Think Like A Uterus

When I was younger the whole world felt like a meat rack. And then one day, I wasn’t on the menu. It’s an adjustment. As a young woman, I lived in fear of malign intentions and sexual assault. Now I’m neither prey nor predator. It feels good. But I have to say some outlandish things to get noticed. Or I would simply disappear.

One of the reasons women over 60 become less visible in society is the hormone rush men don’t get when they look at us. I’m not being snide. It’s science. When men see women they wish to have sex with, they get a certain kind of feeling that they don’t get when they look at their mother, or their grandmother. Civilization is organized around giving men that certain feeling because men rule the world.

Yes, Virginia, the world is organized around the male sex drive. Otherwise, why would we have stilettos? Seriously, look at how societies make rules to protect and isolate women from men. Wouldn’t it be easier to just add a little estrogen to the water supply? I mean, if we can fluoridate our water to protect our teeth, why not add a little estrogen to dilute the oversupply of testosterone that’s killing us?

Of course, men are not to blame. Nature evolved us this way. A penis is designed to be the diversity machine. A man’s member can create hundreds of children without accountability or obligation. A uterus can host only one pregnancy a year. So for a million years a woman has been a man’s portable uterus. It made perfect sense at the time. Try throwing a spear while you’re breastfeeding.

What’s got everybody confused is today a woman doesn’t need a penis to get food or children. She can buy sperm retail and throw a digital spear with one click to get food. Technology has made upper body strength unnecessary. No wonder men are having an identity crisis. What’s the role of men if women don’t need them? To add salt to their wounds, women live longer than men. I could live another 30 years, three decades during which my uterus will lay dormant in my abdomen, while my brain journeys where no man has gone before. Having a dormant uterus is not a blow to my ego. Try saying that about a penis.

If the meat rack is a model for civilization that maximizes the utility of men, I’m hoping for a shift to a new model that’s less about competition and more about caregiving, a shift from quantity to quality of life. There’s a reason babies are incubated in a uterus and not a scrotum. A uterus is a more protected, more nurturing, less risky place. So put this on your bumper sticker: THINK LIKE A UTERUS. Because a world that’s better for the most vulnerable among us is better for all of us.