Contemplating biology.
Sunday, 29 September 2002 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carose59"That Was Painful and Unsatisfying. Can We Do It Again?"*
I keep falling back into the whole biological imperative, and how it affects us. And then I think about childbirth, and pain, and I start to wonder.
From a biological standpoint, a woman's most important relationship is with her offspring. We're designed to give birth, and to nurture our children until they can fend for themselves. And childbirth hurts. It hurts a lot. And yet somehow out of that pain comes a love that overwhelms everything else in a woman's life, that changes her forever. I don't think it's just that we forget the pain. I think our bodies are designed to pull love out of the pain, that pain somehow fertilizes love.
I keep running into the same problem when I try to talk about this stuff: everyone I talk to takes it so personally, takes the words as some kind of moral stance. As though by admitting that the way our bodies work is significant, we're going to somehow lose the right to vote. This makes no sense to me. What's the point in trying to pretend we're just the same as men? We're not. We're not supposed to be. And the big problem we have is that we can't explain ourselves by men's logic because it doesn't fit us. If a woman's husband hits her, she's seen as stupid or weak-willed for not leaving, and nobody wonders if maybe there's some biological explanation for it. That explanation wouldn't excuse the man's behavior, but it could help to change the woman's. We can't change anything without understanding how it works in the first place. (This is the same problem I have with psychoanalysis: until I find someone who understands how my mind works in the first place, I'm not letting any of them near me to make changes.)
There are so many times we (human beings, not just women) don't behave "rationally." But how have we been defining "rational"? I really think we need to look at our biological programming before we assume there's something wrong with our minds. Maybe we're just following a different logic than the one the brain uses.
*Johnny Bravo
I keep falling back into the whole biological imperative, and how it affects us. And then I think about childbirth, and pain, and I start to wonder.
From a biological standpoint, a woman's most important relationship is with her offspring. We're designed to give birth, and to nurture our children until they can fend for themselves. And childbirth hurts. It hurts a lot. And yet somehow out of that pain comes a love that overwhelms everything else in a woman's life, that changes her forever. I don't think it's just that we forget the pain. I think our bodies are designed to pull love out of the pain, that pain somehow fertilizes love.
I keep running into the same problem when I try to talk about this stuff: everyone I talk to takes it so personally, takes the words as some kind of moral stance. As though by admitting that the way our bodies work is significant, we're going to somehow lose the right to vote. This makes no sense to me. What's the point in trying to pretend we're just the same as men? We're not. We're not supposed to be. And the big problem we have is that we can't explain ourselves by men's logic because it doesn't fit us. If a woman's husband hits her, she's seen as stupid or weak-willed for not leaving, and nobody wonders if maybe there's some biological explanation for it. That explanation wouldn't excuse the man's behavior, but it could help to change the woman's. We can't change anything without understanding how it works in the first place. (This is the same problem I have with psychoanalysis: until I find someone who understands how my mind works in the first place, I'm not letting any of them near me to make changes.)
There are so many times we (human beings, not just women) don't behave "rationally." But how have we been defining "rational"? I really think we need to look at our biological programming before we assume there's something wrong with our minds. Maybe we're just following a different logic than the one the brain uses.
*Johnny Bravo