BEING BORN
I only made it through the first season of Mad Men. As a television series set in an advertising firm at the end of the 1950s, I found it hard to watch. Despite the strong female characters I could never get past all the blatant and foul sexism and harassment. Really, I just don’t want to continually see that shit, anymore than I want to watch gratuitous violence or even skateboarders slamming their crotches into stair railings. I’m not ignorant of people’s experiences, and I am as aware as anyone that we don’t live in anything like a sex/gender utopia today. That being said, it's also clear that we've come a long way (too slow and not far enough for sure, however.) Just noticing this then, what our mothers and grandmothers went through, we should all be mindful, vigilant, and keen to declare “lest we forget” and “never again” – and not just on Mother’s Day or International Women’s Day. Like slavery or racism, sexism is just something we must continue to look at, understand, work through, and design out of the system.
To this end, a video from the International Federation of Human Rights, called “Being Born a Girl”, was making the social media rounds recently. Several friends of mine shared it and had different comments about wishing, at different times in their lives they'd been born male, or how everything would have been so much easier and have turned out so much better. Reading this I had to check out the video. It was a kind of animated infographic accompanied by a narration of statistics from around the globe. The facts presented were just as expected and painted a clear picture of the unreasonable hurdles faced by many women, right from the moment they’re conceived.
The video suggests that “Being born a girl means clearing a lot of hurdles.” It reminds us that gender-based abortions have been rampant in Asia for some time; that sexual mutilation impacts two hundred million girls in thirty countries; that more than sixty million girls, it is estimated, are kept out of school around the world; that in some places even very young girls are forced into marriage and pregnancy; that, annually, more than twenty million women have unsafe abortions; and how domestic violence toward women is rampant.
This information should all have us concerned and eager to do more to help women everywhere. But we should respect and support women on basic human rights grounds, regardless of the statistics, and not by comparison to males. This seems obvious. The kind of comparisons being made are both unhelpful and ridiculous. For instance, the sense my friends had when they were younger (and I hear this same idea and others like it echoed by adults all the time), that their situation would have been vastly improved had they been born male is, frankly, pretty crazy. This should be clear with any vaguely honest look at the situation. Being male, contrary to popular opinion, isn’t female minus the hurdles and hard bits. Even the terrible stats shared in the video should, in fact, have the opposite effect they did and cause viewers to be glad they were born female. This, again, just seems obvious to me.
The first thing to notice about this video is that most of the circumstances described are highly unusual in the West. While my female friends have most certainly faced sexual discrimination and harassment, being born in Canada or having arrived early in their life means they are very unlikely to have experienced most of these hurdles. And we can very easily compare this with the reality of most of the Canadian-born males these same people know, their fathers and brothers even.
For instance, the socially sanctioned practise of terminating unborn females is a blight on our species and something many people are concerned about. Yet, virtually everyone everywhere is somehow involved in enabling or directly causing males to be aborted (and not just our own but those of countless other species too.) This is no secret. We have learned in my lifetime that our exposure to certain plastics – specifically their female hormone-mimicking, pseudo-estrogen component – alters hormone levels and brain development which cause birth defects that result in the miscarriage of male foetuses. These chemicals, called phthalates, are used in plastics to make them softer, more pliable, and "safer". They’re common in things like shower curtains, PVC flooring, hospital IV bags, water and soda bottles, children’s toys, and even cosmetics like perfume, lotion, and nail polish. They’re all over the place. And, because phthalates are not chemically bonded to the plastics they’re added to, they easily leach into the environment. (Are you horrified yet?) As a result, we daily ingest these chemicals in our food and drink, absorb them through our skin, and breathe them in from the air. Once in the body they compete with natural hormones and generally wreak havoc, actually suppressing and eliminating maleness (and, no, not for the better). So, since the middle of the last century we’ve increasingly bombarded our world and ourselves with these false hormones, disrupting our endocrine systems – and we’re only now beginning to notice and understand just what we've done. Due to this bad chemistry, researchers estimate there are many millions of “missing males” (just among human populations). The true figure will never be known. And again, this is no secret: there have been journal articles, media reports, books, and films about this problem. There’s even a CBC documentary, called “The Disappearing Male”, covering decades of research on this topic from around the globe and here at home. (It will give you nightmares.) Moreover, one of the worst sites for exposure to phthalates and other endocrine disruptors, with the worst case of diminished numbers of male births, is right here in Canada near Sarnia, Ontario, at the heart of our chemical industry and the home of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation. There, along with rampant miscarriages, women are twice as likely to give birth to a girl than a boy. Despite this knowledge we are still doing very little, for the Aamjiwnaang or anyone else, to address the problem. Thus, in a world full of plastics not only is it better and safer to be born a girl but it is also more likely that you will be.
The next stat in the video mentions female genital mutilation. This practice directed at millions of girls worldwide is shocking and terrible for sure; yet we all know male genital mutilation is far more common – widespread here in the West and around the globe. Without even thinking about it we all know that male “circumcision” (a strange euphemism for mutilation) is almost universal within Muslim and Jewish communities. This being so, we may safely assume more than six-hundred million instances of male circumcision among these populations alone. (You'll note this is three times the number for all women, of all faiths on every continent.) But if you go looking for solid global numbers of male circumcision across all populations you'll dig up World Health Organization estimates showing, in fact, one third of all males on Earth (more than one billion of us) are circumcised. So, is there any doubt, if you wish to avoid genital mutilation being born female is really the only way to go. Being born female means you are rather unlikely to undergo the non-consensual and irreversible excision of your most sensitive parts. And this practice of circumcising women, as you know, is almost unheard of in the West. Yet, if my female friends had been born male in Canada, even into a non-religious family, and even in recent times, it's very likely they would have undergone what is very obviously a needless and brutal operation. Further, notice that even tattooing your baby girl, with her initials or date of birth even almost invisibly and on her butt cheek, is a criminal act while the totally needless removal of parts of your baby boy's penis is acceptable and common practice. (Someone once rebutted this argument by suggesting that female genital mutilation was far worse than the male variety. I agreed that clitoridectomy and excision were horrific, and asked if removing other parts of a girl's body, would make the practice more acceptable. To my surprise she insisted that the removal of any parts of a girl's body was completely detestable – while maintaining that male genital mutilation was different. This remains my favourite example of how confused and inconsistent a person can be.)
Continuing on, the video then mentions domestic violence. On this topic, a meta-analysis of 85 studies investigating what is termed “intimate partner violence” was published by the American Psychological Society in 2000. This research revealed that “women were slightly more likely than men to commit one or more acts of physical aggression and to use such acts more frequently.” Since then, very loud and very widespread criticism of these findings resulted in further research evaluating this report’s methods and conclusions, and also that of the work it examined. The meta-meta-analysis that resulted found that even using a variety of different methods, including better and broader survey questions would still likely yield similar results.
Alongside this, we also know that men rarely report abuse and that many cities and countries don’t even collect data on domestic violence against males – as though it doesn't happen. Of course, in addition, there are the countless forms of normalized male violence, even here in Canada: from public fighting (as is common at schools, in bars and clubs, and on the sidewalks and roadways of our cities) to institutionalized violence (like that found in sports and within sports culture, in the form of police and gang violence, in global, regional, and local conflicts, and more) males are expected to be violent and to endure violence and threats of violence by default. Even in state-operated prisons – where the well-being of inmates is the responsibility of the state (you and your representatives) and where surveillance is total – all manner of violence is rampant and, unless someone dies, goes largely undocumented and unreported. (This is understood, accepted, and even joked about by almost everyone.) Being born male virtually guarantees that you will experience and be forced or encouraged to commit acts of violence in a volume and manner that, from what I’ve seen and heard, most women are either immune to or may freely opt out of. Surely I’m not the only one to observe, whether at a football game or at a bar or just walking down the street, women behaving in a manner that, if they were male, would surely get them knocked out or arrested. (For a specific example, I just saw a woman crying and hitting the tow truck driver who was doing his job, getting ready to tow her illegally-parked Volkswagen Golf... She was not knocked to the ground and then arrested and charged with assault. How is that possible? Because she was born with a uterus and not a penis, it would seem. Why else?) While violence toward women is disturbingly common, there is simply no public disapproval of violence toward or between men. My whole life I and everyone I know have continually been reminded, in countless ways and across all media, that “you never hit a woman”. The contrast feels weird, doesn't it? It should. These very same women you'd never dream of hitting are themselves aware and even encouraging of male violence, even arbitrarily when doing so makes little or no sense. (Again, to get specific, while I was navigating my ex-wife's adultery a close female friend's only recommendation was to find the guy and beat him up. That is: not walk away, not confront one or both of them in conversation, and definitely not beat her up; but, instead, get violent with the only party who could, for all we knew, be entirely innocent – and do so solely on the grounds that he has a penis... And you can be sure this kind of thing, endorsement of and incitement to violence, happens constantly and in countless other ways.) By contrast, stark contrast, "you never hit a woman" is just the most fundamental and unbreakable rule among decent, self-respecting men. And yet it’s understood, even by these same seemingly rational, pseudo-pacifist gentlemen that violence between males is likely inevitable and perhaps, at times, necessary. Given these realities – and from my own experience in schools, in the workplace, and even in the home – if you wish to avoid violence your best bet is to start by being born a girl. (Or, if you like, you could look at murder rates anywhere on the planet. Being male means you're at least two or three times, but maybe as much as ten times, as likely to be murdered. Knowing this, and this alone, you would be crazy to choose to be born male.) I am not sure how someone observes all this, as everyone certainly has, and comes away feeling otherwise.
Finally, yes, as noted in the video, school prohibition, forced marriages, and unsafe abortions are huge problems, faced only by women and girls. These issues should all receive more attention and public pressure. But please notice the problem here, like the above issues and many others, is not being born a girl. These crimes against women and girls are not universal. These issues arise predominantly by being born into certain communities who subscribe to terrible cultural and religious beliefs that most people are loath to even fully acknowledge, nevermind openly criticize or actively campaign to reform. (Doubtless for fear of being labelled a racist imperialist by the relativists of the world or – in the case of countless native reformers across the globe – put on a global hit-list, hunted down and murdered.) Our sisters, embedded by accident of birth within the more dogmatic branches of certain communities, need our overwhelming and unconditional support. Period.
I think my point is made. Being born with different genitals is not a solution here. And we don’t want to seek gender equality on these fronts either. No. We don’t want men and women to face equal levels of injustice and suffering. Instead, we want to improve things for everyone in all situations. We want to look honestly and broadly at well-being and suffering, and the ways we deliver these upon ourselves and one another, and find places to improve. Right?
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