Power of the peri-menopausal woman
posted Sunday, August 16th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
I was reflecting on Ruth Ostrow’s satirical article in the Australian Weekend Magazine on the power women have to draw sympathy or clout from their changing hormonal states, it reminded me of the way the female body and its natural cycles have been medicalised to the nth degree: As Ostrow rather wittily points out -
The thing about peri-menopause is that it’s such a vague notion. One can be peri for a decade, then menopausal for the next decade. Thus 20 years of great excuses for just being a normal, rancid human being. Like my teenage daughter, who gets off having to do anything because, “Oh, she’s just a teenager.” Then, once she’s post-teenager, she can trade on being pre-menstrual, before becoming pre-menopausal, peri-menopausal, menopausal and then post-menopausal. I feel sorry for men, who don’t seem to have ever dreamt up any good excuses for their lifelong, poor hormonal behaviour.
The darker side of these anecdotes – underlying the satire – is the way in which women’s reproductive capacities have become more ‘medicalised’ and processes including menstruation, PMS, pregnancy, childbirth, and menopause ‘pathologised’ rather than seen as normal life events. Sociologist Maria Zadoroznyi has written some interesting stuff on this…*
I wonder if this goes back to the time when the male body was considered ‘the norm’ by the medical establishment by which female bodies were judged as somehow aberrant ?
Zadoroznyi, M. 2004 ‘Gender and Health’ in Grbich, C (ed) 3rd edition Health in Australia: Sociological Concepts and Issues: Sydney, Prentice Hall
who don’t seem to have ever dreamt up any good excuses for their lifelong, poor hormonal behaviour
That would be because they don’t apologise for it, they aren’t looking for an excuse for their poor behaviour. Women, however, excuse them all time – “he’s just a boy”, “what do you expect, he’s a man?”.
But in response to your point, it seems likely that the fact that cycles and long term changes are not characteristic of men’s hormones is the reason why women are supposed to “fix” the changes in their lives. No-one ever says “You know, if he had periods, at least there’d be 3 weeks a month when he wasn’t shitty.”"
Ariane said this on August 17th, 2009 at 8:26 pm