It’ll be slow around here through noon tomorrow; we’re getting ready for my daughter’s first slumber party.

Nah, I’m not that crazy, there’s only three invitees and my daughter.  This should be manageable.  We’re fixing our own pizzas from scratch; I’ll try to think up a few projects without going out and buying a whole bunch of supplies to achieve them.  Like personal paper dolls – we’ll take pictures of each girl, mount them on cardboard after cutting them out, then the girls can design and draw outfits for them.  Or maybe we’ll do girly spa stuff – crank up the hand spa, paint our nails afterwards.

Add the usual stuff, like videos and DVD’s, too much popcorn and junkfood, bake some cookies, try and get everybody settled in before midnight.

I can’t imagine the mess I’ll have to clean up tomorrow afternoon.  I remember a slumber party I attended when I was ten, what an incredible mess we made of the girl’s house.  I woke up at one in the morning being pelted by oatmeal raisin cookie chunks…

If I post in the wee hours of the morning, you can guess why.

1:02:51 PM    comment []

The Struggle in a Bungalow Kitchen continues, with Leah covering new ground in her blog on the topic of feminism.  She’d recently mentioned a “zeitgeist changing”, just before taking up Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex; her latest post discusses a desire for a “kitchen as workshop”.  I think she’s onto something, and it’s a lot bigger than merely where to put the kitchen implements.  It’s how we take charge of our lives as women.

There's a need for holism, an embrace of everything that woman is, emerge from the conflict between the material, the abstract, the ideal. We are our biology, bound by our biology to live cyclically; we can't escape that, without becoming faux men or post-human.  Yet we rebel against any restrictions, the cage that that biology represents to us; we want to be free to dictate our lives without the ball and chain of biology.

What we've missed as we emerged through these conflicts is that ALL humans are bound by biology; we are not human without it.  We are entering a state of post-humanity when reproduction can be performed outside the body, without human woman.  We become irrelevant when we are no longer needed for that which is unique to us -- human man or woman.  How do we fend off irrelevancy?

It may be that we learn to embrace and use what is essentially human.  As women we have that unique ability to build and carry life, nurture and sustain life; it may be cyclical in nature, but in that cycle lies tremendous power, built in over millions of iterations, generations.  When we understand that humanity entirely depended upon these cycles for its survival, we can see them not as a cage but as the essence of humanity.

As an example, let’s look at human estrus.  The monthly cycle is one that our society has conditioned us to see as distasteful.  Older cultures actually separated women from the rest of their people during their menstruation, calling them unclean and placing strong taboos on interaction with menstruating women.  We still feel echoes of these sentiments hundreds and thousands of years later.  What we as humans did not know is that there are reasons why this was important to the success of our species, that the separation of women during menstruation may not be only cultural demanded but physically demanded if humans were to survive.

Woman’s immune system cycles monthly, in sync with menstruation.  It’s at its strongest when ovulating, at its weakest during menstruation.  It may be more efficient for woman’s immune system to run only half of the month on high, only when woman is most likely to be exposed to pathogens and “foreign” genetic material; when conception occurs, the immune system continues to run on high, rejecting faulty embryos or preventing harm to the embryo and woman through morning sickness (bad meat and other toxins are far less likely to be consumed when a woman is nauseous).  When conception does not occur, the immune system can rest – but woman is most at risk for infection during this time.  A separation from other humans when the immune system is at ebb prevents the spread of disease to that portion of the species that carries all of the potential humans, all the eggs that will ever be viable.  The cultural response to women’s cycles may be entirely unconscious and may at times have been incredibly cruel – yet somewhere within that is a grain of the truth, that women must be sheltered from disease for a period of time if humanity is to survive.

When we see physical cycles as essential to the survival of our species, we can embrace them.  We can use our healthiest times for outward interaction with other humans, use our “down time” for internal efforts, regrouping, planning, reorganization.  We can realize greater achievements if we move with that cycle rather than fight against that which is essential to us.  What would we have been able to achieve if we taught our daughters and ourselves that we are strongest 12 +/- times a year?  That we need to care more and better for ourselves within a safe place an alternating twelve +/- times a year?

There are many other physical traits that are essential to our womanhood that we have not explored in the same fashion.  We’ve written them off, denigrated them, not seen them as key to human survival.  Perhaps our traditional roles as home keepers is one of those functions, embedded in our cultural software with roots in our genetic hardware.  We’ve allowed ourselves to be forced into cultural subjugation, chained to our kitchens; we’ve rebelled against the roles by fleeing the kitchen and any connotation of subservience.  Yet there may be a critical reason why women received the role of home keeper, one that may yet exist in spite of our technological advances.  What is that reason?

[Is it possible that the hostility directed against Martha Stewart, as a key example, is both the continued rebellion of the abstract/idealist feminism along with the conditioned, ingrained traditional male response against women who do not conform to older norms?  What else explains the rabidity of reaction?  Is Nigella Lawson not a target of this same hostility because she resonates with both the older norm of woman as home keeper AND as ultramodern post-abstract/idealist feminine? ]

We are on the cusp of something larger.  We are now able to manipulate our cycles -- menstrual, immune system and other -- in order to completely free ourselves of the cultural and biological norms which have shaped and bound us.  Will we do so at the risk of our humanity?  One might think that an overstatement, but ignoring the interrelation of cycles and manipulating only one may result in a serious threat.  Can we look holistically at our entire human system, memetic and genetic, keep what is essential, remove what is not, and retain our womanhood and humanity? 

Can we have the tools we need to control our lives, where we want them, when we want them, without regressing to either the traditional/material or abstract/ideal feminism?  Can we learn how to bake our cake responsibly and eat it, too?

UPDATE 11:56 EST 09-JAN-04 --

Here are a few references which you may find of interest in relationship to menstrual and immune system cyclicality:

9:59:49 AM    comment []