reminder: nipples are not naturally centered and forward-facing. your nipples point the way they do to make it easier to nurse a child. this is just one of the many things I wish I knew before porn destroyed my self-image, but I’m glad I know it now.
One of the oddest things about learning facts about the female body as part of healing my gender dysphoria is that I’ve found what is sexually attractive to men is often at distinct odds with what serves a practical reproductive function. I would have completely balked at reading something like this earlier in my life given that I conflated the two– I would have internally screamed that I do not want my nipples to exist either as a pornographic caricature or as the reproductive ideal, that I want to exist them beyond any of these things, that I just want them to exist without having to think about them or think about others thinking about them– but I am in a much different place now, and I am fascinated now by my own earlier reactions.
Young women are often taught that these two things are one in the same, that becoming or growing-into the ideal woman means “blossoming” into a body that functions as a baby-making-machine-for-men. As a gender dysphoric girl I was terrified of puberty and the rituals around it for this reason. I tried not to acknowledge that I was bleeding when I had my first period and hoped that I was gravely ill instead, crudely crumpling toilet paper under my vulva, because I believed that it not only merely signaled that I could theoretically become pregnant but that I was a woman in the most vulnerable sense, that I was now an appealing candidate for men to force sex and pregnancy upon. I grew breasts at a young age (I began growing them at age 9, although I did not become large-chested until I was in my twenties), even earlier than my first period, and I viewed them as something like alarms emerging from my flesh, telling the world that I was sexually viable and exploitable, and prematurely insisting that I “manage” the obscenity and temptingness of an entity (my body) with which I formerly considered myself fully coextensive. I was deeply existentially frightened by what was happening to me; I felt like I was being wrenched from myself and handed off to men and the women who wanted to deliver me to them.
I think I was startled to find that as I began to unpack my gender dysphoria and my fears about reproduction that you can indeed uncouple “baby making” from “for men” and that even in a heterosexual context, female people have their own distinct stake in creating and maintaining new lives that exists entirely separate from the male stake in continuing their gene lines. Just because many male organisms are parasitical and must use the bodies of female organisms to reproduce, it does not mean that female organisms are “for males”, nor that our reproductive functions (such as the human female menstrual cycle or our vaginal ecosystem) exist solely for males to utilize as a substrate for copying themselves. In fact, many female animals have defense mechanisms against male animals who force attempts at copulation, fertilization, or implantation of a viable but unwanted embryo, such as many female ducks, who have convoluted vaginas with forks and dead ends, or female hyenas, whose vaginas exit through an enlarged clitoris (which is used in their social behavior like a pseudo-penis), or even certain female dragonflies, who fall out of the sky and feign death when they are being harassed by male dragonflies seeking to mate.
What is sexually attractive to men is not necessarily that which enhances a woman’s ability to reproduce or care for her young infants and/or children, since her ability to do this is not directly linked to whether or not she will bear or care for his children. If a female person shows signs of being fertile (as the crudest of psychologists studying attraction, as well as pick-up artists and men advocating for male selfishness and cruelty, often put it) this is not enough to tell a man whether or not she would make a suitable partner for sex and/or reproduction. What is “attractive” in women is instead that which signals her willingness to submit to a man’s reproductive needs. This will of course differ by culture, as what leads to male reproductive success in one culture is different than another, because different cultures have different landscapes for competition between men, different resource distributions, and even different numbers of available women, for example. But this results in situations such as the above, that the ideal size and shape of a woman’s breasts for her to be considered prototypically sexually attractive is totally unrelated to not only what is functional and comfortable for her but also relatively unrelated to whether or not she can nurse her own damn children.
To elaborate: the breast size and shape cited as “ideal” is unlikely for most women at the peak of their reproductive viability (the middle to end of their twenties) when they are less likely to miscarry a pregnancy, less likely to suffer birth complications, more likely to be healthy enough to endure pregnancy, and most able to support and care for a child. If a woman chooses to attempt to achieve this ideal through cosmetic breast surgeries, she can threaten her ability to breastfeed, either by damaging her ability to produce milk, making it uncomfortable or difficult to feed her children from her breast or to pump milk, or causing her to fixate on the aesthetics of her breasts so much so that she is reluctant to use her breasts to feed her child. If she merely chooses to display her breasts in a way that mimics this ideal, through using bras or other garments to shape them and hold them in certain positions, she is doing absolutely nothing that has to do with her own reproductive capabilities in and of themselves. Women’s choices about their breasts are primarily constrained by the fact that men do not find a natural adult female breast shape attractive and instead demand a breast shape and position (but not size– they do prefer them large) that is associated with girls at puberty, who have never breastfed or been pregnant, one that can only be achieved by adult women through the discomfort of wearing restrictive, feminizing clothing literally engineered to make her breasts appear that way, or through paying to undergo the surgical rearrangement of her own flesh. Her choices are not made in the context of a world that makes salient to her anything about how her breasts directly affect her ability to conceive, carry, birth, or raise a child, although women undergoing the most radical of breast surgeries (and tellingly, usually reduction surgeries) may be guilted on the basis of their “destroying” themselves and their future ability to become “a good mother”.
The thing about reproduction is that female human beings have absolute sovereignty over the potential existence of a human life. We are in control, ultimately, whether an egg is fertilized, whether a fetus comes to term, and even whether an infant survives or not, and men spend a tremendous amount of effort to prevent us from exercising this control. They ban and confiscate and destroy contraceptives, they pass legislation against abortion and throw women in jail who have miscarried, they stop women from putting their own life before a fetus inside them. They keep us captive in their houses, they watch what we are doing and laugh or maybe hit us, they don’t let us tell each other about how our bodies work, they take our daughters from us through marriage, through rape, before we can even warn them what will happen in appropriate and approved words. We are told and shown over and over again that our bodies are for them, our bodies are for their children, our bodies are not for us and they are not our own, and we do nothing but sit in incomprehensible silence and “incubate” the personal will, the genetic material, and the very continuation and lineage of men.
This is not true. It is perhaps the greatest lie ever told, and yet nearly every man has told it. And women tell it to each other, lest they be cast out as something even worse than a vessel: a whore or a dyke, those women useful only for abuse and the women utterly useless. While they’re widely derided, the thing that lesbian women who have declared all women a kind of lesbian do get right is this: we are all fundamentally a “dyke”. We are all useless at bottom, we are not actually a kind of tool for men no matter how hard we try to shape ourselves into one, there is not and can never be an appropriate “use” for a woman in the way that there is a use for a hammer or a shoe. We just are, we just exist. We can give birth, and we don’t have to. Nobody made us to be female, although we are female in the particular way we are for reasons, reasons we are capable of understanding, reasons we can use to guide our behavior to do what we want. We do not have to care about how we might be used, about what our bodies can do for men or the women too attached to them; we can eat snacks all night and go to sleep surrounded by salt and crumbs, we can love each other, we can sing the Smiths poorly in the car, we can build a house with our bare hands or just rest them in a cat’s fur, softly, beside us.
I still do not wish to ever have a child. I don’t really want to become pregnant in a world where this would mean that I must carry a child with the genetic material of a man, where pregnancy is still life-threatening and potentially disfiguring due to the total devaluation of the living, breathing, thinking, and feeling woman keeping the fetus alive, where giving birth happens in a traumatizing context among strangers, who are tasked with viewing your body clinically and who are ready to violate your right not only to integrity and dignity but to your own life at any hint of baby-danger, where a mother’s recuperation from birth is considered almost completely unnecessary and her stitching her body back together is just kind of inconvenient, and where two mothers raising a child together is unsupported, forgotten until considered obscene, a weird artifact of maternal baby-lust among women too distorted to know themselves. I could not name what my distaste for pregnancy was before I knew the things I know now; I said the word “parasite” far more than I said the words “unnecessary violation of my humanity”. Perhaps both are still true; the female body is sovereign precisely because a fetus is a type of parasite, and she reserves the absolute right to flush the thing from her at any time. Gender dysphoria contains many very primal recognitions of female reality, and my healing does not involve rejecting those truths, but instead reincorporating them into who I am now. But I also recognize that there could exist a different world, where bearing a child was compatible with my complete existence as a person. We do not exist there, and I have no hope that I will ever see it. But I think of it sometimes, when I cleave myself into mirror-shard reflections, trying to know what sort of woman it is I am, what use I’d like to have, where I went between all these gaps.
holy FUCK like can you please publish this amazing essay. this is the best thing i have ever read? i need to go lie down
What is “attractive” in women is instead that which signals her willingness to submit to a man’s reproductive needs.
Some “feminists” refuse to acknowledge the biological differences between woman and man because men told us those differences make them superior. They think admitting the differences is admitting weakness. But I don’t think being able to knock someone out faster than I can is proof of superiority 🙃
It’s one extreme to another. Men have spent centuries telling us the female body is inferior because it’s different. It’s so ingrained in our heads that daring to say “the male and female bodies are different” automatically means you’re admitting you agree with what you’ve been told.
That is not the case.
The male and female bodies are different. That’s a fact. Separate yourself from all this bullshit you’ve been taught, and you’ll realize that’s a neutral statement. Difference is not bad. One sex is not inferior or superior to another. Our bodies are the way they are for reproductive purposes only. Acknowledging and understanding that male and female bodies are different, but that doesn’t mean one is better than the other, is possible.
What the hell happened to all you liberal idiots preaching “diversity”? That’s a huge buzzword in higher education but so far it all seems empty to me. Do you know what that word fucking means? It means understanding and embracing differences, using them to learn, to grow, and realize that things like religion, culture, race, sex, sexual orientation influence how people behave, think, and act. It means acknowledging that some things don’t work certain types of people, so you find the things that do.
Balance the fucking scales. Slide to the middle of the spectrum. Admitting differences is not admitting defeat. You only lose if you honestly believe with all your heart that one sex is inferior to the other.
Also let’s not forget women didn’t think up their inferiority themselves. We know how amazing women are. The idea that women are inferior because of our differences is on men who are obsessed with domination and think that being physically stronger makes you superior because you would be able to rule with terror if you wanted to. So many men relish in the knowledge that they would be able to hurt you if they wanted to. When you start paying attention to that it will make you resent men on a whole new level. I can’t count the amount of times online and in real life I’ve encountered men saying they enjoy or get off to the idea of being and I quote “the weaponised half of the species.” This idea is rooted in male sadism and ignoring it is letting men off the hook.
how the fuck did all of those renaissance dilettantes learn so much crap? Like they spoke 3 languages and were foremost in several branches of science, plus they wrote poetry, played the violin, and were master artists? And they still had time to be gay?
none of them ever did any laundry at all
The emotional and physical labor necessary to maintain the lifestyles of Renaissance and Enlightenment polymaths was shunted almost entirely to their uncredited servants, slaves, wives, and daughters.
Whenever we compare ourselves to the ‘genius men’ of the past, and wonder why we fall so short, remember this: their intellectual capacity, energy, and freedom was because there was someone else washing the damn dishes.
Rosalind Miles’ “Who Cooked the Last Supper?” is about how women throughout history provided critical services so men could have leisure time.
I’m gonna depress the hell out of all of you. ready? ok go
so, that “stop devaluing feminized work post”
nice idea and all
but the thing is, as soon as a decent number of women enter any field, it becomes “feminized,” and it becomes devalued.
as women enter a field in greater number, people become less willing to pay for it, the respect for it drops, and it’s seen as less of a big deal. it’s not about the job- it’s about the number of women in the job.
observe what happened with biology. it’s STEM, sure, but anyone in a male-dominated science will sneer at the idea of it being ‘for real,’ nevermind that everyone sure took it more seriously when it was a male dominated field. so has happened with scores of other areas; nursing comes to mind
so the thing is, it’s not the work or the job that has to be uplifted and seen as more respectable. it will never work out, until people start seeing women as respectable
but there’s a doozy and who the fuck knows if it’s ever happening in my life time
“observe what happened with biology. it’s STEM, sure, but anyone in a male-dominated science will sneer at the idea of it being ‘for real,’ nevermind that everyone sure took it more seriously when it was a male dominated field.”
Personal anecdote time! I’m in a biology graduate program. An acquaintance wanted to introduce some guy to me because his son was thinking about becoming an undergrad science major. When he found out I was in the biology department, he grinned and said, “Well, I guess that’s kind of related to science.”
I gave him what I hope was an icy look and said, “Isn’t it strange how men outside the field started saying that right around the time biology majors shifted from mostly male to mostly female?”
The guy got this look on his face like he was about to play the “just a joke” card, and then an older woman who had been standing nearby, talking to someone else, turned to me and said, “The same thing happened with real estate.” She went on to explain that, over the course of the career, the male-to-female ratio among real estate agents had dropped, and the pay and “prestige factor” of that job dropped along with it.
This is also famous for happening to teaching. Keep an eye on medicine over the next fifteen years and watch as it becomes less prestigious and less well-paid.
It also happened to secretarial/administrative work – in the 19th century, clerical work was utterly respectable and seen as requiring quite a lot of talent and skill (which it still does!) but then along came the typewriter and women entering the field and HEY PRESTO “she’s just some secretary”
at my university, chemical engineering, or chem eng, was often referred to as “fem eng” why? because it’s an exact 50/50 ratio of women to men, which clearly makes it too feminine. in the 70s/80s chemical engineering was one of the most important and hardest engineering fields (plastics! pulp and paper! OIL) but now that there are more women in the field it’s considered an easier field, in comparison to other fields.
for example, i once heard a girl in mech eng list some of the engineering fields in the order she thought was hardest to easiest. you know what it was? electrical, mechanical, chemical. it’s absolutely no surprise that this list is also a handy ordering of fewest women in the field to most women in the field.
AND, another point! this happens the other way around too. computer science related fields used to be dominated by women, which made it not very important (switchboard operators? yup). once men started taking over the field, well that’s when the big money and prestige came in.
The field of anthropology, which is becoming female dominated from what I can see, has been determined to be useless by some. (I’ve even had girls in STEM fields tell me I don’t study a “real science” so how’s about that internalized misogyny for ya) When I was majoring in anthropology, Gov. Rick Scott determined that Florida didn’t need any more anthropologists and wanted to reduce funding to programs and increase funding to STEM programs. While not considered a STEM field, anthropologists have contributed to the research behind STEM programs and provide a wide variety of services to Florida alone. A team of anthropologists created a powerpoint “This is Anthropology“ to talk about dozens of programs and services they contribute to in Florida which include healthcare programs, education programs, disaster relief, forensic investigation, environmental programs and conservation efforts, research for fortune 500 businesses, agricultural programs, immigration programs, programs and services for the elderly, etc. I’m also in the field of education, and we’re constantly made out to be overpaid (we’re not) and made out to be incapable of doing our jobs without very strict guidance.
It’s all very insulting, really. No matter what we study. No matter what we do to earn a living. It will never be good enough.
It isn’t limited to the US either. In my father’s home country, medicine is mainly pursued by women, and thus, being a doctor isn’t seen as prestigious or respectable.
I’ve had the same thoughts, especially in regards to bio and anthro.
This is why the supposed “debunking” of the wage gap is utter bullshit. Anti-feminists want to tell you that women make less than men because they “just go into different fields”, completely ignoring the race gap and completely ignoring the fact that “just going into different fields” erases all context and social conditioning regarding WHY women go into different fields and WHY those fields are less paid.
So I know the current Discourse pits trans activists and radical feminists against each other but genuinely it’s completely possible to care about trans issues and want them advanced or to be a trans person while acknowledging radical feminist theory and not overriding women’s rights and issues
There’s a hack circulating for how to get around safe mode. It works, but don’t do it.
If you run an adult blog of any consequence – *it’s a trap*. Not intentionally, but it’s still a trap.
You’re *very likely* to get banned altogether. That’s unfortunate for you because you’ll lose the ability to *redirect* people to wherever you’re setting up.
I mean, it’s funny that they messed it up again, but think it through before your set your house on fire for the lulz.
The intended audience for this post is adult writers and performers working to salvage their user base. If you run an adult blog for funsies, and you wanna burn it down for funsies, more power to you.
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