Men have issues with women’s biology. People fear what they don’t understand
What do teenage girls struggle with?
The lack of a sense of agency, lack of self-confidence. In boys, self-esteem drops at the age of 12-13 and quickly rises back. In teenage girls, it remains at rock bottom for years. And the reality we live in doesn’t help. What stands out is the powerful social media pressure that crushes girls and young women. The problem of your own appearance clashing with what you see in embellished, perfect photos on Instagram is frustrating. Dr Iwona Chmura-Rutkowska, an educator and sociologist who deals, among others, with the issue of gender equality, once told me that the social value of a man is assessed by his wallet – we look at what kind of house he has, what kind of car he drives. A woman, on the other hand, is judged by what she looks like. It organises a woman’s world and is the source of her fear of being judged. It’s a gigantic problem that most of us adults can’t handle at all, let alone girls in their teens.
Do girls support each other?
I would like to say yes. Unfortunately, I observe that they can’t. It’s as if the difficulty of being a woman translated into this lack of solidarity. As if girls didn’t want other girls to succeed out of fear that such success would take something away from them. Once, at a workshop, we asked the girls directly about mistreating each other. We listened with horror to how cruel they could be to each other. Here’s an example: one puts on new earrings and asks how she looks in them, and her friend says she looks like a witch. Only she uses a much harsher word. And such behaviour stems from the fact that they are very insecure – they compete with each other, wanting to be better, prettier or have more attractive clothes than their friends. One girl recounted that for a long time she didn’t exist to her classmates because her mum wouldn’t let her have a Facebook account. Young mothers are also under a lot of pressure, as they try to conform to those who show online that you can have a flat belly and you should go to fitness classes three weeks after having a baby. And as a mother, you must be perfect, without any doubts and without the right to weakness. I observe how powerful the insecurity of women is in the public speaking classes I teach. When I ask women to record their speech on their cell phone, they are unable to do it because of all the insecurities they have, because of how unhappy they are with themselves. When I worked in business television, I had trouble getting a woman on the show. I heard, ‘But do you really need me? I don’t think I can do it, why don’t you ask a [male] friend of mine’. And when I was preparing a paper on public-private partnerships in local government, I talked about these investments with excellent female experts. It was just that they didn’t feel worthy to have their names appear next to their statements. Because it might be better to have the mayor or the president signed under them.
As if we don’t deserve recognition.
It is us who put ourselves in the position of a secretary who’s only good for handing flowers and pouring coffee. This has been a daunting experience for me. To change this situation, I started a foundation.
Why is it so hard for us to give ourselves the right to be important, to just be good at something?
Because we don’t have role models. In the crowd of prominent men, we have the overused Maria Skłodowska-Curie. There is also Hanna Suchocka, who, after all, was Prime Minister for only one year and – not to belittle her charisma – was not the leader of a political group, but who fits the image of a strong woman. I once checked how many women’s monuments in Poznań bear their full names. I only found one, of Maria Grzegorzewska, an educator. One in a city of 500,000 people. That’s why every year on March 8, we hold a “Women to Monuments” event. We want to make residents aware of how uneven the public space of our cities is. More and more towns join it every year. Living monuments stand on pedestals for a while to honour women who have been completely forgotten by history. But it’s not just a Polish problem – a statue of women bearing their names has only recently appeared in Central Park.
We have a statue of the Polish Mother in the hospital. Nameless of course. But with a baby at the breast.
Well, such a model of a quiet shero who is ready to make sacrifices for the sake of the family does not help build a sense of self‑worth. And speaking of motherhood, the abortion issue, discussed so lively in recent times, is ruining the sense of security. It sends a message to a woman that she is not important, that her voice doesn’t count and neither does her body. This undermines women’s sense of agency. We really have a lot to do, which is why I had no doubts about my foundation joining the ‘Career Cycle’ programme for employers initiated by the Kulczyk Foundation. It is about taking care of all employees and sensitising them to gender equality issues. The foundation aims at making women’s reality easier and ensuring that we have strong representation in public life and that women’s voices are heard. The number of female Members of Parliament has not even exceeded 30 percent, and this is the magic threshold of being recognised by others as a minority. We have one female minister and out of 16 provinces, only one is managed by a female marshal.
But there are more and more female village leaders.
Because at this lowest level, you have to do a lot, while there is little glamour and agency. The higher up, the fewer women. Men are not rooting for us. I know the story of a lady who won the election for the head of the commune, and her fellow local government officials began to call her ‘Dorothy-three months’, predicting her short career with disdain and superiority. And she’s been in office for over ten years now. We did a survey to see if women thought about running in parliamentary and local government elections. We found out that even if it crossed their minds, they didn’t act on it. They are horrified by the way Polish politics is. They don’t have enough money, as running as an independent candidate involves a huge outlay. And there’s another important reason – they are giving up out of fear of being judged and criticised. After these surveys, our foundation started doing workshops to embolden women to run for office. We convince them that a lot depends on them and they really can change reality.
Tailor it to their needs?
It’s not talked about much, but after all, the space around us was built by men and for men, so that they would be comfortable in it. All you have to do is look around. The pavements are too narrow for a woman with a pushchair and an older child by her side to walk on it comfortably. Kerb ramps are inadequate for pushchair use. And the metal grates at the entrances to office buildings or shopping malls are what kills women’s heels. The Viennese urban planner Eva Kail has drawn attention to the fact that this space is unfriendly for girls and women and has been working together with a group of women on changing it for 30 years now. Even public transport is not adapted for women who use it not only to commute from home to work, but also to do shopping, to pick their children up from school, to take the children to extra classes. But there are numerous examples of such maladjustment in Poland as well. Those narrow and uneven pavements, those high kerbs and metal grates are here too. All those broken heels! Someone will say it’s unimportant...
...but it can effectively spoil the mood.
When I was a young mum and moved around with my daughter in a pram, I lived in a block of flats with two lifts. When the more modern one broke down, whenever I went shopping or for a walk, I had to disassemble the pram to fit it into the other lift that worked. And in one of the companies I worked at, the car park for the employees was on bare ground. Every day, you waded through a sea of muck. Women’s footwear was particularly affected by this. So the women put document sleeves over their feet.
It’s hard to assume that men do this to us on purpose.
Sure. All of this can even be explained. The layout of many cities we know is a 19th‑century concept. They were built and designed by men and for men – public space was, after all, their domain, not the domain of women, whose role was primarily to take care of the home. So it’s hard to expect such cities to be adequate for women with prams. These narrow lifts and car parks on unpaved yards are like that probably simply because no one thought about women’s needs. Our role as women is to fight for ourselves.
Are the Viennese successful?
Eva Kail has already gained approval for several dozen space planning projects that take into account gender equality. For example, to design an estate in which the windows of various rooms look out onto the playground, so that mothers can watch their children from home.
At work, it’s harder for us than for men too.
Let’s talk about women’s physiology then. A foundation board colleague of mine told me a chilling story about how her boss treated women at the company in which she used to work. He observed them at work through cameras and once told one of the workers who happened to be on her period so she needed to use the toilet more often, ‘If you go to the restroom again, don’t bother coming back to your work station’. The rest of the girls later made sure not to leave more than twice during a shift, but, after all, each of us has individual needs, sometimes you just need to change the pad or tampon more often. Many of us might have similar stories to tell.
I feel like women’s physiology hampers men a bit.
Anthropologists point out that the origins of misogyny might be related to biological issues. In Papua New Guinea, South America or Africa, there are cases of women being treated as impure. Sometimes, menstruating women are sent to the outskirts of the village for the time of their period. There are tribes in which the worlds of men and women intersect only when necessary. I read in an anthropological book that men engage in sexual acts out of necessity, because, after all, there must be offspring for the species to survive. But they faint with fear, they clean their fingernails until they bleed. Some people believe that a woman squeezes the juices out of a man and takes away his vitality and strength during lovemaking, which is why men may get sick later.
Where do these ideas come from?
From misunderstanding of biology. After all, blood is associated with a wound, with disease. In a tribe, a wounded man knew he could even die. And a woman would bleed periodically, but that blood did not kill her. And, worse yet, she was bearing children. How can you explain all this? Men couldn’t, so they began to fear. Because people fear what they don’t understand. And fear breeds aggression. Some anthropologists believe that the reluctance to treat women equally stems from this fear.
But, after all, we now know very well why women bleed and how babies are made.
And I’m under the impression that not much has changed in these heads since the tribal times. Fear of otherness still triggers aggressive behaviour in us. After all, we don’t even know ourselves what we fear as Europe when we’re building a wall on the Eastern border. Or what our resentment towards sexual minorities stems from. And there are actually quite a few situations where men have a problem with women’s biology. Take, for example, that blue liquid that used to appear in ads for sanitary pads or tampons. Why blue? It’s an unconscious atavism – because this otherness of women is disgusting, revulsive. There are quite a few grown men who have never seen a tampon or a pad because their mum hid the boxes deep in a cabinet, and ‘those days’ were only talked about quietly and with shame.
So there’s still a lot to be done.
It is a huge project. All you can do is educate. We see how important this is when we conduct workshops with girls. There is no other way than to educate, explain certain phenomena, and listen to what teens are struggling with. People, let the woman go to the restroom. It’s important to say out loud, ‘We have periods, hello, it’s a normal thing!’. We start working with young girls. This year, we want to start a series of workshops for teenage girls and their mums. Entering the teen years is the best time to talk openly and without restraint about physiological issues, about needs, about how it’s worth taking care of yourself and asking for support. Once, during another workshop with teens, we asked the girls to list the most important things they would like to say to their younger friends to make their lives easier – including in the world of social media. Girls advised: ‘accept yourself’, ‘don’t be afraid to ask for help’, ‘don’t be afraid of weakness’, ‘don’t try to fit in no matter what’. There was a lot of wisdom in it.
What helps women?
The support of other women. I see it work wonders in female-only groups, when women start talking to each other. It turns out that we all have similar experiences and similar problems. We advise opening up to other women. Sisterhood provides extraordinary strength. We miss these moments, especially in a world where there are so many things more important to a woman than herself. It’s also important to work on yourself. In the ‘Career Cycle’, we are excited to collaborate on the idea of hosting workshops, meetings, and webinars for the companies that join the programme. We offer meetings for women to help them build their self‑esteem. Many of us struggle with impostor syndrome, which stems from the belief that our skills and expertise are not sufficient, and one day we’ll be exposed and everyone will see our fraud. This is just low self‑esteem, and a great deal can be done to improve it. In our foundation, there are female experts dealing with gender equality, we have a lot of experience and a lot of topics that we cover with the workshop participants. Fortunately, you can see that there is a lot of interest from employers. This gives hope for change. I believe that no woman will ever hear from her boss again that she can’t go to the restroom during her period.
Autorka: Agnieszka Urazińska
Ilustracja: Marta Frej
The text was published in „Wolna Sobota” a magazine of „Gazeta Wyborcza” on 19 February 2022
