Fuck Freud and His Penis Envy; What About Menstruation Envy?
It's a thing. We're making it a thing.
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In Simone de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking and controversial feminist masterpiece The Second Sex she posits that:
“This is when she feels most acutely that her body is an alienated opaque thing; it is the prey of a stubborn and foreign life that makes an unmakes a crib in her every month… woman is her body as man is his, but her body is something other than her.”
With all her intelligence and education, she somehow failed to recognize that what she is claiming is not, in fact, an actual fact. At most, it might be considered a rather popular, albeit patriarchal, opinion.
I personally feel as if my gift of menstruation connects me all the more to life and myself than it happens to hinder me. Every month, along with the increased emotionality and hunger, cramps, and aches, I am reminded that I am capable of creating and nurturing new life. Sure, in a certain sense, men are absolutely required for the perpetration of such. After all, we can’t (as of yet) really do it without them. But if anything, their part in the whole drama seems rather short and simple when compared with the pregnancy and subsequent nurturing of that required by a mother. From this perspective of the utter intimacy and love between mother and child, it is the man who finds himself as the alienated sex in the wondrous dance that is life.
Many could and may jump in here and proclaim that depending upon the severity of her menstrual symptoms, woman is separated or distracted from her life during the most extreme periods of her cycle, whereas man is free of any such distractions exerted upon him by his body. Which is where I shall ask why the male's undisturbed and somewhat monotonous experience is the preferred perspective of the two genders. Is life itself not, in fact, extremely painful and volatile at times? Is it not exceedingly messy and bloody at times? If anything, it is the woman’s experience of existing in, through, an emotional rollercoaster of sorts, which allows her the depth of feeling she receives such flak for. She is deemed unstable and soft for wavering in the face of life, for showing humanity and mercy. She is perceived as unreliable for her capacity to imagine and therefore experience the pain of others around her. Again I ask, why is this assumed as a bad thing?
We all more than know that life just isn’t perfect; it is painfully difficult and unyielding at times—just as a woman’s menstruation cycle can be. And yet the woman bears it, with some degree of grace, each and every month it envelops her. The woman is special in being ever so intimately attuned to the cyclical evolution of life. Because of her familiarity with such she is quite adept at dealing with the trials and tribulations which come along with this experience called life, much more so than man as it were, who does everything in his power to repress, to deny, to escape, and overpower eventually. After all, real men don’t cry, as they claim. I wonder where the fuck that notion came from? Being able to dissolve into a mess of tears and then proceed to pull oneself back together, better and more attuned than ever, is quite possibly a thing an individual is capable of.
It is woman’s negative action, her passivity, which man deplores of her so. It is these attributes that have successfully held woman as "The Second Sex" throughout the majority of mankind’s history. As man was conquering, raping, murdering and pillaging, woman was silently bearing the destruction of life. You may claim the former requires the most courage and strength, to which I will always and vehemently disagree. To witness the destruction enacted around you, against you day in and day out and to still find the strength to love the perpetrators, to toil for their prosperity, is only one of a plethora of wonders capable to woman.
So Freud, you postulate your penis envy all you wish. For I, and many other woman, are waking up to the fact that our lack of such is where our power lays. It is not the overbearing or violent power society has henceforth been accustomed to. It is a soft power, a merciful loving force. And it is this very weakness, as you say, this softness, which will succeed in saving mankind from itself. Man has always been the enactor and enforcer of the structure of society. I simply cannot be alone in noticing that what we have as the contemporary structure of society is simply not working. Maybe it’s time for a change. Maybe it’s time to actually learn from our history. Maybe it’s time to award femininity its place of importance beside that of masculinity in shaping the world that we all live in.
About the Creator
Little Wanderer
Independent scholar & world traveller
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