Dead Ringers

TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy Stock Photo

Back in the days when I used to work for Mumsnet, there was a specific tension that often made things extremely tricky. This tension wasn’t (mostly) within the staff, or between the staff and the users. It was between us as a collective and the outside world. Specifically, it was between the fluent, detailed way the users talked about their own bodies, and the widespread public perception that any discussion of this kind is intended to provoke or arouse or frighten, and must therefore be obscenity of one kind or another.

In my last few years at Mumsnet I worked in communications and campaigns; my whole job revolved around translating our users’ concerns into palatable forms for wider consumption. But when it came to anything that concerned women’s bodies — which is really a lot of things, on a mothers’ website — there were no palatable forms, not even the medical ones. At a very basic level, we think of women’s bodies as unspeakable.

One example of this dates back to around a decade ago, when Mumsnet first started using online auction sites to sell spare advertising slots. Quite quickly, we started to wonder why all the ads coming through this auction funnel were, not to put too fine a point on it, incredibly shit. Auction sites weren’t typically where you got the most lucrative or meaningful commercial partnerships, but they were ordinary parts of the advertising machine, widely used by big high street brands. But we weren’t getting any of this premium stuff. Instead, we were getting the ‘one weird trick to lose belly fat’ bollocks.

When our commercial team started to politely enquire why this was, the answer came back: it’s because your site is listed as ‘obscene’.

‘Obscene?’ we said. ‘Please check again.’

‘No really,’ they said. ‘Most of our advertisers have a blacklist of words that they don’t want to appear against; it’s a way to ensure their brands don’t appear on porn sites. And your website regularly uses… let me check… Jesus Christ!’

‘Wait,’ we said. ‘Do you mean words such as “nipples” and “clitoris” and “anus”?’

‘Yes,’ they whispered.

‘You do know that we’re a website for women, right?’ we said.

‘Sucks to be you,’ they said. ‘Can we mark this ticket as “resolved”?’

In fairness, as well as being full of empathetic chat about breast cancer and birth injuries, Mumsnet is also frequently and deliberately obscene. But even if we hadn’t permitted our users to swear or talk about sex, the fundamental problem would have remained. The language that our users used to discuss the daily joys and complexities of their own bodies was exactly the same language that our advertisers considered to be grossly sexualised. This happened even when our users were not intending to be shocking; when they were being sober, thoughtful, supportive and informative. I mean, postpartum women should not be required to say ‘front botty’. It’s demeaning. But so far as advertisers were concerned, it was either that or STFU about your weird disgusting mess.

The second example was less funny, and very nearly made me loopy for a while. It happened when I was running a long campaign to improve the standards of postnatal care. The first parts of this campaign were relatively easy: when we found that something like one-quarter of the women on postnatal wards were being left both hungry and thirsty, and that women who’d just had major abdominal surgery were being offered two paracetamol and were expected to bend down to pick their own blood clots out of the shower tray, the media found that reasonably easy to cover. But our users, rightly, wanted us to talk about something else: specifically, the experiences of women who had had extremely difficult births, and who had suffered severe obstetric injuries as a result.

There is, admittedly, no nice way to talk about the worst kinds of birth injuries. I became so overwhelmed while reading about them that I had to put my head between my knees to stop myself blacking out. But the point is, they’re not uncommon: among first-time mothers attempting to give birth vaginally, the rate of OASI (obstetric anal sphincter injury) is as high as 6%. These injuries can take months or even years to recover from. That is a lot of women who might need to talk about their perineum, clitoris, anus, vulva and vagina not only to their doctors, but to their partners, family, friends and bosses. These are not mandatory conversations, of course; but the lack of any comfortable way to talk about their injuries and symptoms makes it extremely difficult for these women to ask for the appropriate amount of slack.

When I approached the media with this story, I was pitching something reasonably interesting about practical proposals for reducing that 6% figure, including information about which pregnant women might be at higher risk. I wasn’t just asking for a thousand words about pulverised fannies. And this experience is, remember, quite common. It would have helped a lot if we could have got some mainstream media coverage. But only a few journalists at small, expressly feminist outlets were willing to even consider it. For everyone else, including Woman’s Hour, it was just too difficult to print or broadcast stories that required the use of these words; it was too upsetting; we can’t put that in a headline; there might be children listening. And as we know, women’s bodies — as well as being inherently obscene — have absolutely nothing to do with children.

In the end, I could only conclude that there is literally no neutral, comfortable language women can use to talk about their own genitals and reproductive system. There are clinical terms that the media nevertheless considers to be impolite, and that anyway many people either don’t like or don’t understand (see the widespread use of ‘vagina’ to mean ‘vulva’, two distinct and critically different structures); there are toddler words (flower???); there is porn-speak; and there are scattered pieces of slang that women use for want of anything else, like an ancient tampon at the bottom of a handbag, and that the media also nevertheless considers to be impolite. I mean, personally I like ‘growler’, but I’m not sure it would go down well on Woman’s Hour.

The different kinds of discomfort attendant on each of these kinds of language has, I think, a direct impact on the way we conceive of our bodies. This is language for things that have gone wrong and have become problems; or for infantilised icons of limited functionality; or for disconnected vessels for other people’s gratification; or for things that are scurrilous and sloppy and impolite. I’m a big believer that if you don’t have words it makes it extraordinarily difficult to access the concept, and women simply don’t have a way to to talk fluently and unapologetically about the profound, varied and entirely ordinary functionality of their bodies.

Anyway, all of this came flooding back when watching Dead Ringers (2023, Netflix), Rachel Weisz’s sex-swap adaptation of David Cronenberg’s 1988 body horror flick. Usually when you say something like ‘Rachel Weisz’s’ it means that the celeb is starring in it, but in this case all the credit really does go to La Weisz, who had the idea as well as starring (twice) in it.

Unlike Weisz, I was no fan of the original. Jeremy Irons plays twin oddball gynaecologists with a frighteningly bizarre level of co-dependency. As part of their florid lunacy, the twins invent increasingly horrifying gynaecological instruments with which they inflict obstetric torture on women. By this point I was all noped out, and this was long before I had given birth myself; I don’t think I ever made it to the end of the film. The depiction of literally intrumentalised misogyny was just too much. Weisz, who is obviously made of sterner stuff, saw it as a commentary on misogyny rather than the perpetuation of it, and thought it was brilliant. Or maybe she just had to say that to get the rights; who knows. I should have watched the film again to see whether I could see her point, but I didn’t want to. Feel free to have a go and report back.

What’s brilliant about Weisz’s version is that instead of inventing heightened torture implements and improbable occurrences, she simply uses real, ordinary obstetric experiences to produce the simulacrum of horror. If you haven’t given birth, it’s interesting to think about which parts of this you find truly horrifying. If you have given birth yourself, it’s equally interesting to tick off which parts of this ‘horror’ you’ve personally experienced. Women have vast be-condomed dildos put up their vaginas at the drop of any given hat; yup, I’ve had plenty of dildo-cams in my time. Healthcare professionals walk away from you covered in your blood and shit; yup. Women have their birthing genitals displayed to crowds of people, whether they want them there or not; no, actually (thank you, Haywards Heath maternity wing). Women split open like crushed melons when their baby’s head emerges through the vaginal opening: yup. Women haemorrhage because caregivers think they’re making a fuss about nothing: this happened to three women I know, including my own mother, who had to have most of her labia majora cut away in the aftermath.

The thing about this — about the way we instinctively (or learnedly) categorise ordinary female experience as horrific and extreme and obscene — is that it definitively excludes women from the category of things we consider to be ‘normal’. To have a big pregnant belly is ‘normal’, but you must not talk about the varicose veins in your vulva or the changes in your cervical mucus. It is ‘normal’ to disappear for a few days and reappear with a newborn, but you absolutely must not talk about what happened in between, or what is still happening to you now. For hundreds of years aristocratic women gave birth in sealed-off chambers after an elaborate ceremony of leave-taking, and stayed there for a number of weeks until they could be ritually ‘cleansed’ by a church service. Sometimes, when it comes to our social mores, it’s hard to argue that much has really changed.

So the simple, repeated portrayal of pregnancy, miscarriage and childbirth in Dead Ringers is truly radical. Where is the horror in this body horror trope, asks Weisz and her writer Alice Birch. What, exactly, is icking you out here? Is it the mucus, the blood, the shit? Is it the ripping? Is it the pain? Is it the wounds? Is it the casual cruelty of burned-out healthcare workers? Is it the mortality and death? Is it the disconnect between these women and a system they didn’t design and can’t control? Is it femaleness, and the things it does?

Personally I rather enjoyed watching the births, which seemed extremely realistic. (The odd thing about giving birth is that you have absolutely no idea what the business end looks like.) And while it’s definitely horror of a kind, the depiction of Black women as being more likely to die or suffer severe injury during birth is also based in US and British healthcare data. In one horror/dream sequence Beverly, the more empathetic and slightly less lunatic twin, is visited by the ghost of an enslaved woman (Dead Ringers is set in the US) who describes being tortured over a number of years by an enthusiastic amateur obstetrician who uses her post-partum vagina as a testing ground for his surgical theories, conducting over 30 surgeries on her vaginal wounds without anaesthetic. I was immediately confident that this was based on a real story, and indeed it is; the surgeon concerned became known as the ‘father of modern gynaecology’. With deadening predictability, the original Cronenberg film was also based on a real story.

Dead Ringers is great if you like gothic horror. Personally, gothic anything is not really my bag, and as everything became increasingly heightened my attention started wandering. The plot requires the introduction of some truly hallucinatory reproductive technology — in this case, the cultivation of a 24-week-old foetus in some sort of bag? — and I got quite bored around that point. Having forced us to confront the idea that women’s bodies are, in themselves, a source of horror, the narrative of the last few episodes slides into different (albeit still appropriately hysterical) territory. For my taste there were rather too many questions and not enough answers. There was an interesting sub-plot involving the twins’ domestic cleaner and factotum, who furtively collects their used tampons and gusset-scrapings to make an art installation about her mother, who died in childbirth. But I’m a practical type, and couldn’t really see the potential for wider applicability here.

But then, what is the answer to the ceaseless pejoration of women’s bodies? Like the language we use for disability, any new terminology we adopt comes to be thought of as impolite because society regards us as impolite; deliberately difficult and unreasonable, hard work, fundamentally irksome. We are a constant reminder that humans are nothing more than meat tubes, our potential forever mediated by the tensile limits of gristle and bone.

The absence of fluency in conversations about our own bodies has a political impact too. The positioning of femaleness as strange and revolting, and the obstructive difficulty of naming its impacts, prevents us from organising around necessary improvements. If there is no language for your condition that can be broadcast on Good Morning Britain, you cannot lobby for any kind of change. (We cannot fundamentally change the experience of vaginal birth, of course. But we could make it a great deal easier to have elective c-sections. We could have much better-informed conversations about obstetric risk. We could do a much better job of tracking the relevant data, without which no respectable clinical organisation will countenance changes.)

Dead Ringers is worth your time for the sheer radicalism of its vision, for fabulous performances from Weisz and Jennifer Ehle, and for the sense that everyone involved knew exactly what they were doing. Whatever its imperfections, I was surprised and delighted to see that it got made in this form at all. Presumably it would not have been had it not had Weisz’s name attached, so all props to her. I didn’t expect an uber-glam celeb to be the person to point out so forcefully that women’s bodies and horror are two different things, but I’ll take it.

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Twins and doppelgängers are a common way of exploring female identity on screen: