A life less apologetic
Sorry to say this but if you don't mind I'd just like to quickly say that women should stop apologising
The following is a speech I will be giving on Friday evening in Prague for the launch of the Czech translation of my book Give Birth like a Feminist. The title of the talk is:
Unapologetically yourself, even at birth - take your power back.
If you’re not interested in childbirth, don’t let this deter you from reading, because…it’s not really about birth at all, as you will see…
Today I have been asked to talk about being ‘unapologetically yourself, even at birth’, and I want to begin by saying how nervous I am to stand before you all this evening, and how it is tempting in this situation, to begin with an apology.
Perhaps I should say, ‘I am so sorry that I cannot speak to you in Czech’, or ‘I am sorry if I talk too fast for the amazing interpreter’. Maybe even, ‘I am sorry to take you away from your wonderful conversations with each other’, or ‘I am sorry if my talk is disappointing or not what you are hoping for’.
As women, how often are we truly, ‘unapologetically ourselves’?
How often do we often open or begin with an apology?
How often do we dress up our opinions and thoughts with apologies?
“I’m sorry but I don’t agree.”
“Forgive me but I don’t really like it.”
“Excuse me but can I just say that I would prefer that to be done differently.”
And so on.
Why do we find it hard to be ‘unapologetically ourselves’?
Why can’t we just say
“I don’t agree.”
“I don’t really like it.”
“I would like it to be done differently”.
Perhaps we have the idea that an apology will ‘soften’ our opinion.
Perhaps we think if we apologise, we will be more likeable, or less vulnerable or easy to criticise?
Studies have shown that, from a young age, girls are rewarded for focusing on the feelings of others, whilst boys are rewarded for asserting themselves. Because of this, girls begin to feel that they have more to apologise for. Win a race or get that promotion? This could have hurt the feelings of the person who came second or who lost out. So – downplay your success. Don’t be a show-off. Be kind. Make yourself smaller.
From a young age, too, girls are taught that assertive = bossy. And bossy is wrong, shameful, and undesirable. So by toning down our language with apologies – sorry, would you mind if I just had a sip of water – we seem less assertive and therefore more acceptable.
It is not just our words that can be an apology.
Our bodies can be an apology, too.
For example, our posture, the way we stand, can be an apology.
Our posture can say, don’t look at me too much, don’t listen to me, don’t pay me too much attention.
The way we dress, can also say these things. It can say, “I’m sorry”, or “I’m not here to take up much of your time or attention.”
Tonight I am wearing my brightest jacket, to say to you – I am not sorry for anything!
And the way we walk, from one place to another, can also be an apology.
Our walk can say, don’t feel threatened by me, I will make myself small for you, I will get out of your path.
I won’t take up too much space.
Even the way we sit. In English we have the expression, ‘manspreading’. A man will sit on the train, or in the theatre, or the restaurant, and unapologetically get comfortable and take up space. This is ‘manspreading’!
What is the female equivalent of manspreading?
Answer: there isn’t one.
Again, this begins very early in a young girl’s life. Gendered expectations begin to shape behaviour even in primary school, where boys are excused for being noisier and more fidgety - ‘boys will be boys’ – whilst girls are encouraged to sit in a ‘ladylike’ way with their legs together, and are even used as ‘support humans’ by being seated next to the noisy boys in an attempt to calm them down or make them behave themselves.
And what about the details of our bodies?
How must we adapt them in order not to cause offense?
Well, we must not be too big, or fat. We are taught that the ideal woman takes up less physical space by being as thin as possible. So we suck in our tummies, we diet, we develop anxious or even disordered relationships with food. Many women think about their bodies, especially their naked bodies, in negative ways. Many women don’t like what they see when they look in the mirror. Many women never truly enjoy a plate of food without worrying about the consequences.
Depending on our culture, we must shave our body hair in different ways. Neglecting to do so is either a statement of our refusal to conform to patriarchal beauty standards, or another thing to apologise for. Picture the scene: a woman has rush to the doctor for a pelvic exam, and as she removes her clothes she realises she’s forgotten to shave her legs, or attend to her pubic hair. What does she say? “I’m sorry”!
If our bodies and faces are older, we must try to make them look younger.
But not too much younger. Then people may speculate about what ‘work’ we have had done, or we will be called, in English at least, ‘mutton dressed up as lamb’.
If we shave our body hair, wear lots of make-up, dye our hair or have work done to our faces or our bodies to look ‘better’, we will be criticised for being vain or ‘trying too hard’ or looking ‘too much’.
If we relax and present ourselves as unapologetically ‘natural’ it will be said that we have ‘let ourselves go’.
In all aspects – fat, thin, hairy, smooth, dimpled, wrinkly, saggy, aging – we learn that being in a female body is something we probably have something to apologise about. Even the way we smell is something we have to be very conscious of and perhaps, ashamed of. Our shops are filled with solutions to the problems of our female bodies; conformity becomes an expensive lifetime project.
In our sexuality, we must also be careful and have our apology ready.
If we are sexually cautious, or perhaps wary of criticism, we may be called cold or frigid.
If we are unapologetically lusty and bold, we may be called names which…I do not wish to repeat here at this beautiful event.
As women, we are governed by a set of complex and often contradictory rules and demands, and we therefore live our lives in expectation of getting it wrong. Is it any surprise then, that we think it best to apologise as much as we can, with our words, and with our bodies too?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said,
“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man.”
By the way she also said,
“Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.”
Audre Lord said,
“They tell us to shrink ourselves, to make space for their egos. But I will not be small so that they can feel big.”
Bette Davis said,
“When a man gives his opinion, he's a man; when a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch.”
A bitch is tough, ambitious, and knows what she wants. Some have observed that another word for ‘bitch’ is ‘feminist’.
Rebecca West said,
“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
So do we give birth like a doormat?
Or do we give birth like a feminist?
Since I wrote by book with that same title, people have often assumed that a ‘feminist birth’ is a natural birth or a birth at home, maybe even without any midwives or professionals. They make the same mistake when I talk about, ‘positive birth’ and think this must always mean there are candles and soft music playing.
Perhaps in some ways they wonder if positive or feminist birth is just another way of making rules for the female body: the woman must be calm and serene, quietly ‘breathing her baby out’. Perhaps they think that what I’m saying is that a feminist birth is yet another impossible standard for women, another thing they can fail to achieve, another things they will have to apologise for.
But this is not what I mean at all. I would like all women to have a positive, feminist birth experience, where ever and however they choose to have their baby, and whether they are quietly meditating or roaring; on their back or on all fours; at home or in the operating theatre; having a neat straightforward fairytale experience or a messy, loud, complicated one.
Because a feminist, positive birth is not about the details of individual experiences, it’s about something much much deeper than this.
It is a birth in which the power imbalance, not just of the birth room, but of the world outside the birth room door, is challenged.
It’s a birth in which a woman is unapologetic.
Childbirth is a time when the female body is at the absolute peak of its powers.
It’s also a time when women often feel they have a lot to apologise for.
They are too loud.
They are too visceral.
Their flesh is on display.
They will say to the midwife, ‘Sorry I did not get time to shave’. ‘Sorry I made so much noise’, ‘Sorry my waters broke’, ‘Sorry this is taking so long’, ‘Sorry you must be tired’, ‘Sorry my body made this or that noise’, ‘Sorry I cried’. ‘Sorry I needed a caesarean’.
The system will allow and expect such apologies because we all, every one of us, have decades and centuries of women’s bodies being perceived as weak, fragile or even shameful, underpinning our thoughts and perceptions. We may not think about it, but it is there in the shadows, and giving birth like a feminist means bringing it into the light.
When I came to have my first baby, I had fairly recently read a book by Germaine Greer called The Whole Woman. Her words rang in my head at each hospital appointment:
“Women are driven through the healthcare system like sheep through a dip. The disease they are being treated for is womanhood.”
The belief that there is something wrong with women’s bodies and that they are simply not very good at giving birth is now so embedded in our culture that we fully expect intervention to happen. Unfortunately, many women and their families also expect trauma to be part of their birth experience too, because that is what happens to so many women. Traumatic birth is also something women will apologise for. “Sorry I got my hopes up”. “Sorry I made that silly birth plan”. “Sorry I wasted all that money on hypnobirthing classes.”.
The narrative is that what happens in childbirth is simply a matter of luck and that therefore any hopes or preparation are a silly endeavour. After all, what really matters – as women are constantly told – is a ‘healthy baby’. So if the birth is difficult, or does not go as planned, or is even horrible or traumatic, the maternity system does not need to apologise. It does not need to ask itself any difficult questions. The woman is to blame.
We know that some women do need medical help when having a baby, but we have reached a point now – in the UK at least – where hardly any woman at all has a natural birth. High numbers have labour induced, give birth on their backs on a bed, have instrumental deliveries, or have caesareans. None of this is wrong if it is truly what the woman needs. But if it isn’t, it is depriving her of the opportunity to experience the power of her body doing something quite incredible. Women are being told that straightforward birth was not possible for them, but they were not given the chance.
In Give Birth like a Feminist I quote an essay by the feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young called ‘Throwing like a girl’. In her essay, Young argues that the reason that ‘girls can’t throw’ is nothing to do with physiology, but instead due to the different conditioning of boys and girls from an early age, resulting in their different relationships to their bodies. Young writes about how being female is a paradox of intention and inhibition, as we see a task and decide, “I can”, but then simultaneously, “withhold full bodily commitment…in self-imposed ‘I cannot’”. In other words, we can’t do it because, deep down, we don’t believe we can.
So when we hear a woman’s birth story and she says, ‘it all started to go wrong when I wasn’t dilating fast enough’, or ‘it all started to go wrong when I went past my due date’, I would ask you to picture a woman throwing a ball. Don’t see the moment the ball left her hand, or the moment she pulled her arm back to throw it. Travel backwards, up her arm, into her body, into her mind, into her sense of herself, into the internalised voices of other people throughout her life, and backwards again into the internalised voices and confidence of those people too, and back and back, and outwards, into her culture and every little bit of doubt in women’s bodies and women’s power and women’s abilities it contains.
As Bad as a Mile, Philip Larkin
Watching the shied core
Striking the basket, skidding across the floor,
Shows less and less of luck, and more and more
Of failure spreading back up the arm
Earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm,
The apple unbitten in the palm.
In the powerful embodied experience of a physiological birth, in which a woman gives birth without drugs or intervention and feels fully supported, and like birth is something she is doing, rather than something that is being done to her, women report feeling transformed. “I felt like I would never be afraid of anything ever again”, “I felt so strong, like a warrior, like a goddess”, are some of the most common things women have said to me about births when they truly experience their power.
I think that it’s this power that is the problem, and the reason why birth is so tightly controlled. Birth is probably the most powerful thing a human can do. It’s so powerful, that we are told that the Ultimate Creator of Life (God) was a man! Imagine that! That is quite a rewrite.
Sometimes I think that health professionals unwittingly want to lay claim to this power, the ultimate power, the creative power. I always remember the words one woman said to be about her caesarean, she said the doctor ‘held her baby aloft like a hunting trophy’.
This is what I think of as ‘basking in the reflected glory’, in other words taking that credit and triumph that belongs to women in birth and laying claim to it for yourself. Let me be clear, this attitude is entirely unconscious. No doctor or midwife goes to work thinking, ‘Today I am going to deprive a woman of her chance to feel powerful.’ But patriarchy is the overarching system by which the world operates. And it is the work of patriarchy to undermine women and ensure that they are seen – and see themselves – as ‘the weaker sex’, ‘the fragile sex’; helpless, and in need of rescue. Patriarchy is about ‘power over’. The female body instead represents ‘power within’. Matriarchal systems, which are very scarce on this planet but which do exist, are built on this ‘power within’ – rather than seeking to dominate, they instead seek to create, support, grow, nurture. They seek to work in harmony with nature, not to exploit it.
I have come to believe that the dominance and control that we see in each individual birth room is a microcosm of our current exploitation of the planet – the ultimate mother. My next book is about ultra processed food, and when I researched the damage that our current food system – entirely focused on profit – is doing to the environment, I wanted to weep. And disrupting the mother-baby dyad with practices like traumatic birth, cutting the cord too early, and separating the mother and baby are actually a part of this highly exploitative food system, because they increase the need for the first ultra processed food so many of us consume – formula milk.
I’m pretty sure it’s not a coincidence, either, that childbirth is currently becoming increasingly medicalised, in a time when we are seeing a backlash against feminism. Turn on the news, and see male leaders posturing like peacocks for world dominance. In our new pornography culture, women feel under pressure to present as ‘hyper-feminised’, like Barbie dolls, whilst men follow hyper-masculine influencers like Andrew Tate. Gains in abortion rights are being lost. There are aggressive attempts to erode women’s refuges, women’s sports and women-only awards and shortlists – all of them built and fought for by our feminist mothers and grandmothers. Even the word ‘woman’ itself is under threat and is being removed from women’s health organisations websites and social media, and from policy documents and legislation.
In childbirth, the ultimate power card is safety. We are told that intervention rates are rising because the female body is becoming increasingly unsafe: we are giving birth when we are ‘older and fatter’. But this does not explain the rates of intervention rising across all demographics, including those women who give birth when ‘young and slim’. Still, our bodies being constantly blamed and described as ‘old and fat’ does give us something else to apologise for I suppose!
To give birth, we don’t need to feel our bodies are something to apologise for. We need confidence. In my first birth, I was induced because I went past my ‘due date’, and then I had a forceps delivery. So as I waited for my second baby, there were two things I had never done. I had never gone into labour by myself, and I had never pushed a baby out, either. I was full of doubt. I didn’t know if my body was actually capable of either of these things, or if it was somehow lacking or faulty.
My midwives believed in me and in my body, when I did not.
In my first pregnancy, everyone around me had been anxious and doubtful as soon as I got to around 39 weeks, talking constantly about induction, sweeping my membranes several times, and telling me I would not be allowed to have my home birth if I didn’t get started soon. All of this fed into decades of messages I had unconsciously received that I would not be up to the task of childbirth. Again, picture the woman throwing the ball, and travel back up the arm, and back and back through time…
I approached that second birth disempowered, anxious, and convinced of my body’s inadequacy.
But my midwives did not waver. They were calm and strong as I went to 42 weeks, and then my labour began.
I will never forget the moment they came through the door of my house. I was in labour, and now the next wave of anxiety was here – I would not be able to push that baby out! How was it even possible? With my first baby, it had been clearly and painfully demonstrated to me that it was not possible.
But as soon as my midwives entered the room, they showered me in love and confidence. They were excited, they showed no hint of doubt. And throughout my labour they continued to reassure me that I could do it. And I did. My ten pound four baby was born after a lightning fast second stage in the birth pool at home, and I did not need a stitch. People talk about ‘healing second births’, and this truly was for me. My relationship to my own body was forever changed. And it was my midwives who helped this to happen, by giving me a consistent different message about the potential of my body.
I think they understood about the arm thing.
Really though, my talk today has nothing to do with childbirth. Childbirth is just a place where women’s relationships to their bodies and to themselves gets magnified, often playing out hard and fast, like the few intense hours of a Shakesperean tragedy. To change birth, we have to change the bigger picture, and – even if we never want children or had our babies long ago – think about how we live our lives through our bodies, and how the relationship we have with them is malleable and under our control. Changing this personal relationship will create ripples of positivity outwards into the world – and gosh do we need that right now.
In this decade and in every decade before it, a woman being unapologetically herself is a revolutionary act.
So here’s to no longer apologising. And here’s to the revolution!
Please subscribe so that you never miss a post. You can subscribe for free, but paid subs help support me to keep writing. Substack is a new model of reading in which you get to pay money directly to the writer, rather than to the newspaper or advertiser. It’s only a small amount a month but each subscription adds up to mean that writers like me can get paid for our work. Thank you.
You can also support me by liking or sharing this post, it helps the old algorithm!
Or by buying my books…
Alternatively you can treat me a to a coffee / wine / gin….
Phew! What a powerful speech, Milli. Hear hear! Enjoy Prague.
This is fantastic 👏