Capitalism and gender: would you pay £30,000 for the sex of your baby?

In the Guardian last weekend, there was an article on selecting the sex of your prospective baby. It's illegal in Britain, and according to the article people are spending £25,000-£30,000 on going to abroad for the treatment - that's a fair bit more than the average yearly wage in Britain. What on earth is going on?

These parents are “desperate” to have children of a particular sex. They talk about getting “sick of walking past Baby Gap and seeing these little girl outfits and just getting this pang.” It's interesting that gender is couched mostly in terms of consumption – later in the article there's a description of the bedroom of twin girls born due to sex selection (unsurprisingly, it's pink and frilly). The emphasis on consumption (rather than other gender markers such as, say, the sort of activities one might traditionally do with a child, or behavioural traits) is presumably down to the kind of people who can afford to do this – that is, the very rich – and points to some interesting avenues of analysis around gender and capitalism. What does it mean if gender is a kind of consumption? How might that link into the way that the “pink pound” has redefined sexuality?

The rich parents used as examples are, basically, bosses, and their attitude is not just down to consumption, but also to the way that has made them relate to the world: “Susan says, 'I used to be a CEO of a company... So you can imagine coming from that mindset and having a baby in your body, and your baby holding a secret and you don't know? In the nicest possible way, I needed to know.'” As an illuminating contrast, another (very different) prospective mother, who chose not to find out the sex of her child, says “If I knew, I would have projected a whole future for him or her. I'm excited about that lack of control.” This is getting closer to the heart of the matter: these parents are setting themselves up to define their children. The article rightly points out that sex selection is very much for the parents' benefit. What it doesn't go into is how that relates to capitalism, consumption, and (neo)liberal ideas about choice.

Although the article describes the extreme genderedness that ends up being forced on the children, it doesn't elaborate on what this might mean other than this attitude of trying to control the child, “chipping away at their uniqueness”. It mentions several reasons why people object to sex selection, some of which are salient (the missing girl babies of China and India) and some, um, less so (“the intrinsically virtuous course of nature” and “divine will”). But what is motivating this urge to control? And what is it, specifically, that they are trying to control? Obviously, it's not simply a case of control-freakery in choosing one or the other gender, but a reinforcement of the gender binary itself. Well, it seems glaringly obvious to me, but remarkably they manage to avoid any kind of critique of gender essentialism. The idea that any child should have all possibilities open to them, regardless of gender, is skirted round in a more general discussion of the parent/child relationship, and it's frustrating that they get so close to that sort of much-needed critique and still manage to un-gender it. There is no discussion of the possibility that people should be able to mix together gender traits, to switch around as they like, which is worrying given the heightened reinforcement of gender – in a gender essentialist society, that's tricky already, but if parents have spend £30,000 making you a girl, what are they going to say if you want to climb trees and refuse to wear dresses? What on earth are they going to say if you turn out to be trans? Making the sex of a child so important that it's worth £30,000 puts incredibly restraining limits on possibilites. It's frustrating that despite all the potential, an article like this can just... miss out the fact that capitalism and sexism (in the broadest sense of the term) cut out whole swathes of possible ways to be.

(picture courtesy of Sharon. I still like climbing trees!)

Bodies, essentialism and the shock factor - some thoughts on Femstruation week.

A note before I start... I come from a socialist background, where it's totally normal to write this kind of article – newspapers will usually publish critiques of themselves, and the atmosphere in discussion means that it's OK to do constructive criticism, (usually) without anyone taking it personally. I'm very aware that feminism in Edinburgh doesn't really have that same culture, particularly anarchafeminism,because it's based on more ad hoc groups, and doesn't really have the structure or media for it. My instinct when I realised just how uncomfortable I was with Femstruation week was to write it down, but I just wanted to write this proviso first: I write this out of respect – because I have huge respect for the organisers, and because feminism is a really big deal for me. This is not a personal attack, and the reason that I feel the need to write it is because it was so impressively organised, and the organisers so passionate and dedicated, that I think that it would do them a disservice not to write it. The point of it is to spark some discussion, so please comment!

Femstruation week was, as it was described to me, about breaking taboos around menstruation. The idea is that none of us should feel embarrassed or uncomfortable about our periods, and that we should all be comfortable with the fact that we bleed once a month, knowledgeable about how it works, and able to take care of ourselves effectively. It took the form of a series of workshops, art exhibitions and performance-orientated events. Their blog is here.

I guess my first question was, why a whole week? I agree that none of us should be freaked out by our periods, and that it would be nice not to have to whisper when asking to borrow a tampon, or, in my case, have people look at me like I'm crazy if I wash out my mooncup in a public bathroom. But the idea of a whole week seemed kind of strange to me. Why put all this effort into taboos about one bodily function when there are so many terrifying issues to be dealt with by feminism? I have to say, my period is not the worst thing about being female-bodied – the unfair pay; the possibility of domestic violence and rape; hell, even just being taken less seriously – they bother me much more. So I guess what I'm saying is, I'm all for these stated goals, but I wasn't sure why there had to be a whole week on them. Why not hold a week of feminist events, or even on a topic like body image, and have a day on menstruation?

As the planning process went on, though, I started to notice a different emphasis going on: the idea of celebrating being a women via menstruation. If this was that goal, then a week makes more sense – but this is the idea that makes me uncomfortable. I'm not sure that I want to celebrate being a woman as such. I mean, I'm not ashamed of it, and I damn well think that I'm as good as any male bodied person, but my aim is to get rid of the idea that we're defined by the sex that society has assigned us, not to perpetuate essentialist ideas about what it means to be a woman. I think the thing to celebrate is all the possibilties that we have, rather than any particular formation of femininity.

I think that maybe Femstruation week did end up essentialisng women, defining “woman” as“someone who menstruates”. On the one hand, this is exclusive because not everyone who is female bodied menstruates – pre-pubescent girls, people who've has the contraceptive injection, post-menopausal women, people with polycystic ovaries or another condition that means they don't menstruate. On the other hand (and as a queer person I think that this is a huge deal), it completely ignores those who identify as a woman without being female bodied, and those who are female bodied, but do not identify as a woman. This excludes a huge number of people who should be engaged with feminism, and it marginalises and alienates people who are already sidelined by society.

This idea comes dangerously close to defining women as mothers, as fertile, as closer to nature. While motherhood is brave and important, and while I value my fertility, our feminist forebears put a lot of effort into making sure the we precisely weren't defined as this. (And as for being closer to nature, I think men should probably be closer to nature as well, what with the threat from climate change.) What our bodies are like shouldn't define who we have to be. While I think it's important that the activities that have been traditionally devalued as female (like baking, or cleaning, or looking after kids) are appreciated for the necessities that they are, the clusters of actions and expressions that society has assigned the name “female” to are not essentially tied to our wombs; the ties are breakable, and I spend a lot of time trying to cut them. All genders should be able to be mechanics or nursery nurses depending on what they fancy doing; and all genders should pull their weight when it comes to childcare and cleaning and thinking about nature too.

I think that all this is worthy of discussion, for sure. It's true that we're made to feel rubbish about our bodies sometimes, but menstruation is by no means the only thing that's an issue. What's more, it's a topic that needs careful handling, in that shame is a pretty powerful emotion – if we're being made to feel ashamed of our bodies by society, we have to be careful about how we present discussions on that, to negotiate this feeling rather than just bulldozing it, because it's not so easily avoidable. I think that the explicitness of a lot of the art and publicity probably made people feel uncomfortable rather than engaging with them, and I object to playing with people's feelings for shock value. I think that, because of this, Femstruation week ended up attracting people who already feel relatively ok with their bodies. It became a celebration by these people of the way that they experience their womanhood, which is fine – but I'm not sure how radical that really is. For me, feminism is about reaching out and engaging people, and affecting change. The scope of Femstruation week was limited to a relatively exclusive set of people, and while it was fun in a lot of ways, it was a real shame that it couldn't engage a wider variety of people in discussion and activism.