Discussion of Thursday's Readings

In class we have discussed several different aspects of society’s idea of how to “handle” the female body.  Throughout history the female body has been looked at or “handled” by pretending nothing’s really happening, by medicalizing it and giving the job of “looking after” it to medical doctors and the pharmaceutical industry, by commercializing and building the consumption of products, and disguising much of this in health.  I feel that there is a huge miss (obviously!) in disguising the body project in health. 

            The body is obviously about health, but magazines, marketing, and society have been using the term health rather freely.  Our readings from Thursday’s class, mainly Leonard Sax’s “Why are so many girls cutting themselves?” and “Unwanted” by Sicangu Lakota reiterated my feelings that there is a huge “miss” in our medicalization and misuse of health in terms of young girls’ bodies.

            Now, and very much in the past, the mental health system has missed the idea that girls and boys simply are different and should be treated differently when it comes to issues of mental health, especially when it comes to the body.  Sax (2010) discusses how many girls are either cutting themselves or partaking in some other form of Non-Suicidal Self Injury (NSSI).  The write-up also, mentions a major issue with the DSM-V’s criteria for the diagnosis does not address the gender differences of self-injury (Sax, 2010).  I have also done quite a bit of reading from a source that Sax cites, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema.  Much of her research is on adolescent girls and how we as a society are often teaching them to not actively deal, which is how we teach our boys, with their problems, but to spend much of their time talking and thinking about their feelings.  As a side effect of this girls are turning to their body and taking out their problems on it (Nolen-Hoeksema, 2006).  The girls mentioned Sax’s articles do not “show” as out of control or depressed, but instead are actually very good at presenting themselves as very much together (Sax, 2010).

            While Sax (2010) seems to be discussing the girl who on the outside has it all together, is pretty, and “meeting the gender-specific societal expectations”; Lakota (2002) is a girl of color with a different story that ends the same.  Her inner-turmoil has caused her to take it out on her body.  She spends so much time thinking about cutting and even suicide that she also falls through the cracks.  Unfortunately and probably because she does not meet the grouping that Sax describes her treatment by the system and the mental health system was not what the girl described in Sax’s article would receive.

            To bring it back to what I set out to say, I feel that the mental “health” and medical systems are letting girls down.  They are not treated or seen for their specific needs.  There is a serious need to understand why we are showing or telling our girls to hold their feelings in or to only deal with their issues by only talking about emotions.  We need to empower them to use their bodies, voices, and minds to actively handle the problems.  We need to work harder to understand why girls are turning to “hurting” their bodies to release the pain. 

Additional References

Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2006). Eating, drinking, overthinking: The toxic triangle of food alcohol, and depression—and how women can break free.  New York, NY:  Henry Holt and Company, LLC.