On Women-Annihilating Transhumanism
Plus an event in Washington DC
Everyone is finished with antibiotics at our house! It was a happy but tricky Christmas season.
First off, for anyone in DC, I’l be speaking at the National Press Club next week (Jan 19th) as part of a panel on “Building a Civilization of Love.” We’ll be talking about what a just post-Roe world could look like. The event is sponsored by the Women and Children First Initiative run by the de Nicola Center.
And, whether you’re in DC or not, I’m happy to report that my panel from the de Nicola Center fall conference is now up!
The theme of the conference was "And It Was Very Good: On Creation." My panel (which also included Erika Bachiochi and Pia de Solenni) was titled “What Women Are: The Imago Dei in Creation.”
My remarks start at 19:58 and draw on my essay “Designing Woman” from Comment. I was speaking on the theme of “Women-Annihilating Transhumanism” and here’s a preview (a little telescoped):
For a lot of famous transhumanists, transhumanism is aspirational. It’s a matter of expanding capacity, adding to the human chassis. […] But for women transhumanists, it’s more seldom aspirational transhumanism versus what I would call “survival transhumanism.” While the famous transhumanists are expanding what they can do, women are limiting or altering parts of themselves just to keep up.
Many women who don’t identify as transhumanist begin their day with at least one of two transhumanist acts. First, taking a contraceptive pill, to make sure that one essential bodily aspect of being a woman can be turned off. To say: “this part of being human isn’t adapted for the modern world.”
And then there’s the second option, which I would frame as transhumanist. Many women get up in the morning, look in the mirror, and say, “I’m going to paint a different bone structure over my entire face.” And contouring would definitely count as sci-fi if you were doing it with a little projection of LEDs, but when it’s done with paint, it doesn’t seem as extreme.
But it’s actually very strange to have a culture where every day, millions of women say “to get ready, to look professional, I need to paint the face of a different woman over my face.”
There’s a lot women are expected to do to fix the problem of being women.
The demands can become so routine that it’s easy to forget they’re unjust.
I was glad to be part of the panel, and to get to field questions at the end with my co-panelists. I also realize I wore the exact same dress to last year’s de Nicola conference, so I will try to remember to wear my other dress for the event next week.
In the meantime, I’d love to know what your biggest question about post-Roe policy is.
Mine continues to be about the gap between “life of the mother” exemptions as written and how hospitals are allegedly applying them. I’m still working on finding sources with direct experience who would speak on the record.
I’d also like to know if there’s a practice you’re recently taken on or abandoned that is about making your body fit more easily into the expectations of others.
I quit shaving a while ago for basically political reasons (in particular, to get away from the idea that being or looking "feminine" means involves removing a part of my female body) but I've never thought about these "beauty" practices in terms of transhumanism before. That's an interesting framework, and I think it's especially interesting to look at how people's apparently individual choices still contribute to an ever-stiffer competition for everyone else, and what it costs to walk away from that competition.
On “making [my] body fit more easily into the expectations of others”: I haven’t worn makeup or shaved for years. It’s a combination of not caring to spend time/money/energy on those things and, on the other hand, wanting to bring my authentic appearance to the world. Purely a personal choice and I think there’s lots of room for freedom on this.
Recently, during the obvious/conspicuous part of my second pregnancy, I found myself struggling a lot with people’s probable expectations of my appearance. It seems like past a certain point, a visibly pregnant belly is the *only* aspect of my body and even my self that some people seem to see or care or ask about. It seems like people almost have an expectation that a visibly pregnant woman ceases to be anyone or anything else. I found myself becoming hyperaware of my clothing/accessory/media/activity choices in an effort to visually convey that, though I was glad and grateful to be carrying a baby, I was much more than a mere gestator. Anyway. Idk if this precisely fits the question, and some of the self-consciousness is definitely just my own hangups, but I think there’s a possible element of wider societal expectations of women’s bodies in there too.
Another thing that comes to mind is purity culture dress expectations, but I’m not going to do a deep dive into that right now...