March 2021

Motherhood Rescheduled. – a Clock Ticker being-“A female in her mid-to late thirties who must find a way to take advantage of her remaining fertility before she loses a chance to be a mother.”
 Being a mother is considered in strict biological terms as having a baby from one’s own egg and this is the Clock Ticker’s overwhelming preoccupation; Monica, Kelly, Hannah & Sarah the author – are described as experiencing “baby panic” having postponed child-bearing in order to pursue a successful career, and perhaps less successfully the Right Man.
 The book details the journey of each of these women in successive sections- Longings, Reprieve, Men, Time, Reckoning-though their experience is interspersed with up-dates on the current state of the art of egg-freezing, which are perhaps the most interesting sections. 
 The biographical and autobiographical chapters detail the process of administering hormone shots “to make your body pump out eggs” which are surgically extracted and frozen; later thawed and fertilized with a partner’s sperm; and then ‘placed inside your uterus to grow into babies’. This process releases a woman from the tyranny of the biological clock to become a mother whenever she wants, though the author concedes “not that you would necessarily want to have a baby at, say, fifty or sixty, but the point was that you could.”(author’s italics)
 Could this be a new frontier of feminist choice? Considering the price and the pain involved, probably-and many would say happily-it will remain an option for the privileged few Monicas, Kellys, Hannahs and Sarahs who have the time and funds, or helpful parents to write their cheques. 
In the introductory chapter the author states her two main aims in writing this book; first, to answer “looming questions” as to what happens to women after they put themselves “off the clock” by freezing their eggs; do they really go on to pursue ever more fulfilling career and personal choices? And the real focus for our Clock Tickers seems to be extending personal choice with turning frozen eggs into warm babies a distinctly subsidiary aim.
 The second reason for pulling this information together is to redress the negative image of egg-freezers as the “materialistic career girl”, or the “plucky single gal” who still has not homed in on Mr Right, and to present egg-freezing as a prime example of the “take charge” attitude which is one of the most fundamental American values. This highly individualistic perspective – what does egg-freezing do for and show about the women who do it? – permeates the text though there are some attempts late in the book to place this activity in a broader social context. 
 The cases of women about to undergo therapy for some forms of cancer who freeze their eggs in order to prevent them from radiation damage , or women with a family history of premature menopause are indeed mentioned though this is not the book’s focus.
 Other characters in the book-in addition to the Clock-Ticking Egg Freezers-are the assorted scientists who are in favour or against the process on other than strictly medical grounds. The redoubtable British embryologist who has been against freezing for Clock Tickers converts at the last. perhaps not surprisingly….
 The text is peppered with doctors’ requests for $10,000, $12,000 and $14,000 and moves along at a hectic pace towards the dénouement, despite extended passages on auto-injecting “into my stomach an inch below the belly button” and gruelling episodes with ovaries being nudged by vaginal probes. By page 211 author Sarah has spent $50,000 own and parents’ funds to freeze 70 eggs stored in three different locations.
 With the exception of Sarah who provides almost more detail than is strictly required to support the argument- “I am extremely sensitive to hormonal changes – to the point that my parents counted down my periods until I left for college”-the individuals are difficult to distinguish from each other, though Monica’s Filipino heritage is referred to from time to time. Their high-flying careers which have kept them from procreating are also not clearly delineated though sales and marketing seem to feature, no doubt coincidentally. Perhaps the fact that parents- even after their own divorce (Monica again) are prepared to provide financial support suggests some less than high-flying careers, and maybe an unusual degree of parental involvement in adult daughters’ fertility? Therapists are also on line to guide the journey. Extended passages on their internet dating experiences give large tracts of this book a women’s magazine aspect; “she usually went for conservative types but…’Hell , why not try the arts’ she thought…. It was the first time in years she had wanted to kiss someone back”. It is not always easy to determine whether the humour is intentional or not and to whom it is being directed. “Finally, over dinner on New Year’s Eve she choked down the lump in her throat and forced herself to tell him about the decision to freeze her eggs.” This soft centre of the book cries out for speed-reading…or hysteria.
 And was there a happy ending for Monica, Hannah, Kelly and Sarah? Dear Reader, you must find out for yourself. Whilst only two of these adventures ended in a warm baby Sarah believes that having those eggs in the freezer freed all of them from baby panic and enabled them to feel “in command of their own destiny” and so have more fulfilling lives. In the Epilogue she reports increasing endorsement from the medical establishment and greater demand from women of ever younger age-groups. The epilogue touches briefly upon some of the individual and societal consequences of having more elderly first-time mothers, but curiously does not raise the usual issues of more balanced parenting, or family-friendly social policies and work-places which have made combining motherhood and a career a reality in an increasing number of countries.  
Does this book convince us that the Clock Ticking Egg Freezers are America’s unsung heroines? Hardly. But it provides enough information for CTs out there to decide whether or not

Chromosomes. This is not a book to judge by its title which suggested, to me at least, that it would be exploring the latest thinking on the biological roots of gender differences.Though it belatedly crossed my mind that this may be a clever pun on the reality show. As it turns out the XX Factor is about the effects of the existence of a group of elite women who have successfully “leaned in”… (to quote Sheryl Sandberg’s coinage which has successfully entered the language). In the introduction to The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World Alison Wolf states that “until now all women’s lives, whether rich or poor, have been dominated by the same experiences and pressures”. Today, elite and highly educated women have become a class apart. But these professionals, businesswomen, and holders of advanced degrees have not moved farther apart from men. On the contrary, they are now more like the men of the family than ever before in history. It is from other women that they have drawn away. She argues that whereas previously the lives of all women had been very similar with motherhood and childbearing as the center of their world, the transformation of the labor market primarily related to advances in education for women, and the arrival of the Pill transformed “elite” women’s lives. While education and advances in reproductive technology have been life-changing for women and men, more attention could have been paid by Ms. Wolf to political and legal influences on women’s labor market choices. It is interesting also that Ms. Wolf uses the term “elite” throughout the book with approbation and without any sense of irony. Elite women are those who have benefited from conventional elite education and have gone on to thrive in a world previously dominated by men. It seems not too surprising then that they have “not moved apart from men” given that they have such similar trajectories. Ms. Wolf draws upon a range of already published material and widely used datasets in the public domain, with the exception of one chapter on sexual behavior. Much of the data that she uses is quite dated. For example she relies heavily upon ILO datasets of 1997 even though there is much more recent data available from the UN, the World Bank, and elsewhere. She does however enliven these sets of data by interviews with a number of apparently rather “elite” colleagues and acquaintances (“elegant, tiny, highflying Kathy Matsui at a conference in Bangladesh, multitasking on her BlackBerry and midway between meetings in Milan and her home in Tokyo” is a case in point); and makes a number of literary and topical references. In her chapter “The Rich Get Rich and the Poor Get Children” she states that “the rich have fewer children than their contemporaries, and many will have no children at all.” While this belief still has popular currency more recent data show that in many countries, including the UK, the better off are having larger families, and as she herself recognizes in her conclusion dedicate enormous amounts of money and time to “ all their children.” This is of course made possible by what Ms. Wolf terms “the return of the servant classes”. This means in effect that the relationship between women at the top and the “lower echelons” of society is more or less the same as it was in previous centuries when there was no elite of working women in the labor force. In her chapter Sex and the Single Graduate Ms. Wolf maintains that despite the much vaunted liberation of women the world retains some old taboos in particular the exchange of sex for money. This argument seems a little naïve and simplistic and elsewhere she supports Catherine Hakim whose theory of “erotic capital” emphasizes the importance in the workplace for both men and women of physical and sexual attractiveness. It is generally recognized that in the careers of the heroines she names in her first chapter, (but does not follow)-Nancy Astor, Margaret Thatcher, and Hillary Clinton- their relationships with men have been a significant factor in their success. In her concluding chapter Ms. Wolf states that all women feel that being a woman is central to their identity “the reason must, surely, be children” which seems to counter several of her basic arguments. Does author Wolf convince us of her basic thesis which is that the rise of working women by which she means “elite”, by which she means “educated” working women, has created a far less equal world? Did a unified sisterhood exist already? There is little evidence to show even from the texts that Ms. Wolf is very fond of quoting (for example the works of Jane Austen) that elite women however defined, and working women as normally defined, ever made common cause other than as mistress and servant. In fact it is usually assumed that women of any class who are dependent upon fathers, husbands, brothers, or mentors for their fortunes usually support men rather than women. Thus the following quotation does not support Ms. Wolf’s basic thesis but is rather a demonstration that not much has changed: “Hillary Clinton’s defeat by Barack Obama was a defining moment in the story of today’s successful women. Not because a woman could well have taken the US presidential nomination but, on the contrary because what ultimately decided those primaries where the votes of a certain sort of woman. And those women didn’t think that the candidate’s gender mattered” . As Ms. Wolf must be aware even from the outset the Women’s Movement itself has been characterized by lack of unity and by the kind of elitism that Wolf so eloquently describes. As is true so often in life, more could have been achieved had less been attempted. Her efforts to draw together so many threads over such a broad canvas inevitably lead to discontinuities and contradictions. Despite some glancing references to Chinese

The New Feminism. What does feminism’s new celebrity look like? Most obviously, it looks like Emma Watson and the queasily-named HeforShe campaign(2). Other celebrities -Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Karl Lagerfeld to take just three examples – have also publically espoused the cause…. with varying degrees of credibility and public acclaim (3). There are seemingly hundreds of young feminist writers – famous, infamous and unknown- in this social media enhanced Fourth Wave (though they may have no truck with or even knowledge of the famous “waves” of feminism)(4). 
They are usually outspoken about their sexual needs and experience, and often have a particular focus on women as victims of abuse and violence in its manifold forms. Other strong themes are economic injustice, freedom from the biological clock (surrogacy) and casting off the tyranny of the beauty myth to be a feminist and fat (5). We are seeing in important ways a democratisation of the debate on feminism, with many of the new spokespersons being “lay” feminists, rather than “experts” who do this for a living. Expansion of the base, towards a critical mass, is of course devoutly to be wished; but at the same time we should ask whether every assertive or confessional statement made by a woman is ipso facto and equally a contribution to feminism (6). Some contributions seem more self-referential than representative. (Is Taylor Swift’s removal of her back catalogue from Spotify a statement about gendered economic injustice or just good business?) But the novelty and impact for many young women of hearing one of their own generation speak out publically on women’s rights cannot be denied (7).
The new feminism also looks like Daniel Craig, as well as the (male) leaders of two of the UK’s major political parties in the Elle magazine T-shirt (8). Though particularly with respect to the politicians – whilst we should welcome everyone onto the hitherto rather empty feminist bandwagon… we need to see words now being translated into action. Anyone parsing the BBC coverage of Remembrance Sunday celebrations in Whitehall could be forgiven for thinking that the Her Majesty is one of the only women in the UK ,and of course she only inherited her function in the absence of a male sibling (9).
Whilst public feminism may still look superficially rather white and western there are growing numbers of vocal and honourable exceptions who may or may not overtly identify themselves as “feminists” but who are deeply involved with issues of gender inequality. Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie identifies herself wittily as “a happy feminist” (10) ; whilst Malala Yusoufzai doesn’t appear to mention the term at all(11). 
And in every country and region there exist vigorous networks and machineries of people, who are not necessarily global celebrities, working for the cause (12). Not all people – meaning primarily “women”… who work for gender equality … identify themselves as “feminists”. This is partly due to the still widespread (mis)perception that feminism is largely the domain of shrill and politically demonstrative white middle class women, concerned only with women’s situation , a position seen by many to polarize the sexes and genders still further. Presumably this thinking is behind Salma Hayek’s recent disavowal of feminism though her timing was rather clumsy (13). Development cooperation agencies and national governments tend to advertise jobs for gender experts -not feminists – (though they do not seem to be expressly forbidden!) In the gender expert’s toolkit are the means to deconstruct the social (economic, political, ideological,cultural) forces which determine different and unequal but interdependent gender roles and statuses – hopefully to be resolved through development programmes. 
Whilst some film stars and some gender experts shun the label “feminist” … feminists themselves are not always welcoming. The Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERF) are the latest to insist that feminism is a very exclusive club which does not welcome recent recruits who have formerly been men (14).
We need to pose the question as to whether the term “feminism” with all its baggage can really be applied to other gender discrimination issues or will we still be seeing continuing schism between different subsectors and interests… feminism, gender mainstreaming, LGBTI, men and masculinities; and even subsectors of violence – Violence Against Women(VAW),Violence Against Women and Girls(VAWG),Gender-Based Violence(GBV),Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV),Conflict-Related Sexual Violence (CRSV).This multiplication of acronyms often indicates competition for funding and discourages substantive collaboration.
Seasoned feminists have criticized recent contributors for appearing to think that they are the first on the scene ; this has been the case for Emma Watson, and Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project (15) .This is understandable but not very helpful; even casual scrutiny of the feminist first, second, third and now fourth or even fifth waves shows that this is not a clear evolutionary process with universal application whether one takes historical dates, content or objectives as the guiding principle underlying a wave(16). It may be useful from an academic perspective though not alwaysmuch use or used in the outside world. Which wave is Malala riding, for example? Feminists or gender experts with longer experience need to avoid the appearance of being “more feminist than thou”; and those newer to the scene might benefit from seeing their own situation in a broader historical and geographical perspective, whilst still moving to their own particular drumbeats. The new acceptability of feminism needs to be harnessed to change words into action… whether it is HeforShe or the famous T-shirt. It would be nice to think that this new feminist firework show is the beginning of the end of an era when we worried about gender. Gender is after all just an idea…..constructed around actual or perceived biological makeup… a notion which is itself increasingly under fire. If gender is socially constructed than deconstruction should be a breeze, if everyone…or at least a critical mass… is on board. It should not be so difficult to throw off our self-imposed shackles if we can get beyond the sects and schisms. 
But we need also to ask – is the

Just a few mid-term up-dates on gender issues at the Olympics 2012

First a veneration for the heterosexually- induced vaginal orgasm, in a caring and candle-lit setting, as a source of a woman’s well-being and creativity.

Any doubters can be reassured on this point by entering ‘women drivers’ on Google Images.

It’s that time of year again when Santa is busy stuffing his sack with gender-inappropriate…or appropriate …toys. Opinions differ on the role of toys and play in inculcating gender stereotypes at an early age; and, indeed, on whether there are really any problems with helping children get into the ‘natural’ frame of mind from the start?

This entertaining book – Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity

In her recent book ‘Cut It Out: The C-Section Epidemic in America’ Theresa Morris sets out her thesis that the number of c-sections being performed in the States – 32.8 percent of women who gave birth in 2011 had a c-section – has reached epidemic proportions- in fact this amounts to double the number considered by the World Health Organization to be the maximum. This gives the States a profile similar to poorer countries where health care might be expected to be less adequate.

This is a book – High Altitude WOMAN: From Extreme Sports to Indigenous Cultures –Discovering the Power of the Feminine by Jan Reynolds [1]- that can be read as an amazing story of high altitude climbing, skiing, ballooning and biathlon: and as a commentary on the Great Questions of Our Time, relative to gender stereotyping, nature/nurture and work/life balance.