Recently, I saw a meme that started me thinking. That’s great for blog purposes, at least, but it began chewing on my brain with such determination that it became a blog priority. That’s kind of annoying, because I’d much rather write about my Italy trip while things are still fresh. So this is my attempt to clear the way for Italian thoughts once again.
The meme in question said the following:
Daughters are no longer raised to be wives.
They're raised to be people. And some people
are really not okay with that. They're not being
taught to sacrifice themselves for the comfort
of others. Not being told that marriage is the
finish line. Not being conditioned to make
themselves smaller to be loved. They're being
raised to earn their own money, choose their
own timing, live alone if they need to, and not
apologize for wanting more. They're building
lives where love is welcome but not begged for.
They're questioning things their mothers had to
silently accept. They're choosing healing, not
just habits. And for people who are used to
obedience, that kind of freedom looks like
defiance.
That really resonated with me because I’m going through this phase where the box that I find myself in is really starting to chafe. I’m in that box due to societal pressures. I’m in there because I was taught that that was where I was supposed to be. I stayed in there for many reasons, not the least of which was that it felt safer, and I didn’t know where else to go.
I’m not talking about my marriage. I’m talking about the ways I’ve chosen to show up in the world. What would happen if I started living my life on my own terms? What if I stopped bending myself into a pretzel in order to get love/approval/validation from every person who ever mattered to me? What if I just started being myself, and devil take the hindmost? But how could I be myself when I’ve been masking myself for so long that I don’t even know who I am?
Oh. Were you expecting me to have an answer? Sorry. I’m fresh out. But it seems like a good place to start would be to back up and widen the angle of my lens and take a good look at what has gotten me here in the first place.
There have been some really weird ideas about women throughout the ages. We have been portrayed as weak, intellectually inferior, fragile, and mentally unstable. But at the same time, we’re described as dangerous. We’re temptresses. Witches. Unpredictable. Hysterical. Nasty. It seems that our inferiorities are so overpowering that when we do have a strength, we can only use it with evil intent. What a pity.
Through the centuries, have you ever noticed that it’s always the women who are capable of giving the evil eye? You’d think that that would require a certain level of focus, but we are said to be flighty and ruled by our emotions. We are slaves to our hormones. We have no control over our own bodies. (And if it ever looks like we do, that control will be legislated away.)
Witch hunts have been going on in one part of the world or another for as long as there has been recorded history. And why shouldn’t they? It’s a great way to get rid of the outspoken women, the ones who often demonstrate that they’re capable of living on their own, the ones who give other women agency by providing them with folk medical knowledge. Witch hunts still go on today in sub-Saharan Africa and Papua New Guinea.
And in most cultures, throughout time, when women get old and can no longer bear children and have outlived our usefulness, they are all but rendered invisible. Often the men trade old women in for younger models. Sure, they can pay lip service to the idea that they think old women are wise, but they actually think of us, at least on a cultural level, as a commodity with a limited shelf-life.
According to Ancient Greek and Roman mythology, old women could turn themselves into owls who did things like attack newborn babies in their cradles. And until the mid-1800’s, people actually believed that our wombs were wandering, animalistic, out-of-control parasites that ruled our emotions and controlled our bodies. I’m kind of surprised that we have never heard of Boogeywomen. We supposedly have all the attributes, lurking under the surface, waiting to burst out.
The Book of Leviticus in the Bible tells us that a woman on her period is unclean, and so is everything she wears and touches. Are men ever unclean? Not so’s you’d notice.
In the first century, Pliny the Elder warned that a woman on her period could curse plants, dim the brightness of mirrors, drive dogs crazy, and kill swarms of bees. Her mere presence would make iron rust, steel blades blunt and ivory lose its polish. If, by some freak accident, lightning came in contact with her menstrual flow, the storm would be driven away by her flow’s sheer power. Did he witness these things himself? That would have been enough to make me afraid of women, too. But I think people should have been more worried about Pliny the Elder.
About 300 years later, Aristotle, that much-admired philosopher from ancient Greece, thought that women were incomplete versions of men to the point where they supposedly had fewer teeth (wrong). He also thought that women, while superior to slaves, were meant to serve men because they were physically and intellectually inferior to them.
I think it’s only fair to point out that Aristotle only married once, and she was 22 years younger than he was. When she died, he then had an affair with a former slave. They had several children together. He definitely went looking for women who were bound to be unequal in the power dynamic of his relationships. I think that says more about him than it does about those women in particular, or women in general.
Another strange but very convenient misogynistic belief was held in Medieval Europe, at a time when it was believed that the “4 humors” in your body must remain in balance to remain healthy. To wit: a woman who stopped having her period was viewed as more likely to be out of balance, i.e. mentally ill.
It’s strange how menstrual blood was sometimes a danger, sometimes a strength. In the 12th century, menstrual blood was thought to cure leprosy. (I bet it didn’t take long to disprove that one.) Whereas a monk in the 13th century opined that your menses was venomous, and its fumes could poison children. (What was that Monk doing around menstruating women? And was that an argument to get women to get pregnant again as soon as possible?)
In the 16th and 17th centuries, menstruation was believed to be evil leaving the body, so menopause caused a buildup of evil. Buildup of wickedness could turn women into witches. We can’t have that, now, can we? On the other hand, hysteria was caused by a wandering womb. (Good God. Don’t let them get away. We can’t have wombs scurrying about, willy nilly.)
In the 17th century, society really seemed to double down on the concept that women were slaves to their own biology. We were likened to bitches in heat, and the only cure for that was marriage and having tons of children. Nowadays we don’t believe in such silliness. Now we blame what we consider to be irrationality and mood swings to the equally amorphous and impossible-to-define concept of PMS.
In the Victorian era, women were not supposed to have sexual urges, and those that did were deemed to be low-class whores. And women were warned that masturbation would make them flat chested. Clitorectomies were performed to prevent sexual urges.
In the 18th century, if a woman was accused of having a nervous or bad personality, she could be cured by having her ovaries removed, because we as a gender are dominated by our ovaries. They also believed that epilepsy was caused by masturbation, so the logical cure was a clitorectomy. They’d use the same cure for nymphomania. These procedures were still done in the US as late as 1948.
A Harvard professor once wrote that too much book learning could lead to infertility and irritability in women. Better to keep them minimally educated so they could focus on the family. (No wonder I’m so effing cranky.)
In the 19th Century, many thought that strenuous exercise could harm women’s reproductive parts. (I wish I had that excuse. “Pass me a bonbon, dear. I’m trying to protect my lady bits.”)
Before women earned the right to vote, one of the excuses used to withhold it from them was that we have smaller brains. Never mind that they’re proportionate to our bodies. Small brains make us inferior. An inferior brain doesn’t have the capacity to understand politics. (What I don’t understand about politics is how we allow so many men to screw up our democracy and yet continue to re-elect them.)
Here’s a disgusting fact: Well into the 20th century, people in England and US believed that sleeping with a young virgin would cure them of syphilis and other STDs. Even worse, some believed that doing this would cure them but pass the disease onto the girl, and yet they still gave it a try. To this day, some men with AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Thailand still seek out young girls for this “cure.”
Even now, in parts of Germany and the Tyrol, it is considered really bad luck to walk between two old women on a road. Maybe that’s because these old women have had decades to build up righteous indignation over the fact that this type of ignorance still exists. It’s probably the same feeling that I have when someone tells me yet again that women “can’t do” the job I’ve been doing for the past 24 years.
We women have a lot to be angry about. We can be angry without our ovaries telling us to. All we have to do is remember that we all know women who have been physically, sexually, or emotionally abused. Every single one of us does. And it’s the ignorant beliefs above that allow this type of violence to go on without being addressed.
Today, 200 million women are walking this earth who have been subjected to female genital mutilation. And they’re watching it happen to their sisters and their daughters. It’s happening right now as you read this. For the horrifically gory details and the alarming statistics, check out this Wikipedia page.
What’s particularly disturbing about these weird beliefs, which never seem to die, is that they are also held by men who make the laws that govern us. In 2012 Missouri Congressman Todd Akin claimed that “legitimate” rape victims can’t get pregnant. He was echoing the beliefs of Republican Senate Candidate Fay Boozman in 1998, North Carolina State Representative Henry Aldridge in 1995, and Pennsylvania State legislator Stephen Friend in 1988. When will it end?
The only thing that sounds more ignorant than these undying stupidities are women, when they help to perpetuate them. I had a civics teacher in junior high school who stood up in front of the class and said that a woman should never be president because one week out of the month she could not be counted upon to make rational decisions. Even at that age, I was stunned to hear that coming out of the mouth of a woman. Are we seeing a lot of rationality coming out of the White House these days?
But the meme I mentioned above hit me on a personal level because I flashed back to an ex-boyfriend who had really strange ideas about women as well. I couldn’t understand how he got these ideas, because he grew up with three sisters, and he lived with me for 16 years.
For starters, he loved to write, but whenever he wrote female characters, they were always so fragile. At least once per story, he’d have them covering their mouths in shock or fear. Like they were helpless. (How often do you see that happening?) But even worse, he’d describe it as, “She put her hands in her mouth,” which always made me picture a woman with two hands completely stuffed in her mouth, her cheeks bulging like a squirrel storing nuts for the winter. Weird. I think if he could get away with it, he’d have women wearing gloves and pillbox hats with netting, too. But I digress.
Whenever I’d get angry or upset, the first thing he’d ask me was if I was on my period. He didn’t say it as if he were trying to insult me (although it did). He said it as though the answer would explain everything. As if my thoughts and feelings and experiences were immaterial. None of that mattered. My cycle was all he had to contend with.
And once I had a hysterectomy and he couldn’t ask me about my period anymore, he started asking me if I had remembered to take my pills (meaning my antidepressants). It never occurred to him that he was one of the main reasons why I needed the antidepressants in the first place. But yeah, now Barb’s in a bad mood, and we can’t blame it on her ovaries any longer, so it must have to do with her itty-bitty brain’s inability to remember to take the artificial capsule that would tell her the proper mood to be in.
It was so dismissive. So ignorant. So surprising that I managed to get through 16 years with the guy without punching him in the throat.
That meme made me wonder if he had matured to the 20th century, at least, if not the 21st. He is married now. Maybe she had brought him into the real world in a way that I never could. And we’ve all gotten older. Maybe he had grown up. So I peeked at his Facebook page. And it broke my heart.
He wrote a blog post giving advice about being a husband. In it, he said, “Your wife’s body chemistry is different from yours. It will make her cranky, sullen, doleful, euphoric, maybe all in one hour. Don’t take it personally. Be patient.”
Yep. Be patient, guys. Eventually, that hormone monster that’s actually driving your inanimate wife robot will steer her into a mood you can enjoy. Until then, all you have to do is wait. And maybe feed her some chocolate.
Sexism in general is so stupid and so easy to unravel that it’s laughable. So why does it persist? Our society has built this gender system out of fear. They need sexism to remain strong so that men can feel like they’re in control. There’s a lot of societal pressure that props up these beliefs, too. And with the current downward trend in education and the whitewashing of history, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if witch hunts reared their ugly heads again for future generations of American women.
Currently, it’s old women like me who are the scariest of all. We don’t give a shit. We do and say what we want. God forbid we nasty women threaten the accepted power structure in any way. We can’t have that. Maybe if we ignore the old crones, they’ll go away.
So I hope to God that that meme is correct. Because if it is, young women are starting to get a sense of their own agency. They’re beginning to take it for granted. Yes, it’s a little annoying that many of them don’t recognize it for the feminism that it is, and don’t realize what a fight it has been to get them to a place where they could do what they’re doing now, but either way, you go, girls! Don’t ever let anyone try to tell you that you don’t pilot your own ship.
Despite this heartening news, things are not getting increasingly better. In fact, a recent study shows that we still have a long way to go. There is an widening gender gap in attitudes towards feminism in the younger generations. It seems that those very men who are witnessing these women with newfound strength are feeling quite threatened by them.
The struggle lives on. But at least younger women won’t have to start from scratch. We’ve left good notes, and I’m sure they’ll broaden that knowledge base even more.
Sources:
Things People Used To Believe About Women’s Bodies
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