“Another person has existed in her, and after their birth, they live within the jurisdiction of her consciousness. When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself.” 

Damn. This piece is so quotable it lends itself to complete recitation. Reading this essay, I kept coming back to Joseph Campbell’s first book in The Masks of God and his explanation on how female reproduction instilled fear in primitive man.

Within a womb exists the force of life and death in equal measure. The subjugation of women and the contemporary struggle for reproductive rights seem to be an attempt to control life and death itself. Just another battle in humanity’s siege against anything that reminds us of our own impermanence. 

Existentialism isn’t in our cultural discourse nearly enough, which means Feminist perspectives on existential values certainly aren’t a thing you find often. This essay is a revelatory exception to that rule. 

This essay is one of the few I randomly stumbled across wherein the essayist firmly positions feminism in the center of their existential beliefs.