What A Drag Being Female

Women already know the deal, and still plenty of men assume they have the lighter end of it. Spend an afternoon watching how much time goes into a woman's appearance and the assumption falls apart. The clothes, the shoes, the postures held just to look proper. I have bunions and hammer toes. A couple of them needed surgery, and feet are slow to mend, so that stretched on. Shoes jammed too small to fit the fashion of pointed toes and high heels made all of it worse. I ended up on crutches, then in a cast when a boot alone wouldn't do the job. Compare that to how men handle extra weight, aging skin, gray hair: their clothing hides a lot, and gray or white hair on a man gets called distinguished. A woman needs a bigger, more varied wardrobe. Nobody blinks when a man wears the same suit twice in one week. Add hair and makeup, which cost money and eat up time to put on and keep up. (And yes, the cosmetics and the body and hair products marketed to women really do cost more than the men's versions.)

A woman can go through life as if something heavy were chained to her ankle simply because of her gender, and hardly anyone sees it, not the public and often not even feminist groups. The body itself carries a long list of complications. They begin around puberty and, for most women, they never really let up.

It opens with the mortification of a first period. Where do you deal with it, when, and how. Back in my own adolescence there was a kind of pressure running the other way too: past a certain age, not having started yet marked you as behind. Mine came at thirteen, so I didn't have to manage it until high school, though I was already a woman by the time I got there. A normal bodily function, and yet most buildings are not set up to make handling it simple. Bleeding through with nothing to change into is its own small horror.

As a girl becomes a woman the list grows: gynecologist appointments, bladder and vaginal trouble, infections that pass between partners. Then birth control, and the job of managing it usually lands on her. Not only around the times she's actually having sex, but on the chance she might.

However a pregnancy happens, wanted or not, she's the one left to deal with it, whether she ends it or carries it. Her life and her ability to have children later are both on the line, and there's the stress and the guilt that can ride along with whatever she decides.

The ways of preventing pregnancy can be risky, a hassle to get, expensive, clumsy to use. Most of that falls to the woman. I had the Dalkon Shield, a vaginal implant that got recalled, and having it removed was awful. I hadn't asked for any of that, but there it was. These things mean more frequent trips to the doctor than men tend to need.

There are inherited conditions too: breast cancer, ovarian cysts, fibroid tumors in my case. They arrive without warning and send you into treatment, sometimes into the hospital. I bled for a solid year before I had a full hysterectomy, and at the time I was working inside a large prison. Death is on the table as well. After the surgery I had multiple blood clots in my lungs that went undetected, missed by my gynecologist at the follow-up visits. My nurse practitioner caught that something was off, and I was eventually hospitalized, correctly diagnosed by my doctor, and I lived.

Much of what comes with having children falls on the woman during pregnancy, during the birth, and afterward if there are complications or if she's breastfeeding. The risk of dying through all of it is real. Men in earlier generations often went through several wives while building their families. Walk through an old cemetery and read the headstones in the family plots if you want proof.

When my youngest was a baby I brought her along to staff meetings in a carriage at first, draping a blanket over myself to feed her. Once I went back to work and left her at home, I'd spend twenty minutes locked in a toilet stall twice a day, pumping breast milk by hand, then scramble to find somewhere to store it until I could carry it home. Nearly everything I earned went straight back out to pay for the child care.

So the real question: do women have the same freedom men do to pour themselves into a career? Menstruating on a battlefield seems out of the question. Finding the hours a career demands while being flattened by cramps, or later by menopause. Women are generally told to push through it, or to step back, or to take something with lighter responsibilities because of what their bodies are doing. The instruction, basically, is to act like a man even when you aren't one.

Some workable middle ground ought to exist, and we haven't found it. Men resent women for trying to move into their part of the workforce, or for actually doing it. What they miss is that women don't exactly enjoy the arrangement either. Then retirement arrives, if it does, and couples wind up leaning on both of their checks, so that when one of them dies the survivor can't manage on a single income.

I never went to war, true. But I competed on the same ground as men in college and in graduate school, without the easy fellowship they often have, the old-boy network that hands out jobs. Was any of it easy? I wouldn't call it that.

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