Womb Envy
Womb envy is a profound sense of loss in man due to his inability to create and sustain life. This loss manifests in the form of recoil. Man, unable to create life on his own, creates an image of life (mimetic art) or artificial life (the machine). Or, as with Plato, creates a philosophy claiming that the womb/body is a cave that must be escaped and imagines a heaven of originals in which there is no need for a womb or body; Christianity weaponizes this fantasy and makes it viral. In the west this recoil from the woman’s body develops into a puritanism, or “Christian morality” whose only motive is the policing of these bodies. Because man does not possess a womb, he must at the very least make laws and a legal space (marriage) that control those who do possess one; this space and these laws attempt to confine women to gestation, reducing womanhood to motherhood. Under the unconscious force of womb envy, where the womb is not policed it is denied. Gayatri Spivak: “We might chart the itinerary of womb envy in the production of a theory of consciousness: the idea of the womb as a place of production is avoided both in Marx and in Freud.” These men, unable to think of a woman, can only describe the labor and psyche of a man. Womb envy will always resist even the idea of a womb; in this toxic hallucination there are no wombs, only babies.
