Section Eight Bodies Learning Objectives To Understand How

section eight: bodies learning objectives * to understand how women’s bodies are socially constructed. * to be

Section Eight: Bodies
Learning Objectives
*
To understand how women’s bodies are socially constructed.
*
To be familiar with the ways that race, ethnicity, class, and
sexuality affect women’s access to health care, how women see
their bodies, and their treatment by the heath industry.
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To be aware of the hierarchies embedded in the medical
establishment and how this affects women’s health care body image.
Section Summary
Although physical bodies and health may seem to be purely biological,
they are also socially constructed. Cultural ideologies affect how we
understand our own physical bodies.
*
Social institutions like politics, medicine, and the media shape
women’s access to health care and healthy work conditions and
shape the way women see themselves.
*
Women’s bodies are often the site of political contestation and
control, and feminists have often focused on changing health
policies.
*
Historically the healthcare industry viewed women’s bodies as
abnormal and diseased.
*
The women’s health movement challenged the way medicine treated
women and assisted women in reclaiming control over their bodies.
Today this movement must focus on new technologies and work
alongside other movements.
*
Race, class, religion, nationality, and sexuality intersect with
gender to socially construct women’s bodies.
Reading 37: Anne Fausto-Sterling, “The Bare Bones of Sex: Part 1- Sex
and Gender”
Fausto-Sterling is a biologist who uses human bone (structure,
density, propensity to break, etc.) as an example of the complicated
interconnected relationship of nature and nurture in shaping human
bodies and experience. She introduces a life-course dynamic systems
approach to the analysis of sex/gender which suggests that bodies are
shaped by various and dynamic social processes as well as by genes and
hormones. Fausto-Sterling suggests that to understand the body and to
ward off disease we must recognize that we are both 100% nature and
100% nurture at all times.
*
Sterling begins with examples that demonstrate how lived
experiences resulting from cultural eating habits, occupation,
exercise routine, race, and geographic location likely shape
bones.
*
Feminists, particularly those in the social sciences, and
biologists must understand the body to be simultaneously made up
of genes, hormones, organs, and cells as well as culture and
history which ALL influence both health and behavior. Although
feminists have attempted to separate sex and gender and have
focused on gender as determined by culture, Sterling points to
research in disability studies which bring the body back into the
picture.
*
In medicine, and biological psychology, scientists continue to
examine how biological sex determines a number of gender behaviors
and thus creates differences between the sexes. Many of those
interested in this work are feminists, such as the Society for
Women’s Health Research, who are attempting to bring gender equity
to the healthcare system, but they fail to understand the role of
culture in shaping the body.
*
Fausto-Sterling examines bones because of the long history of the
use of bones to understand history and because problems with bones
such as diseases demonstrate the difficulty of defining sex apart
from gender.
*
Claims about gender differences in osteoporosis are dependant upon
our definition of the disease. Most studies and doctors rely on
bone mineral density tests which are cheap and have been promoted
by drug companies, and this has replaced older diagnoses which
relied on broken bones. However, volumetric measures and knowledge
of bone strength may better determine one’s risk of osteoporosis.
How and why men and women’s bone density differs at various points
in the life-cycle is still not well understood as scientists do no
understand the role of hormones or of culture in shaping our
bones.
*
A dynamic systems approach doesn’t just look at parts of the body
by themselves, but rather looks to understand issues by looking at
the whole.
*
In a figure Fausto-Sterling demonstrates how physical activity,
diet, drugs, bone formation in fetal development, hormones, bone
cell metabolism, and biomechanical effects of bone formation can
be analyzed as a complex system. Each of these systems relates to
each other and produce bodies that either develop osteoporosis or
not.
Reading 38: Becky Wangsgaard Thompson, "’A Way Outa No Way:’ Eating
Problems among African-American, Latina, and White Women”
Interviews with a diverse group of lesbians and women of color
demonstrate that, for many women, eating problems are related to
trauma. We must understand the diverse causes of eating problems in
order to find help for those women who are at the intersection of
multiple axes of oppression.
*
Women who are lesbian, poor, or non-white experience eating
disorders that cannot be primarily linked to the media-constructed
“culture of thinness.”
*
Many women who experience eating problems trace the onset of these
problems to oppression in the form of sexual abuse, racism,
classism, heterosexism, and sexism. Some of these women
experienced multiple traumas that contributed to their problem.
*
Sexual abuse, which was the most common trauma these women
experienced, left the women feeling out of control or needing to
change or punish their bodies.
*
Poverty and heterosexism caused stress that food helped these
women forget.
*
Some minority women were pressured to make their bodies different
in order to aid their families’ assimilation into a higher class
standing.
*
For these women, their relationship with food was a way to regain
control over their lives or to anesthetize the pain of their
trauma or oppression.
*
The traumas distorted women’s views of their own bodies and
blocked their ability to feel connected to their bodies.
Reading 39: Simone Weil Davis, “Loose Lips Sink Ships”
Davis explores the construction of the “problem” of an abnormal labia
which can be corrected with cosmetic surgeries that provide women with
“designer vaginas” through labiaplasty. She argues that this surgery
and other vaginal surgeries like female genital mutilation should be
seen on a continuum that involves a more complex understanding of the
choices and cultural constraints involved in the surgeries.
*
Labiaplasty is a cosmetic procedure that involves cutting labial
tissue or injecting fat into the labia in order to correct
“excessively droopy” or “abnormal” labia. Doctors and patients
seek minimal, unextended, symmetrical, and pink labia that are
“not wavy.”
*
Although most American women are happy with their genitalia, this
surgery creates new fears and self-consciousness for women about
their bodies: are their labia normal?
*
Cosmetic surgery uses medical language and classical aesthetics to
secure modern credibility for their construction of an “ideal”
body and genitalia.
*
Labiaplasty helps women obtain the idealized airbrushed or altered
(fake) body.
*
Current vaginal surgeries derive from a history of Western culture
that has pathologized women’s sexuality and sexual organs and
whose constructions of women have vacillated between modesty and
lustiness, often with racist conceptions of the “other” women.
*
Western doctors performed legal vaginal surgeries to “cure”
women of various “problems” through the 1970’s with at least
one doctor performing them illegally through the 1980s.
*
Today the genitalia of intersex children are also altered
without their consent in order to force the body to conform to
cultural ideals of gender.
*
Racism, classism, and sexism affected how doctors treated
colonized women and who they practiced surgeries on.
*
Western opposition to female genital operations (FGO) in African
females is often ethnocentric and oversimplified.
*
Although African women have less resources to keep their
bodies from the public gaze, this procedure is very similar to
Western cosmetic vaginal surgeries.
*
While FGOs are outlawed in the United States very similar
surgeries performed by Western doctors are not.
*
Cultural and social ideas of what is desired in women
manufacture consent for both procedures. Vaginal surgeries
have various meanings. African FGO can hold cultural,
religious and even meaning.
*
Women who receive both types of surgeries are primarily
seeking beautification, transcendence of shame, and
conformity.
*
The preferred look following both FGO and labiaplasty is the
“clean slit.”
*
Women are not just duped by males into having this surgery.
Rather, women’s own agency plays an important role in
constructing the “need” for both of these surgeries by
encouraging other women to undergo surgery.
*
Although this surgery does nothing to actually help women, the
cosmetic surgery industry has appropriated feminist language and
practices in order to encourage women to feel they are
independently choosing to have the surgery. The industry has
appropriated the women’s movements’ discourse of self-knowledge,
choice/ independence, community building/self-help, and increasing
the medical community’s responsiveness to women.
*
Finally, Davis encourages women to “speak back” to these
constructions of abnormal female sexuality and sexual organs, and
she applauds those who do so.
Reading 40: Andrea Smith, “Beyond Pro-Choice versus Pro-Life: Women of
Color and Reproductive Justice”
Reproductive justice is better understood from outside the dichotomy
between pro-life and pro-choice. Smith demonstrates how both of these
arguments uphold and mask racial hierarchies and capitalism, and both
positions do little to support women of color.
*
The pro-life position maintains that a fetus is a life and
concludes that abortion should be criminalized and people should
be penalized with imprisonment. Smith questions the usefulness of
criminalization as a response to this issue.
*
Criminalization would contribute to the prison-industrial complex
that disproportionately hurts minorities and the poor. Prisons are
the modern method used to control these populations. In addition,
prisons do not decrease (and could increase) crime rates, but they
do take resources away from other institutions that could more
effectively address social issues.
*
The criminal justice system’s intervention into women’s issues
like domestic violence and rape has not been successful.
*
Smith suggests that those in the pro-life camp pay close attention
to other Christian evangelicals who have questioned the efficacy
of the criminal justice system. She also suggests that the
pro-choice position should also come from an anti-prison position,
particularly since many poor and minority women are having their
pregnancies criminalized.
*
The pro-choice position rests on an individualist and consumerist
notion of choice, rather than on a system of rights which are
benefits available to all. Choices are limited by the social,
economic, and political conditions surrounding people.
*
Reproductive “choices” are often very limited for poor and
minority women. The pro-choice position only guarantees
reproductive choices to women who can afford them and who are seen
as able to make “good choices.”
*
Pro-choice groups have often supported dangerous or potentially
dangerous contraceptives and rejected informed consent for
nonwhite or poor women.
*
Many pro-choice organizations have racist histories and allies.
Historically, Planned Parenthood collaborated with the eugenics
movement to reduce the poor and minority population. Today
pro-choice organizations are often aligned with organizations that
attempt to reduce population growth. These organizations blame
poor women for the problems of population growth and have often
sterilized women in foreign countries without their consent. This
focus on population eliminates women’s choices rather than expands
them.
*
Additionally, the pro-choice camp often has a single-issue
political agenda that promotes other structures of repression for
women, particularly women of color.
*
Both the pro-choice and the pro-life positions assume a criminal
justice framework for focusing on reproductive issues, both
reinforce racist and sexist hierarchies, and both do not question
the capitalist system. Smith suggests that we need to search for
the causes of many of the problems facing women in order to fully
ensure reproductive justice.
*
Smith suggests that women of color need to engage in base-building
work in order to argue for social institutions that will better
serve the reproductive rights of all women.
Reading 41: Barbara Ehrenreich, “Welcome to Cancerland”
As a survivor herself, Ehrenreich angrily criticizes the “pink-ribbon
marketplace” and “cult of the breast-cancer survivor” that normalizes
the experiences of breast cancer to the point that having breast
cancer is presented as positive and the causes of the disease are
ignored.
*
Cancer, a group of cells that multiply so rapidly that they
eventually destroy the body they inhabit, is a lot like the
runaway social processes in human life.
*
Although breast-cancer is no longer a disease kept secret, the
rate of survival from breast cancer is littler better today than
in the 1930s.
*
Today’s breast-cancer patients can find an overwhelming amount of
information on the process of breast-cancer, but this information
is almost always packaged in cheery, survivor-as-hero, language.
Those who feel anger or other emotions are typically marginalized
in the big machinery of the modern breast-cancer world.
*
The pink-ribbon marketplace offers thousands of “feminine”
products that often support breast-cancer research or survivors.
Many of the products infantilize the women who have breast-cancer.
*
The mainstream breast-cancer movement has adopted several aspects
of feminism, like self-help groups, without actually incorporating
any feminist ideology or a critical awareness of the causes of the
disease. However, feminist organizations focus on causes and
prevention. One of the suspected causes is environmental
carcinogens. Corporate sponsors would not be so willing to
“support” the breast-cancer movement if it attacked the
environmental problems of industrialization.
*
Those who have lived through the disease are called “survivors”
and these women (and a few men), are heralded by the movement
instead of those who died from the disease.
*
The breast cancer culture feels like a cult to Ehrenreich because
it enforces cheerfulness and prohibits dissent. Much of the
breast-cancer culture seems to positively embrace the disease for
its redemptive powers and “opportunities for self-improvement” or
at least self-transformation.
*
Critics of the of the mainstream breast-cancer movement suggest
that its activities are inefficient ways to find cures for
breast-cancer and instead promote the corporate sponsors and the
breast cancer industry. The movement claims that this all raises
awareness about the disease, but the awareness has done little to
decrease rates of cancer or increase early detection.
*
The breast-cancer cult is complicit in global poisoning because it
encourages women to suspend judgment, follow their doctors’
advice, and see cancer as a positive experience. However,
multinational corporations benefit from polluting the environment
with cancer-causing agents and from expensive cancer treatments
that are painful and rarely extend the life of the women who
undergo treatment.
Boxed Insert: Eli Clare, “Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Disability
and Queerness”
Justice movements like the disability rights movement have
disentangled the body from society’s treatment of disabled bodies, but
Clare points out that the body is a necessary aspect of oppression and
identity.
*
Cultures have often suggested that disabled bodies, or queer
bodies or other non-hegemonic bodies, are “wrong.” The disability
rights movement suggests that the focus should not be on the body,
but rather on unjust cultural treatment of the disabled. This has
shifted the focus away from the physical body and locates the
problem within culture’s ableism, or disability oppression, rather
than within the disabled person.
*
Clare reclaims the disabled body by suggesting that people pay
attention to their physical forms and celebrate the differences of
physical bodies. If bodily differences and difficulties are not
discussed, activists will not be able to transform their culture.
Discussion Questions
Reading 37: Anne Fausto-Sterling, “The Bare Bones of Sex: Part 1- Sex
and Gender”
1.
What are the problems with current thinking by feminist social
scientists about gender and sex? What is wrong with how medical
scientists look at this issue?
2.
What are some examples of how culture shapes our bones?
3.
What are the seven systems that Fausto-Sterling identifies as
being important for bone density and development? How do these
systems relate to each other?
Reading 38: Becky Wangsgaard Thompson, "’A Way Outa No Way:’ Eating
Problems among African-American, Latina, and White Women”
4.
What have many feminists claimed is the reason for eating
disorders? What did Thompson find was the cause?
5.
How are traumas and oppressions related to eating disorders? How
is food used? How does trauma cause women to feel about their
bodies?
6.
What needs to change in order to stop eating disorders?
Reading 39: Simone Weil Davis, “Loose Lips Sink Ships”
7.
What is a labiaplasty? What look are most women trying to achieve
with this surgery?
8.
Why do the women say they had this surgery? What are the cultural
reasons that Davis says that women have the surgery?
9.
How is a labiapsty similar to female genital mutilation? How is it
different? What power differences exist between the African women
and the American women? Do you see these surgeries as similar? Why
or why not?
10.
How has the medical industry co-opted feminist language and
practices in order to encourage women to have a labiaplasty? What
do you think this says about out culture?
11.
What can women do to stop disturbing trends in cosmetic surgeries
and FGM?
Reading 40: Andrea Smith, “Beyond Pro-Choice versus Pro-Life: Women of
Color and Reproductive Justice”
12.
What are the main problems with the pro-life position according to
Smith? What are the problems with the pro-choice position?
13.
How are the pro-life and the pro-choice positions similar? How do
both of these positions treat poor or minority women?
14.
How can a new political focus on reproductive justice be
constructed in a way that does not oppress minority or poor women?
Reading 41: Barbara Ehrenreich, “Welcome to Cancerland”
15.
How does Ehrenreich describe the mainstream breast-cancer movement
and her experiences of cancer? Why does she call it a cult?
16.
Why is she critical of this movement? What are her major
complaints about the way this culture treats women? Do you think
this culture helps women and cancer patients in general? Why or
why not?
17.
How does the feminist movement react differently to breast-cancer
organizing?
18.
What does Ehrenreich suggest is a probable cause of breast-cancer?
Why does the movement not focus on this cause? What consequences
does this have for women?
Boxed Insert: Eli Clare, “Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Disability
and Queerness”
19.
How has the disability movement treated bodies? Why does Eli Clare
want to reclaim the body?
20.
How is the treatment of the queer body and the disabled body
similar? Why do you think Clare includes both types of bodies in
the title?
Assignments and Exercises
=========================
Women’s Health Movement: In order for students to understand the
implications of the exclusion of most women of color and poor women
from the historical women’s health movement, ask students to write a
short paper on one aspect of the women’s health movement that
carefully looks at race or class. Topics may include eugenics and the
birth-control movement, the exclusion of forced sterilization from the
concerns of the movement, the location of abortion or birth-control
clinics, the rare attention paid to the restrictive costs of
reproductive health, etc. Ask students to conclude by suggesting ways
that the problem they have studied should be addressed in the current
women’s health movement.
Ignoring Women in Modern Health Care: In order to explore how medicine
today continues to use the male body as the standard and to treat
women’s health needs as less important, ask students to research an
aspect of the modern health-care system that is gendered. They should
describe their findings to the class and relate them to one or more
readings. Suggested topics:
a.
drugs and medical procedures being rarely tested on women;
b.
the continuing ignorance of women’s experiences with heart disease
and other illnesses that are regularly associated with men but
that also affect many women;
c.
health insurance coverage of Viagra but not of birth control;
d.
abortions or procedures to help women become pregnant rarely being
covered by health insurance.
The Medicalization of Women’s Bodies: This exercise will allow
students to explore how medicine has attempted to control women’s
bodies in the United States. Ask students to research both arguments
regarding issues such as: PMS, menopause, caesarian births, hospital
births versus homebirths, higher rates of bariatric surgeries (or
gastric bypasses) for women, or infertility. Ask them to describe
whether the condition is seen as an existing problem and what
treatments/solutions are available.
Body Rituals: Ask students to list the ways that people work on their
bodies, whether for pleasure, for strength, or for social
acceptability. (Start the list with things such as sports and
exercise, hair dye, makeup, cosmetic surgery, etc.) Ask students which
of these body rituals are more closely associated with males and which
are more closely associated with females. After sorting the body
rituals into two separate lists, ask students how the male body
rituals are different from the female body rituals and what
implications this has for women and men.
Media Portrayals of Women’s Bodies: This exercise is designed to have
students think about the media’s role in the social construction of
women’s bodies. Ask students to explore the portrayal of women’s
bodies in advertising, film, or popular television programming. The
paper should explore what these images suggest about the ideal female
body and how these images contribute to poor body image for many
women. Additionally, the paper should focus on how race, class, and
sexuality are portrayed. Students should look for the following:
a.
How are women of color portrayed differently from white women
(what aspects of their bodies are focused on)?
b.
When are the women shown large rather than thin?
c.
Are women shown as strong or weak?
Explaining Eating Problems: Eating disorders are prevalent on most
college campuses, and this exercise is designed to aid students in the
fight against this gendered problem. Invite a student-health nurse or
someone from a local campaign against eating disorders to come to
class and discuss how eating disorders ravage women’s bodies and what
signs to look for in oneself, friends, or relatives. Ask this person
to describe the possible causes of eating disorders and to explain why
more women than men are affected. Later, discuss what the guest
lecturer had to say in the context of what students learned from
reading Becky Wangsgaard Thompson’s reading.
Film on Body Image: Advertising images of women create a powerful
context in which women learn to equate the purchase of products with
the possibility of being beautiful according to the terms defined by
the fashion industry. The documentary The Strength to Resist: Media's
Impact on Women and Girls can be shown in class to demonstrate the
sexual objectification of women in advertising, its affect on men and
women, and people’s abilities to resist these influences. More
information on the film, including a curriculum guide can be found at:
http://www.cambridgedocumentaryfilms.org/Resist.html
Variety of genital surgeries: Simone Weil Davis (39 “Loose Lips Sink
Ships”) explores the expansion of cosmetic surgery into surgeries that
are performed on women’s genitals and how the Western surgeries are
similar to African female genital cuttings, older practices of female
circumcisions in Western cultures, and surgeries performed on intersex
children (described in greater detail in Reading 7). Since Davis’s
writings additional Western female genital surgeries have gained in
popularity such as revirgination where a hymen is repaired so that it
could be re-torn during sex. In addition, feminists have begun to
explore the social construction of surgeries performed on male
genitals like the commonly accepted practice of circumcision or more
recent penis enlargement surgeries. Explore these topics in greater
detail during class by assigning students to groups and asking each
group to prepare a presentation for the class on one of these
surgeries. Ask them to explore the pros and cons of each surgery.
Web Links
AdiosBarbie
Satire can be the best medicine. Check out the AdiosBarbie website,
which provides a cheeky look at body issues. You can play “Feed the
Model” just for fun!
http://www.adiosbarbie.com/
Alternative Medicines
Many Americans use some form of “alternative medicine”—from massage to
St. John’s Wort to using yogurt to treat yeast infections. Why might
alternative medicine appeal especially to women? Does alternative
medicine pose risks to those who use it? Does it pose risks to the
profits of the pharmaceutical industry? Visit this National Institutes
of Health website on alternative medicine and think about these
issues.
http://nccam.nih.gov/
Breast-Cancer Sites
Women’s breast health constitutes a major concern in women’s health
care. Visit these sites to explore the mainstream wisdom regarding
breast health. Thinking about the criticisms of Barbara Ehrenreich (41
“Welcome to Cancerland”), discover for yourself the atmosphere of
these sites and what is missing (such as information on causes of
breast-cancer) from their discussion of the disease.
Susan G. Komen for the Cure http://cms.komen.org/komen/index.htm
Breast Cancer Connections http://www.bcconnections.org/
BreastCancer.Org http://www.breastcancer.org/
Eating Disorders
Women in Western industrialized countries have suffered from an
epidemic of eating disorders over the last twenty years. Are anorexia
and bulimia cultural, psychological, organic, or genetic? Why do they
afflict women more than men—and why are women on the verge of
adolescence most vulnerable? Explore these issues on-line through this
website.
http://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/p.asp?WebPage_ID=337
The Eugenics Movement
The eugenics movement in the United States resulted in the forced
sterilization of both women and men identified by physicians or social
workers as “mentally defective,” insane, or constitutionally
undesirable. Between 1910 and 1940 the Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory,
a genetics research institute in the state of New York, housed the
Eugenics Research Office which was the central research facility of
the American eugenics movement. Today this laboratory, once closely
affiliated with the eugenics research, displays an on-line archive of
the eugenics movement in order to demonstrate the pseudo-science and
cultural prejudices involved in eugenics.
http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/
Feminist Women’s Health Care
The second wave of the feminist movement inspired the formation of
women’s health centers across the country. Such centers have provided
women with education, support, and health care from a perspective that
supports a woman’s right to make her own decisions about sexuality,
reproduction, and allopathic and alternative medical approaches to
treating medical problems. The Feminist Women’s Health Center, which
emerged from the women’s health movement, continues to provide
feminist-based medical care and education to women with clinics in
several locations and education available via the internet.
http://www.fwhc.org/
Forced Sterilization
Forced sterilization of minority women occurs in a number of places
around the world. One research report based on 230 in-depth interviews
with Roma women in eastern Slovakia, documented this atrocity in
Eastern Europe. Additionally, the forced sterilization of Native
American and other women continues to be of major concern. Review the
following websites to learn more about the forced sterilization of
minority and poor people.
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/1243
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/sterilize.html
http://againsttheirwill.journalnow.com/
http://www.sptimes.com/News/111101/Worldandnation/Human_weeds.shtml
The Long Battle to Include the Concerns of Women of Color in
Reproductive Rights
Feminists of color have worked to include the topic of “forced
sterilization” into the feminist movement since the second-wave began.
This site provides historical information on sterilization of minority
women and an early plea that the women’s movement should address this
issue.
http://www.cwluherstory.com/CWLUArchive/cesa.html
National Organization to Halt the Abuse and Routine Mutilation of
Males (NO HARMM)
This website explores in depth the common practice of male
circumcision. NO HARMM is a network that seeks to educate people about
the risks of male genital surgeries and the social construction of the
normalcy of these surgeries. This network sees many similarities
between female genital operations and male circumcision and seeks to
end both practices.
http://www.noharmm.org/home.htm
Organizations for Size/Fat Acceptance
A number of organizations are involved in a social movement to change
societal attitudes towards individuals who are thought to be above
average size in contemporary Western societies. These organizations
challenge discrimination and prejudice against these people.
National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance
http://www.naafa.org/documents/brochures/naafa-info.html#whatis
International Size Acceptance Association
http://www.size-acceptance.org/mission.html
Our Bodies Our Selves
Our Bodies Our Selves has provided three generations of women with
helpful, woman-centered information and advice about bodies, health,
and health care. Visit their website to find out more about this
feminist health-care institution.
http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/
The Society for Women’s Health Research
Fausto- Sterling mentions this organization as in Reading 37 as an
organization dedicated to “gender-based medicine.” This organization
takes part in lobbying, research, and advocacy focused on improving
women’s health.
http://www.womenshealthresearch.org/site/PageServer
The Strength to Resist: Media's Impact on Women and Girls
Advertising images of women create a powerful context in which women
learn to equate the purchase of products with the possibility of being
beautiful according to the terms defined by the fashion industry. The
documentary The Strength to Resist: Media's Impact on Women and Girls
can be shown in class to demonstrate the sexual objectification of
women in advertising, its affect on men and women, and people’s
abilities to resist these influences. More information on the film,
including a curriculum guide can be found at:
http://www.cambridgedocumentaryfilms.org/Resist.html
The Vagina Monologues
To say the word “vagina” aloud—privately or in public—still
constitutes a radical act in many places. Eve Ensler’s award-winning
play The Vagina Monologues has helped to end the silence and shame
around women’s bodies and sexuality by speaking the previously
unspeakable. College campuses across the country have staged the show,
which is based on hundreds of “vagina interviews” with women in
several countries. Visit this website to read about the Monologues and
learn how they have become a Valentine’s Day tradition across the
globe.
http://www.vaginamonologues.com/index.html
Women and Heart Disease
Heart disease kills more women every year than all cancers combined,
yet many women believe that this is a “man’s” disease. Explore this
site to get more information on how women can prevent or reduce heart
disease.
http://www.womenheart.org/
Women and HIV/AIDS
Women are vulnerable to HIV/AIDS infection and to misdiagnosis because
the symptoms of infection in women differ from those of HIV infection
in men. Visit the website of The Body: An AIDS and HIV Information
Resource and find out more about women and HIV/AIDS.
http://www.thebody.com/whatis/women.shtml
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