Sunday, January 9, 2011
Week 1
I looked at the first link, feministing.com and found an interesting article on the pill. A new study just found that pills with 24 days of active followed by 4 days of inactive seem to prevent pregnancy better than the 21 day active pills. The 24 day regime is becoming more popular with the most popular pill being Yaz and the generic Yasmin. This is interesting because there seems to be a lot of progress made since the beginning of the pill. The first pills made and distributed were very high in hormones, now the pill has became much safer and even helps with acne, endometriosis, and bleed disorders (Roan). They also had an interesting article on womens' tears and how the smell turns men off. This was an interesting role because of the way it was written. I found it a little offensive as a female and written almost like it was suppose to be something funny and ridiculous even though it was a real study that no doubt lots of money went into.
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Hi Mikalyn, good info on the history of the pill. It has definitely gone through many modifications since it's original release nearly 50 years ago! In fact, much of those modifications have been due to activism around women's reproductive health concerns done by feminists. :) Here is a great video series on youtube that shows clips from the PBS documentary, "The Pill:" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpYHQ9hJxI0 If you have time to watch it--it is worth it!!
As for the news on tears...ugh. So, yes, feministing.com is often very sarcastic and sometimes uses strong language, but typically this is to send a message about issues being extremely sexist and oppressive. This was the point in the post about the study on women's tears. Remember how we discussed how science has historically been manipulative to maintain hegemony--in particular, we discussed the use of eugenics. This research is also reinforcing how subjective "science" can be and how social understandings of masculinity and femininity influence scientific results. I hope that makes sense! :)
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