Query to the masses
May. 22nd, 2003 09:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyI'm wondering about something.
I, personally, am extremely stupid about pain. As in, for a random example, yesterday I had a pounding sinus headache; I called Mirrorthaw around one o'clock to coordinate plans and mentioned the foul headache. He said, Have you taken anything for that? I said brightly, I'm planning to, with lunch. Which was retroactively not a lie, but which did gloss over the fact (which I'm sure he knew) that it hadn't actually crossed my mind that, oh yes, we have decongestants and analgesics in the house. I could take something for this headache.
Mirrorthaw is quite used to reminding me to take Advil because I almost never think of it on my own. This correlates, I think, with an attitude I know I inherited/learned from my mother, that one ought not to give in to pain; one ought to suffer stoically. (In high school, I ended up puking in the girls' restroom more than once because I couldn't bring myself to tell anyone that I had menstrual cramps like the wrath of god.) I think this connects with the gender conditioning that women receive, so that we learn to take care of other people before we take care of ourselves. Taking care of ourselves--even for women like myself who haven't a nurturing bone in our bodies--is branded "selfish" or "self-indulgent" or "malingering." And it's shameful, especially if it's somehow specifically female pain, like menstrual cramps or PMS migraines or what have you.
Other women I've talked to about this little mental disconnect have recognized it from their own experience. So what I want to know is, do men have this same problem? And is it all or most women, or have I just found a self-selecting sample?
I, personally, am extremely stupid about pain. As in, for a random example, yesterday I had a pounding sinus headache; I called Mirrorthaw around one o'clock to coordinate plans and mentioned the foul headache. He said, Have you taken anything for that? I said brightly, I'm planning to, with lunch. Which was retroactively not a lie, but which did gloss over the fact (which I'm sure he knew) that it hadn't actually crossed my mind that, oh yes, we have decongestants and analgesics in the house. I could take something for this headache.
Mirrorthaw is quite used to reminding me to take Advil because I almost never think of it on my own. This correlates, I think, with an attitude I know I inherited/learned from my mother, that one ought not to give in to pain; one ought to suffer stoically. (In high school, I ended up puking in the girls' restroom more than once because I couldn't bring myself to tell anyone that I had menstrual cramps like the wrath of god.) I think this connects with the gender conditioning that women receive, so that we learn to take care of other people before we take care of ourselves. Taking care of ourselves--even for women like myself who haven't a nurturing bone in our bodies--is branded "selfish" or "self-indulgent" or "malingering." And it's shameful, especially if it's somehow specifically female pain, like menstrual cramps or PMS migraines or what have you.
Other women I've talked to about this little mental disconnect have recognized it from their own experience. So what I want to know is, do men have this same problem? And is it all or most women, or have I just found a self-selecting sample?
