I’m uploading the text of the video originally scheduled for March here, but you won’t see the video until we’ve reshot it later in April – the raw files of the March shoot were lost in a hard-drive catastrophe.
We do, however, have Paula K’s marvellous behind-the-scenes photos of the day, two of which I’ve added here. I don’t normally add images to a video text post, but March was in no way a normal month. The hard-drive crash wasn’t the half of it – watch Philosophilia’s video A time to grieve… for the whole story.
WOMEN vs. PEOPLE WITH WOMBS
Jack Laurian Pascoe
Last month I promised that this month we’d look at why some people with female bodies have no wish to change them, and yet don’t think of themselves as women. Or, at least, don’t want you to think of them as women.
Well, to make sense of that we need to consider what the word woman really means.
I know right now you’re going omigod everybody knows what a woman is and that’s true, everyone “knows” what a woman is—but they don’t necessarily know it’s the same thing that you know it is. And they have an even wider range of ideas about what a woman ought to be.
You have to remember, the division of the sexes is a fundamental—a basal element in human cognition: you can dispute it, you can distort it, you can disregard it, but you cannot make it go away. Our continued existence depends on it, and not just for the propagation of the species. But that’s not the problem. The problem is the superstructure of values that patriarchy has erected on top of the biological reality. Today’s multiplicity of gender identities is a way of subverting that superstructure.
Yes, I just mentioned patriarchy; before we start talking about women are we all clear on what patriarchy is? It’s the organisational system of a world built primarily by and for men—also known as the developed world, a world which, right up until the 1980s and even later, we still called “the world of men”. The phrase sounds odd to us now, remote even to those who remember it. The world of men didn’t just mean gentlemen’s clubs and company boardrooms—it meant civilisation, as opposed to nature. It meant people and their doings; women and children were included but considered unrepresentative, or even just an aspect of men’s achievement. The world of men was the world men built and the story they told on the principles they devised: women and children inhabited it as accessories. As resources.
Today with less patriarchal eyes we look back and see that women’s contribution to this world as it was erected around them was always significant and often historic, that women can both temper men’s excesses and exceed their accomplishments in sometimes unexpected directions, and that an enormous amount of denial and doublespeak went (indeed, goes) into maintaining the mythos of masculine mastery. Certain conflicting principles of the Enlightenment made feminism inevitable, and those who cling to the mythos of the world of men have a very different idea of what a woman is to the rest of us.
You see, if women are a resource in the world of men, then that resource is first and foremost the womb. The ancients actually believed that a woman’s womb was a living thing that moved around in her belly of its own volition; now we argue over whether a uterus is even the point any more.
But for patriarchalists, the womb is the entire point. It makes women the subspecies they so obviously are. The idea that a woman is just a vessel for a womb—a piece of fancy biological equipment designed for the production of children and the service of men, problematically endowed with free will, and… a consciousness of some sort… this conception of a woman is not as rare as one might wish. That’s a perspective we call phallocentric, in that it literally puts the penis and its priorities at the centre of the story—which is natural to patriarchy.
And of course, you don’t have to be patriarchal to connect womanhood with having a womb. I mean, that’s where it all starts, right? It’s because certain people have wombs that they’re expected to behave in certain ways—nurturing, people-oriented, compliant, unpredictable, illogical, hysterical…right?
The undeniable fact that some people with wombs don’t or won’t or can’t behave “like women”, and the equally undeniable fact that many people without wombs can and often do, is anathema to a patriarchal system, and a perversion to male supremacists—a regrettable, no, dangerous, flaw that should be eliminated from society.
Not to mince words—in the face of the evidence, this is vain and crazy. Look beyond your own narrow context: Life is diversity. Without diversity we die.
But until humankind had the power to threaten diversity we didn’t realise that. In the meantime, patriarchs constructed a monopolistic, even totemic, order of Earthly glory, with plants and insects at the bottom, animals ranked via the food chain and likeness to us in the middle, and Man, the ungendered, default human, at the top, in direct contact with the Sky-God.
And so Man described himself to himself as standing atop the entire world, building his great civilisations on and from the Creator’s bounty, ever higher. He also described himself as siring his progeny on Woman—yeah, that’s how they used to say it; that’s how masculists still think of it—Woman, created by God and/or Nature to be the fertile field and the labour for all that domestic stuff. Patriarchs see Woman as a fragile, unstable creature dangerously enabled and even more dangerously disabled—compromised—by her womb. It’s this affliction that relegates woman to the role of “helpmate”—or in the old translation, helpmeet—a being precisely suited to the function of helping.
Our culture’s so fractured now it can be hard to remember that this isn’t just some archaic misconception: this “truth” is preached implicitly and explicitly, daily in pubs and clubs, churches and mosques, schools and family homes across the civilised world. In the Anglosphere alone we have violently conflicting ideas of what a woman is or should be, violently repressive attitudes to outspoken, independent, or powerful women, playing out in our media every day. It isn’t always possible to live your life in militant conflict with social expectations just to be your true self—even if you’re sure what that is. But the ways we balance our masculine and feminine impulses are skewed by the extra weight given to masculinity. We have evolved an inbuilt disrespect for vulnerability.
Is there a trace, in the language, of a time when the sexes were more equal in England than they later became? Yes, there is. But isn’t the bias implicit in our very names—men, women? Aren’t we womb-men, the subset of men with wombs? Well, interestingly, no—and kind of. Woman doesn’t come from womb-man, but woman is a grammatical subset of man.
In 5th-century Old English, there were two words, wif and wer—adult female and adult male. There was another word, man, for person, or human being, also used as a pronoun, meaning one, they, or someone. Sometimes the two terms were put together: adult female person, adult male person.
Over the next five hundred years or so, charting the increasing dominance of men in an increasingly organised (that is, hierarchical) society, the word for an adult male person dropped its gendered prefix and assumed the universal—man. Meanwhile wifman became wimman, and eventually woman.
So although woman has always meant adult female person, man simply means person, and this linguistic mismatch is part of what centres the masculine—what makes it seem to some people like only women have “gender”, or gender problems, as if man is the neutral default.
That masculine arrogation of the universal happened in English not long after it had happened in Latin, when homo shifted in meaning from a human, literally an Earthling, to a man. Across the west, as written history became a thing, women were being written out of it—erased, sidelined or trivialised, as happened in English with the evolution of male, from the Latin for manly, and female, from the Latin for girly.
Patriarchy is woven into our language in ways we can never entirely eliminate, but must embroider over, around, and through.
You don’t have to knowall this to be influenced by the way it biases our understanding. In fact, that’s how it works: it slips in under the radar. The very fact that female doesn’t derive from male but the two words have settled into forms that suggest it did is rather telling in itself. You could be forgiven for thinking that the inconceivability of gender equality is built into our language.
Lucky we have ways around that.
So I hope you can see now why some people with wombs might resist or reject this persistently belittling label, woman—why they might insist on their humanity before their gender—or they might just want to outright reject the twin male expectations of fuckability and mothering.
And yet, at the same time, there are women who meet those expectations with pleasure, or at least don’t reject them, who embrace conventional or cis womanhood in all its impossible complexity, and many of them think the only way to reverse the structural demotion of women is the defiant reclamation of womanly identity, pride and power. They fear that women—always a threatened species—are collaborating in their own eradication when they start talking about menstruating people, birthing people, people with wombs. As a girlfriend said to me not so long ago, “women are rubbing themselves out of existence.”
In truth, though, I don’t think she need worry. Every gender that is not masculine is a salute to the feminine. All possible solutions have their time and place: diversity is survival. Women won’t rub themselves out acknowledging that—rather they will gather voice and visibility, as indeed we are doing.
Women worldwide are connecting, learning, rising, and growing louder—both against and in support of patriarchy. Men who respect the feminine are defending feminism, and warriors of all genders are already fighting to the death. The innocent continue to fall. Patriarchal crackdowns are always violent, and the years ahead will be no exception, even if the structure cracking down on us is itself falling for the last time. We can hope—and we can help.
There’s been so much to explain here that I haven’t had time to quote the many philosophers, anthropologists and other social analysts whose work informs this thinking. Look up Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Lou Andreas Salome, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Sojourner Truth, Gloria Steinem, Audre Lorde, Anne Summers, Germaine Greer, Lynne Segal—and Lacan and Peter Singer if you need some men. But let me reach my conclusion via Judith Butler’s carefully chosen words on what it is to be a woman.
“If there is something right in Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification.”
In simple terms, we’re winging it—constantly reinventing what a woman is, or can be. Perhaps we’ve always done that, but now we have something we’ve never had before: the power to connect and compare directly with other women, and other opponents of patriarchy. And this vast, fast-growing, subversive network may yet save the world.