The essay on medical metaphor in Emily Martin's The Woman in the Body is one of those analyses that make you think: have people really not given this some thought before? Literature--supposedly objective, rational, scientific literature--on women's bodies is disturbing in its explicit value judgements. Menopause is described as a "failure", a "breakdown". Birth is a machine-like process, with doctors acting as supervisors and mechanics to ensure the efficiency of the procedure. (The "labor" process is subdivided into multiple stages, and if the stages don't progress according to the chart, chemical or physical intervention is employed to bring them up to standard.) And menstruation results from a failure of production whose object is a baby (even when the woman in question had no desire to become pregnant). This is an account of menstruation from a recent college text:

If fertilization and pregnancy do not occur, the corpus luteum degenerates and the levels of estrogens and progesterone decline. ... [Lack of blood flow] causes the tissues of the affected region to degenerate. ... [The blood from weakened capillaries] and the deteriorating endometrial tissue are discharged from the uterus as the menstrual flow. As a new ovarian cycle begins ... the functional layer of the endometrium undergoes repair and once again begins to proliferate.

Read "degenerates", "decline", "deteriorating", "discharge", "functional" (for what?), "repair"... Compare this to the language used when talking about the stomach lining, which is also sloughed off and lost in a cyclical process. This is a "regeneration", and a process of "self-preservation".

And compare it also with Martin's description of menstruation, equally scientific:

A drop in the formerly high levels of progesterone and estrogen creates the appropriate environment for reducing the excess layers of endometrial tissue. Constriction of capillary blood vessels ... paves the way for a vigorous production of menstrual fluids. As part of the renewal of the remaining endometrium, the capillaries begin to reopen, contributing some blood and serous fluid to the vlume of endometrial material already beginning to flow.

The extent to which social prejudices underlie "objective" science worries me, but what worries me more is the fact that most scientists don't seem to realise it. They're carried along, secure in their own paradigm of impartiality and ever-advancing human knowledge. But knowledge is always already someone's knowledge--and we damn well have a responsibility to think about whose.

If you haven't read the book, pick it up sometime. It's an easy read, and well worth the time spent on it.