« a poet's voice | Main | Close, but no cigar »
January 04, 2005
That which cannot be blogged
A familiar fable: the mother who cannot tell her daughter about sex but instead hems and haws until the daughter blithely says she already knows all about it.
An unfamiliar scenario in our culture: the aging woman who finds out that there are all sorts of additional "facts of life" that nobody talks about and nobody ever told her about. These double-secret "facts" are things I really, really wish I'd known about before they happened to me; if I had, I could've gotten treatment a lot sooner, and I wouldn't have been as confused and conflicted about what was happening to me.
Earlier, I blogged about herbal remedies for hot flashes, and I felt daring as I did so. Yet I felt that, even though most readers of blogs (or at least writers; I haven't seen claims or statistics specifically about gender distribution of blog readers) are young men (see also CultureCat) rather than aging women, certain topics need to be broached, to counteract all the PMS jokes and all the determined silence. The silence extends into medical research; when I began cycling 15 years ago, I discovered that all the dietary and training information was based on research on male cyclists. With only that to go on, I nearly ruined my metabolism, doing long-distance cycling on a training regimen that called for too many carbohydrates and too-fast increases in distances. And I remember very well what my doctor told me when he started me on estrogen replacement: he told me that there was very little research available about its benefits and side effects, but the little information available indicated that it was a good idea. It wasn't, of course; as the whole world found out a year or so ago, estrogen replacement significantly increases the chances of heart attack. Now no one takes it, except in very extreme circumstances. A lot of research was available about birth control pills: the male medical establishment was eager to study women of childbearing age, but uninspired by the issues that aging and elderly women face.
So for women medically--and especially aging women--there's a lot of ignorance and a lot of silence. Speaking publicly about a simple thing like black cohosh seems a small counteractive but a necessary one.
Yet I come home from my GYN today, very surprised and disturbed by his diagnosis of recent problems I've been having, but unable to talk about them here. If it's not childbearing, PMS, menopause, or cancer, it's not known and not discussed. If I were to talk about it here on my blog, it would freak out some of the people--especially men--who will be in my classes or whose dissertation committees I will be on. That's not a criticism of SU graduate students or of men; it's just a statement of what I perceive to be cultural fact. And even people who weren't freaked out by such public discussion might very well consider it to be distasteful, tacky, or indiscreet for me to blog about it.
So, much as I would like to share information like this with women who may read this blog and who one day may themselves have the good fortune to be described as "aging"--or with men who may be the moral or material support for an aging woman--I can't. I have to contribute to the silence instead of sharing potentially useful information about a condition that, I discover, is actually quite common.
Damn it.
Posted by senioritis at January 4, 2005 06:36 PM
Comments
You do realize, of course, that you're killing me here.
Posted by: madeline at January 5, 2005 10:47 PM
And YOU realize how aggravated I am by not being able to talk (at least publicly) about this! One to one, yes--and I do. But not publicly. And that's wrong, wrong, wrong--and it's terribly ironic that I can recognize how wrong that is yet feel compelled to perpetuate the mistake.
Posted by: senioritis at January 6, 2005 04:48 AM
Why don't you start a separate blog for this sort of thing and then link from here when you've posted over there? That way you could talk about it, provide info, and not force it upon your "professionaL" audience.
Posted by: Krista at January 6, 2005 09:43 AM
Which is it that's the wrong? that you CAN'T use your blog to talk about it? Or wrong that you are unable to surmount whichever social/blogial barrier and use your blog to help other people?
Posted by: madeline at January 6, 2005 10:21 AM
Ah, Krista, you're talking to suuuch a blog schmuck! Madeline and Collin know what their blogs are about; I don't have a clue about my own. I just get on every day and rattle on about whatever's on my mind, to various imagined & real audiences. And Collin the Heroic had to get into the Moveable Type platform for me today and figure out why my HistoryBump blog for my spring grad course was malfunctioning so bad. So actually having 2 different personal blogs, one pseudonymous and one ID'd, for two different purposes and audiences? It's a great suggestion, and I may one day have the smarts to imagine how I'd manage it. The very idea will keep nagging at me, so thanks!
And Madeline: I think my answer to both your questions is "yes." A male friend who reads this blog called today to make sure I'm okay. And I assured him that I am; I've just been experiencing symptoms of a condition that neither I nor the other women I've talked to have ever heard of, a condition that ought to be treated rather than let go (though it isn't life-threatening); a condition that, it turns out, is quite common in post-menopausal women; and hence a condition that *should* be talked about widely. I've been talking with other women about it since the diagnosis, but I was unable to bring myself to name the condition to him; it's embarrassing. I can say "menopause" on this blog and occasionally in conversation with men; but menopause is no longer a tabooed word (though jokes are still made about post-menopausal women). But I'm realizing that there's a hell of a lot else about my body that's still tabooed with sufficient success that I'm on the silent side of the divide. So yeah: part of it is me and my own limitations. But how to separate that out from socially imposed limitations that prevent me from drawing explicit attention to post-menopausal phenomena to an audience that in fact includes current & future grad students? It would definitely create some discomfort amongst that audience and potentially some uproar in my department. Except for those most general, already-sanctioned categories of discourse, it is just unacceptable to talk in specifics about one's own body when those specifics are both age and gender related. Is this a screwed-up world, or what? Or is it just me that's screwed up?
Posted by: senioritis at January 6, 2005 10:20 PM