Breakthrough.

Insight occurs in mysterious places. I decided to pay attention today to every mental “fail” I gave myself today. Last night I had insomnia and was awake for most of the time from 0130 on. Nonetheless, as my alarm rang at 0600 this morning and I hit the snooze for a little longer, in my brain clicked: “FAIL”.  Eyes snapped open as I realized: Many of our “fails” are directly a result of permitting ourselves to engage our survival instinct.


Take the very first level on Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, without which, one is unable to progress to any of the other levels on the pyramid: air, food, water, sleep, sex. Apply this to many of the predominant areas of failure for the modern female. For instance, we need to eat to live. Evolution dictates that we seek high-calorie/high-fat foods. Yet, when we engage that instinct (by eating a cheeseburger or chocolate cake), we designate it a failure. We need sleep to survive, but I have yet to meet a woman who can honestly say “I get enough sleep every night.” In fact, while I was in law school, sleep was the sworn enemy, the devil, a foe to be fought with all the weapons in one’s arsenal. If one yielded to sleep, one fell into the abyss only while screaming and scratching fingernails on the floor, and one disciplined oneself to reemerge in a time span easily measured in minutes.


Control of the body is a fundamental means for enacting social power. If we return to the basis of western culture within the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is the failure of the original female- Eve- who tempts Adam with her beauty and sensuality to commit sin. Women’s bodies are therefore imperfect in that they entice men into sin and unholy relations. Eve’s appeal is her beauty, which is based in lust, and women are inherently temptresses, and therefore sinful by nature. God’s curse for her sin is that she will experience pain in childbirth- so from the jump women are inferiorized (because we are weak and more prone to sin) and deprived of reproductive control over our own bodies.



If women’s bodies tempt men into sin, then “women’s bodies must be mortified and ascetized in order to control” that which would tempt men (Lowe, “Ideals of Feminine Beauty Body Images and the Politics of Beauty,” 1994). I.e., women must overcome their innately lustful/sinful nature by hurting themselves physically and depriving themselves to the extreme (sound familiar?) St Jerome, for instance, warned women who desired to remain pure “not to eat meat or lie in soft beds.” Margery Kempe (approx
1373-1478) took self-denial to such a fanatical extreme that she declared that God had made her a virgin (the ultimate example of self-denial) once again- after, of course, she had fourteen children. The Alexandrian philosopher Philos declared that women could only begin to approach male rationality if they denied their sexual nature and remained virgins (Bullough 1982, 44-45).


In the far-removed, smoky regions of history, then, Western conceptions of the female originate from the presumption that women are inherently evil (the peanut gallery can shut their faces on this, thank you very much) or prone to sinfulness and it is only by denying our instincts and ascetisizing ourselves (by denial of food, water, sleep) that we may rise above our sinful and imperfect nature.


This makes me intensely uncomfortable. So what we are saying here is that some bearded asshole in the 11th century wrote something that, hundreds of years later, makes me feel like my ass is too fat?


Works Cited:
Bullough, V.L. 1982. Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church. Buffalo: Prometheus.