I had just finished reading this book when the Supreme Court leak happened, which means my ear has been tuned to the language as the outrage exploded and conversations whirled around.
A large part of Emily Martin’s thesis is about the language and metaphor we use for the body—particularly women’s bodies. It’s mechanistic, it’s industrialized, it speaks in terms of gains and losses, waste and production. The medical model we have, from menstruation to menopause, is about irregularity, failure, waste product, syndromes, symptoms, malfunctions. Birth is seen as the one productive outcome, and even that isn’t accomplished by the woman—it’s accomplished by the uterus, the egg, the womb, all these disembodied parts.
It’s very dismembered, this language, and it’s everywhere. Fragmented, isolated, unintegrated, disordered, which has allowed for the long and depressingly misogynistic history of reproductive medicine,1 and excused the violences and injustice visited upon the woman herself.
Raw notes ⚭
- Chaos model, instead of mechanical model
- The heart isn’t the quintessential mechanical body part, a pump, but a self-organizing system
- Regularity is normal, good, and valued; irregularity is abnormal and negatively valued. How do we move to a different view? (Heartbeats; menstruation)
- Menstruation as part of a flexible immune system instead of flushing waste (Margie Profet, 1993)
- Controversial but powerful reversal: sperm as carriers of harmful pathogens instead of gallant rescuers; menstrual fluid responsive to threat instead of useless debris
- The grammar of hierarchies
- A social category masquerading as a natural one
- Women “producing” children as a product (“pro-life” + capitalism!)
- Fragmentation, isolation, non-integration, lack of wholeness
- 17th century, Hobbes and Locke, French Revolution > loss of certainty that the social order could be grounded in the natural order
- Thomas Ewbank, 19th century inventor: the world is a factory, humans are designed to produce. “God employs no idlers—creates none.” (cf. Earthlings, anyone?)
- Only about one out of every 100 billion sperm fertilize an egg—yet menstruation is seen as the waste product 🙄
- Metaphors for time and battle (cf. Metaphors We Live By)
- Every taboo on something shameful has the potential for rebellion written in it
- The United States is alone among all major industrial countries in its lack of a national insurance plan that pays medical expenses for childbirth
- The current structure of workplaces in the United States does not easily allow any woman to live with her bodily functions, whether she be menstruating or pregnant
- Entailed in this view of PMS (as a syndrome with symptoms and suffering) are a series of assumptions about the nature of time and of society and about the necessary roles of women and men
- Regarding work, all but a very few women are subjected to mental and physical discipline; what many women seem to report is that they are, during premenstrual days, less willing or able to tolerate such discipline
- Science and the way it is used in our society to reduce discontent to biological malfunction
- Alternate theory: menstruation as the height of your powers, not to be wasted on mundane tasks and social distractions
- What might in the right context be released as powerful creativity or deep self-knowledge becomes maladaptive discontent
- An anthropological commonplace that spirit possession in traditional societies can be a means for those who are subordinated (often women) to express discontent
- A woman’s period may be “a moment of truth which will not sustain lies.” (Shuttle and Redgrove)
- If we look at a menstrual cycle as something to be eliminated—is it not the same as wanting to eliminate sleep as a cycle we need?
- Inchoate rage which women, because of the power of the argument that reduces this rage to biological malfunction, often do not allow to become wrath
- Forceps were invented by male doctors in the 17th and 18th centuries, part of what enabled these men to compete effectively against female midwives
- Eliminated touch, introduced technology—“an insignificant and dangerous substitute” for their hands
- The laboring woman is being bypassed much as the laborer has been in continuous-process industries
- Doctors becoming employees in corporations based in hospitals—no longer the manager using machines to manage the laborer (woman) to produce the commodity (baby), but now the doctor is the new worker, bypassing the woman to produce the baby
- 1959–1961, mortality rate for nonwhite women was four times the rate for white women
- Diana Scully 😂
- Goffman’s classic study on embarrassment: when the self a person intends to project is confronted with another self he or she would rather not acknowledge or one that is incompatible with the present situation. “Because possessing of multiple selves…”
- Power, subordination, gender, and the underlying cultural grammar of hot flashes
- Metaphors on up-down hot-cold (cf. Metaphors We Live By)
Pull quotes ⚭
By focusing on birth as the thing that unites women, instead of menstruation, we get the prevailing cultural view that pregnancy is the end point and menstruation a wasteful failure, which excludes the ones who don’t want children, or are gay, or abstinent, or infertile. When menstruation is actually the one thing we all share, fertile, infertile, heterosexual, homosexual. (Note: this is still trans-exclusive)
Women are perceived as malfunctioning and their hormones out of balance rather than the organization of society and work perceived as in need of a transformation to demand less constant discipline and productivity.
Why only the losses, and not gains in complementary areas? Does the loss of concentration mean a greater ability to free-associate? Loss of muscle control, a greater ability to relax? Decreased efficiency, increased creativity, empathy, sensuality?
Female anger disrupts harmony. This entire account is premised on the unexamined cultural assumption that it is primarily a woman’s job to see that social relationships work smoothly in the family. Her own anger, however substantial the basis for it, must not be allowed to make life hard on those around her.
What is missing in these accounts is why, in Anglo and American societies, women might feel extreme rage at a time when their usual emotional controls are reduced.
“The mothers, if we could look inside their fantasies—we would see the embodiment of rage, of tragedy, of the overcharged energy of love, of inventive desperation, we would see the machinery of institutional violence wrenching at the experience of motherhood.” Adrienne Rich
Hot flashes and women’s and society’s responses to them are layered with levels upon levels of intentionality and interpretation, just as the same muscular contraction of the eyelid can be a twitch, a wink, a parody of a wink, a rehearsal of a parody of a wink, or a fake wink.
The single strongest predictors of longevity: not genetic heritage, physical functioning, or use of tobacco but simply one’s general satisfaction with work and overall happiness — the same predictor goes for contentment during menstruation or menopause.
Borrowing this turn of phrase from Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us ↩︎