I’ve definitely heard deep-sounding (well, trying-to-be-deep-sounding) period apologetics. As has been mentioned, there isn’t quite as much of an incentive to justify it since it’s already mostly preventable via birth control, but there have been attempts to frame it philosophically as an overall good and honorable thing. (Example including what seem to be the most common ones: “Your period. It’s a rite of passage. The miracle that allows you to create life. And it’s what makes you a woman.”)
What about women with non-functional ovaries, or none at all? Gender is admittedly hard to define (I suspect that, like human morality, it’s a built-in, highly complex, poorly formalized match predicate), but attempting to define it through spiritual non-information like that? Ugh.
Not that I’m defending this viewpoint, of course, but it is far from meaningless. Bearing children is quite literally the value of a woman—in most societies “that do not derive from the Enlightenment”, as Eliezer would say. A barren woman is worthless and therefore not a woman at all, in the important sense—she is not a functional woman.
To a majority of all men who ever lived, and probably to most women who lived with them, “the value of a woman is in bearing children”, or “bearing children is what makes a human being a woman”, are nearly tautologies. You should not be surprised to encounter such statements. (Ugh field optional.)
Oh, I’m not surprised. It just feels so… sad and cheap to see the value of a person reduced to purely their reproductive value. Is this the “logic” behind haters of childfree people?
I’ve definitely heard deep-sounding (well, trying-to-be-deep-sounding) period apologetics. As has been mentioned, there isn’t quite as much of an incentive to justify it since it’s already mostly preventable via birth control, but there have been attempts to frame it philosophically as an overall good and honorable thing. (Example including what seem to be the most common ones: “Your period. It’s a rite of passage. The miracle that allows you to create life. And it’s what makes you a woman.”)
Those sentences are meaningless nonsense.
What about women with non-functional ovaries, or none at all? Gender is admittedly hard to define (I suspect that, like human morality, it’s a built-in, highly complex, poorly formalized match predicate), but attempting to define it through spiritual non-information like that? Ugh.
Not that I’m defending this viewpoint, of course, but it is far from meaningless. Bearing children is quite literally the value of a woman—in most societies “that do not derive from the Enlightenment”, as Eliezer would say. A barren woman is worthless and therefore not a woman at all, in the important sense—she is not a functional woman.
To a majority of all men who ever lived, and probably to most women who lived with them, “the value of a woman is in bearing children”, or “bearing children is what makes a human being a woman”, are nearly tautologies. You should not be surprised to encounter such statements. (Ugh field optional.)
Oh, I’m not surprised. It just feels so… sad and cheap to see the value of a person reduced to purely their reproductive value. Is this the “logic” behind haters of childfree people?