I’ve been
listing to NPR on the radio a lot recently while I’m driving (shocking I know).
One story I heard a few days ago that I found really interesting was one about
paranoia. The story was exploring the results of an experiment that dealt with
women and paranoia. So they took three groups of women: a control group that
was made up of women who had a low work and stress load, another group with low
work and stress load, and a final group with high stress and work load. The
radio host was saying that the study concluded that the more stressed and
worked women are the more paranoid they are and the more they are likely to
develop paranoia as a disorder. Some of the symptoms of their paranoia is her
thinking that her husband or boyfriend is cheating on her, or her drink was
spiked, or that a female coworker is out to get her and her job.
This got
me thinking of this whole idea of women being paranoid or even hysterical.
After all, the term hysterical roots back to women as I’ve learned in my
psychology disorders class from last semester. When merely looking up hysteria
on Wikipedia you get that exact information, “In the Western world, until the
seventeenth century, hysteria referred to a medical condition thought to
be particular to women
and caused by disturbances of the uterus
(from the Greek ὑστέρα "hystera" =
uterus), such as when a neonate emerges from the female birth canal.” Oh and my
favorite information on that page is, “By the mid to late 19th century,
hysteria (or sometimes female hysteria)
came to refer to what is today generally considered to be sexual dysfunction.
Typical treatment was massage of the patient's genitalia by the physician and,
later, by vibrators
or water sprays to cause orgasm.”
Moreover, older physicians
used “forensic or even social and communal truths” to connect disorders like
this to the uterus. And their solution was? Fill that uterus up with babies! Or
‘massage’ the genitalia to fix the hysteria… yah I don’t know if they were
lying to women or just lying to themselves…
Why are those disorders
mainly related to woman? Men also, go through those problems, yet it isn’t
socially highlighted, are there such things as women psychological disorders
(that are only because of the uterus)?
This is an interesting post. I never knew the roots of the term “hysteria” and the psychological background. That being said, with very limited prior knowledge about the study of psychology, it does not surprise me that hysteria and paranoia are generally related to women. As we’ve read in articles and as we know by living in our world, women are viewed as the emotional ones. Stereotypically, women have a harder time dealing with stress and women are the ones more prone to jumping to irrational conclusions. In fact, in a lot of relationships when there are trust issues, the man will emphasize the woman’s tendency to be paranoid. For example when a man is questioned about cheating, he might offer responses like “how could you even think that?” “do you not trust me?” all of which play right into the generalization that women are more irrational and illogical then men. Obviously, men can be just as paranoid or hysteric as women but I’m not surprised that these terms that solely carry negative connotations are linked to women.
ReplyDeleteI attended a friend's class on sexuality back home, and the teacher had an entire list of diseases mostly mental and associated with women. The symptoms of some of these diseases were anything from having sex too often to looking at a man lasciviously. The treatments were so many horrible things like (as you said) removing her clitoris. I feel like these were obvious societal constructs to control women through their sexuality. We have gotten away from these violent ways in America for the most part, but genital mutilation is constantly happening in the world. There is a similar idea behind slut shaming: telling a woman she is awful and wrong for having sex is a way to control her.
ReplyDeleteI feel like in the case of hysteria, and in many other similar situations, the whole reason it is seen as being something particular to women, is that in a lot of cases, especially before today's time period, women were more vocal about this displeasure and discomforts within society, whereas men were taught to internalize it and show no weakness. If the man showed no weakness, he could not be in any way malfunctioning or psychologically inept, where if the women was vocal about it, is was way more evident a problem existed, and it came a problem prescribed mainly to women
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