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MOLT
Critique: The Society for Menstrual
Cycle Research 2003 Position Statement on
Menstrual Suppression |
‘In a MOLT minute’ ~ a
more diversified SMCR board of directors and membership would have produced a
more effective position statement.
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Click
here to read SMCR's 2003 Position Statement on Menstrual Suppression Below are three issues MOLT has with the SMCR
position statement on menstrual suppression. MOLT would love to hear what you
think! Email us with your opinion at infoATmoltx.org.
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Stuart
Energy public hydrogen refueling pump. See #3 below. |
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~
1. “Hey, has anybody seen my interdisciplinary? I
can’t find it. I had it a second ago...”
As Martha Stewart would put it, “it’s a good
thing” that:
“...a panel was recently delivered on June
6th, 2003 at the 15th Biennial Meeting of the Society for Menstrual Cycle
Research...” “In an effort to raise awareness about menstrual suppression and
initiate dialogue among women’s health practitioners and scholars of the
menstrual cycle.”
But perhaps it’s a bad thing, when the
resultant position statement is confined to the boundaries of
biomedically-oriented feminism, rather than truly opening outward to express
“multiple perspectives.”
The SMCR home page describes the Society as
“a nonprofit, interdisciplinary research organization. Our membership includes
researchers in the social and health sciences, humanities scholars, health care
providers, policy makers, and students with interests in the role of the menstrual
cycle in women’s health and well-being.”
However, the June 6th panel on menstrual
suppression consisted of only three papers, one which “reviewed studies that
have been published on extending the schedule of oral contraceptive pills in
order to reduce the frequency of bleeding,” and the other two which both
addressed attitudes toward menstrual suppression: one the attitudes of
individual women, and the second, implicitly, the attitudes of producers
of “print media” (some of whom, indeed, are women also). That is, the
panel consisted of one paper from a health science perspective, and two from
the social science.
Here are some academic perspectives which
were not included in the panel:
History of Science; Philosophy of Science
African Studies
Religious Studies
Anthropology; Medical Anthropology
American Studies
Journalism
Business (especially research into women’s
entrepreneurship in the fields of print and other mass media)
Museum Studies
Just as it can be fun to come up with names
for fictitious musical groups (“The Poster Children,” “Ellipsoid,” “Inc.
Cartridge”), it can be fun to come up with titles for fictitious papers
presented at a panel on menstrual suppression, a panel which includes scholars
from all the above-listed disciplines.
MOLT finds it disturbing that, in the face of
an issue SMCR itself describes as “complicated and controversial,” more effort
was not made to ensure that its position statement reflected the widest possible
breadth of scholarly opinion, even if that would require extraordinary effort
at reaching out to, for lack of a better way of putting it, “scholars of the
menstrual cycle who didn’t know it.”
2. “New Reproductive Paradigms...and Old Origin
Myths”
Perhaps if scholars from some of the
above-listed disciplines had presented papers at the June 6th, 2003 panel,
there would have been “raised awareness” that menstrual suppression advocacy
derives much of its visceral charge, its “complexity and controversy,” from its
status as an origin myth...of the human female reproductive pattern.
One need only contemplate “Eve, Adam and the
Apple” to see how integral another such origin myth has been to Western
culture. Interestingly, there are other relatively recent attempts at creating
encompassing narratives of the human female reproductive pattern (or what MOLT
refers to as the ‘menovulatory lifetime’): Judy Grahn’s 1993 “Blood, Bread and Roses: How
Menstruation Created the World”; Harry Finley’s Museum of Menstruation and Women’s
Health, founded in 1994; and even this curator’s own paper
from 2001, “Holomenses and Holocaust: A Comparison
of the Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health and the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum,” from which MOLT emerged.
Not all of these efforts would pass close
scholarly scrutiny (i.e., peer review); perhaps none of them would. But
certainly SMCR, with its 25+ years of menstrual cycle research, was uniquely
qualified to offer a competing, and data-driven, “origin myth” in its position
statement, one that did not start by objectifying Dogon women of Mali as the
“poster women for prehistory,” and end with a call for menstrual suppression as
a global cultural norm; but rather, started with a critical stance toward the
use of contemporary anthropological data in the creation of prehistoric
scenarios, and ending with its own version of a “new reproductive paradigm” –
perhaps one in which informed decision-making by women is greatly enhanced by: Internet access;
AIDS awareness campaigns in Africa
and China;
efforts to historicize the menovulatory lifetime in documentaries, museum exhibits
and books;
an annual menstrual holiday;
etc.
MOLT finds it disheartening, to say the
least, that the relationship between Dr. Coutinho (author of “Is Menstruation
Obsolete?”) and the female-dominated Society for Menstrual Cycle Research,
should so weirdly conform to the sexist stereotype of the active, inventive
male and the passive, reactive female. If “mathematics is the handmaiden of the
sciences,” so SMCR, in its failure to counter his “new reproductive paradigm”
with one of its own, serves as the handmaiden to Dr. Coutinho. Something to
think about!
3. Although People Make “Popular Media”...It is Not a
Hormone Secreted by a Gland
To begin: My dad has a friend, let us call
him Ron. Ron is an engineer, a white male, a Republican. Ron has held many jobs
in the auto industry over several decades, including work on fuel injection
systems. My dad (also an engineer, albeit with only one year of college) worked
for Ron. Briefly. Ron says of himself: “I don’t get ulcers. I give them to
other people.”
Ron has held a number of salaried positions,
but has also worked freelance. One of the freelance positions he has held is
what is informally referred to as “a ramrod.” When a factory would get behind
on production, way, way behind, management would call in someone like Ron to
get them back on track. If that meant calling a supervisor every 15 minutes,
then he would literally call that supervisor every 15 minutes. My dad said:
“Everyone in the whole plant hated him, but management loved him.” Ron was very
good as a ramrod, and he got paid well too. Not everyone can be a ramrod.
What’s the above story got to do with
menstrual suppression? Specifically, an analysis of “popular media coverage of
menstrual suppression?” Let’s look at the following diagram:
-- From "Menopausal Zest and Twisted Confusion
-- The Experiences of Women in Taiwan" by Chueh Chang, Associate
Professor, Department of Health Policy and Management; Researcher, Women's
Research Program, National Taiwan University, Taipai, Taiwan; Society for
Menstrual Cycle Research member.
“Popular media coverage” would fall within
the ovoid shape at the top of the diagram. When Ingrid Johnston-Robledo and
Jessica Barnack in their paper “concluded” “from their analysis of print media”
“that regular menstruation is presented as bothersome and even unhealthy,” they
left something out. Let’s put that something back in:
“regular menstruation is presented by
producers of print media as bothersome and even unhealthy.”
Although we’re not used to thinking of it
this way, imagine popular media as a factory, and instead of producing auto
parts, it workers produce news stories, magazine articles, web content, even
advertising. Thinking of it this way, that “menstruation is presented as
bothersome and even unhealthy” and that “advocates of menstrual suppression and
its benefits were afforded more space than opponents and risks,” is a problem
with production, specifically, quality control.
If, in addition, we survey the research
literature to see how long this quality control problem has been
going on, we see it’s been a chronic problem, going back decades!
Looks like it’s time to call in the ramrod!
Pay them whatever they ask for! We need to get this situation turned around,
fast!
But no: And here we’re really hitting the wall
of biomedically-oriented feminism: Anyone involved in producing media that
presents menstruation in a positive light...is not viewed, or valued, as a
potential ramrod in an extremely static situation...but rather (more’s
the pity) as an activist, who apparently by definition is an
ineffective, unintellectual, nonresearcher who looks great “on the microscope
slide” as a research subject for those SMCR members who are interested, but
certainly cannot be taken seriously as an effective partner in research, or
whose work opens up new research opportunities that would not otherwise exist.
The SMCR position statement claims:
“Women and health care providers need to know
more about the reasons why people [sic] choose menstrual suppression...We need
psychosocial research looking at women’s attitudes, concerns, preferences, and
needs for information.”
Hormonally-induced menstrual suppression is
obviously the ultimate, invisible tampon, whose advocacy represents the “nth
degree” of the “popular media” produced by pad and tampon manufacturers. Who
would imagine a Brazilian reproductive endocrinologist would beat North
American pad and tampon manufacturers, and the advertising agencies they hire,
at their own game? But apparently he has. SMCR is sponsored by both Proctor
& Gamble and Kimberly-Clark; how hard is it to email your sponsors and find
this out?
MOLT suggests instead that what “women and
health care providers” need, is for SMCR members to funnel their “psychosocial
research” towards supporting, improving, and expanding the reach of
menstruation-positive media created by, yes, ramrods.
Here’s an example from the auto industry,
specifically, government funding of hydrogen
fuel research projects:
“Conducting
limited hydrogen vehicle and infrastructure “learning demonstrations”: To complement laboratory
research, automakers and energy companies need to work together to
develop integrated technology solutions for a national
infrastructure. Eight automakers and six energy companies (under five major
awards) will work together with their teams under this project to
demonstrate integrated and complete system solutions operating in real
world environments. Government and industry are providing matching funds. Teams
also include utilities, universities, and small businesses. These
demonstrations will provide important data on fuel cell vehicle and
hydrogen-refueling infrastructure performance, cost, and durability and allow
refocusing of research priorities as progress is made. These
demonstrations are critical so that all stakeholders (including Congress) can
track progress towards a commercialization decision in 2015.”
Yes, it’s fun to think up new names for
fictitious bands. But it also might be fun to revise the above passage,
starting with the headline: “Conducting menstruation-positive media
“learning demonstrations.” MOLT has bolded key phrases to make it easier -
give it a try! (See also “Some
methodological problems associated with researching women entrepreneurs”
in the Journal of Business Ethics, and Profiling
a New Generation of Female Small Business Owners in New Zealand: Networking,
Mentoring and Growth, in Gender, Work and
Organization.)
Well, there’s still the little matter of the
phrase “out of a rejection of a normal, healthy menstrual cycle,” but that’s
all this curator can stand to engage with this position statement for the
moment. To go to the first MOLTXIBIT on menstrual suppression, just click the top
link below:
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Go to "Who's Your Daddy: The
Problem of Paternity-Dependent Contraception" |
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Index" |
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From Protection to
Expression: The Future of Menstrual Advertising |
Menstrual Monday |
Broken Tampon Memorial
Fountain |
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Menovulography:
the years from puberty to menopause, told as a story with pictures
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