How people understand the concept of gender is a topic that fascinates me, and today I'm going to talk about how contraception has influenced our understanding of what gender means.
In the pre-scientific western world, and for many people today, gender was all about procreation and was essentially the same thing as physical sex (that's a whole 'nother post, and we'll get to that later.) Men fathered babies, and women had babies. Easy. And like all simplistic explanations, it's incomplete and doesn't hold true in all circumstances. But for most people biology was destiny and the world really did work that way.
The reason the world worked like that in so many cases was that people couldn't reliably control their fertility, but in 1960 the first contraceptive pills were approved for use and that began to change.
If you think about it for a while, you'll see that effective, readily available, relatively safe contraception is one of the most important inventions in human history. In terms of the effect it has on how we live our lives, it's comparable to agriculture, antibiotics, and the internet. Contraception allows us to fit procreation around all the other things we want to do in life, rather than having to fit our lives around any pregnancy we or our significant others happen to have. It should be obvious that contraception has revolutionized women's lives in particular, and allowed us all a level of freedom our great-grandparents simply didn't have.
This is not just sexual freedom, it's also the freedom to define what gender means in ways that have nothing to do with reproduction. Caring for children is no longer an inevitable part of womanhood, so we are free to explore definitions of womanhood that don't relate to childrearing at all. We can also start to explore the idea that gender identity sometimes has nothing to do with our reproductive organs, and there are many different ways we can identify. We aren't automatically stuck with one of two roles in life according to whether we have indoor or outdoor plumbing.
As far as most western societies are concerned, this is a new development. It's so new that we've only just begun to explore it as a society, which is why many people today still see gender as a question of indoor versus outdoor plumbing. To me, this is really exciting. I can't wait to see how our understanding of what gender is evolves over the next 50 years.
In the pre-scientific western world, and for many people today, gender was all about procreation and was essentially the same thing as physical sex (that's a whole 'nother post, and we'll get to that later.) Men fathered babies, and women had babies. Easy. And like all simplistic explanations, it's incomplete and doesn't hold true in all circumstances. But for most people biology was destiny and the world really did work that way.
The reason the world worked like that in so many cases was that people couldn't reliably control their fertility, but in 1960 the first contraceptive pills were approved for use and that began to change.
If you think about it for a while, you'll see that effective, readily available, relatively safe contraception is one of the most important inventions in human history. In terms of the effect it has on how we live our lives, it's comparable to agriculture, antibiotics, and the internet. Contraception allows us to fit procreation around all the other things we want to do in life, rather than having to fit our lives around any pregnancy we or our significant others happen to have. It should be obvious that contraception has revolutionized women's lives in particular, and allowed us all a level of freedom our great-grandparents simply didn't have.
This is not just sexual freedom, it's also the freedom to define what gender means in ways that have nothing to do with reproduction. Caring for children is no longer an inevitable part of womanhood, so we are free to explore definitions of womanhood that don't relate to childrearing at all. We can also start to explore the idea that gender identity sometimes has nothing to do with our reproductive organs, and there are many different ways we can identify. We aren't automatically stuck with one of two roles in life according to whether we have indoor or outdoor plumbing.
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| Yes, I know it's a silly pun, but it's better than a stock photo of some contraceptive pills, isn't it? |
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