The Story of V

Finished July 23

The Story of V: Opening Pandora's Box by Catherine Blackledge

This is an in-depth look into female sexual organs, sexuality, reproduction, and sexual pleasure. The author has a PhD in science, and worked in science and medical journalism. As one would guess from the title of this book, the central subject of the book is the vagina, but it goes beyond that.

She describes how female genitals have been studied over history and talks about how knowledge has ebbed and flowed. Some things were discovered, denied, and then discovered anew. Sometimes these complex organs were simplified or misrepresented. 

She also references female sexuality across numerous species, including insects, birds, and mammals, and talks about how, in many cases, it is the female that controls the sexual encounter and whether fertilization occurs. 

She also talks about how our sexuality goes beyond our genitals involving other areas of our body, and how scent is a big influence on our sexual pleasure. One thing I found interesting in the connection between the nose and sexual arousal was that, for many people, nasal stuffiness or congestion can occur in conjunction with sexual stimulation or orgasm. 

She talks about the structure of the different parts of our genitals, and when we learned about different aspects of them, linking research to knowledge and where we still have things to learn. 

This is an important book, particularly for women, to better understand their own bodies and responses. I read it slowly over many months, taking time to absorb the different learnings throughout. 

X + Y

Finished December 31

X + Y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender by Eugenia Cheng

I was looking for a book to help meet a reading challenge and came across this book which got me thinking about many things in different ways. The author is a mathematician and an artist. She teaches mathematics at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. In her career, and in other aspects of her life, she has encountered sexism and racism. She has thought a lot about this and how often gender issues are substituted for behaviour issues. She outlines how our society favours more aggressive, competitive, individualistic behaviour, and about how that behaviour has come to be seen as masculine. 

She has come up with new descriptors for this issue around behaviour that take the gender out of the discussion, eliminating one red herring to change. She describes two behaviour types as ingressive and congressive, where ingressive is the current valued type of behaviour that values competition, winners, contests, and individual success. The other type of behaviour, congressive, values understanding, sharing, working together, collaboration, and societal success. She makes a great argument for this new set of descriptors and how using them and thinking of them more in the behavioural sense and not tying them to gender norms can overcome not only gender bias, but also other biases in our society that favour the status quo. 

I found myself easily understanding her descriptions of category theory mathematics (I was a math major in my first year of university) and seeing how it applies to this idea of behavioural categories. She advocates gradual change, using congressive approaches and responses to replace ingressive or passive ones, and finding a way forward that will benefit not only society as a whole, but individuals more broadly as well. 

This is a fascinating book that needs to be read by more people and have them seriously consider her suggestions.