Feminismo Pavlov

Birth control pill manufacturer Wyeth has whipped up a new product, Lybrel, that will not only prevent pregnancies but will apparently eliminate menstrual periods altogether. Does this development constitute a liberating break from biology for women or a subtle message that their bodies need to be somehow ‘fixed’?

New York Times: And studies have found no extra health risks associated with pills that stop menstruation, although some doctors caution that little research has been conducted on long-term effects.

The topic has, however, inspired an hourlong documentary by Giovanna Chesler, “Period: The End of Menstruation?,” currently screening on college campuses and among feminist groups.

Ms. Chesler, who teaches documentary making at the University of California, San Diego, said she became concerned about efforts to eliminate menstruation when she first heard about the idea several years ago.

“Women are not sick,” she said. “They don’t need to control their periods for 30 or 40 years.”

Eu há uns tempos li isto e fiquei sem saber o que pensar. Não me pareceu nada mau não ter que passar pelo período menstrual, que pode por vezes ser bastante desconfortável (estou a falar de dores, meus senhores). Contudo, já tenho idade suficiente, para compreender e esperar que as pessoas imponham simbologias a processos naturais. Contudo, as feministas irritam-me um pouco, pois reajem à Pavlov: olham para o mundo pelas lentes anti-homem, em vez de olhar pelas pró-mulher e nisto quem sofremos somos nós, numa guerra tola.

O que eu pensei foi: será mesmo natural parar a menstruação? Não é suposto acontecer e não nos fará mal não ter? Aí, por uma coincidência feliz, este fim-de-semana li isto (podem saltar logo para o último parágrafo, se bem que acho que vale a pena ler tudo):

Of all the hormones that inhibit the reproductive system during stress, prolactin is probably the most interesting. It is extremely powerful and versatile; if you don't want to ovulate , this is the hormone to have lots of in your bloodstream. It not only plays a major role in the suppression of reproduction during stress and exercise, but it also is the main reason that breast feeding is such an effective form of contraception.

Oh, you are shaking your head smugly at the ignorance of this author with that Y chromosome; that's an old wives' tale; nursing isn't an effective contraceptive. On the contrary, nursing works fabulously. It probably prevents more pregnancies than any other type of contraception. All you have to do is do it right.

Breast feeding causes prolactin secretion. There is a reflex loop that goes straight from the nipples to the hypothalamus. If there is nipple stimulation for any reason (in males as well as females), the hypothalamus signals the pituitary to secrete proctalin. And as we now know, prolactin in sufficient quantities causes reproduction to cease.

The problem with nursing as a contraceptive is how it is done in Western societies. During the six months or so that she breast-feeds, the average mother in the West allows perhaps half a dozen periods of nursing a day, each for 30 to 60 minutes. Each time she nurses, prolactin levels go up in the bloodstream within seconds, and at the end of the feeding, prolactin settles back to pre-nursing levels fairly quickly. This most likely produces a scalloping sort of pattern in prolactin release.

This is not how most women on earth nurse. A prime example emerged a few years ago in a study of hunter-gatherer Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa (the folks depicted in the movie 'The Gods must Be Crazy'). Bushman males and females have plenty of intercourse, and no one uses contraceptives, but the women have a child only about every four years. Initially, this seemed easy to explain. Western scientists looked at this pattern and said, "They're hunter-gatherers: life for them must be short, nasty, and brutish; they must all be starving." Malnutrition induces cessation of ovulation.

However, when anthropologists looked more closely, they found that the Bushmen were anything but suffering. If you are going to be nonwesternized, choose to be a hunter-gatherer over being a nomadic pastoralist or an agriculturist. The Bushmen hunt and gather only a few hours a day, and spend much of the rest of their time sitting around chewing the fat. Scientists have called them the original affluent society. Out goes the idea that the four-year birth interval is due to malnutrition.

Instead, the lenghty interval is probably due to their nursing pattern. This was discoverd by a pair of scientists, Melvin Konner and Carol Worthman. When a hunter-gatherer woman gives birth, she begins to breast-feed her child for a minute or two approximately every fifteen minutes. Around the clock. For the next three years. (Suddenly this doesn't seem like such a hot idea after all, does it?) The young child is carried in a sling on the mother's hip so he can nurse easily and frequently. At night, he sleeps near his mother and will nurse every so often without even waking her (as Konner and Worthman, no doubt with their infrared night-viewing googles and stopwatches, scribble away on their clipboards at two in the morning). Once the kid can walk, he'll come running in from play every hour or so to nurse for a minute.

When you breast-feed in this way, the endocrine story is very different. At the first nursing period, prolactin levels rise. And with the frequency and timing of the thousands of subsequent nursings, prolactin stays high for years. Estrogen and progesterone levels are suppressed, and you don't ovulate.

This pattern has a fascinating implication. Consider the life history of a hunter-gatherer woman. She reaches puberty at about age thirteen or fourteen (a bit later than in our society). Soon she is pregnant. She nurses for three years, weans her child, has a few menstrual cycles, becomes pregnant again, and repeats the pattern until she reaches menopause. Think about it: over the course of her life span, she has perhaps two dozen periods. Contrast that with modern Western women, who typically experience hundreds of periods over their lifetime. Huge difference. The hunter-gatherer pathern, the one that has occurred throughout most of human history, is what you see in nonhuman primates. Perhaps some of the gynecological diseases that plague modern westernized women have something to do with this activation of a major piece of physiological machinery hundreds of times when it may have evolved to be used only twenty times; an example of this is probably endometriosis (having uterine lining thickening and sloughing off in places in the pelvis and abdominal wall where it doesn't belong), which is more common among women with fewer pregnancies and who start at a later stage. (Remarkably, the same is now being reported in zoo animals who, because of the circumstances of their captivity, reproduce far less often than those in the wild).

"Why zebras don't get ulcers. The acclaimed guide to stress, stress-related diseases, and coping." (2004) Robert M. Sapolsky. Owl books. Terceira edição. págs 132-134.

O que parece significar:
FEMINISMO IDIOTA - 0 | 1 - BIOLOGIA FEMININA