Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Is the world our oyster, or is it more concerned with our clams?

I've had a minor hormonal imbalance for years, and today I asked my doctor if there were some procedures or tests that I could undergo to finally discover the root cause. (I'm an academic with leanings towards political economy and explanation, after all.)

In more genteel language, he said that only my (inevitable) decision to get knocked up would merit an investigation into these underlying health concerns. What bothered me was that my health, in his eyes, was made significant only in relation to my female ability to reproduce and bear children. Is he of the "women are just ovaries with legs" school or, giving him the benefit of the doubt, simply a young general practitioner who does not follow current medical and biomedical research which increasingly emphasizes the complex roles that hormones play in longevity, weight loss/gain, predisposition to certain cancers, nutritional absorption, I.E. OVERALL HUMAN HEALTH? 

Let's look at it this way. General practitioners hold certain preconceived associations between hormones and gender, which stems more broadly from their ideas about what are significant health concerns depending on a patient's gender. Men tend to benefit from a more holistic, or at least amplified list of ailments and maladies that can result from some type of hormonal dysfunction. This is quite simplified, of course, but it spells out my point:

Hormones + Women = The ability to get pregnant, the inability to get pregnant, or a desire to get pregnant in the future.

Hormones + Men = Virility, but also more robust health conditions such as prostate cancer, hair loss, heart health, etc. etc.

Men too suffer from a bias towards their virility. I am not arguing along the lines that women always have it worse, but anything related to hormones and women is almost indefinitely related to their superior capacity or weaknesses in relation to getting a bun in the oven!

I love how I can be reduced to my female parts in a second, from the aspiring educator and academic that I am working hard to be, one day.

A loud, guttural WHOOPEE for womanhood!

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Love for a Frankenstein

Sao Paulo, I love you, you broken, messed up thing. 

How I wish I were in the interior of you, in the middle of a cane field sitting around a bonfire and sinking my toes into your fertile red earth.

Sao Paulo, urban and rural, que saudade