her exDH, health and surgery and no children as a result but a sparkling career. I am in no doubt that she would have gone a lot further if she had been a man though but we came together, from very different pathways, at a point where we were both searching for new meaning. We found we weren't that different after all and share a lot of aspirations. Her's was as much a woman's experience as mine and shaped by her biology, just as mine was.

Mind you, reading the thread about the pp who is concerned she may be pregnant from "globby fingers", sperm is also pretty impressive stuff.

This is how I see it - control of a woman's reproductive capacity is the basis for patriarchy. It exists so that men can control private property by means of heirs. That's what patriarchy is. And that's why everything to do with pregnancy, childbirth and nursing has been devalued by men. We, as women, are doing patriarchy's work for it when we sneer at women reclaiming this value.

Separating out the types of oppression that women as a class encounter based on reproductive capability from women who are known to be mothers, doesn't mean you are sneering nor does it make you a patriarchal agent (yes I'm the infertile handmaid, with a big ERROR sign on my bonnet.. or perhaps just a Martha).

I'm glad that women who have found understandable empowerment through their positive birth experiences. If the thread title was "Celebrating (biological) motherhood" then I would have enjoyed reading the experiences of the women here, like I do in a professional capacity. Unlike my work, where there is no place for my own personal situation (I would never dream of discussing my own health issues to the women I have looked after), I discussed here how it's exactly my female biology that has caused me suffering. A comment was made that women that don't experience childbirth will never experience the true strength and power of their female bodies. That's the type of judgement and female-deficit that's placed on me by other women, who say I've lost this sacred, female essence of growing and birthing life. It's the type of comment that I will challenge through my feminism.

For what's it worth:

Andrea O'Reilly's matricentric feminism:

"..what needs to be emphasized here is what mothers need is a feminism that positions their needs and concerns as the starting point in theory and activism on and for women’s empowerment.

This is not to suggest that a matricentric feminism should replace traditional feminist thought; rather, it is to remind and emphasize that the category of mother is distinct from the category of woman, and that many of the problems mothers face—socially, economically, politically, culturally, psychologically and so forth—are specific to women’s role and identity as mothers. Indeed, mothers are oppressed under patriarchy as women and as mothers. Consequently, mothers need a mother- centred or matricentric mode of feminism organized from and for their particular identity and work as mothers. I would argue further that a mother-centred feminism is urgently needed and long overdue because mothers, arguably more so than women in general, remain disempowered despite forty years of feminism"

mommuseum.org/aint-i-a-feminist-matricentric-feminism-feminist-mamas-and-why-mothers-need-a-feminist-movementtheory-of-their-own/

(Points up)

All of that. Just because men have spent millennia trying to convince us that because we can give birth that's both worthless and all we're good for doesn't mean we have to believe them.

I'm loving all these responses! SockGoblin - just thinking about your psychic roar makes me feel happy!

This is how I see it - control of a woman's reproductive capacity is the basis for patriarchy. It exists so that men can control private property by means of heirs. That's what patriarchy is. And that's why everything to do with pregnancy, childbirth and nursing has been devalued by men. We, as women, are doing patriarchy's work for it when we sneer at women reclaiming this value.

It's fantastic that women now have reproductive rights so that we can control when we conceive and whether or not we continue with a pregnancy. These are vital advancements for women so that we can live the lives we choose to live.

But, underneath that, is the patriarchal devaluation of human reproduction. It doesn't matter that some of us choose not to have to children. What matters is that we reclaim the magnificence of women's bodies - not as individuals but as a sex class. Without us, there would be no human race. Without the gobsmacking capabilities of our bodies to gestate fully-formed human beings, we would cease to exist. Our bodies are capable of feats men's bodies are not.

It's not a coincidence that the first deities were fertility goddesses. And it's not a coincidence that the earliest patriarchal religions had rites and rituals that represented the violent appropriation of birth (eg the Aztec priests donning the flayed skins of sacrifice victims then bursting out of them to "prove" that men now held power over birth).

This is an amazing thread.

Like so many others the biggest thing for me is also childbirth, because it was the first time that my femaleness was utterly all consuming, it was inescapable, awe inspiring and also utterly terrifying.

I don't believe my having given birth is the pinnacle of my womanhood.

But. There was this moment, in the minutes after giving birth, after i'd seen my child and started to process all that had happened, where I suddenly knew, for the first time in my life - I was powerful.

I knew suddenly that I could do extraordinary things.

Giving birth empowered me to change my entire life - not because I was suddenly at the apex of womanhood for having gone through a pregnancy, but because I finally understood I was a powerful person.

I had a psychic roar the day I gave birth and that roar has filtered into all aspects of my life - especially in areas that are quite unconnected with motherhood.