On being female, and being a woman.

Being female is a matter of biology, it denotes a specific set of answers to the pressures of group survival. Being a woman is a matter of culture. It denotes a specific set of answersⁱ to the pressures of individual existence. The two terms are otherwise unrelated, save for the happenstance that women were historically born female (at least... preponderently).

Female cows are not women cows, yet they are perfectly capable of "reproduction"ⁱⁱ and some limited cognition -- but neither parturition nor that limited cognition are the criteria for womanhood.ⁱⁱⁱ They're actually sexually receptive, after a fashion, in the sense that if you insist enough you might fuck one. Sexual receptivity in this sense also isn't the criteria for womanhood.

Women differentiate (ideally, with help from older women) from the females they were born as, generally at some point during their second decade of life. Whether this occurs early or late within that decade matters little in practice ; but as far as retarded development is concerned the third decade contains a hard biological limit -- much like children who've not learned to speak by twenty likely never will, so human females that haven't womened by thirty likely never will (simiarily, whether children learn to read at five or eight makes relatively little difference, as long as they're actually reading, as a central and self-defining occupation, by the age of ten or so).

What differentiates the woman from the female (or the can of deodorant spray) is specific, narrowly defined and narrowly construed self-positioning, as a subjective and subjectively recognized self-defining experience. Just as armies recognize bridges they never before seen, just so the woman recognizes herself, in her own view of the world surrounding, which includes herself as a self-perceived image of the self. The little girl looking down on her own naked body and thinking "it looks just like a whore's!" finds herself in the throws of the very process of becoming a woman, by herself and for her own needs ; "society" socialism's^iv desperate quest to prevent this very fulguration the proximate cause for all sorts of absurdist fiction, from Santa Claus to touching dollies, ultimately driven by the retarded female's existential anxiety, and their misperception that women are throwing the curve "for them", as if women and mere females could ever be on the same curve.^v

This is the sort of thing that makes them say, and deeply feel, that I'm the last romantic left.

1. Rather amply illustrated on this here only thing currently occuring. [↩]
2. In the sense of parturition, id est reproducing themselves ; not in the sense of reproduction id est reproducing "whatever fucks them". The standard contemplated for this misnomer of a "reproduction" that's mere production self-obviously is that something'll come out at all, and not that anything in particular'll come out whatsoever.

   Yet a "matter replicator" (as in the "Science Fiction" concept) that replicated some matter, randomly and as counterdistinct from "whatever matter you put in there" (and to an arbitrary standard of exactness as applied to both composition and structure, because if it only replicates composition what the hell is it, an allegedly advanced blender ?) wouldn't pass muster anymore than this bovine "reproduction" in the sense of selfproduction does. [↩]

3. Nor would be, even if they weren't so drastically limited as Bos primigenus displays. Even were a bioblob genetically engineered capable of reproduction in the strict sense of replication ad idem and limited cognition in the hard sense of Artificial Intelligence, yet still that bioblob, while certainly female, would not necessarily be a woman, nor necessarily any closer to being a woman than any can of deodorant spray or any other byproduct of industrial activity. [↩]
4. There is no practical way to distinguish christianity, socialism, and plain idiocy. They're all the same thing because... well, they're all the same thing, what do you want from me.

   Ever tried to delineate the supposed distinction ? [↩]

5. Male ineptitude, muddling the all-important distinction, has perhaps some part to play in this failure, or at least in how commonly it's experienced. [↩]