Women’s War With Ourselves

The Most Important Lessons Series

Most Important Lessons is a series of ten letters to my teenage daughter. When she was one year old, I helped her learn to walk and talk. Now, these lessons on healthy sexuality are the most important I can teach her. In this one, I tackle periods and the pesky idea that women are somehow the second sex.

At its heart, this is a letter about shame. It is a shame fueled by three great lies. Without them, we would awaken to realize that there is no greater blessing than being born a woman.

Dear Eve,

Sitting amongst a circle of my friends last week, you gazed at us with ease and declared, “there is so much power in a woman’s beauty.” How surprised I was to hear you say it, as you are coming of age in a generation that shuns gender in general. How right you are.

A soul, just yesterday arrived at womanhood; I am often caught breathless by the power of your beauty. It is a thing so potent that it can silence a room and can cause many a heterosexual man to lose his mind. I am a student of history and cannot think of a time that that pure power was allowed to just be, wild and free.

Burnt at the stake? Yes.

Legislated? Yes.

Policed? Yes.

Celebrated? Ever so rarely…

It is a tricky thing, helping you to celebrate your beauty because you are so much more than your radiance. You are curiosity and intellect, able-bodied and kind. As a human, you are born to live your purpose, as all humans are. And still, there is a radiance in you that is undeniable. To look at you is to see life itself.

“To look at you is to see life itself.”

For most of the last 10,000 years, cultures have related to women’s beauty as something sexual. While it is true that being in the presence of a woman’s beauty can stir a desire to draw close to her, to have her and hold her, to devour her, labeling the power in a woman as sexual is to tell only half of the story.

Mother of All Life

Men and women are different. As a woman, unlike men, you have been born with the ability to carry life within you and to give nourishment from your very flesh. It is nothing short of miraculous. To gaze on a woman’s beauty is to see the very pulse of life. Perhaps for this reason, the Bible names the first woman Eve calling her “Mother of all Life.”

The fact that you are born with the physical ability to menstruate, become pregnant, and nurse from your breasts does not mean that you must use these abilities. They are not a command, nor are they, god-forbid, a curse. They do not encapsulate the totality of you. You are much more than these biological abilities. Still, they are a part of you. To deny their potential is to deny a part of yourself.

Likewise, your body’s potential to carry children does not mean that these systems always work perfectly. Nature is messy, our bodies most of all. Fertility and infertility are heavy burdens for women to bear. They are weighty because they are precious.

Shame Where Reverence Should Be

Rather than celebrating women as source of life, our culture polices the pulse of life as it moves through women’s bodies. The policing comes in the form of subtle messages, many sadly whispered from mothers to daughters, from the advertising industry and the law.

No matter the source, the root is the same. Patriarchy fears radiant women. Untamed, we are too powerful. Rather than cheering on girls and women to thrive, thrive, thrive, Patriarchy tames women by regulating our most basic human drives: Hunger, Arousal, Aging.

In physics, change is the only constant. In a body, you are programmed to do only three things. To live, you must eat. To survive, you must procreate. Day by day, you will age, whether you like it or not. Food, sex, and aging are non-negotiable.

“Don’t get fat. Don’t be a slut. Don’t get old.”

The messages “Don’t get fat. Don’t be a slut. Don’t get old.” put women at war with ourselves and our most basic nature. What better way to diminish women’s power than by forbidding the very things that are unavoidable for all human bodies? Mother Earth has made the first two quite pleasurable, yet, women’s relationships to these three facts of human life are fraught. The sum total of the energy and financial resources women have collectively dedicated to taming our needs for food, sex, and aging could feed the world many times over.

At the deepest layer, Patriarchy’s policing of women is expressed as disgust. When a woman savors delicious food, when she bleeds each month, when she takes pleasure in her sexuality, she is met with judgmental disdain where reverence should be.

Such snickers and glares will break your heart if you let them. The most important thing I can do for you as your mother, beyond loving you, is to help you to understand them so that you can become immune to them.

Internalize Shame

As my daughter, you are still relatively healthy. Whereas you are still taking pleasure in food and aging is still a landmark awaiting you in your distant future, the shame you cannot help but have internalized already is a sense of embarrassment around your period.

It is true. Periods can be hard to manage and often arrive before girls have begun to think of themselves as women. Whereas so much in 21st-century living is within our control, the arrival of your period each month is not. It’s just something that happens, and when it does, it can be uncomfortable, red, and messy. Menstruation, especially when we meet it with resistance, can impact mental health as well.

Menstruation — Aunt Flo, Bloody Mary, the Rag, Moon Time — is a hormonally controlled process that prompts your body to release the uterine lining that has built up, preparing your uterus for the possibility of carrying life within you. In addition to causing your period, such hormones can also impact your overall sense of well-being. For that reason, it is so important to talk with me and with those adults who are here to care for you if you are met with deep sadness for a few days of your cycle. Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), a chemically induced depression that can precede your period, is too common and totally treatable. The same goes for bad cramps. Don’t suffer alone. I can help, and good doctors can help.

I believe that even chemical processes like PMDD are related to internalized shame and Patriarchy. You are made to bleed. Your blood is a reminder that only you have the potential to carry new life within you. Making friends with your period, learning to track its arrival and flow, taking the days you bleed as a time for inwardness and self-care will help you to turn your blood into a blessing.

My favorite nomenclature for menstruation is “moon days,” a term rooted in Native American tradition (source). There is a moon inside you that waxes and wanes on approximately the same 28-day cycle as the shining moon in the sky which governs the tides. Your moon cycle connects you to the natural world, and some evidence shows that it connects you to other women as well. It should not cause you suffering. If it does, ask for help. I am here for you.

Woman as Source of Life

Archeology reminds us that there was a time before Patriarchy (and some rare matriarchies have survived until today (source). The oldest archeological layers we’ve discovered, those that date back 10,000–30,000 years, remind us that women were once revered for being the source of life. The oldest renderings of deity we have found are shaped as voluptuous women, bellies and breasts spilling out one over the next, symbolizing her thriving.

Venus of Willendorf, BP 25,000 as shown at the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria (CreativeCommons 4.0)

As you come of age as a woman daughter, throw out your barbies and take images like this 25,000-year-old voluptuous Venus as your inspiration. When you taste food, know that it feeds your thriving. When you bleed, know that your blood is proof that your body can do what no man’s body can. When you age, know that you are becoming the Crone, your wisdom rich with your embodiment of life all these years.

Patriarchy has historically met these postures of women’s thriving — devouring food, passionate lovemaking, bloody moon cycles — with disgust. I beg you, daughter, be deaf to their lies. Love your body. Love life. Love the gift Life has given you to be, if you so choose, a bestower of life.

To be a woman is a miracle. Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.

Yours,
Lilith

About the First Three Lies

In his groundbreaking work Homo Deus, Noah Yuval Harari explains the power of story or shared cultural myth to transform civilization. He remarks:

“Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states, or corporations, no complex human society can function. We can’t play football unless everyone believes in the same made-up rules, and we can’t enjoy the benefits of markets and courts without similar make-believe stories. But stories are just tools. They shouldn’t become our goals or our yardsticks. When we forget that they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality.“

Ten thousand years ago, patriarchy — the political system that establishes men as heads of their households — offered the world a story so compelling that it has seduced us ever since.

The world, a chaotic place, says Patriarchy, was shaped and formed by a Father sky god who offers protection and order. His embodiment on earth is man, from whom woman was taken. Man’s purpose, the story goes, is to subdue the earth, to bring forth food through the sweat of his brow.

Patriarchy’s story changed the world, offering us, among other things, the agricultural revolution, also known as the Neolithic Revolution, which took place about 12,000 years ago.

No story has had more profound an impact on the world than this one.

Thanks to Patriarchy’s story, we believe that the planet is ours to use and abuse. Patriarchy’s story divides the world into order and chaos and into those who dominate and those who are dominated.

No story has done more damage to women than Patriarchy’s story, as in it, women are defined through the male gaze. Her identity is determined by the impact she has on men.

Patriarchy’s story rests on these three false claims. They are:

1. Men are physically superior to women.
2. It is men, not women, who make us feel safe.
3. Humans emerge from the body of a man, supporting the claim that lineage should be traced through the paternal line.

They are Patriarchy’s three foundational lies.

Never has the power of myth been more apparent than in its convincing civilization of these three great lies.

What is in fact true is that every human being ever to walk the earth was born from the body of a woman. That body is by order of magnitude more capable than that of the male body in that it can withstand the pain of childbirth, produce milk and gestate an infant for nine months. Once leaving the womb, almost all humans were cradled in the arms of women. Indeed, the foundation of attachment theory is that the unconscious felt sense of deep safety humans need to survive is established during the first months of life, generally within the bond between mother and infant.

It is time we set straight the three great lies told to us by Patriarchy these last 10,000 years. The truth of the human condition is that we all, every one of us, emerge from the womb of a woman who was endowed with the miraculous ability to menstruate and gestate new life. We only survived infancy because we were held in loving, protective, caring arms, so often belonging to a woman.

 

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

 

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Photo credit: iStock.com