Girl Talk

Two interesting stories in Slate that taste interesting together:

Bloodless Revolution: The abolition of menstruation. By William Saletan

and

The Goodling Girl: How Monica Goodling played the gender card and won. By Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick

The first of these gives a good, if minimal, overview of the contorted relation between nature and culture implicit in our understanding of menstruation, as brought to light by the new pill which is being marketed to help women avoid having a monthly period. The second is a sharp analysis of Monica Goodling's canny choice to present herself as a powerless appendage to her bosses at DoJ rather than accept responsibility for going beyond the law in using partisan judgments to disqualify job candidates.

These stories have in common their obvious utility as evidence for the depressing conclusion that, as Bazelon and Lithwick write, "we haven't come as long a way as we'd hoped, baby." But even beyond that, they point to something very particular about the slippery way that notions of weakness get tied up with notions of femininity. Monica Goodling's story is relatively familiar and easy to recognize in other contexts, where women's power gets exerted under the cover of powerlessness. This cultural pattern is sometimes disavowed (as in Goodling's case), sometimes revered (by the vanishing breed of believers in matriarchy, for example) and sometimes reviled (as when a lug-headed acquaintance once explained to me his conviction that caucasian men who marry Asian women thinking they are submissive often get a rude awakening when they find themselves under the thumb of a steely-willed if quiet wife; a clever racist-sexist two-fer). In all these versions the weakness associated with femininity has enough cultural torque to allow a different kind of power to be wielded in its shadow; on closer inspection either the weakness or the power turns out to be a screen for the other.

In the story about using a birth-control pill to stop menstruating, there is also a strange interplay between apparent weakness and apparent strength. Is menstruation a liability -- both because it could be seen as draining physical strength and because it functions as a symbol of everything that women are and men are not -- or is it an asset -- because it is part of the overall process of fertility and thus a symbol of the almighty womb? Or is it (as I would contend) neither a liability nor an asset, but a basic bodily function that, because it is linked exclusively to women, gets drawn into the complicated cultural game of hide-and-seek to which women and their agency are relegated? In other words, the ambivalence about menstruation is another facet of the ambivalence about women's difference from men and the newly-public (though not really new) choice of whether to have a period or not is another example of the way that women's choices and actions come to be viewed as not really their own. Saletan writes, "The danger, from a standpoint of emancipation, is that some of these women won't shut off the bleeding to satisfy themselves. They'll do it to satisfy others." Well, maybe that's true, but if menstruation weren't already a charged signifier of all the ways that women are different from men, would we worry about this possibility any more than we worry about overweight people who lose a lot of weight (are they doing it for their health or to look good?)?