I’ve probably mentioned this before in one of my posts, but I used to be exceedingly passionate about politics. For a while, it was my entire identity. I would even consider it my lifeline. I held onto it tightly—quite literally for dear life—especially around 2020–2021, when the pandemic and everything that came with it was slowly killing me. My passion for social justice and human rights single-handedly fueled my will to live. Consuming political theory, studying public policy, and just analyzing humanity as a whole felt energizing. It was thrilling. Truly a rush. It was what I wanted to build my future around.
But over the past few years, the very thing that used to make me feel most alive started to drain the life out of me. Everything felt unbearably heavy. No matter how many different perspectives I read or how hard I tried to understand, the world still felt desperately terrible. So, I pulled back from politics entirely, and consequently, from a huge part of my identity—which, as you can imagine, led to a serious existential crisis. I stopped feeling compelled to give my opinion. I stopped feeling the fiery urge to debate. I stopped feeling like I had room in my brain to store information, or even the capacity to form a singular fucking thought. I never stopped wanting to care; I just stopped being able to. If I can be very vulnerable with you, it has felt difficult to be alive. Nothing feels like it matters. Not really.
Given all of that, it makes me genuinely euphoric to share that recently, I was part of a conversation that made me feel like things matter to me again. For the first time in a long time, after years of total apathy, I felt something. Feeling strongly about a topic again made me break down in tears. I’ve never felt such relief. Anyway, I don’t want to dwell too much longer on this dark period, because there is so much more I want to get into.
The conversation felt like a Socratic circle (so fun)—someone introduced a provocative idea, and it opened the door to a deeply insightful, layered dialogue. This experience reconnected me with the passion, devotion, and sense of responsibility I thought I had lost. It revitalized that joy and purpose that critical thinking once brought me. Questioning, analyzing, theorizing, critiquing, dissecting, rethinking, connecting… AH! All my favorite verbs. I am so grateful to have been reminded that as long as we are still doing that—still talking, still refusing to accept everything at face value, still thinking (wink wink)—we are not as powerless as it can sometimes feel.
Hopefully I’ve now built enough anticipation and intrigue to finally share the idea I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. It was one of those takes that literally stops you dead in your tracks. One of those things that feel so obvious the second you hear it, yet somehow you had never heard it said out loud. It was brilliant, and it abruptly exposed just how much we’ve been internalizing without even realizing it.
For as long as history has been recorded, the way we think, talk about, and even subconsciously perceive women’s bodies has felt predetermined. We never really got the chance to form our own perception of the female body, because the narrative has been the same for as long as anyone can remember. It’s already figured out, right? Women are the ones who create life, carry it, and nurture it—so of course everything else is supposed to follow from that. Of course we are more maternal, more emotional, more naturally suited for the home, and more responsible for what happens when sex leads to something bigger. This is all framed as common sense, as biology, as human nature, as just the way things are. But looking at it through an actual biological lens, this narrative is entirely wrong. Real biology doesn’t dictate these narrow social roles; the patriarchy does. Yet because this deception is repeated so casually and it permeates every system and institution that structures our lives, it doesn’t feel like an argument anymore. It just feels like reality.
But the idea that came up in that conversation flipped that logic entirely. It posed the notion that, if we actually look at how the male and female bodies are biologically composed, the story we’ve been told completely falls apart. Women’s bodies literally possess a dedicated organ whose sole biological purpose is sexual pleasure. Women can experience desire, sex, and orgasm entirely independent of reproduction. And while men obviously experience pleasure too, their sexual function is mechanically tied to reproduction because ejaculation directly involves the release of sperm. It’s not that women’s bodies have nothing to do with reproduction; they clearly do. But they are not as singularly defined by it as we have been conditioned to believe.
It feels off to read that, doesn’t it? Because if female sexuality isn’t actually bound to reproduction, then why has it always been treated like it is? Why has it been the weapon used to dictate women’s roles, their responsibilities, and even their morality? Why has the entire purpose of all women’s existence on this Earth been reduced to their capacity to breed? Women are not fertile all the time. Sex does not guarantee pregnancy. Pleasure does not mean reproduction. And yet, society still conflates these independent realities into a single, inescapable loop. We are told that sex, reproduction, and motherhood are all just different chapters of the same story. Female sexuality is flexible, conditional, and unpredictable—and yet, it has still been treated as the most fixed, rigid thing about us.
The more you sit with that, the less it feels like a coincidence. It is not just about how bodies work, but what society chooses to look at and what it chooses to ignore. The fact that women’s bodies have a built-in capacity for pleasure is not new information, yet it has been historically ignored, minimized, and treated as a biological footnote. Hell, women have even been punished for experiencing it. For centuries, female desire was pathologized as “hysteria,” and in the most extreme cases, societies resorted to forced surgeries and literal mutilation to physically destroy a woman’s capacity for pleasure altogether. The clitoris was not prioritized in research, it was omitted from education, and for a long time, its full anatomical structure wasn’t even mapped. This is not an oversight. It is a pattern. When a biological reality does not serve the submissive, reproductive version of women that society demands, it is easier to simply erase it.
None of this is to say that biology doesn’t matter; obviously it does. Pregnancy, childbirth, and physical recovery are monumental experiences that naturally shape how societies are organized. But there is a massive difference between a biological capacity and a social prison. Being able to carry a child is a biological fact. Forcing that fact to become a woman’s sole identity, her expected destiny, and the metric of her worth is a trap. Somewhere along the line, a biological capability was weaponized into a social obligation. And we have normalized this hijack so completely that we no longer see the chains, we just see “nature.”
It is surreal to realize that, at the most basic biological level, reproduction is completely unbalanced. Women operate on a high-stakes, finite system. There is a limited number of eggs, a narrow window of fertility, and a successful pregnancy demands months of physical labor and lifelong bodily consequences. Men, conversely, produce sperm by the millions every single day, with virtually zero biological cost attached to each attempt. It is a completely different level of investment. If society applied any shred of logic to this reality, the body assuming all the risk would be the one granted absolute control over how that risk is managed. But historically, it has worked in the exact opposite direction.
It gets even more counterintuitive when you look at the clock. Women are only fertile for a handful of days each month. The vast majority of the time, female sex has absolutely nothing to do with reproduction. Men, however, are fertile twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Yet somehow, it is female sexuality that has been violently restricted, monitored, and tied to morality. If control were actually about managing reproduction, men would be the ones subjected to relentless policing. But it isn’t about biology at all. It is about a patriarchal system that actively warps biological reality to wage a relentless war on women’s autonomy.
We see this logic play out really clearly in the way we approach birth control. Most of the responsibility still falls on women’s bodies: pills, IUDs, and implants, all of it involving synthetic hormones, violent side effects, or physical invasion. Meanwhile, men’s options are pretty limited in comparison. And of course, their typical options are non-invasive and completely free of side effects. There is that incredibly good analogy about how society demands we make everyone wear a bulletproof vest instead of simply taking the bullets out of the gun. It might sound a little dramatic to some, but it sticks because it points to something deeply true. Sure, the biological solution might not be quite that simple, but we have defaulted to managing reproduction through women’s bodies without ever questioning why.
It infuriates me that it is not only the fact that birth control is designed for women, but what we have been willing to tolerate depending on whose body it affects. Women are expected to deal with raw emotional volatility, chronic migraines, sudden significant weight gain, and deep, agonizing pain during IUD insertions—and that’s just treated as normal, just part of the gig! But it goes way deeper than that. We are expected to just accept the constant medical risk of life-threatening blood clots, strokes, and clinically induced depression.
That contrast is impossible to ignore because it is embedded into medical history. When the birth control pill was first tested on low-income Puerto Rican women in the 1950s, scientists literally ignored reports of severe pain and blood clots, and three women died during the trial. Yet, it was still pushed to the masses. Fast forward to 2016: a promising, highly effective trial for a male contraceptive injection was abruptly halted. Why? Because the male participants reported acne, mood swings, and depression. The exact same side effects that women have been handed like a casual party favor for over half a century were suddenly deemed too risky and unacceptable when applied to men. We did not just design birth control around women’s bodies. We built a monstrously higher tolerance for human suffering into them, too.
Underneath it all, there is a quieter, much darker assumption that has been operating this entire time. Reproduction is theoretically an act that involves two people, but the burden of it is never evenly shared. Not even remotely. Women are expected to anticipate it, prevent it, survive it if it happens, and explain themselves if it doesn’t go the way society demands.
This is not a subtle expectation. It is consistent, and it is absolute. Society does not just expect women to be involved in reproduction; it reduces them to human incubators. We are treated as biological machines tasked with keeping ourselves in perfect operating condition to serve at the pleasure of a man.
Let’s take a very blunt and literal look at how the mechanics of this operation are forced onto us. When a man does not want a child, a woman must ensure that her machine’s settings are aggressively preventing conception—forcing her to swallow daily synthetic hormones, insert copper coils into her uterus, or bury rods under her skin. But the second that same man wants to breed, the woman is expected to flip the switch to maximum fertility. She must manipulate her cycle, ensure the sperm successfully fertilizes the egg, and make the pregnancy stick. She must carry the fetus to term, survive the physical trauma of delivery, and present the child to the man in pristine condition.
And it doesn’t stop at birth. She must then continue to empty her own body to sustain it, sacrificing her career, her autonomy, and her identity to live solely for that child. All because of an ancient social script dictating that women are the default caretakers. Women are demanded to give up their lives. Their entire existence is reduced to a disposable incubator, a breeder, and a lifelong servant.
This brutal conditioning is exactly why we must look at something like female pleasure through a much more radical lens. It is not just about whether female desire is socially accepted or ignored; it is about what that desire represents. A version of womanhood that does not revolve around reproduction—and therefore refuses to be claimed as an extension, an asset, or an accessory to a man’s legacy—is harder to organize, harder to police, and harder to contain. That is exactly why it has been historically treated as a biological footnote.
This isn’t about flipping the script and claiming women are designed for pleasure while men are built for breeding. As much as I am tempted to do that, it would just be replacing one lazy, oversimplified story with another. The point is to finally notice where biology ends and the social construct begins.
When I started writing this, I told you I had been feeling totally dead inside for years. I had given up on caring, given up on speaking. That recent conversation didn’t just snap me out of a bad mood, it pulled me back into conscious existence. It forced me to look at how we have built an entire global civilization on the assumed, uncompensated, and forced labor of the female body. Every economic system, every religious institution, and every social norm relies on the premise that women will simply absorb the risks, the pain, and the erasure required to keep the human race moving forward. We are not just participating in these systems; our very biology was hijacked to construct them.
This realization didn’t give me a generic sense of empowerment; it gave me a cold, terrifying clarity. For as long as history has been recorded, we have been told that a woman’s purpose is to give life. To create it, to carry it, to nurture it. It has even been positioned as a beautiful, magical thing. The miracle of life, right? But what we are actually being asked to do is to hand over our lives. We are expected to surrender our minds, our physical bodies, and our actual identities to serve a narrative we never consented to.
So, what counts as life?
Is it merely the biological act of breathing, maintaining the machine, and reproducing for the sake of the system? Or is it the fundamental right to live purely for yourself? Is it having the freedom to just exist without having to fulfill a predetermined “purpose”?
I am very much done accepting the patriarchy’s convenient definitions of what is “natural.” My existence was never meant to be a machine for someone else’s legacy. I am thinking, I am feeling, and I am wide fucking awake. In a world built on our silence and compliance, refusing to pull the covers over my head is the ultimate act of resistance and rebellion.
It feels deeply relieving to have a pulse again and to actually care about something enough to write it down. I was not expecting this unceremonious conversation to bring me the same intellectual high I used to get during pre-AP English Socratic circles (good fucking times!). I am going to step away from my computer before I over-edit this. Gonna make myself some delicious food and just exist without worrying about my “predetermined purpose.” You should probably go do the same. I loved writing this and I love women.