childbirth etc./AND P CONTENT!

[Vaska Tumir]

The whole nature/culture polarization here strikes me as misleading [Pynchon
uses it in _GR_ but with such a dose of thoughtful and deeply thought-out
ambivalence that it undercuts any attempt to plunk oneself down on one side
rather than another].  Here's why, in point form [I'm not reading Pynchon's
mind but merely continuing with my own observations]:

Culture, to paraphrase Aristotle a little, is natural to our species.  Even
Marx, or especially the old Karl, had quite intelligent things to say about
our "species nature," one of whose inherent characteristics is the
production of culture[s].  Much clearer on that than Hegel, for example, for
whom obfuscation was a stock in trade.

The nature-culture split also runs along along the *very same* ideological
lines as the feminity-masculinity split; both of which are imaginary but
also performative constructions of considerable proportions: i.e. they have
real consequences in the lives of flesh-and-blood women and men -- and children.

To reify evolutionary processes into a semi-personified nature as Charles
has done in one of his recent posts is an absurdity Darwin might have taught
us all to at last try to avoid, whenever possible, i.e. whenever we are
sensible enough to actually try to think rather than serve as mouthpieces of
received opinion -- and to avoid for the sake of some [more] production of
real knowledge.

There's another and strictly specific culture-bound dimension to this
discussion that no one's mentioned so far: midwifery has never had the same
fate in Europe as the one it underwent on the North American continent.  A
first-hand observation: my own ob/gyn father has spent his entire
professional life working side-by-side with midwives, some of whom are
family friends, and without whose care, intervention and knowledge his own
ability to help women in labour would have been severely impaired.  To say
the least.  By the same token, I watched him for years getting up 2 or 3
times *a night*, 3-4 days *a week* [on average], called by those same
midwives to come in and take over in those emergency situations they simply
couldn't handle on their own.  These women [for all of them were women] were
highly experienced professionals, too.  [I've watched my father and the
midwives he's worked with help women deliver babies since I was a
ten-year-old; the collegiality and the co-operation I saw in those delivery
rooms were palpable and entirely focused on easing the woman's stress and
pain as well as the trauma any infant goes through in the process of being
born.  And sometimes the level of empathy -- at least from what I was lucky
enough to see and witness -- was almost magical in its depth and results.]

The faults and crimes of modern medicine are many; but let's not sweep it
under the carpet that the incidence of puerperal fever and other causes of
death associated with childbirth have gone down to almost zero precisely
through the efforts of that very same modern medicine.  Given a choice, no
woman in her right mind would prefer to bear a child in the 19th [not to
mention the 16th or the 13th, say] as opposed to the 20th century.  

Finally, it was a man who noticed that modern delivery techniques not only
alienated the child-bearing women but were also profoundly [and
unnecessarily so] traumatic to the new borns themselves -- and then took
measures to prevent that state of affairs from perpetuating itself.

The myth of nature propounded in some of the recent posts is no less bizarre
today than the myth of a golden age of pre-modern medicine suggested in
others.  
BTW: women, too, have rectal examinations.  I was surprised to see that this
seems to be considered something only men undergo.  Not so. 

Vaska

P.S. As for Esther's nose job: I remember hearing that Pynchon himself went
through a much more painful and prolonged surgical process for much the same
reason.  I wonder if people really "buy into" any beauty myths as respond to
the actual behaviour others accord to them.  The fact that each culture has
its own distinct set of aesthetic standards of preference -- and that these
are also historically bound -- makes me suspect that the production of
aesthetics is also a part of our ever so pliable species-nature.  But that
it is there at all, cross-culturally, makes it into a realtivism which
expresses a universal [but totally content-free] predisposition of sorts.