What does it mean to be a woman?

2022 was the year we were asked 'what is a woman'. Turns out, we've been asking the wrong question all damn year.

2022 was the year that the question: ‘what is a woman’ suddenly became hard to answer. Even a soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice was stumped by the question, deflecting it with the mind boggling answer: “I’m not a biologist.”

A woman is an adult human female. In a sign of how debased and deranged our societies have become, that simple answer is in many circles unspeakable, heretical. Perhaps that is because, in part, we have not been fully honest in the answer to this question: ‘what does it mean to be a woman?’ 

The answer to the question ‘what is a woman?’ is specific and narrow.  The answer to ‘what does it mean to be a woman?’ is all-encompassing, involves some level of subjectivity — and is therefore harder to pin down. But it’s important to try. Because there are some universal truths about being a woman that transcend nonsense cultural programming — but instead of recognising and understanding those truths, we tell girls and boys all sorts of demoralising, half-baked and misleading garbage. This week — as I turn 47 years old (!!!) —  I will attempt to articulate some of those truths as I have come to know them, experiencing life these last 47 years.

One: our biology is intrinsically tied to every other aspect of our experience. While  that is true generally about humans — physical wellbeing is tied to emotional wellbeing in men and women, after all —  the physical changes that happen to girls and then to middle-aged women are more intense, more primal, more painful, and quite frankly, scarier than what males go through. While the difficulty of women’s biology is widely acknowledged in public discussion, it always seems to be in the worst possible way. For traditionalists and conservatives, women’s reproductive capacity and the complicated equipment it requires are seen through a saccharine and somewhat sanitised lens. For the progressive left, it’s the increasingly gross opposite: an almost fetishistic close-up of menstruation and the overuse of the word vagina. (I’m old enough to remember when this word was rarely spoken in mainstream conversation, and I kinda wish we could go back there.) 

While attacks on female bodies used to be the purview of the conservative right, in the last few decades we have increasingly come under attack from the left (anyone who understands the nature of misogyny should not be surprised by this.) I failed to notice this until the last few years, but it started, like so many other terrible ideas, in the warped detachment of academia quite a long time ago. An influential essay by feminist theorist Donna Hathaway, published in the Socialist Review in 1985, is an early signal of the schizoid female-body-loathing-yet-also-appropriating ideology that dominates our culture today. “There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses,” Hathaway wrote. 

The correct term for Hathaway’s analysis, I believe, is horseshit. Not only is it just an exercise in intellectual masturbation, it is also the foundational principle that has metastasised into middle aged, violent male sex offenders being allowed to serve time in female prisons by the simple act of putting on a dress. Hathaway’s premise is what leads to the celebration of porn-addled fathers deserting their families and cutting off their genitals because they think they can be women. It’s what convinces young teen girls to have their breasts cut off because growing into a woman is…nothing. It’s worse than nothing. It’s a curse.  

The lack of wisdom on either side of the political spectrum denies women access to an essential truth— our female bodies are actually value neutral, we are just mammals after all. But our procreative power is so great that it should be no surprise that legions attempt to control it on our behalf. The left’s denial of female agency has convinced many young people that girls can’t afford tampons and that their female bodies are nothing but a total drag — either making them a target for sexual violence or holding them back from achieving great things in life. The right, on the other hand, implies that everything was better in the past. While conservatives correctly point to all the harms done these last few decades in the name of feminism, the implication always is that before being legally emancipated, women were wholesome and their children, delightful. 

Two: the power of female beauty is one of the most powerful things that exist. I have yet to come across a think piece or podcast that gives an honest reckoning over just how entrancing a beautiful woman is. The image of a beautiful woman casts a spell over men and women alike, regardless of sexual orientation or age, and produces in the viewer a powerful longing that in many cases is not sexual desire. It is to either be her, or be with her. And for my entire lifetime, (did I mention that’s been 47 years!!???  culture has been absolutely saturated in images of female beauty, arrayed in displays that have become more and more explicit. And I’m not even referring to pornography. These gorgeous faces, toned legs, flowing hair and heaving breasts have cast something of a spell over girl children in particular, eliciting a hunger that is focused on the superficial, artificial, and is located outside the self. Beauty does not automatically make the beautiful woman powerful. Though it does sometimes, it can also make her the target of destructive envy and violence. And of course, beauty does not last forever. Beauty’s power lies in the emotions it elicits in the beholder, emotions which none the parties will automatically even recognise. Longing, desire, emotional hunger, all these emotions can be triggered by a beautiful woman, and can bring chaos. Because we live in a secular, mechanistic society, we no longer believe in the casting of spells and of dark, psychic powers. Our education and civilisation have rendered us helpless against them. It’s not for nothing that the Taliban forbid all imagery of people. It’s the very power and beauty of the woman that produces in some men a fetishistic obsession with appropriating it, to the point where they are willing to castrate themselves in service to their fantasy. 

Beauty is also hierarchical, natural (as in, you are born with it) and unfairly distributed, which makes it impossible for our meritocratic, progressive-left society to understand. As a result, our image-saturated brains are constantly receiving messages that give us an impractical, and increasingly robot-like, standard of beauty, and we have no coherent moral framework for processing this. I believe the ubiquity of plastic surgery, fake hair and nails, and very questionable fashion are the ugly result of this decades long barrage on our senses.

Three: family is not a source of woman’s oppression, it is a source of woman’s power. I’m going to sound conservative in saying this (and who cares if I am?) But I cannot understand how modern culture portrays motherhood and domestic life as an exercise in female humiliation and subordination. What?? This is a truly demented inversion, and believing it is only possible if your culture has been totally cut off from tradition. The normalisation of it through popular culture is nothing short of destructive. If you are a mother and your family is not treating you with respect, then you need to start kicking some ass and knocking some sense into the ingrates who live with you. The trope of the put-upon working mother, whose husband is a helpless boor and whose children are horrible brats, is a sign of the collapse of traditional female wisdom and power. And we’ve traded that in, for what? Fat models on the cover of fitness magazines? A nightly bottle of wine? Medication for our moods and our hormones? Why does mainstream Anglo culture denigrate the middle aged and older woman, but in highly patriarchal and/or traditional societies older women rule over their families with an iron fist? 

Of course, these thoughts have been shaped by the women who raised me. And those women were — to a man — absolute ballbusters. Maybe I’m a total outlier, but I do not have any weak women in my family. Since the family I happened to be born into skews heavily female, I never fully bought the patriarchy argument. My devoutly Catholic grandfather definitely tried to be patriarch, but he had seven daughters who flagrantly and enthusiastically defied his every moral dictum. The women who raised me were never shy, modest, paragons of virtue. They were saucy, bawdy, broads who cursed like sailors. When I was growing up they tended bar and waited tables and drove taxis and worked as nurses. They worked hard both inside and outside the home, with food being an absolutely central way of expressing love. They adored babies and were very open, and enthusiastic, about sex. The pieties of their wannabe patriarchal father were not just unheeded, but thrown back in his careworn face.

In that way, I grew up totally unburdened by the notion that to be female was to be weak and projected upon. I don’t think many of my female friends did either. Contemporary culture and sexual politics would do well to bring some of this reality back into the conversation.

My grandmother and her seven daughters on her 50th birthday.