12 Rules for Life (Full) ENGLISH

revolutions, including the invention of the birth control pill. At least such
things might be taken into account, before the assumption that men
tyrannized women is accepted as a truism.
It looks to me like the so-called oppression of the patriarchy was instead an
imperfect collective attempt by men and women, stretching over millennia, to
free each other from privation, disease and drudgery. The recent case of
Arunachalam Muruganantham provides a salutary example. This man, the
“tampon king” of India, became unhappy because his wife had to use dirty
rags during her menstrual period. She told him it was either expensive
sanitary napkins, or milk for the family. He spent the next fourteen years in a
state of insanity, by his neighbours’ judgment, trying to rectify the problem.
Even his wife and his mother abandoned him, briefly, terrified as they
became of his obsession. When he ran out of female volunteers to test his
product, he took to wearing a bladder of pig’s blood as a replacement. I can’t
see how this behaviour would have improved his popularity or status. Now
his low-cost and locally made napkins are distributed across India,
manufactured by women-run self-help groups. His users have been provided
with freedom they never previously experienced. In 2014, this high-school
dropout was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in
the world. I am unwilling to consider personal gain Muruganantham’s
primary motivation. Is he part of the patriarchy?
In 1847, James Young Simpson used ether to help a woman who had a
deformed pelvis give birth. Afterwards, he switched to the better-performing
chloroform. The first baby delivered under its influence was named
“Anaesthesia.” By 1853, chloroform was esteemed enough to be used by
Queen Victoria, who delivered her seventh baby under its influence.
Remarkably soon afterward, the option of painless childbirth was available
everywhere. A few people warned of the danger of opposing God’s
pronouncement to women in Genesis 3:16: “I will greatly multiply thy
sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children ...”
Some also opposed its use among males: young, healthy, courageous men
simply did not need anaesthesia. Such opposition was ineffectual. Use of
anaesthesia spread with extreme rapidity (and far faster than would be
possible today). Even prominent churchmen supported its use.
The first practical tampon, Tampax, didn’t arrive until the 1930s. It was
invented by Dr. Earle Cleveland Haas. He made it of compressed cotton, and