Neglected or Misunderstood Read online

  Finally, what is to be made of Firestone’s vision of an androgynous society? On the one hand, freeing people from expectations based upon the details of their anatomy is surely to be welcomed. Feminist theory has long sought to distinguish between gender – psychological characteristics and behaviors – and biological sex, arguing that sex does not determine the gender identity of an individual (that this is instead acquired through processes of cultural conditioning). Simone de Beauvoir, among many others, is offering a version of this sex/gender distinction. In the 1990s, queer theorist Judith Butler would come to challenge even the sex/gender distinction for ceding too much to an idea of “sex” as belonging to a realm of pure biology. In fact, Butler pointed out, “biological sex” presents not a binary but a field of physical variations in terms of the presence of external and internal sexual organs, chromosomal makeup and hormonal levels. For Butler, that we must interpret this empirical variation into two distinct sexes shows that concepts such as “sex,” “biology” or “nature” are themselves always being shaped by cultural values and frameworks. Today, many, especially younger people, are rejecting notions of binary sex or gender. In a recent survey half of US millennials agreed that gender isn’t limited to male and female.67 This “gender fluid generation” is increasingly comfortable with identifications such as transfeminine or transmasculine, agender, androgynous, non-binary, queer trans or multigender. Facebook and other social media allow for self-identification along these lines, while acceptance of gender-neutral bathrooms and pronouns (“they”) is growing.

  This picture differs somewhat, however, from the ideal of androgyny that Firestone advocates. Where gender fluidity suggests a proliferation of differences and the potential for an individual to shift between these, androgyny can, potentially at least, involve the annihilation of differences – homogeneity, not heterogeneity. Though it is hard to know for sure that this is what Firestone proposes, since her references to androgyny are fairly limited, it is certainly suggested by her dialectical schema, which looks forward to a teleological endpoint in which the sex difference that has been the driver of history is eliminated in a final merger of masculine and feminine principles.

  Why does this matter? For one thing, the androgynous vision can look like what Rosalind Delmar has called a ‘counsel of despair.’68 It is as if for Firestone sexual difference has proven so destructive, so traumatic, that there is no hope for a healthy, happy, variant of it – the only thing to do is to eliminate sexual difference entirely. The suggestion of “somatophobia” – understood by Spelman as the thought that it would be better ‘if we were not embodied’ – perhaps arises once again here.69 For another, such an elimination of difference quickly becomes itself repressive, albeit unwittingly. What would happen, for example, in a society where androgyny were the norm, to individuals who identified strongly with some particular version of traditional gender, who wished to identify and be recognized for their femaleness or maleness? It is a question that arises with particular acuteness in light of Firestone’s acknowledgment that there might continue to be anatomical women who wish to reproduce the old-fashioned way, with pregnancy bump, and morning sickness, and birth, and blood and pain. How might such women be regarded and treated, given the threat to social harmony that Firestone’s theory suggests this could entail?

  Conclusion

  The Dialectic of Sex ends here, with the conclusion of the outline of Firestone’s ‘very rough plan’ for the social arrangements that might follow after feminist revolution (216). Despite its roughness, it is a design that she believes fulfills each of her revolutionary demands. Women will have been freed from the tyranny of reproduction by the development of technology and the diffusing of child-rearing responsibilities across society. Economic independence and self-determination will have been gained for all, with economic classes abolished and all people given the opportunity to flourish. Women and children will have been integrated into society as a whole, with children’s dependence upon adults, and women’s (mothers’) dependence upon men, rendered obsolete. Sexual feeling will have been freed from the constricted and often destructive channels into which it has been forced by the patriarchal nuclear family.

  Her proposals are certainly open to criticism. There is a pronounced tendency in her writing – understandable, in light of the urgent task of enthusing her readers about a possible alternative – to downplay the difficulties and the complications of the new arrangements that she describes; to wish to put to bed too quickly the potential, even in this more compassionate, more just, more humane society, for ongoing social antagonisms.

  But while I have pointed to just some of the possible problems with her proposals, it is not that I think Firestone wrong to imagine a society that is radically different, and better. On the contrary, we need such imaginings; today, if anything, more so even than in Firestone’s day. While she wants us to take her historical, causal, account of women’s oppression literally – as what really happened – her utopian future is, I think, offered in the spirit of a ‘literary image’ of future possibilities (203). It is an attempt to do what good science fiction does: to escape the imaginative fetters of the present and conceptualize how things could be otherwise. It is, as Gillian Howie contends, a ‘hypothetical political construction,’ and a potentially ‘worldchanging fiction.’70

  9

  IVF, Egg-Freezing, Surrogacy

  A pregnant woman will never simply be a container.

  (Mia Fahlén and Gertrud Åström71)

  In 1970, Firestone was writing on the cusp of technological and political developments that promised to transform reproduction. Indeed, just eight years later, in 1978, the first “test tube baby,” Louise Brown, was born in Oldham, England. While her birth attracted controversy about “Frankenstein babies” and her parents – Brown has recently revealed – received hate mail, there have today been an estimated 6 million IVF babies born around the world,72 and the procedure’s widespread acceptance as a routine treatment reveals just how conventional and contingent are judgments as to any particular technology being “unnatural.”

  So where are we today, nearly 50 years after the original publication of The Dialectic of Sex? Have subsequent events borne out Firestone’s claims about the revolutionary potential of new reproductive technologies? And if they have not done so, or have done so only partially or ambivalently, then to what ought this to be attributed? Would it show that Firestone had, after all, always been hopelessly over-optimistic about the potential of such technologies? Or might there be a different explanation?

  For me, the great value of Firestone’s work is precisely that it calls for such an interrogation. In identifying the historically causal origin of women’s oppression in their reproductive functions, it compels us to ask, “To what extent do women’s roles in procreation continue to contribute to their unequal status today?” But this is still the case, I think, even if one does not accept Firestone’s causal story: even if one were to think, for example, that she wrongly identifies as biological caused inequalities that are actually social or cultural in origin. For it would be hard to deny that reproduction is a major site of gender injustice today, however one understands that to have come about. Laurie Penny, for example, has written powerfully about what she calls ‘reproductive tyranny,’ about the ‘obscenity of living in a culture that tries to stamp itself all over one’s womb and clamp itself around one’s ovaries and shame XX-genotype women for owning bodies that can create new life.’73 Recognizing this, we are immediately confronted by the questions that Firestone was asking. These are questions about how women’s role in the bearing and raising of children impacts upon their participation in other areas of life; with what consequences; and about who is in control of a woman’s reproductive capabilities.

  My aim in this chapter and the next is to sketch out the coordinates of a Firestonian analysis of some of the major reproductive issues facing us today. There are many important issues that I do not have space to develo
p: for example, the sharing of childcare within heterosexual relationships, or the impact of women’s continued greater domestic and childcare responsibilities on the gender pay gap and on the under-representation of women in many areas of public life. Instead, the present chapter will focus upon egg-freezing, IVF, and surrogacy, as instances of the kind of technological intervention into reproduction that Firestone was interested in. The following chapter will examine the situation in the US with respect to contraception and abortion rights, in the face of the looming horror of a Trump presidency. A key premise of my analysis in both chapters is that any investigation of these technologies must locate them squarely within their context: that of global capitalism, the spread of neoliberal ideology, and, I argue, the continuing grasp upon our imaginations of ideologies of motherhood and the nuclear family.

  That we are still in thrall to these ideologies is clear. Firestone protested, in 1970, against the marginalization of non-reproductive lifestyles, the idea of motherhood as central to women’s fulfillment, and a sentimentalization of maternity that conditioned what was permissible to feel, think or say about this experience. In 2016, the hegemony of parenthood continued undaunted, and although non-reproductive men are also the targets of this, the notion of a childless woman as a failure is particularly pernicious. British politician Andrea Leadsom provided an example when she presented herself as a better candidate for Prime Minister than the childless Theresa May, on the grounds that “being a mum means you have a real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake.”74

  But the other side of this prejudice against women who are not mothers is the continuing intrusion into the privacy and autonomy of those who are. On becoming pregnant, a woman is subjected to a clear set of messages that communicate that her body is no longer her own and that she is the vessel for something more important than herself. US feminist Jessica Valenti has written on this, pointing out how an over-valuing of motherhood in women leads to a devaluing of their human status.75 Among her many compelling examples are the erasure of women themselves from how pregnancy is often pictured (literally, as her interviewee Professor Rebecca Kukla points out, in the case of the pregnancy book What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which begins each chapter with an image of a pregnancy bump minus the woman’s head, arms and legs), and in what she identifies as the decentering of maternal health that occurs when fetal health is prioritized – a tendency of healthcare providers that finds its complement in the media celebration of mothers who quite literally give up their lives for their children (by refusing cancer treatment while pregnant, for example). Valenti is surely right. This diminishing of pregnant women’s status is evident in a range of social practices: from the apparent benignity of uninvited touching of a pregnant woman’s stomach; to the issuing of advice from mere acquaintances or even strangers on what she eats, drinks or smokes, or whether or how she exercises; to the vocal condemnation she may face should she decline to conform to expectations. And it is nowhere more clear than in today’s US, in the state surveillance that is targeted especially at poorer income women and women of color, as Chapter 10 will explore.

  Egg-freezing

  Developed initially for people with severe medical conditions – such as a cancer patient whose treatment would threaten their future fertility – egg-freezing has in the 2010s been heavily marketed at healthy women in their twenties and thirties as “fertility insurance.” Egg-freezing allows women to store healthy eggs with the prospect of later fertilizing these and beginning a pregnancy at a time in their lives when they feel ready to have children, but when their natural fertility will have declined. It is therefore championed as a way of putting women in control of their reproductive lives, of freeing them from the biological constraints of women’s reproductive lifetime, and allowing them the option otherwise restricted to men of becoming a genetic parent later in life. For Professor Geeta Nargund, Medical Director of CREATE Fertility, Europe’s largest IVF clinic, egg-freezing promises to free women from what she calls – in what sounds a very Firestonian formulation – ‘nature’s gender inequality.’76 It has been lauded by some as promising to revolutionize women’s lives on the scale of the contraceptive pill. But how much freedom does this really offer women? And is there another side to its potential benefits?

  The first thing to note is that this technology does not free women from the “burden” of procreation, as Firestone had wanted, but in many ways intensifies it. It shares this with IVF – and egg-freezing is, in essence, the first stage of that procedure.77 Over a number of weeks a woman must self-inject a cocktail of hormones into her abdomen to stimulate massive follicle growth and egg production, before these eggs are “harvested” through draining the ovaries while she is under sedation or anesthetic. The high levels of the hormones involved can cause unpleasant physical symptoms such as nausea and fatigue, and contribute to emotional disturbance and mood swings. The egg-collection process can produce abdominal pains lasting for days, and in the week following collection there is a risk of Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome (OHSS), in which the ovaries produce too many eggs following egg-collection, leading to symptoms including pain, bloating, nausea and vomiting, and for which a woman may need to be hospitalized.

  Nor is there any guarantee of success. From any batch of harvested eggs (doctors usually aim to collect 14 or more), there is no guarantee that any will make it through the process of freeze-thawing, fertilization and implantation. The UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Association (HFEA) states that up to December 2012, approximately 580 embryos had been created from frozen eggs, and transferred to women in 160 cycles, from which resulted 20 live births.78 Although a new procedure for flash-freezing eggs (“vitrification”) should decrease damage to eggs caused by the freezing process, it remains the case that from any one cycle of egg-collection there is a significant chance of no viable embryo resulting; anecdotally, many women report undergoing several cycles without success. Nor is this process cheap. EggBanxx, one of the largest “providers,” states that the process of follicle stimulation, retrieval and vitrification can cost between $8500 and $18,000.79 In the UK, prices for one cycle average at around £4000, with additional costs of approximately £300 per year for egg storage. Critics of the marketing of egg-freezing to healthy women say that the fertility industry is downplaying the potential risks – physical, emotional and financial – of the procedure, and inducing false confidence about the capacity to control one’s fertility.

  As with IVF, we need to distinguish the technology itself from the industry, and from the wider economic and cultural context in which the industry exists. The technology of egg-freezing certainly has the value of increasing reproductive options in the face of “natural” constraints. That there is a “natural” limit on women’s child-bearing years that is not so in the case of men is the cause of much heartbreak for older women or couples wishing to conceive. As Firestone insists, the “natural” is not a human value: there is no reason why this limit imposed by human biology should be accepted, any more than there is that a failed organ such as a heart should mean the death of the person concerned. Egg-freezing also holds out the possibility for trans men of becoming a biological parent after sex-realignment surgery (although such a possibility currently requires use of a surrogate; more on this below). From this perspective, egg-freezing indeed looks like an instance of human control over nature, of the use of technology to liberate people from natural constraints, that Firestone would welcome.

  Yet the extent to which liberation is really at stake becomes questionable once one interrogates the actual circumstances that produce egg-freezing’s popularity. Why are healthy younger women choosing to avoid starting a family until later in life, when their “natural” fertility may have drastically declined? This is a difficult question to raise, since it is also the question asked by moral conservatives – albeit often rhetorically, their answer being that it is feminism that is to blame for making women think they can “have it all.” But the
Left must ask this question too, from the perspective of the structural forces driving this phenomenon. Student debt, low wages, rising housing costs, the insecurity of renting, the casualization of employment, the erosion of welfare and social security: these all contribute to an experience of precarity that is leading young people to delay having children, even while they fear for their future fertility.80 While Apple and Facebook have been praised by some for including egg-freezing among their perk options for female employees, this prompts the question as to whether the real problem is workplace practices that dissuade people from having children until they feel relatively secure in their positions. And while some women report that it is not lack of housing, or secure employment, but lack of a relationship that leads them to consider egg-freezing, once again, the question is prompted: what are the factors (economic, social and cultural) that make the prospect of parenting outside of the traditional, monogamous couple, so very daunting? And why are single parent or parental couple the only imaginable possibilities?