When the tubes and pathways are working properly, there is a clear passageway between the two mouths. Both mouths have a neck (cervix) and lips (labia), which are connected by a subsystem of tubes and containers. The Hippocratic texts seem to imagine a woman’s anatomy as a central tube with mouths at either end. Women’s health, then, is more tenuous than men’s, in that it depends on their bodies’ powers either to use up or expel excess fluids. Because the heat and dryness of men’s bodies absorbs excess liquid, they do not need to menstruate and semen is the only excess fluid they emit. Because of their cold sponginess, women’s bodies absorb more fluids, must shed blood regularly, and so are naturally imbalanced. The need for women to bleed regularly was taken to prove female flesh to be moist, porous, spongy, and cold, in contradistinction to men’s dry, firm, hard, and warm flesh. Two features of the female body convinced the Hippocratic authors of a crucial difference between female and male bodies: Women have menses and a womb (or uterus). In the words of one Hippocratic author, a human being “enjoys the greatest health, when these are in balance to each other in terms of mixture, power, and quantity.” If we endorse the idea that human flesh is fundamentally a collection of fluids in various forms of “concoction,” then it is reasonable to see human health as depending on their proper balance. Before the advent of dissection, an account of the body based on fluids must have seemed eminently plausible: A human body is full of blood, guts, bile, and stuff to be vomited and such fluids do seem fungible in that, say, food becomes other sorts of fluids which have a range of qualities. The Hippocratic authors agree that the bones or infrastructure of a human body are covered with flesh, which is constituted of different kinds of fluids, which themselves are more or less hot or cold and moist or dry. These multi-authored medical writings, roughly a quarter of which concern the health and diseases of women, contain the first clear differentiation of female and male bodies and were foundational in the Western medical tradition. The earliest period for which we have detailed written accounts of women’s bodies is classical Greece of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the period when various texts, long associated with Hippocrates, were written. What about women’s bodies might make them so degraded? That is, the Timaeus suggests that women are a degraded state of humanity, a kind of punishment that follows from unwise behavior. There, the narrator spins a tale according to which the gods first created men and then punished those “who lived lives of cowardice or injustice” by turning them into women in their next lives. Plato suggests something like this in the Timaeus, his mythic account of how the world might have been created. How might someone who endorses Plato’s views about soul, body, and the good explain the paucity of female interlocutors in the dialogues? Might there be something about a woman’s body that makes it harder for her soul to “purge” itself of bodily associations so as “to concentrate itself by itself”? A Platonist could consistently believe both that all souls are equal in capacities and that female bodies are more difficult for the genderless soul to escape. If patriarchy is the system by means of which men control women and, in the recent words of Kate Manne, sexism is “the branch of patriarchal ideology that justifies and rationalizes a patriarchal social order,” then misogyny is “the system that polices and enforces” patriarchy’s “governing norms and expectations.” The audacity of Chambliss’s pronouncements can be traced back through hundreds of generations of powerful men to the earliest writings on women’s bodies. One of the sponsors of the bill, Senator Clyde Chambliss, defended the “purity” of the law, which denies abortion to survivors of rape or incest, explaining, “When God creates the miracle of life inside a woman’s womb, it is not our place as human beings to extinguish that life.” Whatever else we might say about Chambliss’s argument, it has an ancient pedigree and impeccable logic: It is the duty of those men able to discern the divine goodness in the world to protect women’s procreative powers. Among the 25 Alabama state senators who voted on May 14 to pass the country’s most repressive restriction on women’s health care, every single one was a man, many of them joyous in protecting the sanctity of motherhood and saving women from themselves.
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