Women's Bodies In Woman In The Body By Emily Martin

Women's bodies are often subjected to scrutiny. For example, a woman is expected to make herself pleasing to those around her. If she chooses not to comply with societal rules regarding the way her body should look, the consequences include ridicule, rejection, and exclusion. It is assumed to be some sort of moral failure on her part. While men also encounter pressure to meet society's physical standards, the stakes are much lower. In most cases, men are not defined by their inability or unwillingness to conform the way women often are. Because of this extreme pressure they experience, women learn to scrutinize and objectify their own bodies, which contributes to creating a fractured sense of self. This is just one way in which women's bodies …show more content…
In The Woman In The Body, Emily Martin examines these images. Describing the respective roles delegated in birth metaphors, she writes, “If the doctor is a supervisor, the woman might be a 'laborer' whose 'machine' (uterus) produces the 'product,' babies.” (pg. 57) Here, the woman is the lowest class of worker, the production process is completely out of her control. And the machine, her uterus, works independently of her to produce a baby. Furthermore, doctors are most concerned with the product in this situation- the fetal outcome. Menstruation and menopause also carry with them connotations of a system of production. In the case of menstruation, metaphors suggest a woman's reproductive system has gone haywire, making an excess of products, i.e. waste. This communicates a message of failed production. Menopause is seen as a breaking down of the authority structures in the body, which calls to mind images of disused factories and idle machines. These images make sense to us because we live in a capitalistic society and scare us for that same …show more content…
Such comparisons dehumanize women and remove them from their own bodily processes. It suggests that women's only purpose on this earth is the production of babies and, if a baby is not formed, menstruation is merely the symptom of her failure and her “malfunctioning” reproductive system. If a woman does become pregnant, her body is at the mercy of doctors who will often disregard her interests or treat her as some sort of “host” to the fetus. In addition, many women experience birth, menstruation, and menopause as something that happens to them, rather than a natural part of themselves or, in the case of birth, a process they can participate in and in some way direct. The message in these metaphors either teaches women that their body is a thing that is separate from themselves or serves to reinforce that