childbirth etc./AND P CONTENT!

[davemarc]

> From: calbert at pop.tiac.net
> 
> Dana submits:
> 
> > It isn't nature that has screwed over women, it's culture and the
> > cultural contexts of childbirth and menstruation. 
> 
> So no-one needs epidurals, just culture adjustment.
> 
> > It's the way
> > midwives were exiled by orthodox (read patriarcal) medicine, the
> > way hysteria was associated with our organs,the way menstruation has
lost
> > its cool original ideology as a cyclical return in tune with the
cosmos.
> 
> Are women better off with or without obstetricians and gynecologists? 
> Are women who practise these arts collaborators?
> I'm beginning to wonder if you should be allowed to read without 
> supervision.

Let me get this straight.  Charles feels that nature has screwed over
women?  That the male medical establishment hasn't?  

Even if I weren't aware of the points Dana raise (the well-documented AMA
assault on midwifery and normal female biological functions), my awareness
that many male doctors colluded to put unwanted wives in the loony bin and
typically made light of women's pain--from menstrual cramps to depression
to typewriter-wrist (a working woman's maldy that finally became
legitimized as repetitive stress syndrome as soon as men started using word
processors)--I've read enough Pynchon (say, the plastic surgery scene in
V.) to realize that Charles's contemptuous rhetoric only illustrates the
case she's making.  Keep it up, Charles old sport--you're doing great work.

davemarc