Please sponsor my 5k swim coming up in April and help support Marie Curie Cancer Care, an organisation which provides home nursing care to people with terminal illnesses.

From Feminists Don’t Bake Bread (though I would if I had an oven) comes a new mantra: Real women have bodies. Real women vary in size, shape, and form. Every shape is validly female.

This slogan, however, applies to more than body image. Real women have bodies, and bodies can be injured or grow ill. Women need health care to preserve our bodies whether we are living in an over or underdeveloped country and no matter our ability to pay for it. Real women do not just have bodies; we need our bodies. Our very existence depends on them. The right to have access to healthcare and related information, then, is as basic as the right to live. This includes reproductive healthcare.

Real women have bodies. These bodies are ours and do not belong to our fathers, lovers, or spouses and certainly not to any system of laws or body politic. That means an undeniable right to control what grows inside our bodies. It means we have a right to control how we use our bodies and with whom. To shame an individual woman for choosing sex or choosing not to have sex is to deny her this right; to analyze the social pressures that may push her to make one selection or the other is to recognize that society does not fully grant this bodily sovereignty, and such an analysis is necessary before we can claim full sovereignty. I believe this applies to paid sex as well as unpaid.

Moreover, those of us in a position to do so have an obligation to speak out against the abrogation of a woman’s sovereignty over her own body. When a young girl is forced into marriage, whether in Afghanistan or Texas, control of her body is taken away from her before she can even fully claim it. All forms of rape are a violation of basic bodily sovereignty.

Real women have bodies, whether we are born women or once lived as men. The obvious truth is that all people have bodies but that it is not me who are typically told to cross their legs and take up less space; it is not men who are taught that their bodies are dirty, shameful things with processes that should be hidden at all costs (just why is it more embarrassing to buy tampons than to buy toilet paper?).

Real women have bodies, and more than that, we have a right to control and maintain these bodies. The space they take up, too, belongs to us.

Related posts:

1. Real Heroism: Private 1st Class Aguayo
2. Racist Attacks on Real Change Vendors
3. Treating Women as Pre-Pregnant: Still a Problem
4. Are women writers now sexless?
5. Amy King’s Men by the Lips of Women
6. Forget Fuel Efficiency: The Real Reasons Cars Shouldn’t Have Air Conditioners
7. National Girls and Women in Sports Day
8. Orchestrated Conflict & Real Resistance: The Revolutionary Nature of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Community
9. Blogging for Choice: Voting for Choice
10. Seen on Capitol Hill

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.