Love in the extremities

A friend has recently started a social media project about peri menopause, as my generation is the first to encounter every phase of life with a terrifying kaleidoscope of physical horrors of womanhood projected annually onto the Sydney Opera House at Vivid.

To be a woman is to be endlessly subjected to a narrative of biological frailty, a meandering pick-a-path of portentous foibles and malevolent corporeality. It begins when you’re about 9 – the whispering hints about periods and ‘developing’, then there’s the reality of dealing with menarche, and then, for the Gen Xers, the ongoing attempts to convince any and all medical professionals that whatever is wrong with you, from rashes to heart failure, probably won’t be solved by going on the Pill.

It’s not just the simple story of contraception, although that is enough of itself. It’s the rise in the preoccupation with this stuff, the deafening roar of body-fear. We are taught to fear every single aspect of our womanhood, to approach it with something between trepidation and naked dread. Limitless news articles warn of the nuanced chaos that our hormonally responsive bodies are plotting against us, a constantly evolving foe just waiting to bring us down.

Obviously some periods are worse than others – pregnancy is a particular nightmare. The culture of pregnancy, in case you didn’t know, provided an early model for all social media – the most dramatic stories are nourished, sensationalised and amplified. In my early motherhood days, surrounded by women who were pregnant or trying to be, I found myself surprised at the reaction to my ‘birth story’, precisely because it was completely ordinary. I’d say something along the lines of, ‘Yeah, it’s really painful, but let’s face it, we’re in a modern western society with free healthcare. If it all turns to shit, and there’s a good chance it will, it will still be OK. in my case, it turned to shit and it was OK’.

I truly believe much of the trauma associated with birth stems from the fact that women fear it, or that they have ideas about ‘the right birth’ and then feel ripped off when it doesn’t happen. These are all emotional responses. They have nothing at all to do with the actual physical reality of birth. If you can keep your shit together you will have a ‘good birth’, no matter what happens. If you lose your shit, it’s going to be awful. To be sure, there are women who end up with injuries from birth, and it’s reasonable to expect that this is difficult to adjust to. I’m not dismissing the fact that women can experience trauma but I think the way we go into this stuff makes us our own worst enemies. And we are encouraged to do so.

I’ve digressed. My point, I guess, is we live in a culture that is increasingly presented as a dualism – either we’re constantly scared of our bodies in a low level way or we’re ’embracing our bodies’ and completely ignoring the fact that they can kill us (the ‘always homebirth’ crew, I’m looking at you).

I don’t want to receive an upbeat blog-newsletter with meme-ified 90s pop references that forewarns me about the next reign of terror my body is plotting against me. For instance, apparently changing hormone levels in the next stage of life will alter my gut biome [problem] and change my metabolism [problem] and also my hair might fall out [problem] .

But I simply don’t give enough of a fuck because I’m now old enough to realise that this, like all of the ‘techniques of the body’ is nothing more than marketing and control, and, moreover, I’ve managed to work out all the other female-body shit that has happened so far without much incident. The first time you give birth your overwhelming observation is, ‘JFC none of that is ever going to come right’ but it does, and quickly. This is the thing about being a placental mammal.

And, without wanting to get too philosophical, I have a dear friend who is in her early 40s and is in the final throes of breast cancer. She will not experience these, ‘horrors’. Her hair has already long since disappeared. It feels so utterly wrong to be fuming about the minutiae of peri menopause or whatever it’s called this week when you’re chatting with someone who is actually dying, someone with children, someone who is so unbelievably loved. It’s just rude.

So, if you are a young woman, perhaps a woman who is thinking about having kids, or is having problems with your female arrangements, I would recommend only reading medical papers, if you’re really flummoxed, you could try WAITING IT OUT. Because the one thing that no one ever fucking says, with all the female-body-doom-scrolling is that things do change, and often, it’s for the better. You have a baby and your body heals. I read somewhere the other day that ‘birth trauma’ is defined as, ‘not fully healed after 3 months’. Who the fuck decided that 3 months was the cut-off date? This only makes sense if you think of this as part of a medico-marketing scheme to convince you that normal things should be pathologised. Another example – I can’t tell you the number of women I know who had terrible migraines throughout their childbearing years that remitted with menopause and yet I bet that if I googled, ‘menopause’ and ‘migraine’ I would get a litany of articles about how migraine is worse with menopause etc. etc.

Men do not get this shit, and partly it’s because their biology is different, obviously, but it’s not that different. Men’s hormone levels change over time. They enter different phases, their metabolism changes, they find themselves losing their hair, or at a higher risk of reproductive cancers. Where are the endless instagram accounts chirpily warning of their imminent demise?

So, my feminist anthem remains the same as it always has – fuck right off with that.

The fidelity of identity

When offence is truly harmful.

Disclaimer, first up – I’m not a social worker and I don’t know much about training to become one other than knowing it requires a degree. A neighbour is undertaking this degree and informed me that she was required to role-play and pretend to be someone in need of assistance from a social worker, like a homeless person, or perhaps someone who needs to navigate the intersection of aged care and hospital. The aim of the exercise is to present some real-life scenarios and practice techniques for helping people who might be distressed or unable to adequately communicate what they need.

I thought this sounded like a good idea. The students disagreed. They refused on the grounds that it was unethical and potentially harmful to, ‘pretend to be’ something they are not. The teacher accepted their position wholeheartedly and the exercise was abandoned.

The trouble is, social work is about helping people who are almost always different to you. To me, the fact that students refuse to imagine the lives of those less fortunate than themselves represents a triumph of neoliberalism – the celebration of the personalisation of problems. A person who is homeless becomes a “homeless person” – it is an identity, rather than a situation. We know it is now part of their identity because 23 year old social work students refuse to role play, ‘being a homeless person’. They’re not role playing being homeless. They’re role playing being a homeless person.

This conveniently switches the focus from the structural reasons for homelessness, to the homeless person themselves. Everything is oriented around the “homeless person’s” experience of life, obviating the need to examine, discuss or mobilise around the reasons for becoming homeless in the first place.

There are various terms to refer to the cultural shift towards the individual and their identity, and away from the broader structures and institutions of society. Many of these terms have been adopted and bastardised by the far right. We are warned about ‘identitarianism’, where newer identities are dismissed as nothing more than rarefied, gilded narcissism.

In the last week Viktor Orban genially explained this phenomena to a credulous Tucker Carlson, whilst the latter squirmed with delight. In America and the rest of Europe, the focus is on the self. In Hungary, he opined, the central unit of society is self sacrifice to the [Christian] family. We, in the West, are all a bunch of self obsessed cry babies, with no understanding of our broader place in the world, the explicit suggestion being that we should stop supporting Ukraine and all be nicer to Russia because Orban lives next door. Orban’s performance was a master class in populism, playing up accessible, domestic issues (culture war) while ignoring the broader context, (that the US is helping Ukraine to escape from Russia’s control, just like it did with Hungary 50 years ago). Perhaps Orban is hoping for a window-office when Hungary becomes part of Russia again – who knows?

Anyway, my point is that all of these culture wars are nothing more than naked power. Every time someone asserts the terminating clause, ‘I don’t identify as….’ any and all other considerations are rendered null. The idea that one’s personal identity is so sacrosanct it cannot possibly be imagined by another human being has been floating around for a long time, but it’s taken a while for it to realise its full power – the complete sterilisation of political change.

Representing an identity that is not your own opens the door to taking liberties, for sure, and it should not be done lightly. We are right to have championed the views of marginalised perspectives to obtain better insights into how things actually are in the world, and how they differ for different people. However, there’s a point where things get silly – women arguing, for instance, that men cannot be obstetricians (this is a remarkably common position). Men’s and women’s bodies are different in many ways, not just the grosse reproductive stuff. Our organs, endocrine systems, vascular systems……so many things. To suggest that a man cannot be an obstetrician leads us to a place where women cannot ever perform a surgery on men and vice versa. Can we only provide services to people who are exactly like us? Do I need to find a surgeon who is a red head, has working dogs and a motorbike?

Because that’s where this stuff leads. We should always encourage ourselves and others to try to imagine what it is like to walk in someone else’s shoes, to have someone else’s identity. We should listen to others and let it inform our own views. Yes, we might fuck it up, but it’s important to try. The fidelity of identity is the most dangerous game of purity politics.

Are all those YA books about foppish vampires are written by actual teenagers? Or actual vampires?