How much do I love British pop culture? Well, if the fact that I’m willing to fork out five bucks for a single imported issue of heat magazine doesn’t clue you in, then let me say this: when I was in London last fall, I actually ran back to my hotel so I wouldn’t miss X-Factor and Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. Folks who know me know this: I don’t run. No sir, not me. I even got a doctor’s note to get out of running the mile in high school. So clearly this was a big deal for me. Sweat pouring off me, my camera bag smacking into my aching thigh, my blistered feet shrieking with every pounding footfall, I was like, “...*pant, pant*...gotta get...*pant*... back...*gasp*...Ant and Dec...*pant, cough*...must...see...Simon...” It’s all about priorities, people.
Me with the height of wonderful British trash: Pick Me Up magazine.As he mentioned on his blog, Shawn and I recently got into a discussion about wandering uteruses. Because that’s what normal thirtysomethings do. But here’s the thing—the discussion’s languidly meandering path actually makes some semblance of sense when viewed as a whole, and it’s pretty interesting, too, because it leads to darker themes that fill your average feminist with the fury of a thousand suns.
Here’s how it began. I found a cool website that allows you to read transcripts from every trial conducted at the Old Bailey between 1674 to 1834. One of the cases listed concerned a woman who, “to the disgrace of all womankind, did commit Buggery with a certain Mongrel Dog, and wickedly, devilishly, and against nature had venerial and Carnal copulation with him.”
Shawn said to me, “Not that abuse of animals is acceptable, but all I keep thinking of is the witch trials. The neighbors probably didnt’ like her, so they made stuff up. They probably killed the dog too.”
I agreed that the alleged dog buggerer was probably innocent, because women really got the shaft in those days. If they had even a slight inclination to be independent or unconventional, if they refused to adhere to the party line, if they dared to enjoy sex…they were decried as witches or lunatics and were subsequently burned at the stake (or drowned/pressed to death) or thrown in an asylum.
Shawn then mentioned a book he owns which is all about the portrayal of women in Victorian art and culture. It talks about the doctors and scientists who were dead serious when they declared that women have a lower intelligence as men, they have brain damage from losing blood each month through menstruation, and because they’re barely human they are naturally prone to fits of masturbation and hysteria.
I told him that this was very similar to what I learned in my Abnormal Psychology class at Scranton and my Sociology of Psychiatry and Mental Health class at Goldsmiths. We learned about how easily and frequently women were institutionalized for hysteria, which was supposedly caused by “wandering uteruses.” Plato believed that a uterus would wander if it was deprived of sexual activity and Hippocrates thought it wandered around the body looking for love or pining for a child. When it bumped into other organs, diseases developed. Later psychiatrists associated wandering uteruses (and out-of-control sexual desire) with all levels of hysteria. If a woman got upset or cried, it was chalked up to her wandering uterus.
This inspired me to blow the dust off two of my books on the subject. From Women, Madness, and Medicine, by Denise Russell:
As the nineteenth century progressed medical discourse attempted to turn many moral categories into medical ones. What in the past had been wrong came to be seen as diseased or unhealthy. In particular, medicine appropriated the social right to pass judgment about sexuality. … When female sexuality got out of line, psychiatry could be brought in as a corrective force by either incarceration or an asylum, “rest cures” in private mental institutions, or intimidation in private consultations.Given my political and religious leanings and my distaste for blind conformity, I suspect I would’ve been burned as a witch or thrown in an asylum back in the day. But then again, I generally keep a low profile and fly beneath the radar screen as an act of preservation, so maybe I could’ve hid my heresy well. However, it’s possible that people would’ve detected it anyway. Last year I wrote a blog entry about how my friends and I were indifferent to the whole idea of fitting in with our peers, but that really only began around 10th grade. Up through 9th grade, although I hosted lofty, and some might say delusional, ambitions for my career, in my day-to-day life I wanted nothing more than to be normal and fit in with everybody else. I never entertained overly grandiose hopes about actually cracking the popular crowd’s inner circle, but I was still hoping to move up socially. At the same time, I wanted to blend into the background. I mean, I didn’t want to be invisible—I just wanted to be so completely normal I wouldn’t stand out. Thus the big bangs, frosty pink lipstick, blue eyeliner, Esprit shoulder bag, the latest faddish sneakers, etc.
… Women who tried to engage in political activity ran the risk of committal to a psychiatric institution, and women who pressed for greater educational opportunities found that doctors were leading the debate against them—claiming that the risk of insanity was too great. At this point it is clear that a link has been made between women and psychiatrists as moral guardians. The latter are needed by the patriarchal culture to keep women within their narrow role boundaries.
Finally, the medical view of women’s health regarded her reproductive functions as pathological: menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause were all looked upon as diseases. Yet it was the reproductive function that defined woman’s nature.
But it didn’t work. Kids—those crafty bastards—can smell differentness on you no matter how well you try to camouflage it. It leaks from your pores in sour waves. And they will pounce on you—the runt of the litter—as if their very act of self-preservation depends on it. This alienation, coupled with clinical depression and a hearty splash of regular ol’ teen angst, caused eruptions of tortured journal entries and poorly-written, maudlin poetry to spew forth from my hand. Poems with titles written in Latin and French. Poems about Anastasia Romanov and the war in Belfast. And I’d lock myself in my room, moodily writing in my journal and singing along to Les Misérables (the West End version, natch). I could feel Fantine’s pain. After all, being a poverty-stricken, starving single mother in pre-revolutionary France, and being forced to sell your hair, teeth, and body in order to put food on your kid’s table, totally equates to struggling in algebra class and having a bitchy sister.
Later (last month, specifically) I parlayed that woe into six submissions (three journal entries, three poems) to the Cringe Book. Hopefully my submissions will be accepted so my adolescent angst can be loosed upon an unsuspecting public.
Anyway, I’m drifting off-topic. I’d just like to marvel about how far the psychiatric field has come since those heady days when doctors advocated clitoridectomies to cure hysteria (recommended and performed by Isaac Baker Brown in the 1860s) and removal of the ovaries and cervix to cure hysteria (recommended by James Israel in 1880), and blamed hysteria on wandering uteruses. Psychiatry is still flawed, and some might even say a tad barbaric, but it’s nothing compared to how it used to be. For this I am thankful.
And my uterus? Don’t worry about her wandering too far—she’s too lazy to move off the couch, bless her hysterical little heart.
song heard most recently before posting:
Tercer Verano—Jere Laukkanen’s Finnish Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra
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