Bodies are for peasants
Glosswitch has thoughts on Germaine Greer and the hatred of old women.
She starts with bodies, and how vieux jeu it has become to take them seriously.
Once upon a time, people thought that there were bodies that gestated new life and bodies that did not. That there was a way in which you could tell – not always accurately, but generally so – which did which. This led to people being given different names on account of which of the two categories their bodies appeared to fall into, categories not based on any complex chemical or neurological detail, but just on the question “does your body look like the kind of body that can get pregnant or doesn’t it?” Because reproduction – the mechanics, the ownership, the ideology – matters, or at least it used to, back when bodies were a thing. Back when we understood gender as power – patriarchy/matriarchy, paternity/maternity – and not as each individual’s private domain.
Today we know that to be old-fashioned nonsense. Who thinks it still? Old people. Old women, to be precise. Creaky, decaying second-wavers like Germaine Greer, who, the righteous legions of Twitter inform me, will in any case be dead soon enough.
I’m always curious about people who look forward to the deaths of women they dislike, so I clicked the link. It’s a Twitter “activist” I’ve seen before, who calls herself Germaine Queer haw haw.
Germaine Queer @infurioustoo
True fact, Germaine Greer is 76 and will therefore be dead sooner than most of the rest of us.
Activism at its finest.
Old women who refuse to think themselves beyond the body. Watch out, younger women. Stay vigilant, don’t mention those vile secretions, don’t mention the work, or this could one day be you.
No no. Today’s wonderful young people will be the first generation in history to not age. They will be 24 forever, and perfect forever, and more right than anyone else forever.
“Biological life,” note Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, “impinges directly on the group activities of production and play.” To lay claim to having a female body is to be behind the times. Didn’t you get the memo? Don’t you know that they don’t have to make women like that anymore? Mother Nature is, as the Tampax advertisements remind us, a creature to be outsmarted. Don’t be the girl who leaks rust-coloured blood on her new white skirt. Don’t be the employee who gets pregnant, the carer who falls outside the markets that matter, the woman who dares to have pubic hair and odours and wrinkles, all those things that might make you more than an idea.
Barbie dolls forever.
That @infurioustoo twitter account is one that I remember. She unleashed an unsolicited (in the sense that I had no idea who she was and we’d never previously interacted) stream of invective at me for making a comment at the FtB B&W. It was bizarre, violently aggressive, and extremely hostile. Unhinged, even. The person who suggested that @AoifeLovesOwls should kill herself regularly approvingly retweets @infurioustoo.
Birds of a feather.
Wow. On the one hand, opinions (even those as objectionable as some of the ones Greer has voiced) on gender literally endanger the lives of trans people. On the other, openly wishing that people who hold those opinions will die, and even encouraging them to kill themselves, is totally fine.
What? What on earth does this even mean? Sure, we can pharmacologically or surgically redirect the natural reproductive potential, but such efforts wouldn’t be necessary in the first place if there weren’t some biological sex-driven events going on. Just because we’re not all sitting around bonding in the Red Tent anymore doesn’t mean that the basic *functional* definition of a traditionally female body is obsolete. Jesus.
That’s a fine, snarky, moving piece from Glosswitch. It goes well with Ursula K Le Guin’s Introducing myself
A very, very fine piece of writing.
This is basically a kind of fable, of the sort philosophers like to tell; it sounds exactly how it would have happened if language were being invented by mathematician cavemen. It sounds remarkably like the fable that libertarians tell, about how government was invented. We don’t actually know how government, or sex, or families, were invented. The one thing we DO know, for certain, is that it was nothing like the above fable.
(I’d like to see a dramatization of the fable, though. “Ugh! Thag do sex to Grog many times; no baby! Could be Grog have no bumps? Bumps on chest important for make baby? Go find bumpy-one! Ask if bumpy-one know anything about this!”)
We know it’s false because social groupings predate the genus Homo. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzee had social structure. We have no idea whether the females did all the child rearing, or whether they shared the duties, or whether the males took over after the baby was born, or what. We have no idea whether a troop of our chimp-like ancestors consisted of one family or many. Whether it was led by the biggest, strongest male, or by the oldest female, or what, we have no idea.
What we DO know is that long before we evolved language, we already had some sort of social structure, which we used to solve disputes, decide who got the choicest banana, dictate what we expected from our mother and what from our father (or, alternately, whether we even got to know who our mother and/or father were), etc. When we finally invented words for mothers, fathers, potential mates and competitors for mates (if we competed at all, back then), it was in the context of this social structure. Whatever a mother/woman/girl/female’s place in the social structure, the word by which we designated them was freighted with that as baggage. The word was never used to mean no more nor less than that, all things equal, we probably expect babies to come out of this one but not that one. It implied also the expectation that the mother would nurse the baby until weaned, and (depending on the social structure at the time) either that she cared for the baby while others brought her food, or that others cared for the baby while she went out and hunted up her own food, etc., etc.
From that day to this there’ve been a myriad of cultures, and the word “woman” has taken on a myriad of connotations depending on the cultural context, but from that day to this there has never been a word that means, “likelier than not to have babies, based on observable evidence,” without any other connotations whatsoever. The closest we get is when scientists use the word “female” in reference to other species.
Jesus H christ, is this person living in cloud cuckoo land? I wish it were “each individual’s private domain” (but in practice it most certainly isn’t allowed to be) and I only bloody wish it were not associated with a massive power imbalance (but in practice it most certainly is).
I only hope this writer made more sense in context; this extract, at least, is about as worthwhile as – I don’t know, professional hairsplitting or biblical exegesis or something.