With public conversations about periods, pregnancy and the menopause at an all time high, it can sometimes feel like we’ve never been more aware of women’s health issues. But data exclusively seen by i suggests women are still worryingly clueless about their own bodies – and it could have serious consequences health consequences.
According to a YouGov survey carried out by gynaecological cancer charity The Eve Appeal, just 51 per cent of women can correctly label all five parts of their gynaecological anatomy on a diagram. Revisiting survey questions first put to the public in 2014, the Eve Appeal found some, but very little, improvement in women’s ability to identify the ovaries, womb, cervix, vagina and vulva on an anatomical diagram.
(In the Medieval period, everybody covered up ladies’ hair. WITNESS.)
Y’all may have heard about how the French are being super uncool about letting ladies wear whatever the fuck they want to the beach at the minute. Like me, you also might be having your various social media feeds blow up with a bunch of basic-ass Beckies trying to justify this. “But Islam is just SO oppressive of women!”, they type. Because in the West women are totally equal now, not paid less than their male counter parts,told what they need to wear, and blamed for their own sexual assault. It’s totally fine here!
Yes, it is true that these fools are available as a part of Sainsbury’s reasonably priced own-brand range, cuz they basic as hell. But would you like to explain to them the historical facts for why that is? Sure you would! Let me help.
Islam is near and dear to the hearts of most medieval historians because it is the only major world religion that began in the medieval period. In a very quick span of time it swept from the Arabian peninsula, across the top of Africa over to Spain, and out East across Persia, and unto the Asian steppes. Islam was on fleek as hell in the medieval period.
One of the reasons why it was so popular? Muslims were having way way more fun than their Christian neighbours. Witness, my friends The Tale of Two Hasish-Eaters from the 1001 nights wherein Sharhrazad breaks us off to a balling ass story about getting too high on edibles, comparing dick size, and then pissing on the Sultan. Truly it is a tale for the ages.
The Tale of the Hashish Eater (there’s just one guy getting high in this story) tells us all about how this dude, much like A$AP Rocky, loved Bad Bitches (aka fair women), ‘and spent his substance on them, till he became so poor that nothing remained to him’. See, in the Islamic world it was possible to get high as FUCK and spit game at ladies. The society was open enough that people were out and about in mixed company. This is not what was going down in Christian society, where as I have already explained, dudes were mostly sitting around holding their boners and looking at the married lady they lived with.
Hell, in the Islamic world women were allowed to train as doctors. Yeah it was because men weren’t supposed to be checking them out, but in the Christian world women were specifically prohibited from practicing medicine after it became regulated and taught at university. The women who continued to do so (mostly midwives) were then the subject of witch-hunts in the Early Modern period. SUPER EVOLVED EUROPE.
Even the stories from the medieval period where Christians try to persuade us that Muslims are monsters make it look way more fun to be Muslim. For instance, the martyrdom of St. Leocritia in Cordoba which appears in Eulogius’s Martyrs of Cordoba gives us a glimpse into a pretty awesome world for ladies. Leocritia decides she wants to convert to Christianity (which was possible even in Muslim al Andalus because Muslims always let Jews and Christians stay in town in order to tax them). Off she goes to the local cathedral (cuz the Christians were so oppressed they were allowed to have whole bishoprics), and she and Eulogius make a PLAN. Leocritia dresses up all sluty-styles (That’s a reclaimed word. All praises to the sluts.) and tells her parents she’s off to party at some wedding. They’re like, ‘K BYE BITCH!’, because in the Muslim world you could go full slapper and then walk off unattended to a wedding by yourself.
Anyway because Leocritia was boring as hell, and apparently wasn’t in to dressing up super-hot and going to parties, she went and hid in Eulogius’s crib instead. Eventually the police show up and are like – ‘Yo priest dude, any chance that you’ve got a young woman sleeping in your house? Cuz her parents are looking for her.’ And Eulogius is like, ‘YES. AND SHE IS CHRISTIAN NOW SO YOU’LL NEED TO KILL US BOTH.’ The police are like, no seriously, just send the girl home and she’ll go back to parties and we’ll pretend this didn’t happen.’ Eulogius – ‘NO THANKS. PLEASE KILL US BOTH NOW THANKS.’ The police, ‘Um, ok?’ Who is being awesome to women here – not the damn Christians, that’s who.
Now I’m not trying to say that it was a free-for-all for Muslim women in the medieval period. Their lives, like the lives of most women then (AND FUCKING NOW) were limited because of the patriarchy (which hurts us all). They did, however, wield an impressive amount of power, and have fairly open lives, especially when compared to Christian women at the time.
The point is that Islam is no more oppressive to women than any other religion. Hell Islamic society as a whole isn’t more oppressive to women than any other society. (Except that one in, like, interior interior Tibet/Nepal where the women run everything and have fuck boys come to their huts at night or whatever. Look it up. And pay attention in Anthropology class.)
Some governments in Islamic countries have been riding the coattails of Wahhabism since the seventies and using Islam as an excuse for treating women like garbage really hard, it’s true. That is some shit that took off in the last fifty years though. And it’s not a part of Islam as a whole. To say those douches are like Muslims as a whole is to say that the Duggars or the creepy Mormons who marry their sisters in rural Utah are representatives of Christians. They are not.
Historically, Islam has been way kinder to women on the whole. So maybe just chill the fuck out and let women wear whatever they damn well please to the beach – k?
Say some sex shit, like wetter than jacuzzi, bitches.
I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but a lot of hip hop songs refer to ‘hoes’. (I know, I know, stay with me.) What that can mean in any given context varies, of course, but in general terms what we’re talking about are either sexually available women in general, or specifically actual sex workers.
The thing about the hoes is that whether you’re announcing to a woman that she is one (before taking her to a ho-tel), reminding everyone that you can’t trust them, telling them to leave if they can’t accept the basics, or simply wondering where they at - hoes are an integral part of the hip hop landscape.
In many cases the very concept of masculinity is pinned to one’s ability to either attract hoes, or traffic them, a situation which ain’t easy, and makes it hard out here for a select group of men.
Across the board, however, one thing is certain about hoes – they are not worthy of respect, and the fact that men don’t respect them is absolutely paramount to their street cred. Jay-Z wants you to know he doesn’t eat with them. Snoop just needs you to understand that G’s are more important than them. Hoes are women who are available for sex, but don’t have the ability to hold emotional focus or respect from men.
This concept – of a sexually available woman who should have some stigma attached to her as a result of that availability – sits alongside another hip hop trope, that of the bad bitch. Bad bitches, like hoes, are generally sexual, sexualised, or sexually available. Unlike hoes, however, who have been pronounced unworthy of love by too many people to name, bad bitches are LOVED. Kanye is searching the globe for a hotel that hires them as cleaning staff. Nicki Minaj (to whom all praises) has declared herself the badest bitch, though she may also kiss others if you dare her.
So if some women who like having sex are Bad Bitches, and others are hoes, how is the line drawn?
Largely it seems that the ho/bad bitch dichotomy is resolved through masculine control of emotional attachment. If a bad bitch is not causing problems for a man, but does him the favour of remaining sexually available to him, she retains her status as a bad bitch. If a woman becomes a problem for someone, she becomes a ho. The fastest way for a bad bitch to lose her title is for someone to fall in and out of love with her, at which point she is reduced to the level of ho. Similarly, if a woman is sexually available to one hip hop artist, she’s a bad bitch. If she’s fucked every one she can, she’s a ho. Especially if she fucks with Drake.
Of course Drake draws his own distinction, saying that hoes want attention, and women want respect. Arguably, then, when men are done respecting women it’s at that point that they become hoes, because it is their perception that allows them to state what a woman’s end goal is.
On the whole, then, in the hip hop context bad bitches are good, hoes are bad, and men get to determine who is what and where the line is drawn.
This is exactly the opposite of the perception of sexually available women in the medieval period.
Most people assume, through not much fault of their own, that during the Middle Ages in Europe, sex was considered across the board to be a Very Bad Thing. Given that the Church and its control of the continent is essentially the over-arching institution of the medieval period, and that the Church on the whole says that sex is quite naughty and should only be done by the marrieds, it would be easy to assume that any sex for funsies was off limits.
This is only half true, however, because the Church whilst announcing that sex is Well Bad, and Definitely Not Holy, also acknowledged that it’s probably sorta kinda necessary. Not for women of course - don’t go crazy! – but for men.
In fact, it was the Church’s position that men need sex so badly that if they don’t have access to it, they might just burn the goddamn city down. Any city. Cuz boys will be boys.
So what are a bunch of unmarried dudes to do? They can’t have sex, but they will almost certainly go on a violent rampage if denied it. To this the Church has a solution – prostitutes.
Oh hell yes they bigged up prostitutes. Saint fucking Augustine started on this line of thought during the Late Antique period.* In the thirteenth century, Saint fucking Thomas Aquinas reaffirmed that shit in his Summa Theologica**, and basically everyone was just like, ok cool, we’ll get some prostitutes in the joint then.
So since many Church thinkers had acknowledged that prostitutes were pretty useful, and people didn’t want dudes who weren’t getting any to burn the fucker down, most cities had municipally chartered public brothels where you could go get some, and hopefully not riot.
These brothels were usually outside of or near the city walls, because cities knew they needed to have them, but didn’t want to look like they were celebrating that fact. So, for example, in London brothels had to be across the river in Southwark.
A lot of cities would also legislate what prostitutes had to wear so that everybody would know you were a prostitute. In London, again, the uniform was a ‘hood of ray’, meaning black and white stripped material.
So normalised was prostitution that it was considered completely acceptable to run a brothel, and intrepid businessmen doing just that in London included the Bishop of Winchester, giving rise to the euphemism ‘Winchester geese’ . (I dare you to write a rap using that right fucking now.) A lot of those ladies are buried in the Cross Bones graveyard, which you should go check out next time you’re near Borough Market.
Technically having sex with a prostitute was a sin, but it attracted very little penance. Similarly, whilst being a prostitute was a sin, if you decided you were over it (and didn’t have the money to join a specialist order of nuns like the Magdalenes – who still exist!) you just had to get married and you were pretty much off the hook. You were, after all, doing society a service.
All this means that there was a place, both figuratively and literally in medieval society for prostitutes. The same is not true of bad bitches.
While it was totally legit for a dude to go get off with a prostitute if he was feeling it women pretty much had to STFU. Are you married? Then go ahead and have you some sex. (But not on a Sunday, or during Lent, or while you’re on your period, or, you know what? Just check this flow chart.)
If you weren’t married? Nope. Nothing doing. Absolutely not. Maybe become a prostitute for a while if you really feel like you need to be having TEH SEX? In medieval Prague there was even a term for women who liked having a good time (good times being defined as gambling with men, polkaing, and presumably sexing on dudes) – suspect women, or mulieres suspecte.
By being sexually available and interested in, you know, fun, you were considered someone to be wary of. Someone untrustworthy. The bad bitch was therefore the one to watch out for, and the prostitute the acceptable individual.
Again, however, you will notice that the good woman/bad woman divide here is determined by dudes. If women are having sex specifically to take care of the needs of a bunch of men, and are willing to subject themselves to the regulations men determined to control them, then they are fine. If women are attempting to gain their own ends by having sex, and that doesn’t necessarily have to do with catering to the whims of men, then they are problematic.
The point of all this, then, is that from the medieval period to now, Western society has done a 180 in terms of defining which sexually available women are alright. It used to be ok to be sexual if you were getting money for it, now it’s ok to be sexual if you’re just doing your thing.
What has remained constant, though, is that the permission to be a sexual being is still predicated on catering to the needs of men. It’s alright to be sexual if a dude says so. The game may have changed, but the rules are the same.
My wife and I are both on our second marriages. We’ve been married for 23 years. Recently, she showed me her wedding band from her first marriage. I asked her to get rid of it. She refused. She said it’s part of her history. This bothers me: The ring was given to her by another man with whom she exchanged vows and to whom she was married for six years. Your thoughts? — Honoring the Past?
Dear Honoring the Past,
That your wife of 23 years recently showed you a wedding band from a man she was married to decades ago is clear evidence that she is actively engaging in a sordid affair about which she is desperately trying to hide the evidence, and you are lucky to have discovered it now through your extreme cunning and wile, which is to say, because she showed it to you of her own volition because it is not a big deal whatsoever.
Worse, your putative “wife” is lording over you the shocking revelation that she existed on planet Earth before you came along — something you could never have known purely by virtue of the fact that you are her second husband. Who was she married to before this abrupt and traumatic reveal? Why, her imagined prince charming — you, of course! Obviously she has only and ever been married either to you or to the hope that she would find you, personally, somehow.
It is cruel indeed for your secretive wife to suddenly divulge out of nowhere and with no compunction whatsoever, that she, a formerly married woman who was completely open about her prior relationships, had in fact been formerly married to a real-life human man rather than preserving for you specifically her womanly gifts, as you had every right to believe up until the specific moment when, because you had never seen it before and thus it could not exist purely because she told you it had happened and we all know how women do be making these things up, her previous marriage. Your cruel wife has casually revealed to you the horrifying evidence of her desecration of the marriage vows which she had not made to you because you were not her husband, and this insult shall not stand!
This ring is only part of her “history” if your wife is allowed to believe that the sorry play of her life had worth and value and meaning before you made your entrance onstage. That’s no platform on which to build a relationship; the only way to know if your marriage is secure is to abandon her for her infidelity to you, a man she has been married to nearly three times longer than the man who gave her that ring all those decades ago. If she takes you back, you will only know it’s real if she throws away the ring over which she exchanged vows with a total stranger lo those 23 years ago.
Niezsche has some pretty hateful things to say as well. It is extremely hard to find a well-respected, long-revered philosopher who didn’t have horrible things to say about women. These men are considered geniuses, but never even bothered to question the gender norms and misogyny of their time. This isn’t even touching on the horrible things Freud had to say about women.
Seems remiss to leave out mythology like Pandora and the Garden of Eden, which explicitly blame women for the evils of the world / the introduction of sin. But frankly I think it just boils down to: women were at home because they were often pregnant, therefore men were in charge, so of course they’d invent and/or subscribe to beliefs that they deserve the power and freedom their sex allowed them. It’s like rich people convincing themselves they totally earned those millions with hard work and cleverness. Why would they question gender norms? That threatens their power. And nobody with power wants to risk having to give up even a fraction of it.
