Am I a Woman? A Skeptic's Guide to Gender
From chapter 2, "Under the Axis: The Physiology of Sex":
Right now I live in one of the more sex-defined, heterosexist American subcultures you can imagine. At least 90 percent of my social life (such as it is) is spent with other heterosexual couples and their (and our) children. We’re all at least quasi feminists, having come of age during an era when women and men could be friends and not just lovers, so at parties we make a point of speaking with members of the other sex. It’s a farce though. It’s never more than fifteen minutes before the women are all huddled in the kitchen together while the guys are out back stoking the grill. I’ve listened in on these male conversations by the barbecue. As often as not, they’re talking about their children, just as we are: how to stop little Hannah from pitching fits in the grocery store, what’s causing Alex’s sleep problems, where Kayla should go for summer camp. But we do this in different rooms as often as politely possible. We women watch to make sure that the men occasionally prepare a salad or set the table, that they change diapers and wipe noses and go check on the kids when we hear screams from upstairs. But when someone gets in the car to go buy a six-pack, it’s always someone with a penis.
I do all right in this universe. And yet the occasions on which femaleness has felt to me like a sweet smooth body stocking are easily outnumbered by those times when it’s been like a suit of clothes that itches and rubs and pulls and just doesn’t feel right.
There are degrees of discomfort, obviously. I would not undergo surgery and hormone treatments to become a man. Even if a genie appeared and promised to make me a man with no knives, no drugs, and no scarring, I’d turn down the offer flat. I’ve invested a lot of work in being a woman. Why would I want to be a man? Oh, I can see that there are advantages. Even if you think that on balance women have it just as good as men, even if the word patriarchy would never trip off your tongue, you’d have to admit that there are perks associated with being equipped with one penis, one Y chromosome, and a whole host of androgens—things you can do more easily and with less social disapprobation if you’re a man. But the way I look at it, I’d be trading in one set of itchy clothes for another. What’s the profit in that?
So call me a relatively well adjusted heterosexual individual with two X chromosomes, a standard-issue set of external and internal female organs, apparently normal hormone levels, and a comparatively fixed sense of herself as a woman (that is to say, a gender identity that I don’t particularly want to disrupt).
And yet I’ve always suspected that there’s something not-all-there about my femaleness. Not something—many things. Appearances notwithstanding, my femaleness has never felt unquestioned to me even on that level that people like to call “the obvious biological sex differences.”
. . . [A favorite place for locating my not-all-thereness as a woman] has long been my body hair. Women have body hair. Lots of it. In fact, here’s a news flash: women grow hair everywhere that men do. It is sometimes paler, finer, and less plentiful than the hair of men, but this usually has more to do with race and ethnicity than with sex (for example, a Slavic woman is likely to be hairier than a Chinese man). I was never a pathbreaker when it came to feminine rites of passage. Pantyhose and training bras and fingernail polish were things I only came to well after the bulk of my peers had adopted them. When I did adopt them, it was more because I wanted to fit in than because I had any independent interest in strapping elastic around my chest or hauling nylon stockings up my legs or shellacking my fingernails. But boy did I ever want to shave my legs. I lobbied for permission to do so before I left elementary school, and it was eventually granted. I managed to hack up my flesh pretty thoroughly, but I never for a moment questioned the worthwhileness of this enterprise. I had found a way to hide my secret shame: a perfectly acceptable, very grown-up way of hiding my secret shame. What could be better?
I shaved my armpits too. Once I had the technology, I used it just about everywhere. No sooner did I begin to grow pubic hair than I began to shave it off (just the “bikini line,” you understand), leaving pimply red welts in two lovely strips along my upper thighs. There were stray hairs on my stomach. These, I found, could be shaved as well, as could the hair on my elbows and toes. When my friend Janet handed me a pair of tweezers, suggesting that I might want to thin out the turf along my brow ridge, I embraced that technology as well. There were three dark hairs growing between my breasts. Yank! Gone. There was a long black hair growing out of a mole on my arm. Yank! Gone. If you didn’t know any better, you’d have thought I was a real woman.
I did know better though. And I was convinced that all that body hair spoke of some subterranean maleness that my chromosomes and genitalia had cleverly eluded, but that was nevertheless there in every last hair follicle on my body. I could fool the world (after all, everybody else was shaving their legs and armpits too), but I knew that shaving was no once-a-week spot-check operation with me. It was a daily all-body ritual.
By the time I was in college, I began to sprout chin hairs. I’d seen plenty of movies by this point in my life, and I knew that men liked to take their big broad hands and lift up your silky chin so they could plant a wet one on your soft sweet lips. I became adept at avoiding this maneuver. (I’ll tell you the trick: when they start to reach for your chin, grab their hand and stick it on the closest available breast. Singularly effective.) I policed my chin every morning, and yet there were many times when I’d glance in the rearview mirror of my car only to find a big black porcupine quill sticking out of my face. “How could I have missed that?” I would panic, while dipping into my purse for my spare pair of tweezers, sometimes not even waiting for a red light to execute the necessary plucking operation.
But then in my early twenties I decided on an impulse to grow out my leg and armpit hair. The direct inspiration for this was my German-American roommate, Lise, who had never taken a razor to her flesh, not anywhere. She thought it was a sicko American thing, this shaving obsession. I thought Lise’s hairy legs, especially under a pair of nylon stockings with all the little hairs being dragged this way and that, were nothing short of disgusting. I couldn’t imagine why any woman living in America, with easy access to a razor and soap, would walk around looking like that. And yet I grew my own leg hair out that winter (you didn’t think I was going to do it in the middle of the summer, did you?) in solidarity with Lise. At the time, I told myself that it was strictly a matter of curiosity, that I had been shaving at least every other day for more than ten years, and I wanted to see exactly what I was shaving off.
Let me tell you, all that hair was gross. I immediately wanted to shave again, but I didn’t feel like I could while Lise was living with me. It would have seemed too much like a slap in her face, since we had had long heartfelt discussions about the misogynistic implications of American women shaving their legs. But the morning I put Lise on a Greyhound bus to Nevada, I went straight home, popped in a fresh blade, and rendered myself hair-free. I felt like a woman again.
Except that I didn’t, not really. Because I knew that I was faking it, that I couldn’t manage an acceptable level of bodily femaleness without artificial help from my razor and my tweezers. I think that’s what drove me to grow it all out again a little over a year later. I wanted to let my body go its hairy way and convince myself that I was plenty female like that, just the way God made me. I saw this as a bold, reverse-psychological counterattack. “Yes, you’re hairy,” I imagined my armpits saying to the rest of me. “So what? You’re still all woman.”
In the midst of this experiment with in-your-face hairy femaleness, I took a camping trip through western Canada by myself. I thought it was a very independent, free spirit sort of thing to do, but it only took a few days for terminal boredom to set in. When at a hostel in Banff I met up with a German guy who was hitchhiking his way across Canada, we quickly figured out that if we teamed up we would both have access to his tent (much nicer than mine), my car (better than his thumb), and each other’s company. And so we spent a week or so camping and hiking together.
My legs and armpits were at about a quarter of an inch at this point, and growing. Around five days into our vacation we stopped for lunch at a beautifully crystalline lake in Mount Robson Park in British Columbia. We took off our hiking boots and waded into the frigid water.
“Is it true that all women in America shave their legs?” Michael asked me.
“Pretty much,” I said.
“And under the axis too?” he inquired, gesturing under his arms.
“Yup,” I replied.
“Hmmmpff,” Michael grunted. “That’s stupid. Women don’t do that in Germany. It’s a very foolish American custom.”
“I know,” I said, glad to finally be on the correct side of a cross-cultural dispute. “I just stopped shaving a couple of weeks ago,” I pointed out to him. “You can see that mine is growing in.”
“Yes, I noticed,” Michael said. “Your legs are very hairy. Even in Germany I think you would have to shave.”
Glitches like this notwithstanding, no man has ever declined to get naked with me solely because of my hairy legs and armpits. More significantly perhaps, no man—friend or lover—has declined to be seen in public with me, even when I was wearing shorts and a tank top (which requires a bit more bravery on his part, I think you’ll agree). Most summers I’ve gone ahead and shaved my legs, but I haven’t shaved my armpits for nearly a decade. I like my armpits this way. Really. Yes, there’s a bit of a feminist political statement at work here. But it’s just as much a matter of aesthetic preference. I’ve always liked men’s hairy armpits, and now I have my own.
Not that I never experience any ambivalence on this matter. Last week, on the first fine spring day of the year, I was carrying Lucy, my nine-month-old baby, into her day care center. She was in her car seat, balanced on my hip, and we were both in our summer clothes for the first time since early last fall. With that look of intent curiosity that she wears on her face whenever anything unprecedented appears (a common event in her life at this stage), she reached up and grabbed a few armpit hairs in a pincer grip with her tiny fingers. She looked puzzled. She twisted them a bit. She broke into a huge grin. Then she laughed out loud.
“Oh Jesus,” I thought, unable to disengage her fingers because I didn’t have a free hand, “please don’t let any of the other parents see this.” I wondered again if I shouldn’t just cave in and make like a normal woman. It wouldn’t take more than sixty seconds every couple of days to shave my armpits. I could play with my husband’s armpit hair if I got the urge, I reasoned to myself; I didn’t need any of my own.
Am I a woman then? Of course, but . . . but what? Well, maybe I could be a woman who’s slightly off hormonally, a somewhat mannish woman. I read an article several years ago about women with higher-than-normal (for women) testosterone levels. These women were more aggressive than other women, they were more interested in sex, they were less likely to be married and have children and more likely to have successful careers. I unpacked that chunk of rhetoric in no time. Come on, I make no bones about it: I’m a feminist. Not the sweet, reasonable kind; the pissy, bad-tempered kind. “What bullshit!” I hollered in my empty office, tossing the magazine to the floor, fuming. Then I picked it up again so I could read the sidebar listing the signs of too much testosterone in women. “Maybe this is why I’m not like other women,” I mused to myself. “Maybe I have an excess of testosterone.” There it all was: facial hair, high energy, loves sex, savors achievement. . . .
This might make it easier to explain why a double-X-chromosome-bearing, vulva-owning, menstruating, baby-birthing, lactating heterosexual suburban mother-of-two has often felt her femaleness to be an itchy, annoying, not-all-there sort of thing. Except that I had my testosterone checked not long after that. Not because of the article. Well . . . not directly. I was having my hormone levels tested to see if there was anything out of whack that might be contributing to my severe PMS. I really only needed to test my progesterone and my estrogen for that, but I told them to check my testosterone too, as long as they were at it. It turned out everything was in the normal range, except my testosterone. I had the testosterone level of a seventy-five-year-old woman. The lab recommended that I speak with my doctor about prescribing testosterone supplements to help me cope with the effects of my hormonal deficiency: you know, hair loss, lethargy, low sex drive . . . that kind of thing.
Physiologically speaking, then, am I woman, when you put it all together? Yes, I imagine so, in spite of my neurotic worries over the years. Still, I can’t say that I’m happy with any of the definitions of physiological femaleness (or maleness) that I’ve considered here. There are people I would want to call women who don’t menstruate or who have no breasts or who couldn’t pass a chromosome test for female Olympic athletes. And I’m not sure that a person with XY chromosomes who has lived thirty years as a man and now has a surgically constructed vagina is a woman. I’m not sure she’s not. It just seems to me that the nature of biological sex is vastly more complicated and poorly understood than we typically surmise, that it’s not so all-or-nothing, male-or-female, as people make it out to be.
There are clearly some physiological traits that go toward constituting femaleness. But it’s also obvious that someone is loading the dice pretty seriously. For example, women on average have larger breasts than men, so men aren’t supposed to have any breasts at all. I saw a television news magazine segment on this a few weeks ago. It emphasized the great trauma suffered by men who have observable breast tissue (sometimes as much as a B cup!). There’s nothing detectably “wrong” with these men, no hormone imbalance or extra chromosome. They just have breasts. Gynecomastia, it’s called: breasts like a woman’s. The television commentator suggested that simple human charity should dictate surgical redress for these men. No man should have to go through life with breasts.
Or in an example closer to my heart, men are on average hairier than women, so women shouldn’t be hairy at all. I talked to my electrologist, Eileen, about this one day. (You can tell I haven’t completely overcome my fetish for eradicating telltale unfeminine body hair.) She told me that lots of her clients are positively mortified when they first come in. “They all think they’re the hairiest thing that ever lived,” she says. “They’ll sit down and ask nervously, ‘Have you ever seen anything like this before?’” (I remembered asking her this very question some eight or nine years ago, sitting in that very same chair. I didn’t remind her of this.) I asked Eileen what proportion of the female population she thought had facial hair, conspicuous facial hair. “Oh, ninety percent,” she answered confidently. “Everyone is waxing or bleaching or tweezing if they’re not getting electrolysis.”
“The funny thing is,” she said thoughtfully, “being worried about your body hair doesn’t have anything to do with how much you have. I get women in here who look like the missing link, and all they want done is their fingers or something like that. And then, like I had a woman in here the other day who couldn’t have had more than six strands of facial hair, I swear, all of them blond. I could barely see them, even under the magnifier. But she was absolutely freaking out. She told me that she’d already been to her doctor’s office, insisting that something must be medically wrong with her to have these six hairs on her face.
“Lots of women treat it like a total secret,” she went on. “They tell me, ‘Here’s my office number; don’t ever call me at home, because my husband doesn’t know about this.’ Or they say, ‘If you call and my husband answers, tell him you’re calling from the nail salon, okay?’ I had one woman in here a couple of months ago. She was an actress, absolutely stunning. She was waiting to put together a portfolio until after the electrolysis was done, until ‘I get this fixed,’ she said. I told her how gorgeous she was, and that she shouldn’t let a few facial hairs slow her down, and she said ‘I can’t help it, I just hate it. I’m such a man.’”
Let’s say my electrologist overestimated. She’s a professional hair remover; she’d be bound to overestimate, don’t you think? So how about if we say that only 60 percent of North American women have significant facial hair? Now I would submit that any characteristic exhibited by 60 percent of women is by definition not a “masculine” trait. So why do we treat it as though it were? As though nature had made some horrible mistakes, and that if we didn’t fix them by surgically removing men’s breasts and electrically frying women’s facial hair follicles, then the two sexes might just slide right on into each other? That they might—perish the thought—become indistinct?
That is, why is it that we’re so inordinately eager to polarize the two most common biological sexes (not the only ones, remember) ever further than “nature” alone would dictate? If as physical, sexed beings we are more alike than we at first seem, what’s going on here that could account for such exaggerations?
(C) 2003 Cynthia Eller All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-8070-7508-6
From chapter 2, "Under the Axis: The Physiology of Sex":
Right now I live in one of the more sex-defined, heterosexist American subcultures you can imagine. At least 90 percent of my social life (such as it is) is spent with other heterosexual couples and their (and our) children. We’re all at least quasi feminists, having come of age during an era when women and men could be friends and not just lovers, so at parties we make a point of speaking with members of the other sex. It’s a farce though. It’s never more than fifteen minutes before the women are all huddled in the kitchen together while the guys are out back stoking the grill. I’ve listened in on these male conversations by the barbecue. As often as not, they’re talking about their children, just as we are: how to stop little Hannah from pitching fits in the grocery store, what’s causing Alex’s sleep problems, where Kayla should go for summer camp. But we do this in different rooms as often as politely possible. We women watch to make sure that the men occasionally prepare a salad or set the table, that they change diapers and wipe noses and go check on the kids when we hear screams from upstairs. But when someone gets in the car to go buy a six-pack, it’s always someone with a penis.
I do all right in this universe. And yet the occasions on which femaleness has felt to me like a sweet smooth body stocking are easily outnumbered by those times when it’s been like a suit of clothes that itches and rubs and pulls and just doesn’t feel right.
There are degrees of discomfort, obviously. I would not undergo surgery and hormone treatments to become a man. Even if a genie appeared and promised to make me a man with no knives, no drugs, and no scarring, I’d turn down the offer flat. I’ve invested a lot of work in being a woman. Why would I want to be a man? Oh, I can see that there are advantages. Even if you think that on balance women have it just as good as men, even if the word patriarchy would never trip off your tongue, you’d have to admit that there are perks associated with being equipped with one penis, one Y chromosome, and a whole host of androgens—things you can do more easily and with less social disapprobation if you’re a man. But the way I look at it, I’d be trading in one set of itchy clothes for another. What’s the profit in that?
So call me a relatively well adjusted heterosexual individual with two X chromosomes, a standard-issue set of external and internal female organs, apparently normal hormone levels, and a comparatively fixed sense of herself as a woman (that is to say, a gender identity that I don’t particularly want to disrupt).
And yet I’ve always suspected that there’s something not-all-there about my femaleness. Not something—many things. Appearances notwithstanding, my femaleness has never felt unquestioned to me even on that level that people like to call “the obvious biological sex differences.”
. . . [A favorite place for locating my not-all-thereness as a woman] has long been my body hair. Women have body hair. Lots of it. In fact, here’s a news flash: women grow hair everywhere that men do. It is sometimes paler, finer, and less plentiful than the hair of men, but this usually has more to do with race and ethnicity than with sex (for example, a Slavic woman is likely to be hairier than a Chinese man). I was never a pathbreaker when it came to feminine rites of passage. Pantyhose and training bras and fingernail polish were things I only came to well after the bulk of my peers had adopted them. When I did adopt them, it was more because I wanted to fit in than because I had any independent interest in strapping elastic around my chest or hauling nylon stockings up my legs or shellacking my fingernails. But boy did I ever want to shave my legs. I lobbied for permission to do so before I left elementary school, and it was eventually granted. I managed to hack up my flesh pretty thoroughly, but I never for a moment questioned the worthwhileness of this enterprise. I had found a way to hide my secret shame: a perfectly acceptable, very grown-up way of hiding my secret shame. What could be better?
I shaved my armpits too. Once I had the technology, I used it just about everywhere. No sooner did I begin to grow pubic hair than I began to shave it off (just the “bikini line,” you understand), leaving pimply red welts in two lovely strips along my upper thighs. There were stray hairs on my stomach. These, I found, could be shaved as well, as could the hair on my elbows and toes. When my friend Janet handed me a pair of tweezers, suggesting that I might want to thin out the turf along my brow ridge, I embraced that technology as well. There were three dark hairs growing between my breasts. Yank! Gone. There was a long black hair growing out of a mole on my arm. Yank! Gone. If you didn’t know any better, you’d have thought I was a real woman.
I did know better though. And I was convinced that all that body hair spoke of some subterranean maleness that my chromosomes and genitalia had cleverly eluded, but that was nevertheless there in every last hair follicle on my body. I could fool the world (after all, everybody else was shaving their legs and armpits too), but I knew that shaving was no once-a-week spot-check operation with me. It was a daily all-body ritual.
By the time I was in college, I began to sprout chin hairs. I’d seen plenty of movies by this point in my life, and I knew that men liked to take their big broad hands and lift up your silky chin so they could plant a wet one on your soft sweet lips. I became adept at avoiding this maneuver. (I’ll tell you the trick: when they start to reach for your chin, grab their hand and stick it on the closest available breast. Singularly effective.) I policed my chin every morning, and yet there were many times when I’d glance in the rearview mirror of my car only to find a big black porcupine quill sticking out of my face. “How could I have missed that?” I would panic, while dipping into my purse for my spare pair of tweezers, sometimes not even waiting for a red light to execute the necessary plucking operation.
But then in my early twenties I decided on an impulse to grow out my leg and armpit hair. The direct inspiration for this was my German-American roommate, Lise, who had never taken a razor to her flesh, not anywhere. She thought it was a sicko American thing, this shaving obsession. I thought Lise’s hairy legs, especially under a pair of nylon stockings with all the little hairs being dragged this way and that, were nothing short of disgusting. I couldn’t imagine why any woman living in America, with easy access to a razor and soap, would walk around looking like that. And yet I grew my own leg hair out that winter (you didn’t think I was going to do it in the middle of the summer, did you?) in solidarity with Lise. At the time, I told myself that it was strictly a matter of curiosity, that I had been shaving at least every other day for more than ten years, and I wanted to see exactly what I was shaving off.
Let me tell you, all that hair was gross. I immediately wanted to shave again, but I didn’t feel like I could while Lise was living with me. It would have seemed too much like a slap in her face, since we had had long heartfelt discussions about the misogynistic implications of American women shaving their legs. But the morning I put Lise on a Greyhound bus to Nevada, I went straight home, popped in a fresh blade, and rendered myself hair-free. I felt like a woman again.
Except that I didn’t, not really. Because I knew that I was faking it, that I couldn’t manage an acceptable level of bodily femaleness without artificial help from my razor and my tweezers. I think that’s what drove me to grow it all out again a little over a year later. I wanted to let my body go its hairy way and convince myself that I was plenty female like that, just the way God made me. I saw this as a bold, reverse-psychological counterattack. “Yes, you’re hairy,” I imagined my armpits saying to the rest of me. “So what? You’re still all woman.”
In the midst of this experiment with in-your-face hairy femaleness, I took a camping trip through western Canada by myself. I thought it was a very independent, free spirit sort of thing to do, but it only took a few days for terminal boredom to set in. When at a hostel in Banff I met up with a German guy who was hitchhiking his way across Canada, we quickly figured out that if we teamed up we would both have access to his tent (much nicer than mine), my car (better than his thumb), and each other’s company. And so we spent a week or so camping and hiking together.
My legs and armpits were at about a quarter of an inch at this point, and growing. Around five days into our vacation we stopped for lunch at a beautifully crystalline lake in Mount Robson Park in British Columbia. We took off our hiking boots and waded into the frigid water.
“Is it true that all women in America shave their legs?” Michael asked me.
“Pretty much,” I said.
“And under the axis too?” he inquired, gesturing under his arms.
“Yup,” I replied.
“Hmmmpff,” Michael grunted. “That’s stupid. Women don’t do that in Germany. It’s a very foolish American custom.”
“I know,” I said, glad to finally be on the correct side of a cross-cultural dispute. “I just stopped shaving a couple of weeks ago,” I pointed out to him. “You can see that mine is growing in.”
“Yes, I noticed,” Michael said. “Your legs are very hairy. Even in Germany I think you would have to shave.”
Glitches like this notwithstanding, no man has ever declined to get naked with me solely because of my hairy legs and armpits. More significantly perhaps, no man—friend or lover—has declined to be seen in public with me, even when I was wearing shorts and a tank top (which requires a bit more bravery on his part, I think you’ll agree). Most summers I’ve gone ahead and shaved my legs, but I haven’t shaved my armpits for nearly a decade. I like my armpits this way. Really. Yes, there’s a bit of a feminist political statement at work here. But it’s just as much a matter of aesthetic preference. I’ve always liked men’s hairy armpits, and now I have my own.
Not that I never experience any ambivalence on this matter. Last week, on the first fine spring day of the year, I was carrying Lucy, my nine-month-old baby, into her day care center. She was in her car seat, balanced on my hip, and we were both in our summer clothes for the first time since early last fall. With that look of intent curiosity that she wears on her face whenever anything unprecedented appears (a common event in her life at this stage), she reached up and grabbed a few armpit hairs in a pincer grip with her tiny fingers. She looked puzzled. She twisted them a bit. She broke into a huge grin. Then she laughed out loud.
“Oh Jesus,” I thought, unable to disengage her fingers because I didn’t have a free hand, “please don’t let any of the other parents see this.” I wondered again if I shouldn’t just cave in and make like a normal woman. It wouldn’t take more than sixty seconds every couple of days to shave my armpits. I could play with my husband’s armpit hair if I got the urge, I reasoned to myself; I didn’t need any of my own.
Am I a woman then? Of course, but . . . but what? Well, maybe I could be a woman who’s slightly off hormonally, a somewhat mannish woman. I read an article several years ago about women with higher-than-normal (for women) testosterone levels. These women were more aggressive than other women, they were more interested in sex, they were less likely to be married and have children and more likely to have successful careers. I unpacked that chunk of rhetoric in no time. Come on, I make no bones about it: I’m a feminist. Not the sweet, reasonable kind; the pissy, bad-tempered kind. “What bullshit!” I hollered in my empty office, tossing the magazine to the floor, fuming. Then I picked it up again so I could read the sidebar listing the signs of too much testosterone in women. “Maybe this is why I’m not like other women,” I mused to myself. “Maybe I have an excess of testosterone.” There it all was: facial hair, high energy, loves sex, savors achievement. . . .
This might make it easier to explain why a double-X-chromosome-bearing, vulva-owning, menstruating, baby-birthing, lactating heterosexual suburban mother-of-two has often felt her femaleness to be an itchy, annoying, not-all-there sort of thing. Except that I had my testosterone checked not long after that. Not because of the article. Well . . . not directly. I was having my hormone levels tested to see if there was anything out of whack that might be contributing to my severe PMS. I really only needed to test my progesterone and my estrogen for that, but I told them to check my testosterone too, as long as they were at it. It turned out everything was in the normal range, except my testosterone. I had the testosterone level of a seventy-five-year-old woman. The lab recommended that I speak with my doctor about prescribing testosterone supplements to help me cope with the effects of my hormonal deficiency: you know, hair loss, lethargy, low sex drive . . . that kind of thing.
Physiologically speaking, then, am I woman, when you put it all together? Yes, I imagine so, in spite of my neurotic worries over the years. Still, I can’t say that I’m happy with any of the definitions of physiological femaleness (or maleness) that I’ve considered here. There are people I would want to call women who don’t menstruate or who have no breasts or who couldn’t pass a chromosome test for female Olympic athletes. And I’m not sure that a person with XY chromosomes who has lived thirty years as a man and now has a surgically constructed vagina is a woman. I’m not sure she’s not. It just seems to me that the nature of biological sex is vastly more complicated and poorly understood than we typically surmise, that it’s not so all-or-nothing, male-or-female, as people make it out to be.
There are clearly some physiological traits that go toward constituting femaleness. But it’s also obvious that someone is loading the dice pretty seriously. For example, women on average have larger breasts than men, so men aren’t supposed to have any breasts at all. I saw a television news magazine segment on this a few weeks ago. It emphasized the great trauma suffered by men who have observable breast tissue (sometimes as much as a B cup!). There’s nothing detectably “wrong” with these men, no hormone imbalance or extra chromosome. They just have breasts. Gynecomastia, it’s called: breasts like a woman’s. The television commentator suggested that simple human charity should dictate surgical redress for these men. No man should have to go through life with breasts.
Or in an example closer to my heart, men are on average hairier than women, so women shouldn’t be hairy at all. I talked to my electrologist, Eileen, about this one day. (You can tell I haven’t completely overcome my fetish for eradicating telltale unfeminine body hair.) She told me that lots of her clients are positively mortified when they first come in. “They all think they’re the hairiest thing that ever lived,” she says. “They’ll sit down and ask nervously, ‘Have you ever seen anything like this before?’” (I remembered asking her this very question some eight or nine years ago, sitting in that very same chair. I didn’t remind her of this.) I asked Eileen what proportion of the female population she thought had facial hair, conspicuous facial hair. “Oh, ninety percent,” she answered confidently. “Everyone is waxing or bleaching or tweezing if they’re not getting electrolysis.”
“The funny thing is,” she said thoughtfully, “being worried about your body hair doesn’t have anything to do with how much you have. I get women in here who look like the missing link, and all they want done is their fingers or something like that. And then, like I had a woman in here the other day who couldn’t have had more than six strands of facial hair, I swear, all of them blond. I could barely see them, even under the magnifier. But she was absolutely freaking out. She told me that she’d already been to her doctor’s office, insisting that something must be medically wrong with her to have these six hairs on her face.
“Lots of women treat it like a total secret,” she went on. “They tell me, ‘Here’s my office number; don’t ever call me at home, because my husband doesn’t know about this.’ Or they say, ‘If you call and my husband answers, tell him you’re calling from the nail salon, okay?’ I had one woman in here a couple of months ago. She was an actress, absolutely stunning. She was waiting to put together a portfolio until after the electrolysis was done, until ‘I get this fixed,’ she said. I told her how gorgeous she was, and that she shouldn’t let a few facial hairs slow her down, and she said ‘I can’t help it, I just hate it. I’m such a man.’”
Let’s say my electrologist overestimated. She’s a professional hair remover; she’d be bound to overestimate, don’t you think? So how about if we say that only 60 percent of North American women have significant facial hair? Now I would submit that any characteristic exhibited by 60 percent of women is by definition not a “masculine” trait. So why do we treat it as though it were? As though nature had made some horrible mistakes, and that if we didn’t fix them by surgically removing men’s breasts and electrically frying women’s facial hair follicles, then the two sexes might just slide right on into each other? That they might—perish the thought—become indistinct?
That is, why is it that we’re so inordinately eager to polarize the two most common biological sexes (not the only ones, remember) ever further than “nature” alone would dictate? If as physical, sexed beings we are more alike than we at first seem, what’s going on here that could account for such exaggerations?
(C) 2003 Cynthia Eller All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-8070-7508-6
