It's a phrase I hear a lot. Or another popular one:
"These are our mothers, our sisters, our daughters, our wives."
And then there's the common expression, when discussing political interest groups:
"Minorities and women."
There is a common theme here, an underlying problem. Its been bugging me for a while, but I think I finally figured it out: these descriptions suffer from an astonishing lack of personhood.
My goal in this entry will be to turn these sentiments on their head, and by the end construct a new descriptor that appropriately illustrates that womens issues are, at their core, about people.
Men, on the other hand, are XY. This means that when sperm develop (by splitting in half), 50% of them receive an X chromosome and 50% receive a Y. Half the sperm competing to fertilize the egg will result in a female baby if successful, the other half will result in a male.
This is a single, instantaneous event, it only happens once. There are no other changes down the line that can affect your biological sex (gender - both social and psychological - is another issue altogether which I will not be addressing here), it's set at conception. This means that when a baby is born, you can flip a coin and the chance that it will land "heads" is the same as the chance that baby will be female.
So why, then, do we talk about women like they're a minority interest group? Why do we bring percentages into the discussion at all?
The phrase "mothers, sisters, daughters, wives" is inherently problematic because it defines women by their relationships with men. It reminds men that they only should care about women because they have a personal relationship with them; not - as it should be - because they are people and people have intrinsic value.
But I don't think this phrase is communicating anything new. It emerges from a larger, long-standing attitude: that women are peripheral, they are accessory to men. Men are central, they are a societal and personal focus. Women are sidekicks, decoration, supplemental. Our stories are filled with heroic plot-driving men and afterthought-designed women who hang around but never really contribute. Our attitudes are shaped around this notion, and our language reflects it. "Minorities and women." We are an interest group. Not a statistical minority, but, let's face it, still a minority in the social and political sense.
So, what then? Women do, technically, make up 50% of people. But that expression is extremely problematic. How, then do we discuss these issues that affect our society so deeply?
I say it's more like this:
Humans are split evenly into two groups. A given person, chosen at random, has an equal chance of being a woman or a man. People are people, and gender should be of no consequence. Which is why issues that overwhelmingly or specifically affect women are unacceptable and must be addressed.
The bottom line is, people have value because they are people. But when we put a descriptor - any descriptor, whether it's gender or skin color or nationality - before personhood, we lose sight of that. We can't let anything, especially something as petty as semantics, distract us from the value of a human life.
Put personhood first: it's not that women make up 50% of people, it's that people are 50% women.
