Posts

Definition of “normal” depends on a society you live in. The society is shaped by cultural norms. But who establishes cultural norms? The obvious and incorrect (I believe so) answer is majority of people. However, my answer on who defines cultural norms is norms are defined by a group of people who manipulates society in order to increase their power and money and a small group of radical people.

So who benefits from establishing what is “normal” sex life? On top of my list are pharmaceutical companies that by medicalizing sexuality they can make medications for imaginary disease and make billions of money curing women who do not need cure. Next are doctors. As much as I respect doctors and eager to embrace modern medicine as anyone who needs help, as I grow older I become more and more skeptical of doctors work. However, neither doctors nor big companies can make money or doctors establish norms in medicine without some support from the population. Unfortunately, in the United States usually some very conservative, religious and loud minority dictates what is normal. It is admirable that voice of minority is heard. However, in case of American society minority makes life of majority hellish.

There are several problems I can identify with doctors. In the United States doctors, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies live in symbiosis and cannot survive without each other. Often doctors are doctors and businesspeople at the same time. So understanding doctors’ intentions is really hard. Another problem is harm doctors cause to the society when they in a rush of solving everything with medicine. For example, Carolyn Lewis gives an example how general physicians saw themselves as figures fit to solve problems of sexual lives of Americans by performing premarital pelvic exam to show women what to expect on wedding night. What interesting is that doctors argued that young women were confused, anxious, and ill prepared for wedding night (doctors also assumed women would be virgins). At that time doctors, using similar language, argued that women could not understand side effects of DES. Therefore in mid-twentieth century cultural norm was to see a woman as passive vagina, a mother, a hysteric, and a property that belonged to men. Women in menopause and young girl were urged to take DES to get personality or physical appearance appealing to men, and young women needed to get fiancé permission to get premarital cervical exam. So along these lines we can expect our doctors to make us to comply with modern stereotypes. But since we live in this time period, it is hard for us to identify these cultural norms.

Today over sexualized media and culture tell women how they have to look and what sexual life they have to have. With the help of plastic surgeons and medications desired look and sex life can be achieved. According to “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” in last decades labiaplasty became very popular. Unfortunately, young girls and women learn how their vulva supposed to look like from porn. According to documentary “Sexy Baby” (I saw it a year ago), one of the women in the documentary went under knife because she could not enjoy sex because she did not like how her vulva looked like and her doctor reinforced her insecurity. Therefore, because of luck of experience (arguably intense) Elizabeth Reis describes in her article “What is in your vulva?”, women grow up judging themselves based on porn that everyone with access to internet can see. Absence of visual proof of different vulvas, absence of open talk about what to expect from sex, how to enjoy, or what is a norm for individual woman separates and imprisons women in their luck of knowledge. This ignorance allows loud minorities to create dissonance that later doctors, big corporations, people with power, porno industry, and pharmaceutical companies use to make money on women and harm them. DES proved to be lethal in the long run. So Viagra for women can also turned out to be lethal.

By the way I just finished watching documentary “Let’s talk about sex” to my surprise and my delight I saw you professor in it.

Cultural beliefs about gender such as women are responsible for delivering healthy babies and women serve men’s needs played a major role in approval and use of DES. Pharmaceutical companies exploited cultural beliefs about women to transform perception of a female body. Companies targeted women from childbearing age to post menopause age that created huge market for a newly developed drug. As twentieth century progressed government and companies could not say that women’s only job was to please men out loud because women became more self-conscience. Therefore, instead companies used tactics of transforming women’s understanding of their bodies and their duties to their families.

So let us consider pregnancy and giving birth. Pregnancy and giving birth can result in miscarriages and stillbirths. However, using wartime insensitive that was a need for healthy nation and idea that science can fix everything pharmaceutical companies told women that it was their duty as women to create a healthy nation. Such situation can be paralleled with our current society where women are expected to and pressured to do everything to deliver healthy babies. In other worlds, responsibility for a healthy nation is put on women instead of emphasizing importance and a role of the government and big corporations that exploit and poison people and environment. So women were pressured to accept usage of DES to deliver healthy babies while refusal to comply with DES meant refusal to be a good mother and not to be a woman who did not want to put chemicals in her body. Therefore, the women’s primary role was and still is portrayed as being mother.

Being mother leads to the second cultural stereotype that was doing everything for family’s happiness and that stereotype targeted women before, during and after menopause. Natural process of menopause was seen as a threat to family’s happiness and especially to men’s comfort. In other words, a good mother would not cause distress to her children by complaining and making their life hard or by divorce. So children’s happiness was abused to serve men’s needs where women were pressured to use medications to prove that they were good mothers and, therefore, hiding their self for the needs of their children.

However, the most horrific cultural belief that allowed for DES approval and use was that women were not capable of understanding importance or danger of side effects of DES. More specifically, women were expected to get hysterical and irrational about usage of DES. However, companies used cultural beliefs to manipulate American society to get DES approval and make huge amounts of money on a drug they knew was dangerous. Unfortunately, DES is not the only example. Cultural beliefs are used today in the same way. Women are responsible for delivering healthy babies while corporations can be unregulated and make money on products that make impossible to deliver healthy babies, that cause cancer and infertility in both men and women, that destroy environment and threaten existence of life on Earth. Cultural beliefs about women are used to justify violence against women, pornography, restricting abortion and many other things. To summarize, people with money and power shape cultural beliefs about genders to acquire more money and more power.

In “If Men Could Menstruate,” Gloria Steinem says, “whatever a ‘superior’ group has will be used to justify its superiority, and whatever an ‘inferior’ group has will be used to justify its plight.” The way women learn to think about their sexuality throughout their lives comes down to the way their unique development is portrayed. The processes female bodies undergo have often been seen as a problem that is a direct reflection of women’s weaknesses. The issue with seeing menstruation and menopause as a female flaw is that menstruation and menopause are not uniquely female. Many trans men and gender nonconforming individuals also have to deal with these developments, but are often excluded and erased from the dialogue. Seeing menstruation and menopause as exclusively female problems is also troubling because it turns women and girls into specimen. Every behavior, choice, and emotion a woman has must be in some way tied to her womanhood, not the power dynamic in which she exists. By reducing women to their bodily processes, men can effectively detach themselves from conversations about sexuality, relationship expectations, and even sexual health. Girls, young women, and even older women learn to feel shame about their sexuality because it has been understood as a problem, rather than something natural and normal.

There has been a movement to normalize menstruation, but it continues to be exclusionary because it is so centered on periods as a women’s issue. In doing so, it can marginalize nonbinary people who either cannot have periods or have periods, which can feel incongruent with their gender identities. On one hand, care packages for young girls to get sanitary napkins and candy that are perfectly timed with their cycles is great. Something that was once considered a curse and a source of shame has been turned into an opportunity to engage in self care and self acceptance, which is especially important for girls beginning to develop a sense of their sexuality. On the other hand, it is important to be able to separate menstruation from sexuality, because menstruation and femininity are not indefinitely intertwined. For some people, having a period can be incredibly alienating and can cause feelings of dysphoria. Furthermore, girls who have reproductive difficulties and never menstruate, either because they are transgender or because of amenorrhea can feel less feminine or less valid as women because their bodies do not do what stereotypical female bodies can do.

Along with menstruation, there is a new rite of passage: Gardasil. Human Papilloma Virus is not exclusively a women’s issue, but it has become a girl’s issue with the advent of the HPV vaccine. In an attempt to sell the vaccine, Merck advertised it as a way to prevent cervical cancer, making it an issue of “girl power.” The problem is, HPV is not contracted or spread by women alone, and although people with cervixes are at risk for developing cervical cancer if they’ve had HPV, the advertisements completely avoid the elephant in the room. The target audience is young girls and their mothers, but what about transgender boys who have not transitioned or who have cervixes? There is no guarantee that the vaccine even prevents cervical cancer because there simply isn’t enough research. How ethical is it to be proposing that 11-12 year olds who are most likely not sexually active, or even have a full understanding of how HPV is spread, get vaccinated for something that is not posing a widespread threat to public safety? At 11 or 12, this is hardly informed consent, but underneath the veil of female empowerment and autonomy, it appears to be a good choice. There simply isn’t enough information to suggest that there’s any correlation between the age of vaccination and likelihood for cervical cancer, except one thing: sex. In the transition from girlhood to womanhood, it is morally imperative to protect your health. But it still comes back to boys and men; why is it only a female moral imperative to be safe and protected from HPV? Isn’t it just as morally important to be sure you don’t catch HPV so you don’t spread it to someone who could potentially contract cervical cancer? Why is the responsibility on an 11 or 12 year-old girl to protect herself from cervical cancer? This breeds a sense of fear in heterosexual girls beginning to explore their sexualities. There is a new level of blame that will develop for girls who choose to forgo the vaccine if they later contract HPV that boys simply won’t have to face, even if they are spreading it.

This deflection of responsibility is not new and is not limited to younger people. Judith Houck’s chapter about menopause is particularly startling for a number of reasons. Menopause and womanhood as a whole were, and in many ways continue to be, pathological. Failing families and struggling sex lives can all be reduced to one common denominator: aging women. First, women are taught to be ashamed of their bodies. As young girls, they are not allowed to talk about their periods in front of or with boys. They are told that it is a curse. Then, they are taught that the main objective of sex is to procreate and that they should save their virginity for their husbands because it is special and sacred. But then, at the same time, they must also cater to their husband’s sexual desires, even if the current objective is not to get pregnant. When they are no longer useful as fetal containers, women stop having sex because, well, they were told that sex is for having babies, so if you can’t have babies anymore, why have sex, right? So if your husband cheats on you, it’s because you stopped wanting to have sex. Or maybe because you want too much sex. Or maybe because you’ve become a bad mother, and you stopped washing your hair, and painting your nails, and putting on makeup, and you’ve gained weight. The absurdity continues. Although the focus of sex in some cases is to procreate, in other cases it’s to please the husband, but in almost no case is it for a woman’s own pleasure or desire. While theoretically women should feel most comfortable having sex when they no longer have to fear getting pregnant, by that point they have been conditioned to see sex as purely mechanical and goal oriented. Sex is an obligation, another chore women are expected to perform, but not participate in. If a woman hasn’t developed this view of sex, she is surely pathological as well. By this logic, husbands and men can relinquish all responsibility in a relationship when menopause rolls around. All the blame falls on the woman, although there are plenty of justifications for the sexual and emotional changes women go through during menopause, which can be either mitigated or aggravated by the man’s level of understanding and care.