a vindication of the value of women

Woke up tired again. I don't think I've slept well in at least three weeks; I fall asleep immediately every night but foul dreams creep through my sleep like wisps of mustard gas, destroying my rest. I wake with them still poisonous at the backs of my eyes but I can't remember them, and I wake tired, as though I spent the night crawling away from something. This morning, however strategically I applied cover-up to my eyes, the sockets look sunken in and I feel hideous and scary, something small children would hide from behind their mothers' knees.

Then the monthly hormone crash has struck, leaving me blearily irrational, irritable, prone to tears. Fortunately this will only last a day or two, but ugh, they're not going to be pleasant days this go-around. My parents are both brittle this week and I hope I'm not unbearable; maybe I'll shut myself up in my room so I don't bother anyone. If our house had a tower I'd hunch my way to the top and lurk around ringing bells. And not with cute talking gargoyles, either.

But I can't hide in towers swinging from bell ropes; I have to earn my bread by moving in society, and it's probably better that way. I just hope no one notices when my eyes overflow without provocation; it's embarrassing.

I also hope fervently that I can be present today. I tend to get all lost in my head on days such as this and even more absentminded than usual, to the point where even my body has trouble with its autopilot and I bang my hand on doorknobs, my legs on doorjambs and my elbows on the edges of counter- and desktops. (Maybe I'll start claiming an inner ear problem. That sounds a lot more respectable than clumsy.)

Not an auspicious night to work at the bookstore. (Next to last shift. Next to last shift. Next to last shift.)

On the other hand, if I'm all lost in my head, I don't care about things as much; foggy awareness buffers the instances that would ordinarily bug the hell out of me.

MP and I were discussing womanhood on Sunday. Both of us have (I believe), at one time or another, for medical purposes, been on the Pill; neither of us is now, and we prefer it that way. However much the ebb and flow of hormones drags our moods around like the tides after the moon, it's cyclical, it's natural, and it teaches us to deal with life in its rawness. Blunting that, relegating a woman's monthly hormone crashes to female craziness, labeling it negatively and medicating it away makes us sterile in more ways than one. I don't like the focus on sterility anyway; the potential, the ability, to bear a child is the one thing that only women can do, and it's a beautiful aspect of femininity, something to be respected if not treasured, and not scorned or stifled.

Our bodies give life. In our death-driven culture (and I'm not only talking abortion here, and even if I were, I wouldn't be holding the tired old argument nobody listens to anymore; I'm also talking about the sedentariness, the overwork, the obesity, the redefinition of beauty as skeletal to kill the people who don't weigh too much, the drug use, the meaningless sex, the disease, the godlessness, the isolation, the overwhelming emptiness that everyone can feel gnawing at the backs of their minds so that they live even more frantically attempting to ignore it) women have fallen prey to a horrible ideology. Our wombs are an object of horror, a potential threat to autonomy and wealth, and only acceptable if fallow, like a field sown with salt. Our breasts have been divested of their nourishing purpose and exist to sate only the appetite of the eyes, so that even we have grown uncomfortable with the idea of nursing children, viewing it as strange, painful, a little bit repulsive, and, ironically, unnatural.* We are not supposed to be fertile anymore, as a general rule. And sexuality stripped of the facet of fertility turns inward, eats away at the human spirit.

If it weren't enough to warp social views of giving birth to and sustaining children, even our monthly cycles have fallen under widespread criticism, from no one more than ourselves. We stem the flow of blood at the source (I know it's sanitary that way, but I'm looking at this from a symbolic, as opposed to medical perspective) or try to eliminate it altogether (one more recent version of the Pill allows a woman to menstruate only once every three months). The effects of hormone fluxes are seen as detrimental to our relationships, our days of premenstrual irrationality something to be suppressed in order to maintain order -- when, if approached more gently, it might come to be recognized as a time of rare fragility when a couple can come even closer together, because for the rest of the month, strong women in particular keep themselves together for everyone else, refrain from voicing objection to various hurts, and for these few days they can't hide those hurts, and for these few days these caretakers need someone to take care of them. Gentleness does a lot more good than Midol, let me tell you.

This isn't me being all fanatically Catholic; I'm not going to launch into a rant about birth control, because I don't think that birth control is always a problem, even (or perhaps especially) within marriage, and I don't think the Church's heavy-handed emphasis on ways to be "open to life" is doing much good. But think of the design of sex, think of the purpose of female fertility: Love was made to give life, and not just to the couple. Yes, it's supposed to be recreational (which is why human women, unlike, for example, lionesses, do not conceive every time they have sex); yes, it's supposed to be the highlight, the pinnacle of human love; it's also supposed to be joy. And joy does not come from self-interest.

But in a culture that sees children as a financial burden and sex as stringless, female fertility is a social evil. Instead of living in and celebrating a cycle of give and take, of caring and being cared for, of unconditional love, we creep around swallowing tablets that take away the effects of womanhood. As a result, we're tired, brittle, bitter and bleak; our skin looks dry and peeled; our eyes are hollow; and we apologize for what we are, ashamed of ourselves, of our hormones, of the way our bodies and our minds are inextricably linked, of our internal messiness that defies, for a little while, the prized traits of order and reason (doesn't our society sound a little like a morgue? Surgical, sterile, steel tables, no room for a pulse).

I realize this is all generalization. (Remember, I'm not too rational myself at the moment. But, as I've been saying, that doesn't invalidate any of this.) People are excited to have children, people love their babies, celebrate their births. But there's something weird about a lot of it. Something clinical in how we raise our children -- consulting the books, withholding discipline, regulating meals, counting calories (or not paying attention at all), scheduling days around how children are supposed to develop, lavishing them with toys and goodies like they were puppies, trotting them out to play groups and failing to give them moral grounding -- smacks of a continuation of the same sterility, the same focus on cleanliness and order that does not allow for the beautiful burgeoning messiness that defines life at its most basic level. And often it seems that the adults, men as well as women, aren't allowed to live, either.

A society reveals its health by its view and treatment of its women, and, by extension, its children. We may have the power of the vote (not that many of us use it), the power of equal opportunity employment, the power of political independence, the power of choice; but underneath all of that power, lauded a little too loudly, we are kept as statuesque machines -- lifeless creatures of usefulness and objects of lust, whose true womanhood must be kept quiet, hidden or obliterated altogether.

We're supposed to be so much more than that. Life is supposed to be so much more than this. Love is supposed to be so much freer, so much more sacrificial, so much more life-giving than we allow it to be. And everyone suffers; notice I'm neither blaming nor attacking men: I love men, and men are as badly hurt as women by woman's current social conditions. When women are not allowed to be women, men cannot be men, and children cannot be children. Women are supposed to be sustainers, and if we can't embrace the ebb and flow of the cycle that symbolizes a sustainer's role, we can't sustain; we're divorced from our own natures. Men suffer from that lack of sustaining love, children suffer from the absence of their mothers' nourishing presence, women suffer for want of all that manhood is supposed to be, and no one is quite fully human.

So we're all in this bind together. It's a significant problem, and the love of Christ is the only answer. I think a lot of times Christians, for all their indignation at the way "things are going," have not really realized that this is a post-Christian era. We follow the dictates of the times because for so long those dictates coincided with Christian values. They don't any longer. We need to start putting our heads together to identify how the values we're raised with -- education, finances, marriage, children, home buying, retirement, friendship, sex -- differ from the guidelines of the Scriptures, and then plan ways to live counter to those differences.

I'm not saying we all need to be weird home-schoolers; but our kids absorb as many secular ideas from their Christian parents as they do in their secular schools. It's reached the point where we have to choose, consciously, the ways laid out for us by Jesus -- our society will not guide us in those ways by default like it did a hundred years ago. Examining, and revolutionizing, the way we view, treat and cherish people as human beings, starting with eliminating the shame of womanhood (because the treatment of women defines and prefigures the treatment of everyone in a society, not because I want to be first in line; and I recognize fully that a lot of that starts with us, with an openness to who and what we are, with learning to be who and what we are), seems like the best place to start.



*BIG CAVEAT: I am NOT saying that women's breasts are only for nourishing children, nor that the appetite of men's eyes is of itself a bad thing. Quite the contrary. It's the imbalance that breeds problems, which, by the way, is exactly the problem I have with how the Vatican tends to deal with sex -- by swinging too far in the opposite direction for the sake of being reactionary instead of progressive. You can't emphasize one element of sexuality to the detriment of the others. The sexuality of women's breasts is as beautiful as their function in nursing babies. Think Song of Songs, here. The soul and body "dripping with myrrh." There's a powerful description of physical desire. The intensity, the physicality, the beauty of sex are to be as much a part of sexuality as its potential for creating life. When you really look at it, and examine it through a lot of history and many cultures, it would strongly appear that we don't have sex in order to have babies; we have babies because we have sex. Which says a lot of good things for sex. The whole thing is to be enjoyed in all of its ripeness and richness, the whole thing is natural and good, or was created to be.