Body Image in medicine?

[SeaCat]

I have noticed something in my many years of working in the medical field that always has me shaking my head.

When you are out and about you look at all the young women and how they are dressed. In many cases they are dressed provocotively, and when they aren't they are very relaxed about their dress and what they show. The older women on the other hand are much more restrained.

Then they come into the hospital and things change.

The youngsters are so shy about their bodies that it is insane. A male Nurse seeing them will cause the world to stop turning. Heaven forbid a male would see their breasts, their asses or anything else. A male knowing they shit, piss or fart is tantamount to the world ending.

The older women on the other hand are much more relaxed. A male nurse walks into their room and they could care less. Being bathed by a male is no big deal just as their bodily functions are no big deal.

The only reason I can think of for this difference is their body image. The youngsters can't imagine their bodies being damaged or marred while the older women know it can and will happen.

Cat

 

[Stella_Omega]

Nice observation, Cat!

 

[amicus]

Here be another perspective to that, SeaCat...imagine a young, attractive nurse being required to insert a Foley Catheter into an older male who is in such pain as he could care less who is administering care.

There is a lot in your post that most will not approach; the individual privacy and modesty that I postulate is natural to most people, especially of a younger age.

I sense that women are somewhat different, as intimate Pap Smears, and other such procedures are far more common to the female than the male.

I will offer this as a caveat learned from experience; that those with the ability and emotional parameters to serve the public in such a manner, are rare indeed, and I applaud you for having the compassion to do so; I certainly do not...

regards...

Amicus

 

[KillerMuffin]

Another answer would be socialization. Try this little test: go to Walmart and start in the toy aisle. Look at the girls toys and the boys toys. You can tell the girl's toy aisle because it's almost uniformly pink. What are the dolls wearing? How are the formed and shaped? What other sorts of toys are available? How do "girl" toys begin shaping gender? Now, move on to the clothing area, specifically for little girls, and look at what's available for purchase and the words printed on various articles of clothing. Compare a pair of girl's shorts to a pair of boy's shorts. The first cuts off just below the buttocks. The latter cuts off at the calves. Move to the junior's department for women. Look at the clothes available there. Try this interesting comparison: select a pair of size 12 junior's jeans and compare the waist to a pair of size 12 misses jeans. (Juniors = teenagers, misses = adult women who aren't fat, women = adult women who are fat). Note the difference in size? Particularly how skinny the junior's clothes are? How are girls expected to dress? How are boys? Did you notice what the pictures in posters in the section and on tags look like? How do these clothes define gender? Now, move to the health and beauty section and take a look at the facial cleaning supplies available for women and then the stuff available for men. Yeah, interesting how they're developing more and more "beauty" products for men these days, huh? Look at the stuff, particularly the pictures of women on the boxes and advertisements. How do these define gender?

A girl will see over 1,000,000 images of photoshopped, sexily displayed women by the time she's 12. These women are portrayed in a positive manner, connected to things that are rewarding and "good", such as luxury cars, expensive vacations, and smiling people. Plus sized models, non-provocative women, and ugly women will make up about 10,000 images in the same 12 years. These women will be the subject of ridicule or displayed negatively. How does this define gender? Finally, hit the magazine aisle and skim through a few magazines aimed specifically at women. How much advice do they have on weight loss? On understanding how the boy/man is in to you and what you can do to make him want to be? How much is about making yourself over to look attractive? Look at the ads. How does all of this socially (not individually) construct gender expectations?

Teenagers do not have the experience, emotionally or intellectually, to grasp the social construction of gender and how to apply it to themselves in their most comfortable manner. All they understand is the pressure exerted by society to conform to a certain standard of "beauty." They are taught, particularly by advertisements and magazines aimed at them, that their bodies are not good enough and never will be, unless they purchase certain things, wear certain clothes, behave in a certain manner, and are thin. Boys do not fully have this pressure, yet. But it's coming. The cosmetics industry has discovered that 50% of the population is available to purchase their wares, just as soon as they feel insecure in their attractiveness (watch and Axe or Tag commercial, it's happening).

Body image is a simplistic answer that doesn't really begin to touch the problem. Yes, they have a poor body image, but that comes from not just the media, but nearly every aspect of our society beginning from birth. You're experiencing our culture's view on female youth and beauty: you're not beautiful enough, is, by the way, what our culture says about it. Older women move on from that. They spend enough time in the world to learn security in their looks, or to quit caring. They quit reading 17 magazine. But the social construction is still there. How many of them go without makeup?

 

[amicus]

I had to go to the dictionary: ser·aph (srf)
n. pl. ser·a·phim (--fm) or ser·aphs
1. A celestial being having three pairs of wings.
2. seraphim Christianity The first of the nine orders of angels in medieval angelology.

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[Back-formation from pl. seraphim, from Middle English seraphin, from Old English, from Late Latin seraphn, seraphm, from Greek serapheim, from Hebrew rpîm, pl. of rp, fiery serpent, seraph, from rap, to burn; see rp1 in Semitic roots.]

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se·raphic (s-rfk), se·raphi·cal (--kl) adj.
se·raphi·cal·ly adv.

~~~

I imagine you have 'people watched' at one of the huge variety stores that are common place now; and I suspect you have observed that most of the shoppers are old, fat, ugly and very common place.

Beautiful people are a rarity in all societies and are worshipped as such, whether you like it or not.

They grace the silver screen and the tube and all the magazines you might notice. They are the weather girls and anchor ladies on the news/talk shows, they walk the plank at the fashion shows and you, yes you, notice their haughty walk and plumage in every aspect of human interaction.

It is not the media, it is not society, it is the bare bones of nature that determine the most attractive humans, male and female, who will produce the most viable offspring and carry on the traits of the beautiful and the most healthy.

It is nature's way, buck it if you must, but be prepared to suffer.

Such is life.

I did not forumlate the parameters, nor did you; I cannot change them, nor can you.



Amicus

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

KILLERMUFFIN is full of shit, of course. Everyone is exposed to the same stimuli, and though MANY ARE CALLED, FEW ANSWER. There's a reason niggaz excel at basketball but not philosophy or physics or swimming.

 

[oggbashan]

KillerMuffin is correct but why is this polarisation so prevalent?

Is it a symptom of a sick society that it doesn't allow women and girls to be their unimproved selves? That personal appearance trumps all other qualities?

Or that boys and men can't be caring and if they try to improve their body image with male-orientated cosmetics they must be gay?

The marketing industry must take some responsibility for the media pressure on teenagers, yet when I read magazines from the 1960s, the 1950s and even the 1860s, the advertisements aimed at women are obviously trying to sell a product by creating insecurity about personal appearance.

Og

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Dear Reader

Our Old Queen believes males and females are unaffected by the last 3-4 million years of evolution, and that males/females do not select the opposite sexual traits when they mate.

Its not the fault of our stars or Madison Avenue that does it.

 

[xssve]

Killer Muffin is largely correct, much of gender identity is a social construct, and fashion has a lot to do with it - it instills a lot of unnecessary self esteem issues for the purposes of marketing.

Lot's of fat girls around here wearing shapeless jeans, oversized T-shirts and ball caps - they dress just like the guys, and they're usually married.

Look at the Jr. high and high school students, naturally, they're dressed at the height of fashion, and they have almost uniformly adolescent body types, mainly because they're... adolescents.

One problem is that maintaining a low body weight as an adolescent actually sets you up for weight problems later on, because it keep your metabolism on simmer, and your diet changes as an adult for the healthy stuff and smaller portions you parents give you to ubiquitous, greasy, high calorie junk/fast food.

That plus the typically low activity lifestyles everybody leads creates leads inevitably to weight issues.

The opposite, is the anorexic girl who deliberately starves herself, and suffers from underdeveloped musculo-skeletal structure, though some women are naturally ectomorphic.

There is a reason the porn star is often (derisively) described as an unrealistic standard of feminine beauty, but in fact this is what women are "supposed" to look like, they are almost all uniformly healthy mesomorphs - many of them are dancers and spent years engaging in high physical activity, they're essentially athletes, dancing is a form of low impact aerobics - they have plenty of subcutaneous fat (and fake tits), but they're all muscle underneath and muscle burns more calories, making it easier to stabilize your weight.

So, buy your daughter a pole and a G-string, and let nature take it's course.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Nonsense. Sexual identity is biological and always will be. You cant have it both ways. You cant say that Gay is biological and pose social influence on everyone else.

 

[xssve]

Granted biology has a lot to do with it, but where biology ends, culture is only to eager to rush in - what, pray tell, ought the sexual identity of a hermaphrodite be? Does "society" have any normative role for that, other than "corrective" surgery, consensual or not?

Why object to women wearing pants, or going shirtless?

Why object to homosexuality, other than it involves a man "acting like" a woman?

What's the big deal if it's just biology?

For those in the fat center of the curve, it's all about them, the fat center of the curve, that's just herd behavior, there's nothing particularly sacred about it, form a biological standpoint, just like economics, the real action is always on the margins - sexual reproduction itself is an "abnormal" mutation - didn't start out that way, it's not "traditional".

 

[xssve]

I mean you do know a penis is just a modified vulva, don't you?

 

[xssve]

You're just demonstrating a typical, bovine mesomorph attitude, where identity is determined purely by external physical attributes, no exceptions tolerated - we're a much more complex species than that, so quit trying to play god, get back in your stall and chew your cud, let the humans deal with this.

 

[Stella_Omega]

You must be arguing with one of the invisible trolls, xssve. It looks funny!

 

[3113]

Actually, there's a whole other, simpler, Occam's razor reason....

Older women have lived with men beyond that initial sex-appeal stage. Meaning they've been with husbands or long-time lovers who saw them at their not-best and heard them fart and didn't have raging hormones kick-in every time they walked around naked (just some of the time). Young women have only had men see them at their best, and those young men almost always were filled with lust by their naked bodies (or for what they showed of those bodies to make themselves look sexy and perfect).

So, the experience of younger women says that the Male Nurse (1) should not see them at anything but their best, including not see imperfections, (2) should not see them naked as he will lust for them.

In addition, older women have been in the hospital before. Sometimes a lot. If they've got kids, well, they lost all modesty while giving birth. Young women haven't. They're not used to wearing the skimpy gowns and having strange men around while they perform bodily functions--their only experience is all women's bathrooms and locker rooms. They're not used to surrendering control and they're not used to thinking of their bodies as anatomical and medical rather than, again, objects of lust and desire.

In the end, young women just don't have the time or experience to be at ease in the hospital. If they do...then that tells you they've lived a very sad life.

 

[djserani]

You must be arguing with one of the invisible trolls, xssve. It looks funny!

I was just thinking that.

I am one of those women who have struggled for SO long with body image and self-esteem because I've always been small-breasted. As I got older, had three kids and started to struggle with weight and (later) health problems, it got even worse. I used to get made fun of because my boobs were small. I was jokingly referred to as "concave" by my larger-breasted friends.

Because, you know, if you don't have big tits, you're not worth anything. And lookee here, you can get them just by having this surgery! Or buying these bras! (That don't work, btw, they can only work with something that already exists!) Or put these pads in! (Did that, and I made the mistake of wearing it under my swimsuit once, which proceeded to fall out in the swimming pool at band camp).

Seriously, and people wonder why girls have such low self-esteem? My daughter is 5'11" tall and is still currently close to 30 pounds "underweight" for her size. I keep telling her to enjoy herself while it lasts before the doctors start telling her she's overweight.

For the record, I'm supposedly some 40 pounds overweight, according to their norms. I sincerely think there's a problem when ALL women who happen to be within a similar height should be nearly the exact same weight. There is NO room for individual differences.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

XSSVE really is debating himself, and plays the troll part, too.

 

[xssve]

You must be arguing with one of the invisible trolls, xssve. It looks funny!

Naturally - the "biological" argument from the right has a significant flaw in it: it doesn't encompass all of biology, it only reflects whatever narrow, socially determined aspects of it they approve of - largely due here to the notion that has been foisted on them by Christianity, i.e., the "Great Chain of Being", a mechanistic, aesthetic, Aristotelian paradigm of reality, where Humans are the center and pinnacle of creation, rather than just another organism, subject to the physics and ways of all organisms - which is just a little more complicated.

Nature, by contrast, is indifferent to whether the humans approve of it or not - might as well talk to the weather; we are nothing particularly special except to ourselves.

You'd think, that after all these centuries of bitching about it, and having failed to make the slightest detectable dent in any of it after all that time, they'd simply accept the inevitable of what actually is, celebrate who they are, quit whining so much about who everybody else is - but it seems humans are attached to nothing so much as their precious delusions.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I mean you do know a penis is just a modified vulva, don't you?

Cant wait to see STELLA make a penis that works.

 

[xssve]

I was just thinking that.

I am one of those women who have struggled for SO long with body image and self-esteem because I've always been small-breasted. As I got older, had three kids and started to struggle with weight and (later) health problems, it got even worse. I used to get made fun of because my boobs were small. I was jokingly referred to as "concave" by my larger-breasted friends.

Because, you know, if you don't have big tits, you're not worth anything. And lookee here, you can get them just by having this surgery! Or buying these bras! (That don't work, btw, they can only work with something that already exists!) Or put these pads in! (Did that, and I made the mistake of wearing it under my swimsuit once, which proceeded to fall out in the swimming pool at band camp).

Seriously, and people wonder why girls have such low self-esteem? My daughter is 5'11" tall and is still currently close to 30 pounds "underweight" for her size. I keep telling her to enjoy herself while it lasts before the doctors start telling her she's overweight.

For the record, I'm supposedly some 40 pounds overweight, according to their norms. I sincerely think there's a problem when ALL women who happen to be within a similar height should be nearly the exact same weight. There is NO room for individual differences.

There is no evidence that short of gross obesity, being overweight is in any way unhealthy.

And breasts express the same amount of milk, regardless of size.

At 6'4" and 180 lbs, I've always been less than the mesomorphic ideal from a distance: men and women both dismiss me as a scrawny, pencil necked geek - until they stand next to me - I wear 48 jacket, and 17 inch collar will just about strangle me.

But that skinny body has served me well, I've worked many a meso, with their greater oxygen and glycogen requirements into the ground.

At close to Fifty though, I decided to put on some weight, and I'm nominally stabilized at 195, think I'll try for 5 more.

 

[squarejohn]

After spending four months, hospitalized and flat on my back, I lost the last shred of personal modesty I might have had. And I give the nurses and other health care workers my deepest thanks for being the kind of people they are.

 

[fuckwaffle]

I mean you do know a penis is just a modified vulva, don't you?

it depends on whether you are a pessimist or optimist.

a vulva is just modified penis and ovaries are just modified testis.

it all depends on your point of world view.

 

[xssve]

it depends on whether you are a pessimist or optimist.

a vulva is just modified penis and ovaries are just modified testis.

it all depends on your point of world view.

No, it doesn't - all fetus's start out as female, Males start differentiating at between 9 and 14 weeks, and a lot can happen in that time depending on what inherited alleles are suppressing what other inherited alleles, and you have the added complexities of random mutation, and they can both affect the entire nervous system, including the brain, where the effects are not visible - autism for example has no external markers, which is true of any number of neurological conditions - we don't even fully understand what's going on the brains of adults for the most part.

i.e., given that there is some differentiation between the male and female brain, some of which has to do with bihemispheric differentiation, there is no empirical reason a man cannot have the brain of a woman, and vice versa, in fact, given the wide range and variability of human adaptation, I'd be surprised if it wasn't statistically predictable.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Uh, no. Your analogy is wrong. A better anaology is humans start out human and develope male or female from their proto-human fetal stock. Its more like marble that gets chiselled into one thing or another.

 

[xssve]

You don't add anything to the XX chromosome to get a male, you have to remove something.