"But I'm still an embryo/With a long, long way to go."

For some reason I didn't reflexively change the channel when Helen Reddy singing "I Am Woman" came on the radio today, and I even listened to the lyrics, something I probably hadn't done since the 70s. (I've always considered this song annoying and embarrassing.) I was amazed by the line "But I'm still an embryo/With a long, long way to go." Here's this big old feminist anthem, and the woman is calling herself an embryo.

IN THE COMMENTS: Invoking the most well-known line in the song — "I am woman, hear me roar" — Amba writes:

A roaring embryo? That is grotesque.

Actually it explains something about the psychology of abortion: the unready (unReddy?) pregnant woman feels she is in competition with the embryo because she herself has not yet had a chance to fully develop. It's a question of whether she is expected to abort her own development and step aside and put that new embryo at the center. It's indignation at all those thousands of years when it was rarely considered important or even permissible for girls to develop their own gifts and interests, and when at best they had to subordinate doing so to being mothers. It's a making up for lost time kind of thing. (This is the other side of the story, which I can also understand.)

Brillliant. I write that before reading the next comment, from Victoria:

Brilliant!

She goes on:

It's a making up for lost time kind of thing.

Maybe I'm missing the gene which allows people to think in these terms, but this is just absurd.

If you're going to live your life based on a quasi-revenge factor, then don't be surprised if others do too. A man might think: hey, you know the millions of women throughout the ages who suckered men into marriage by getting pregnant?

Guess what ladies? It's payback time today!

Then Maureen Dowd wonders why she can't get a man.

Amba responds:

Hadn't thought of it as revenge -- more a sort of plaintive "Hey, what about me? It's MY turn!" -- but now that you mention it, hmmm. In some of the stories on I'm Not Sorry, e.g., there is a lot of rage, as if the embryo were a parasite that had attacked the woman.

But e.g. this song, it's definitely competitive. "I want to be the one at the center of attention. I want to be the one that's celebrated and anticipated and nurtured. I want to nurture ME!"

chuck b. said:

It's amusing to think that somewhere in the American midwest, today a radio station played "I Am Woman".

Maybe it was a dream.

It amuses me to think that you take comfort in consigning the playing of "I Am Woman" to a place in the "American midwest." I was listening to a channel called 70s on 7 on XM satellite radio.

He actually throws this on top:

Did the masculine women of the American midwest with their tight perms and mom jeans unite in choral joy?

Now, that's just irksome. It irks reader_iam (who lives in Iowa). (I think chuck's in San Francisco.) (Reddy was Australian.) Reader:

Why the "Midwest"? ... [I]t's clear I'm missing something. What is it? That's an actual question. Are either of you willing to plainly state an answer?

Chuck tries to answer:

Why midwest? Well, A-house was driving there, and that song came on, and I thought, Women of the midwest, unite! But there is kind of a jokey-understanding in America about midwestern women being manlyesque, having tight perms, wearing mom jeans.

I'm playing with a crude stereotype, that's all. I could play it with people in other places too.

I don't want to be cruel; I just want to offend. Sarah Silverman is, like, my girlfriend. And she would be my girlfriend if she wasn't with that Jimmy guy, and if I wasn't gay. And if was a lot funnier and more intelligent and Jewy than I really am.

A childhood spent reading Penthouse Letters taught me the other stereotype about midwestern girls... they all attend large midwestern universities and have long, honey-blond hair and tanned, pert little titties.

It's all good.