Menstruation is a natural process where the uterine lining sheds approximately once a month, including the discharge of blood and other secretions through the vagina. Menstruation gives the ability for women to become pregnant and is a natural part of life. So why is it that this natural process is so stigmatized in our society? This natural process is the reason for life, we should be appreciative of this process, instead of having stigmatizing and stereotyping this process in our everyday social interactions. I have chosen to analyze and understand how menstruation is constructed throughout our society. I will be analyzing, how over the years menstruation has become socially constructed through social interactions and the media impacting …show more content…
When growing up, I lived in a family environment where we could openly communicate about any topic, including the taboo topics of sex and menstruation. When growing up I always asked questions or sought advice from my mother regarding menstruation. I even told my mother when I was menstruating and asked her how to use a tampon. To our family these were normal conversations, but as I was growing up I learned from my mother that when my mother was growing up talking about her period was not appropriate. My mother could not talk with her mother about menstruation because my mother was scolded for talking about something so inappropriate. Also, growing up I was only able to talk about menstruation with my close friends in private, because I was too ashamed or embarrassed to talk about menstruation with anyone else. Menstruation was and still is socially constructed to be only discussed among relative and close friends in …show more content…
Menstruation discussions are not acceptable or appropriate in public. Looking at this social phenomenon through a social constructionist perspective we can understand how social interactions and historical specificity helps us analyze and understand this social phenomenon. Social constructionism is based on how our distortion of knowledge is manifested by our social interactions. Also, historical time, where and when one lives can impact our knowledge (Burr, 2003). In my example, my mother grew up in a different era, where it was more socially accepted not to talk about menstruation at all. Where as in my experience, it is more normal for mothers’ and daughters’ to talk about menstruation today. With the construction of menstruation discussion as not being appropriate to talk about it in public is knowledge I have earned based on my everyday social interactions. For example, it is acceptable for me to talk to my close friends and mother about menstruation, but it is inappropriate for me to talk about menstruation to men or a coworker. Our society has constructed that openly talking about menstruation is totally unacceptable and inappropriate, but yet it is acceptable for menstruation to be talked about when justifying how women act and behave, how
All of the women are to take contraceptives in order to prevent pregnancy (Huxley 38). Babies are now decanted from bottles in factories, and strictly monitored and conditioned throughout development. To have a child naturally is deemed uncivilized, and would be a massive embarrassment to a woman, so all the girls are extremely careful about taking their birth control regularly. Unlike America, where hundreds of children are born each day to mothers without shame. According to the Curriculum Review, in the year 2009, over four-hundred thousand babies were born to mothers here in America, between the ages of 15 and 19 (Responding To Teen Pregnancy, 10). Woman here in America take pride in their pregnancies, even taking pregnancy photographs for memorabilia, and using their nine months of expecting to happily prepare for the coming of their child developing in their womb. The majority of mothers here in America would say pregnancy is difficult, but a life changing experience that leaves their heart filled with more love than they ever thought
Menstruation is the monthly passing of blood, tissue, fluid, and mucus. It is also known as a period. Your body is shedding the lining of the uterus. The flow of blood usually occurs during 3–7 consecutive days each month. Hormones control the menstrual cycle. Hormones are a chemical substance produced by endocrine glands in the body to regulate different bodily functions.
Women throughout time have been compelled to cope with the remonstrances of motherhood along with society’s anticipations
Introduction The topic of gender differences must understandably be approached with caution in our modern world. Emotionally charged and fraught with ideas about political correctness, gender can be a difficult subject to address, particularly when discussed in correlation to behavior and social behavior. Throughout history, many people have strove to understand what makes men and women different. Until the modern era, this topic was generally left up to religious leaders and philosophers to discuss. However, with the acquisition of more specialized medical knowledge of human physiology and the advent of anthropology, we now know a great deal more about gender differences than at any other point in history.
In Doing Gender authors West and Zimmerman argue the concept of gender being an outcome of daily life rather than an outcome from a physician with an ultrasound with only two permanent results. The meaning behind the term gender invokes different connotations of either masculine or feminine qualities that lay the groundwork for societies preexisting roles. Society today views gender as being either of masculine or feminine form however the controversy with this is how this is determined in our society today as well as in the past. Both authors fall upon the idea that sex is a disposition of birth whereas gender is a disposition of your actions after your birth. “It is necessary to move beyond the notion of gender display to consider what
It makes one wonder how society came to these ridiculous standards of beauty and the taboo of talking about women's bodies that still resonate today. I can personally attest to the uncomfortableness of the conversation of menstruation and developing bodies. My mother was taught, as her mother before and so on, that these conversations are to be kept in private and talked about quietly. In response to this, the power of men have an increasingly strong hold on the ideal physical beauty and how the changes of the body, such as menstruation, be in private and never spoke of. The Body Project gives a disturbing look at how women in the past few centuries and the present should act, look like, and keep hidden in response to what men think is most desirable. No matter how free women think they are, we are still under the control of men even if it is not directly. This book opens the conversation on the problems that are still plaguing women and how society needs to change to have a healthier environment for women to be comfortable in their
Instead of asking if the baby has all its toes and is overall healthy, the mother wants to know right away the sex of the baby. With this in mind, they raise them to act the way their gender should. This made me think about how much my culture and family influenced my gender identity. I was raised wearing pink dresses and playing with Barbie dolls. But I also would stray away from my expected gender roles. For a long time, between the ages five and ten I would run around without a shirt on. But then came the point where my parents said that I needed to stop doing that because I am a girl. Girls are expected to behave like civilized ladies. My father does not like when I use profanity and tells me that ladies should not curse. I questioned him by asking why is it that he can tell me how I should act, but I cannot really tell him how to act? He was taken aback by my argument and said that I made a valid point. I challenged the stereotypical views that men force upon
Nelson (2014) defines menstruation as the shedding of tissue and blood from the lining of uterus through a woman’s vagina. The author also states that menstruation acts as an important sign of puberty among females whereby they normally start having menstrual periods between the ages of 11 to 14 years old, around three to five days per cycle. Marshall (2014) studies that when periods come regularly, it is called the menstrual cycle which also implies the changes that occur in a woman’s body to prepare for fertilization and pregnancy. The cycle usually starts on the first day of the menstrual period and ends the day before the next period starts (Nelson, 2014). Ganong (2003) says the average cycle is 28 days but the length of the cycle is variable
The menstrual cycle occurs in the uterus and the ovary as a part of making sexual reproduction possible. The menstrual cycle is a monthly occurrence and happens so the ovary can produce eggs and the uterus can get ready for an egg becoming fertilized. (Wikipedia) The menstrual cycle is a complex cycle and is controlled by hormones produced by many different glands. The hypothalamus causes the pituitary gland to produces chemicals which then cause the ovaries to produce the sex hormones oestrogen and progesterone. Each gland and structure is affected by the activity of another which is a biofeedback . The menstrual cycle has been assumed to last around 28 days and happens in four stages, the menstrual phase (day 1-5), follicular phase (day 1-13), ovulation phase (day 14) and the luteal phase (day 15-28). The day count for the menstrual cycle starts on the first day that the blood comes out of the vagina. (Women’s Health)
Lorber grabs the attention of any reader by using some effective strategies and stating that discussing gender is considered equal to “fish talking about water”( Lorber 1). Therefore it meaning that a fish cannot think of living without water and similarly human beings cannot ponder the thought of living without gender. Judith Lorber has also compared the questioning the authenticity of gender to the rising of the sun. So, it is clearly understood that gender, though being practiced inevitably in our daily lives, many of us fail to accept that it is a way of organizing our lives and practicing gender is like practicing to organize our disorganized lives.
The human body is one of the most complex and yet beautiful things on the earth. We live in a time where our perception of the way we view the body is driven my social stereotypes. In todays world we are supposed to live by the standards of this unwritten code. All of this affects the quality of life we live in. It ranges from the workplace; our personal relationships to the way strangers perceive a person. At this very day in age we are categorized due to being born male or female and things that should be talked about are considered taboo to others.
If the definition of gender is taken to be “the structure of social relations that centres on the reproductive arena, and the set of practices...that bring reproductive distinctions between bodies into social processes” (Connell 2002, p. 10), then both the structures
Society created the role of gender and created an emphasis on the differences between the two genders. Alma Gottlieb states: “biological inevitability of the sex organs comes to stand for a perceived inevitability of social roles, expectations, and meanings” (Gottlieb, 167). Sex is the scientific acknowledgment that men and women are biologically different; gender stems from society’s formation of roles assigned to each sex and the emphasis of the differences between the two sexes. The creation of meanings centers on the expectations of the roles each sex should fill; society creates cultural norms that perpetuate these creations. Gender blurs the lines between the differences created by nature and those created by society (Gottlieb, 168); gender is the cultural expectations of sexes, with meaning assigned to the diff...
Gender is such a ubiquitous notion that humans assume gender is biological. However, gender is a notion that is made up in order to organize human life. It is created and recreated giving power to the dominant gender, creating an inferior gender and producing gender roles. There are many questionable perspectives such as how two genders are learned, how humans learn their own gender and others genders, how they learn to appropriately perform their gender and how gender roles are produced. In order to understand these perspectives, we must view gender as a social institution. Society bases gender on sex and applies a sex category to people in daily life by recognizing gender markers. Sex is the foundation to which gender is created. We must understand the difference between anatomical sex and gender in order to grasp the development of gender. First, I will be assessing existing perspectives on the social construction of gender. Next, I will analyze three case studies and explain how gender construction is applied in order to provide a clearer understanding of gender construction. Lastly, I will develop my own case study by analyzing the movie Mrs. Doubtfire and apply gender construction.
The relationship between sex and gender can be argued in many different lights. All of which complicated lights. Each individual beholds a sexual identity and a gender identity, with the argument of perceiving these identities however way they wish to perceive them. However, the impact of gender on our identities and on our bodies and how they play out is often taken for granted in various ways. Gender issues continue to be a hugely important topic within contemporary modern society. I intend to help the reader understand that femininities and masculinities is a social constructed concept and whether the binary categories of “male” and “female” are adequate concepts for understanding and organising contemporary social life with discussing the experiences of individuals and groups who have resisted these labels and forged new identities.