Warning, this is explicit, and about body parts. Don’t read
if you prefer to not think about body parts or sex.
A skit of James Franco competing with a 4 year old from SNL-- and being 31 weeks pregnant-- inspired me to write about bodies and what
they say about who we are.
The skit itself was silly, and made me laugh to myself as
Franco (who is almost constantly channeling the dirty old man he will
undoubtedly become) yells into the camera about seeing the scrotum of the
father of a four year old years before the boy is born. “We play squash
together. He took a hard dive and his balls came spilling out of his shorts.
They were huge and red and Tommy [the four year old] was still inside them.”
What this reminded me of is the myth of the homunculus. I am
not sure where I ran across this thinking, but I’ve always associated it with
the deprivation of non-masturbation and genital identification with sexuality.
The homunculus idea is that inside each individual sperm there is a miniature
person, waiting to be implanted and grown to baby form. If, as Franco jests and
16th century philosophers posited, each sperm is a potential person, than
masturbation for people with penises is really murder.
When I was a child, there were whispers of this old
viewpoint in the Catholic school I attended from seventh through ninth grade. I
was at an all girls school, however, so it was mostly discussed at the lunch
table. Lucky for me, I was not from a devout home, so my suspicion of this
thinking was high. Not so for other girls. Wide eyed and unsure of what their
bodies were for, these girls were the most scared of what was going on down there. I remember listening to
girls talking about sins of the flesh, and the risk of boys committing murder
if they made sperm come out of them.
In 8th grade, we got to health class, and all
these conjectures fell away, except for the specter of the homunculus, and its
attendant question-- What are our bodies
for? The sisters couldn’t help us, at least not with ease or
self-awareness, as they had rejected the urges of the flesh, or sublimated them
in good works and self-deprivation. But for we who knew we weren’t heading that
way-- once we could believe we were desirable at all-- these questions loomed
large. What happens down there? What are our bodies for?
When I started having sex, it was with people with penises,
and then people with vaginas. I found pleasure down there, and I sidestepped any concern about use and function by
departing from heterosexual assumption at 15. Without the phantom mythic
homunculus, I was free to see my body as my own, and the bodies of my lovers as
something other than strictly speaking useful, as I had been taught in middle
school. I also started being able to see erotic pleasure in more things than
the body, or particular body parts.
In seminary, this experience I named in a feminist sense as
body-god(ess)-talk, where the information and the vicissitudes of the body
become a site for naming the divine, as a site for worship, as a place that
moves between peoples, that creates something new. It wasn’t about
reproduction, at least not in the normative sense. It was generative, and it
was both about the body and not determined by it.
And then I started wanting to have a kid. I was 32 when I
really started having that feeling, and I see this as part of healing for me.
Part of rejecting that determinism of the body meant that I felt I also had to
reject the possibility of family and parenting. So the desire to have children,
from wherever it sprung, was something I repressed, much like those sisters in
middle school (I knew I had more in common with them than I thought!). At 32 I
stopped repressing, and started healing work to get ready to have a kid. And at
37, #1 came through my body into the world.
And now, #2. As the last weeks of pregnancy loom large, and
my belly looms larger, I wonder about the homunculus, and the fear from which
he comes. Am I carrying a fully grown being? Am I merely a vessel for this
creature? Some conservative thinking about pregnancy and women’s roles would
say, yes. The homunculus still lives in the hearts and imaginations of those
who do not see what is really happening with pregnancy.
The symbiosis of pregnancy, the incredible interconnection,
and the development of a being from very little to a baby is pretty amazing.
But it’s not anything to privilege over any other life changing event.
Oftentimes I have heard mothers say-- you have no idea until you become a
mother, until you are pregnant, until you are nursing, until you are until you
are……. You know, this is true! But it’s no more true than someone having other
body experiences that are singular, that are personal, that do not ultimately
determine who that person is. We are bodies. We have experiences. They are
powerful.
What is happening to me is a fundamental experience of the
body, but so are most other things. The desire to compare or privilege this
experience over other bodies and their experiences recreates the world where the
homunculus can grow big in our psyches. And I am truly not saying that what is
happening to me is small-- or unimportant. But it does not determine value, or
create more meaning or value than other bodies and their experiences. If I did
that, if I wanted to have the pregnancy pedestal made for me and other people
with uteruses who choose to grow babies in them, then I would be risking the
loss of my sense of self to this experience. And I would be ignoring the rich depth of body experience and sources of the divine in my life before having children, before I chose this path of engaging my biology.
This is my body, in all its vicissitudes, holiness, and commonness. And I honor the body growing in me, as a part of me, and as not all of
me. And with each birth, with each experience of the body, I wave goodbye to
the homunculus ghost in this misogyny machine, and know there is more than what
we bring to the project of nurturing life, in ourselves and in each other, in this world soon changed by someone new. We'll see who they are.
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