Psychology of Gender – A different perspective: imagining body equality

Too often, a woman’s identity and value is reduced to her body. Women are seen as valuable because their bodies can provide sex, bear children, cook, clean, and labor. And in order to maintain their value, women’s bodies must look and function in a certain way, fitting into very specific standards of beauty and ability. But for every person who values a woman only for her body, there are countless women challenging those norms. Women are imagining a world where they have autonomy over what they do with their bodies, and redefining what bodies can look like.

The article Making Sexism Visible: Birdcages, Martians and Pregnant Men (Kleinman, Copp, Sandstrom, 2006), caught my attention especially in the chapter Men is Women’s Body, where it unveils the belief that women’s inequality is ultimately built into her body.   Substituting the word men with the word women (like substituting race for sex), will make people realize the double standard applied to women.

I felt inspired by the concept and I tried to illustrate the change of perspective that Gloria Steinem presented in her article “If Men Could Menstruate” (1978). She uniquely introduced a true and accurate stance on gender distinction based on the fact that any and almost every thing has been used to promote male superiority and female inferiority. Steinem showed women their relative voiceless-ness, and in this way, suggested that there is work to be done yet in the feminist movement on account of the fact that oppressive, patriarchal logic continued to sanction gender inequality. Her text has longevity, it tackles foundational attitudes about gender and is consciousness-raising, even though these attitudes have been written-off and undermined to a degree, they have not been obliterated.

There has always been a “double standard” between men and women, preventing women from acting a certain way because it goes against social norms. While menstruation and child barring have portrayed women as being weak in the eyes of men, I believe that it is plausible that if the roles were reversed men would see it has a sign of power that they had the ability to bring life into the world.

For many women, equality is when your body can be a tool, a canvas, or a sanctuary in the struggle for women’s human rights. We do not choose the body we are born into, but women around the world use their creativity to thrive with the bodies they’ve been given. Arundhati Roy put it best when she said, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.” Can you hear her?

Here are some illustrations I designed after reading the article, I’m thinking about exhibit them with a specific pad or tampon hanging next to each poster: