The word “upper ring” has never been a light symbol for generations of chinese women. It was a policy of coercion, an indescribable pain in the body, and a brand that countless mothers and wives were forced to bear under the flood of the times. But today, in the corners of some platforms, this word, which carries heavy memories, is alienated into the labels of the eyeballs, the tools of glittering – when the nicknames of the “up-to-air” and exposed plastic bundles appear, when suffering is deconstructed as a mirage of love games, we see not only ignorance, but also cruel betrayal of the memory of millions of women。
The alienated “upper ring” label: from physical memory to decay of flow codes
Turning to the home pages marked “up-ringed”, the content is strikingly similar: deliberate sexy positions, lenses focused on the privacy of the body, and the deliberate emphasis on identity labels such as “single mother” “lactating woman” ... These elements have nothing to do with the upper ring per se, but they use precisely the taboo and controversial nature behind the term。
They may not know what this word, which is used as a flow code, means to other women — it's a continuous inflammation reaction within the uterus, it's an abnormal haemorrhage from the non-menstrual period, it's a pain in the waist when bending, and it's a pain when it's pulled by a device. One of the netizens recalled her mother's experience with the ring: “the doctor used a probe to groan in the womb, the mother was shaking, and the ring she pulled was covered in blood and flesh, and she was lying out of bed for a week.” such painful memories, in the raging of the flow, have been softly turned into "love insinuations."。
It is even more discomfort that these accounts often deliberately emphasize young status such as “after 05” “female university students”. At this age of piety in dealing with historical suffering, mother-to-child pain is consumed in the lightest way. This “down-to-down breakthrough” is essentially a tool for using women's bodies and suffering together — both by stepping on the painful eyes of their predecessors and by reinforcing the bias that “women's bodies can be blinded”。
Ii. The neglected historical weight: the real cost behind 540 million women
According to the commission, over the past 50 years, 540 million women in china have worn birth control rings. Behind this huge number is the sacrifice and indignity of countless individuals. During certain historical periods, the “uplink” is linked to work, household registration, school attendance of children, etc., as an implicit constraint: the four months after the birth of a child must go up, without which no pay is paid, and rural women may face limited land distribution if they refuse。
The artist zhou's silent work, women's series . . . . . . . . . . . . 300:1 restored . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The purpose of her creation stems from her experiences with her mother — a ring that has been in her body for more than 20 years and that has been embedded in her body, with haemorrhaging at the time of extraction and subsequent examination of suspected uterine cancer. In the editorial area of the work, hundreds of messages were put together in similar pains: mothers were repeatedly tortured by pelvis and cervical disease for more than 20 years because of cyclic discomfort; mothers were cut through the uterus and almost removed from their kidneys because of cycling alienation; and, as others recalled, the mother took the ring with weakness, saying, “it hurts more than when you were born”
These are not distant stories, but the suffering that really happens in millions of families. When the “upper ring” is removed from the historical context and turned into a tool for sexual games, it is essentially a disregard for the suffering of these women — as if they were insinuated and their sacrifice could be consumed at will。
Iii. Women's solidarity should not be a slogan: be wary of the trap of “homosexuality”
The slogan “girlshelpgirls” (girls help girls) is moving because it points to a common bond and support between women: it is the strange sister in the subway who carries a coat for a girl whose period has been missed, the principal of zhang guimei, who built a school for girls in the mountains, and the daughter who holds her mother's hand in the clinic to take the ring. The bottom color of this mutual help is, "i know how you hurt, so i'm protecting you."。
But those accounts that consume the “upper ring” are going backwards — they use their female identities to harm women. On the one hand, they treat men in the same way as men, exacerbating the bias of “women's body is the landscape”; on the other hand, they remove the seriousness of the “upper ring” as a women's issue and make it more difficult for the public to focus on the needs of women who still suffer from the after-effects: for example, the call to integrate the cost of the ring into health insurance, for example, the science of the long-term side effects of the ring, for example, reflection on historical policy。
Even saddeningly, this narrative of “homosexuality” is precisely the trap of certain prejudices — when women themselves do not take the suffering of their peers seriously, when “harm” can be packaged as “personality”, and when the outside world is more reckless in its contempt for women's suffering. As one aunt said, "we were in pain, we were crying, and others said, "women are like this," and now they joke about it, and they just say, "look, they don't care."
Conclusion: respect for suffering is true goodwill for women
The upper ring should not be a flirt, much less a flow tool. It is a history that needs to be looked at, a memory of countless women writing in their bodies, and a wake-up call to remind us that “women's rights need to be valued”。
The true solidarity of women is not a sloganic carnival, but rather a painful bond with others — knowing the pain of a mother when she takes the ring, and not taking the upper ring for fun; seeing the difficulties of a previous generation fighting for dignity, it is not going to be a body that meets a low-profile gaze. May we all remember that respect for suffering and awe of history are the deepest goodwill for women themselves。
