Routinely forgetting to accommodate the female body in design – whether medical, technological or architectural – has led to a world that is less hospitable and more dangerous for women to navigate. [loc. 5423]
The physical differences between men's bodies and women's bodies are not the only inequalities which Perez discusses. There are three major themes in this book: the female body, women's unpaid care burden, and male violence against women. I was most interested in the 'female body' content, as it introduced me to some fascinating data that I hadn't previously encountered. I did not know, for instance, that there is a safe, effective treatment for period pain -- something that plagued me for decades despite nurofen, codeine, mefenamic acid -- already on the market. It grants 'total pain relief over 4 consecutive hours’, with ‘no observed adverse effects’. Unfortunately it is marketed to men: it's Viagra.
I also did not know that 'cells differ according to sex irrespective of their history of exposure to sex hormones': for example, muscle-stem cells transplanted from a male donor won't regenerate in the way that cells from a female donor will. (I found this fascinating and weird: my further reading is noted at the end of this review.)
A lot of the book, with its relentless onslaught of figures, covered familiar territory, even if I wasn't aware of the specific data. As a woman at the lower end of the height curve, I am all too accustomed to a world designed for people taller, stronger and with a different distribution of fat and muscle. I have experienced sexism in every area of life, and am constantly aware of my physical vulnerability and the risk I take by being in possession of a female body in public. The only reason I don't have an unpaid care burden is because I am, in sociological parlance, 'unencumbered' by care responsibilities.
But I can still be enraged by the ways in which female experience is ignored, discounted or deprioritised. I was fascinated (and furious) by Perez' account of how female farming practices are dismissed: "Hoeing can be easily started and stopped, meaning that it can be combined with childcare. The same cannot be said for a heavy tool drawn by a powerful animal....female farmers in this area didn’t see yields as the most important thing. They cared about other factors like how much land preparation and weeding these crops required, because these are female jobs. And they cared about how long, ultimately, the crops would take to cook (another female job)." [loc 2650-2735] The perils of bias in voice recognition systems: "a woman who had bought a 2012 Ford Focus, only to find that its voice-command system only listened to her husband, even though he was in the passenger seat" [2922]. I wonder about statistics like this one: "among men and women who smoke the same number of cigarettes, women are 20–70% more likely to develop lung cancer" [3450] and how different the anti-smoking campaign might have been if the propensity had been reversed.
The book does present gender, and biological sex, as a binary. I don't think it aims to erase trans, nonbinary, intersex experience, but it certainly doesn't focus on them. Regarding 'the female body', I found it useful to mentally translate this as 'bodies assigned female at birth' (AFAB): while there are distinct differences between AFAB bodies and AMAB bodies, not all AFAB bodies belong to women, just as not all AMAB bodies belong to men.
This book made me very angry. It was refreshing, informative and infuriating. And it is extremely well referenced, for anyone wishing to read more on any of Perez' statements.
Fulfils the 'A Nonfiction Book Focused on Social Justice' prompt of the Reading Women Challenge 2021.
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