On courage

So before I go any further, I want to apologise for not being a good enough feminist to have been keeping up with news in the world of Men’s Rights Activists. Whilst searching the internet for new inspiring pictures to put in my desktop background folder, I ended up stumbling onto the publicity leaflets for MRA haven “A Voice for Men”- infamous in the land of feminists for being some of the most awful examples of graphic design ever made (below are probably the two best)!

But very persuasive, as you can see! Anyway, it turns out that when I wrote last week about having “taken the red pill”, I didn’t realise that this had already been co-opted by every single vaguely nerdy person in the last 15 years MRAs to describe their own awakening regarding the feminist conspiracy to draft them into the military and force them to be crappy fathers. I feel like this could be a bonding moment between me and misogynists- like a real life version of that “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” song, but about overcoming the zero-sum model of gender relations rather than just continuing to date a clearly unsuitable person.

It also turns out that whilst I was fussing about the State of the Planet Conference, over in the rest of Development-Land they were holding the first annual Day of the Girl Child, celebrating progress in expanding education and choices for girls and pointing out what needs to be done in the future. Somewhat fittingly, this day ended up coinciding with the week in which members of the Taliban in Pakistan decided to end the life of 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai, whose crime had been to be too “western minded” and to loudly advocate girl’s education in her region of Swat. The day itself focused on ending the problem of child marriage- it is estimated that 25,000 girls aged 11-16 get married every day, an event which almost always signals an end to their education and makes them much more likely to become an adolescent  maternal mortality statistic (maternal mortality is the leading cause of death for 15-19 year old women).

Whilst a lot of the dialogue from this day passed me by, I did get time to read one particular story from UN Women which resonated. It was about Fetura Mohammed, a girl from Ethiopia who decided, upon being informed by her father that he had arranged her marriage at aged 14, to use her knowledge of laws surrounding the issue and the help of local organisations, to go to the local court and fight it. After successfully winning both her legal case and the case for educating her and allowing her to make her own life choices to her father, she now combines continuing to go to school with working with the groups which provided her with awareness of her own rights, and helping to distribute that knowledge to others.

To contrast, when I was 14, I was writing weird derivative fantasy stories in order to attract the boy of my dreams, and worrying about whether or not my year 9 exam results were going to be better than my bestest frenemy. Due to the vagaries of the British schooling system, I made some subject choices which at the time I thought were going to affect the rest of my life (largely due to aforementioned frenemy trying to convince me that I’d never go to a good university without a GCSE in Spanish, to which I say se te escapo la tortuga, 矮个子), but which turned out to have been completely irrelevant to anything ever. The battles I thought I was fighting were 1) imaginary and 2) conducted against a different 14-year-old girl, whose actual level of control over my life chances was completely non-existent. For me, being 14 was just one particular year of being in an education system where everything was set up for me, a British girl living in the UK*, to succeed.

The first time somebody told me that, as a girl, I could not expect to do as well or better than the boys I was being tested against academically, was when I went to a university that has  a“finals gap”, where women consistently underperform compared to men in pretty much all subjects (stereotype threat much?). But it was never accompanied by any sanctions; there was no suggestion that it was therefore pointless to let girls into the university because they wouldn’t match the expectations of the boys**. At no point in my academic career has courage ever been an integral part of my experience or progression as a female. Ambition, perhaps, and a certain amount of bloody-mindedness, but never courage. No male relatives have ever beaten me for doing what I want to do, and no female ones have ever emotionally blackmailed me into “knowing my place”. My parents are as disinterested in my eventual marriage prospects as I am, at least for the foreseeable future. No international organisation has power to stop me from doing what I want to do, no gunman is going to break into my Beijing dormitory and try to end my western-minded life.

It’s an uncomfortable truth that for the vast majority of feminists like me- including, no doubt, myself- that this privilege is what lets us be feminists at all. Faced with constant threats against our lives (either in the literal sense or simply in the sense of being able to belong to our own families and communities in some sense), most of us would not be pontificating over subtexts of male entitlement in bar etiquette or whether the word “slut” should be reclaimed or avoided altogether- we’d spend most of the time trying to protect ourselves in the immediate sense, trying to figure out how to better our situations within the constraints of the situation we’re in. This is true of all of human progress, of course- being at the sharp end of social change always have to be the preserve of the courageous and bright few (and those with access to organisations like ActionAid in Ethiopia, which helped Mohammed understand her legal rights and bring a case against her father to prevent her child marriage), with the rest of us able to push the boundaries further from a position that’s already relatively secure.

I don’t mean to suggest that the big problems faced by North Americans and Western European women are at all trivial (indeed, in a few cases, they look pretty similar to those faced in Taliban-influenced areas of Pakistan or Ethiopia, and we’d do well not to forget that). Sexual assault and domestic violence aren’t trivial. The wage gap is not trivial, particularly given how many families and children are supported by women alone***, and particularly given how it becomes exacerbated when race is taken into consideration. The assumption that women should raise children without society considering it a significant, valued labour undertaking (because raising children is something women can do naturally!) is not trivial. The way in which women are encourage to perceive our own bodies and the time and money we’re expected to spend “fixing” them is not trivial. The thousands of remarks catalogued on “Everyday Sexism” might seem trivial when taken individually, but what they add up to certainly is not. The weird guy who leered at me and called me “honey” when he was trying to get past me at the bar on Tuesday night was trivial, but he exists on a sliding scale of male entitlement which gets non-trivial pretty quickly. Arguing that men are discriminated against because they could be drafted to fight (even though they haven’t been in the US since the 1970s and even longer in the UK) is a bit trivial, sorry MRAs.

What these things are not, with the big exception of sexual violence, is individually threatening.**** Wage gaps, childcare expectations, conversations with weird men that we’re socialised to be too polite to escape from, enforced beauty regimes, institutionalised gender equality in exams: all of these are issues which grind us down rather than terrifying us into submission. And then we are shown that we live in a world where 14-year-old girls are shot for going to secondary school, or trapped into marriages with much older men, and the fact that we don’t have that particular problem seems to make frustration with our own gendered lives a bit ungrateful. This idea particularly tends to pervade conversations I have about gender equality in China- now that women can get educated and find good jobs and aren’t physically crippled as girls and then shipped off to live under a mother-in-law at age 11, surely it’s time to stop worrying? It’s enough to have to worry about finding a decent husband (before age 27, remember!) and getting promoted beyond a certain point, and having fair enough skin and beautiful hair, and of course overcoming the various moments of stupidity that are just so female- we can’t even seem to cross the road without getting run over and let’s not even try doing economic calculations- without having to also worry about feminism. Plus, feminism scares men away. There's only so much any person can do.

So how the hell do we contextualise all of this- our lives, our gendered problems, our non-gendered problems, other women’s problems, the world’s problems- without going completely insane? Especially since we’re living in the first era (imperialism definitely does not count) where globalisation seems to demand that we do so. The privileged educated white feminist response- even when faced with diverse voices within their own countries, let alone having to contend with those from outside- is too often to either retreat into privileged educated white female problems (like the “right” to not sit at home being looked after by wealthy men, which has never been a representative lifestyle for most of the world’s women!) or, less often, to get very worried about issues like child marriage or female genital mutilation or the position of women in Islam which we don’t actually have any insight into whatsoever, and to impose our rather irrelevant thoughts onto those debates. I'm not going to be an apologist for cultural relativism or anything like that, because I've only ever seen that used to deny women personhood based on an accident of geography, and I frankly think it’s an insult to suggest that there is such a thing as a culture which cannot secure universal human rights. But what those big, scary debates need- and have- is the courageous voices of girls and women who actually contend with these issues to advocate and to be heard.

We privileged few have two safer but far more difficult tasks. One, to keep listening to what is going on all over the world- listening, not speaking, and certainly not talking over! And two, to keep moving forward ourselves on issues which demand the patience of us all rather than the courage of a few. It might just be the fact that I’ve started paying more attention since I began this blog, but I feel like the dialogue about feminism and gender issues in the UK and the US is becoming more mainstream once again. That’s great, but it’s also reaching an audience of both men and women who have been privileged throughout their lives, who can see what is going on elsewhere, and who conclude that the situation we face now is trivial and natural. Most young girls in the UK grow up like me, completely unaware and indifferent to gender issues until pretty late in their childhoods. It’s speculated- by Gloria Steinem, for example- that maybe there is a different “radicalisation” lifecycle for women, that we begin conservative and only start to understand what has been taken from us later on in our lives, that the counterpart to an “angry young man” is actually an “angry old woman” and we shouldn’t worry too much about how non-radical our youth are. Perhaps that’s true, but if so it means women won’t fight for change until it’s too late for them as individuals. Better, perhaps, to start now, with what we know- because for now at least, there’s always a next step.

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*And for a while before that, Australia, but the same point holds.

** Although I’ve no doubt that there is plenty of institutionalised sexism in an admissions procedure that overwhelmingly still depends on whether one or two old white men warm to you in twenty minutes

***This is feminism’s fault for being so damn discriminatory against rights for fathers, of course! Misandry <3

**** For some women that’s probably an eyebrow-raisingly big exception to make, sorry about that. Living in China, where I can go home alone at any time of the night without any fear whatsoever (and before then in Oxford which was pretty much the same deal) means I’m absurdly privileged in this respect.

Thinking like a feminist

A couple of weeks ago, I got rather angry. This is not in itself a gripping news event, both because I am a relatively uninteresting young woman of no particular importance to the rest of the world and because I spend a significant amount of my life getting rather angry about things. I was an easily enraged person long before I identified as a feminist, and I hope to be one long after the patriarchy comes crashing down around our heads and feminist identification is no longer necessary (which is going to happen any day now, right?) However, this was the first time that getting angry led to my getting to speak at a conference right after the UN Deputy Secretary General, so in the context of my life it was a relatively important event.

What happened was, my school, who are not known for giving significant notice of important events at the best of times, decided to e-mail my class during the week when we were all busy working to a thesis deadline, asking for proposals for a two minute slot talking about China’s development in Colombia’s State of the Planet conference (there are various school related reasons about why this was a Thing which are very dull and irrelevant). The evening before the deadline- which just so happened to be a Saturday evening, just to add insult to injury- S. told me that he was preparing a proposal of majestic proportions. After reminding myself of what he was actually talking about (thesis deadlines are pretty all-consuming sometimes!), some remarks on bad timing and the importance of not being lame on a Saturday night ensued; then I jokingly suggested that, As A Feminist, I should write one about “teh Wimminz” to defeat his manly well thought out “triple bottom line” approach.

To which he told me that, if I wanted women’s concerns to be included in the Sustainable Development Goals, I could always write a paragraph that he could put in “in one form or another”, but he didn’t really see how I’d be able to write a whole proposal from my own perspective.* Development is about people, after all, not women. Needless to say (it is what I started the post with after all), this did not go down well in the Land of Adrienne. What followed was an incredibly lame Saturday evening of coffee, feminist inspired socially based sustainable development goals and a monologue of “I’ll show that twatbag, girly paragraph in his manly proposal is it, why don’t we see which other manly places I can stick this feminist paragraph, bloody wanking tosspot” &c. &c. By the end, I was too caffeinated and rage-addled to sleep and ended up sinking into a vague stupor of feminist developmental rage until the morning.

Upon rousing, I had another look and it turned out that my anger-induced views on sustainable development goals were actually not too bad, although to be fair they were nothing particularly groundbreaking either. I submitted and through various- largely luck-based- mechanisms, ended up landing the slot. Then, ironically, I ended up having to cut the thing down so heavily to fit into the time slot that I almost ended up losing the explicit references to gender-related targets entirely. As it is, to the casual observer, my feminism kind of does look like a paragraph in the middle of someone else’s socialist idealism. A fitting end to a misinterpreted joke, perhaps.

Except that’s not the right distinction. The ten seconds of my two minute speech where I explicitly make reference to breaking down stereotypes about female leadership in China through international goals about female representation do not represent my feminism hanging out in the middle of a bunch of totally objective other stuff about social development in general. The reason all of that other stuff is in there, is also because I’m a feminist. I could have just as easily written an hour long speech about the same subject, still from a feminist perspective, and it would have contained the same proportion of specifically gendered stuff. That’s why it’s so infuriating for people to mistake “being a feminist” for “having a narrow focus”- even beyond the fact that women are 50% of the human race, and therefore talking about women ought to cover half the relevant things about humankind, which is also about as much as you can cover by using “people” as a proxy for “men”.

No, it’s more than that. The day I signed up for my feminist license (totally a thing), I didn’t stand there and swear an oath that the only thing I would ever talk, write or think about from that day forth would directly involve uteruses, boobs, bras, Judy Blume, bell hooks, yoga, skimmed milk or a combination of the above. I just looked one final time at how the majority of the world likes to generalise from “men” to “people”, and to use the word “girly” like it’s some sort of degrading insult… and I decided to stop framing things that way. All of the things. Given a bit of knowledge on the subject, I could literally talk about everything from breakfast cereal to cartography to East Timorese politics using this lens- some of it would come out looking the same as if I’d framed it using the patriarchy, of course, but I would still be applying feminism to it and I wouldn’t have to just refer to women in order to do it. To bring out a ridiculously outdated and overused move reference, the day I started being a feminist was the day I took the red pill**. Now I am outside the Man-Matrix, looking in, and let me tell you it’s an interesting view.

Of course, putting this way makes the whole thing sound a bit edgier and more awesome than it is. Once one has taken the step- conscious or otherwise- to not look at things from a patriarchal perspective, there’s a sense of incredible freedom, but it comes at the price of nobody back in the Man-Matrix really understanding where you’re coming from any more. It’s particularly prevalent when talking about actual “women’s issues” like birth control and abortion, where discussions are too often characterised as feminists vs. other people (they’re not). Most of my information about this comes through the lens of listening to other people talk about US politics, which I have no more than a general interest in, but when blustering Tory moron Jeremy Hunt decided to weigh in on UK abortion law a few days ago, I had my feminist fury activated with the stupidity of the debate. How can they be talking about survival ages when the entire point is about not forcing human beings to use their bodies to support the lives of other organisms! And yet perhaps, without being outside the Man-Matrix, it really is just accepted that some humans will have to do this and some will not and the way we draw that distinction is of no interest to society. It’s what my old Philosophy tutor used to refer to as the War of Incredulous Glances- how can we get anywhere near a political debate when it’s not being held anywhere near our own terms?

So, are feminists really doomed to be the human equivalent of the 52 Hz whale, wandering the earth singing our high pitched lady songs whilst the rest of the whales hang out in different registers? Women and feminine people have been banging on about our own value and rights as more than just ornamentation for centuries, in one way or another and there’s been significant scholarship on the issue for a rather long time too; yet here we still are, being asked to be paragraphs in the books of men. I guess the only way forward is to keep demonstrating that we are talking about it. I’ve no great love for Australia’s Julia Gillard (because, did you know, it’s possible for different people to see things through a feminist lens and come to different political conclusions, another thing the rest of the world seems to struggle with at times- although maybe it’s just because it’s more entertaining to view disagreements between feminists as bitchy irrelevant catfights!), but like many women I was incredibly excited by her sustained attack on the misogyny of Tony Abbott, the leader of the opposition, simply because it forced a patriarchal institution to at least listen to a feminist criticism of a man’s*** behaviour in a realm which isn’t traditionally “female”. Because maybe then we teach people that feminism is relevant to that realm, and we can actually move on to talking about the real issues as a society, rather than whether or not women should just shut up and move back to the kitchen.

(Transcript here)

 It’s imperfect, of course. For every person who goes “wow that was an inspiring instance of behaviour”, there’s another one going “haha, stupid woman” and yet another going “but she opposes gay marriage and literally cut benefits to single parent families on the same day as this happened, which negates all value of this speech”. If you’re reading this at the time of writing and really want to appreciate how enormously diverse (and largely stupid) reactions to feminism are, try looking at the #sorryfeminists hashtag on Twitter- something which started as an in-joke mocking stereotypes about feminism which has now been co-opted to perpetuate stereotypes about feminism, mock feminists from an MRA perspective, give non-feminist women a space to vent vague confusion about feminism and give the occasional wit the space to make a blowjob joke to an unreceptive audience. To be fair, it was a vague joke to start with, but the speed and aplomb with which the majority of people have completely missed the point is pretty depressing from this standpoint. Especially talking over the internet, where people can express quickly and rudely about their point-missing, knowing that the only way forward is to talk to those who literally don’t have the mindset to interpret what you’re saying in the way you mean it is an extremely depressing thought.

Still, we keep going, largely because we all kind of have to. The point of the Matrix is that you don’t get to plug back in- that bad guy who tried to ended up getting horribly electrocuted, remember?- and, in the same way, once you start thinking about things from a feminist perspective, I don’t think it’s possible to ever go back to not caring (unless it really is about breakfast cereal in which case yeah I’m pretty sure I think about that in the same way as everybody else.) Tomorrow, I’ll give a feminist speech about sustainable development that nobody will really know is feminist, because it’s really not possible for me to write any other kind of speech without regarding it as an exercise in fiction. I’m sure plenty of people in the audience will automatically disagree with my being too idealistic, too socially focused, too uninterested in easily measured goals. That’s OK, they don’t understand why it’s important to me. Maybe one day they will.

(Want to watch me take Columbia University by storm? Go to http://stateoftheplanet.org on October 11 and watch the live webcast at about 9.40am New York Time. That’s 9.40pm Beijing time, 2.40pm British Summer time. If you live somewhere else, you do the maths!

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*I’m being a bit disingenuous, to be fair- the implication was that it would be impossible to write a comprehensive two-minute speech about the topic from a feminist perspective, rather than that I would be incapable of doing it. It’s still wrong, of course, but not actually a personal insult.

**It’s red because menstruation. Really.

*** Though if Australia’s parliamentary behaviour is anything like the UK’s, it should more strictly be “institution’s”. 

The night time worries of the Y chromosome

It would seem that we reached an important milestone in gender equality last week: August 24, 2012 marked the first time that a trite feminine platitude became important enough to write a New York Times opinion piece about. Or, at least, it marked the first time I became aware of a New York Times opinion piece inspired by a trite feminine platitude, which in my selfish little universe is basically the same thing. I refer, of course, to “Men,who needs them?”, by biology and criminal justice man dude Greg Hampikin: an intriguing piece of literature sent to me as faux pacification after I went on a Caitlin Moran related reading strike of all poorly-thought-out woman-related media* (more on that in a few days). The big controversy raised here is that the answer to “Who needs men” may in fact be “not babies”, an answer which, as controversies go, seems a bit surreal given the way gender stereotyping has traditionally divvied up the whole childcare business anyway. In other news, it turns out that pears may not be necessary to the process of cider making! There, I just turned thousands of years of human history and the brewing traditions of charmingly-accented western folk on their head. I think I’ll reward myself with some of this new-fangled apple cider.

I am being disingenuous of course. It’s not yet possible to write an article as glaringly superfluous to the human condition as “Women are better than men at growing small humans and feeding them milk!” But it does seem like this, and the existence of sperm banks, and an apparent lack of ideas about what fathers might do that might complement the whole physical baby-farming business, is supposed to lead to a sense of futility about the entire male gender. A large portion of this is based on the absence of men in what must be the ultimate anti-choice fable about the origins of life: our identity apparently begins not at conception or even at ovulation, but at the formation of our ovum inside our mother’s foetus. That’s right, you were once inside two reproductive systems at once, like a little unicellular Matryoshka doll. Then you came out of one vagina, hung out in an ovary for a while, went on a rocking waterslide for a couple of days, possibly saw an enormous penis which is even now the root of many of your subconscious insecurities** and then you met a sperm which, for the purposes of this story, was not very relevant because men are not very relevant. After that complete non-event, you ruined your mother’s body, came out of another vagina, ruined your mother’s body some more, and that’s the end of all meaningful stories about where babies come from. I’m so glad a New York Times sanctioned biologist was around to share this profound origin story with me!

To be fair, I think Hampikin’s only fundamental flaw is that he fails to situate this narrative of the human condition in its natural home: in the kind of pseudo-profound metaphysical worries one gets at 3am when you accidentally make yourself a non-decaf coffee before bed and then discovered your pillows have, to all intents and purposes, been replaced with sandbags. For instance:

“What is my purpose in life? Should I have been born? What if I hadn’t been born? Will I find love? Will I be reincarnated? Was I reincarnated before? Did I find love when I was reincarnated before? What if I am supposed to find love with the same person I was in love with before I was reincarnated, but then he was really bad and got reincarnated as a jellyfish? Or a dragonfly? And then maybe I will be a jellyfish when he’s back to being a man and we’ll never meet again. Or wait- what if he never got born? Maybe he’s sentient somewhere as a gamete, but unable to find me! What if the person I am supposed to find eternal reincarnating love with is trapped in an ovary????”

 When I consider that the likes of Greg Hampikin have to contend with “What if men are less biologically necessary to the continuation of the human race than women?” on top of all that nonsense, I do have to wonder how men manage to sleep at all.

A skim of the article’s comments shows that this is serious threat to certain invidivuals’ masculinity- perhaps the social construction of male-as-first-sex might not be completely justified from nature? Hampikin doesn’t offer any alternatives to sperm in terms of fertilisation, thus saving the male organism from complete obsolescence, but it seems it genuinely is jarring for anybody who isn't accustomed to being referred to as “the weaker sex” or “the second sex” or “the fairer sex” to suddenly confront even the theoretical notion that they might be… “The extra sex”. “The questionably relevant sex.” “The sex which just needs to wank in a cup (and technically not even that but let’s not push this too far).” Suddenly, thanks to the night time worries of a biologist with a Y Chromosome (and True Feminist Ally) the really obvious truth that men don’t grow babies inside them has become a deeply subversive issue at the heart of gender relations! Again, I am blown away by this novel and profound conclusion. I can just hear the machine of gender discrimination grinding into reverse with this bombshell- we’ll be writing World Bank reports on male infanticide and missing men before the decade’s out.

Mocking male egos is a cheap shot, however, especially when the egos in question are those of people who habitually comment on online news opinion pieces. The interesting thing about the whole thing is, for an article that is ostensibly about child-rearing, this article has nothing whatsoever to do with child-rearing. It’s true that babies have to come from somewhere in order to be reared, and the storks are probably all busy catching fish and sitting on stork eggs or whatever it is storks do when they’re not posing for “you just had a baby!” greeting cards. I can’t help but note, however, that I’ve got two parents who are both very important in my life, who have done a little more in the past twenty-four years than just contribute genetic material and ensure I got born. My memory is a little hazy on some of the details, but I distinctly remember some passing on of important life skills happening there. Learning to walk and talk and read and ride bicycles and do cross stitch and scuba dive, for instance. Some assistance in getting nutrients and resources. General love and encouragement as well, that sort of thing. In fact, the only thing not provided by a parent is practically the only post-womb activity the article mentions- a long-running supply of breast milk. I’m sure this oversight was second only to the pre-conception penis exposure in irrevocably scarring my poor infant psyche. I have been, in both the traditional and the important senses, very lucky- traditionally because I was raised by my two direct antecedents, who still spend a statistically significant amount of time living under the same roof and have been married 26 years today (go parents!), and importantly because I got to spend my childhood being looked after by loving adults, who were interested in raising children, in a secure environment.

And that’s where this whole 3am-male-irrelevance-nightmare seems to miss the point in quite an important way. Sure, the production of babies requires more direct involvement from females than males, but as a conception of parental responsibility that’s a starting point at best. Human reproduction needs men because human children are rubbish an incapable and need responsible adults to stop them from falling off mountains or getting eaten by wolves. And aside from the semi-necessary involvement of women in breastfeeding there is nothing to stop these all-important caretakers from being men. In fact, As A Feminist I’d say it’d be positively encouraged! Perhaps it could even help us poor woman people to collectively move on from the whole work/child/”supermum”/double burden business that keeps popping up and confusing us and making stupid people question if "feminism has gone too far?" now that women have to make life choices. Which then keeps me and my X chromosomes up at night: not worrying if feminism has gone too far, but worrying about how exactly I am going to be able to convey to the people talking about it just how stupid and misguided and utterly ridiculous they are.

Of course, there’s far more to this whole child-having business than I can realistically cover here (which is probably why it's consumed rather a lot of humanity's collective energy for a very long time). For instance, I am dimly aware of (and Hampikin briefly alludes to) swathes of sociological research on whether one’s caretaker humans should indeed be those all important direct antecedents, or whether being raised by four men, a non-binary femme and a talking mongoose would have the same impact. There’s also the matter of how society differentiates between mothers and fathers: paternity leave and custody laws and a whole host of issues which, bizarrely, are a prime stomping ground for that wonderful beast, the Men’s Rights Activist- the kind of charming gentlemen who tend to concern themselves more with finding submissive women to give them blowjobs without expecting reciprocation than fighting for the right to blow noses and change nappies. I’m going to leave ideal family structure to the experts and MRAs for another time, however, and finish with a plea for us all to think about the real victims in all this: unfertilised ova people. Having to live for 10-50 years in a cramped ovary, seeing two vaginas but both of women related to you and from the wrong side, and they don’t even get to be a fully chromosomed person at the end of it! Now there’s a thought that can truly cross gender boundaries and keep us all awake at night.

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*The astute reader will note this is an excellent justification of my lack of proofreading. It’s always good when one can disguise ones laziness with “principles”.

**  NOTE FOR BIOLOGICAL ACCURACY: You never saw this penis. It was on the other side of the cervix to you. But Freud never let little problems like realistic female biology get in the way of his psychological theories, and neither shall I.