Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Parts by Helen King; Basic Books, 480 pp., $35
In a 13 BCE contract, a Persian woman named Didyma agreed to “nurse and suckle … with her own milk pure and untainted” a foundling owned by a rich woman. Didyma promised not to “injure her milk nor sleep with a man nor become pregnant nor suckle another child,” or else pay 500 drachmas in damages—an amount 50 times her monthly wages. Lest we think this a quirk of the ancient world, a 1664 Italian medical treatise says that “congress with a man spoils the milk.” Thus hiring a wet nurse could become an arrangement in which “a rich man paid a poor man not to have sex with his own wife, so that the rich man could continue his unlimited access to his own marriage bed.” So writes classical scholar Helen King in Immaculate Forms, an examination of beliefs about the body and how it functioned at different points in (mostly) Western history. Using medical and religious texts, King explores how these beliefs informed what was expected of women and what they were allowed to do—how the ways in which people imagined the body influenced women’s lives.
Dividing her book into sections on the breast, the clitoris, the hymen, and the womb, King demonstrates that the body and its parts are cultural constructions as much as physical realities. She quotes poet Anne Boyer, who, in a book about her own body and treatment for breast cancer, writes, “It’s all made up. I mean having a body in the world is not to have a body in truth; it’s to have a body in history.” By denaturalizing our own unexamined beliefs about bodies, King renders our own bodies unfamiliar, revealing them to be, at least in part, chimerical. Her assertion works like a magic trick, or a turn in a poem that recontextualizes everything that precedes it. As King exposes how our ideas about the body are “made up,” this reader looked down at her own body, made suddenly strange, wondrous, and unexplained by science.
In the section about the hymen, King explores virginity, sexual purity vs. maturity, male control over female fertility, and the relationship between those ideas and female genitalia. By the end, I was unsure whether the hymen exists. The additional sources I read seemed to be burdened by cultural information that was more interpretive than biological, like what King had described in other eras.
The ancient Greeks believed female bodies to be biologically unstable because they were dominated by menstrual blood, which could build up inside the womb, causing it to move around (a lot!) and press on other organs. “They used such body-based beliefs about women to justify excluding them from much of the life of the Greek city-state,” writes King. Women were too mercurial to participate in politics or own property. Belief in the “wandering womb” resulted in extraordinary medical advice: if a woman stopped menstruating, then bleeding from elsewhere was thought to be the cure. Even vomiting blood would do the trick. Scent therapy was also used to treat gynecological problems; it was believed that a prolapsed womb would travel up inside the body if a woman sniffed something fragrant. “For us, not just the treatments but the very notion of the wandering womb makes no sense,” writes King. But eerily, some of the older beliefs are still familiar. Aromatherapy. Breast milk as a cure for conjunctivitis. The idea that mental illness in women is related, somehow, to our wombs.
How are men and women different? In 16th-century Europe, many people believed that men had one rib fewer than women because Eve had been created from Adam’s rib. Some held to the ancient idea that women’s bodies were colder than men’s. Other binaries overlapped with the sex binary: female-male, wet-dry, soft-hard, left-right, nature-culture, flesh-spirit. If one wanted a female child, tie up one’s right testicle, according to the ancient Greeks. Victorians thought that women should be excluded from higher education because there wasn’t enough blood to supply both brains and wombs. “If women were educated, the human race would die out,” King summarizes, explaining a rationale I could swear I’ve heard before, albeit in an altered guise. Some terminology used to describe female anatomy comes from Latin, the language of a culture that believed that the womb was shaped like an inverted jar. Cervix is Latin for “neck,” and labia means “lips.”
King’s section on the clitoris largely deals with how pleasure might align (or not) with the concept that female body parts were “made for” the purposes of reproduction. “The Hebrew Bible and other texts associated with Jewish and Christian groups can serve to support the link between women’s pleasure and conception,” King writes. In 2012, Todd Akin, then a Republican congressman, said in an interview that pregnancy seldom resulted from “legitimate rape.” If there is conception, Akin assumed, there must have been pleasure. King points out that Akin has a master’s degree in divinity from a conservative seminary.
After referencing jokes about its elusive nature, King writes that the physical extent of the clitoris was known in the 19th century but not widely accepted until the 1990s. “Just because, in modern times, something was correct, that didn’t mean people were willing to believe it,” she writes. The book includes an image of a 3-D printed model of the clitoris, which looks like a bird, the beak of which is the only external part. The rest is internal erectile tissue that extends nine centimeters. “The clitoris is not a button, it is an iceberg,” says Sophia Wallace, an American artist. The 3-D printed models are used to teach schoolchildren in France about human anatomy; I had no idea that the clitoris was so large, nor had I seen the full shape of it before.
“Historically, people trying to understand what constitutes ‘being a woman’ have always enlisted the body as their main evidence,” writes King. “Many have argued for clear boundaries between men and women, often to support different assumptions about what men and women can be and can do.” Yet the past, she points out, also provides stories that collapse the sex binary: there are menstruating men as well as women who become masculine by physical exertion. The body parts that her book explores aren’t necessarily only parts of female bodies. And not all women have them.
Gender is constructed, King demonstrates, but biological sex is itself less a binary than a continuum. The line between sexes is often arbitrarily drawn; King writes that in order to be designated a “boy” at birth, a child must have a penis length of 1.9 centimeters or greater. She points out that how biological sex is determined has expanded in the past century, to include not only anatomical tests but hormonal and genetic ones.
There is a temptation, King warns, to think of old ideas as backward and current beliefs as enlightened. But, she writes, “inescapably, we can only think about and make sense of our bodies in terms of the beliefs and theories of the period in which we live.” No one exists outside of ideology; we’re all in the same fix. King contends that understanding the changing nature of historical ideas about bodies, gender, and sex presents us with opportunities to challenge and expand our own.
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