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Record W2340457794 · doi:10.14288/1.0077016

The social and cultural meanings of menstrual suppression

2011· article· en· W2340457794 on OpenAlexaff
Robin Repta

Bibliographic record

VenuecIRcle (University of British Columbia) · 2011
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicMenstrual Health and Disorders
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSocial psychologyPsychologySociology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This study investigated how women interpret and experience menstrual suppression, the long-term limiting of women's menstrual cycles using hormonal interventions such as oral contraceptives (birth control pills) or Depo-Provera injections. Asserting that monthly menstruation is detrimental to both women's health and their lifestyles, some physicians and health care professionals are recommending menstrual suppression to women. Critics argue that menstrual suppression is unhealthy and has the potential to harm women physically, emotionally, and psychologically, as menstruation is commonly regarded as a key aspect of being female (Chrisler, 2000). To date, the research on menstrual suppression includes clinical studies and psychological investigations of women's knowledge and openness to menstrual suppression. However, the existing research has not investigated the relationships between women's feelings about their bodies, their senses of femininity and sexuality, their lived menstrual cycle experiences, and their perceptions of menstrual suppression. Building on the extant research, this study used in-depth interviews with 12 women aged 18 to 36 to examine the meanings that women give to menstruation and menstrual suppression. My findings suggest that women's experiences and perceptions of menstrual suppression are complex and bound up with issues of sexuality, femininity, body image, and socialization. The majority of the women described menstruation as a nuisance, embarrassing, "gross", and also as a marker of womanhood. The women also argued that Western culture promoted negative views of menstruation, and they described how they made sense of these menstrual taboos. The women maintained that they would consider menstrual suppression for reasons of convenience, to please their sexual partners, and to feel more positively about their bodies. Reasons to avoid suppressing menstruation included fears about compromising one's health, worries about altering the "natural" menstrual cycle, and uneasiness with pharmaceutical products in general. The findings are discussed in relation to feminist theorizing about menstrual culture and body work. The findings from my research underscore the need for more thorough clinical research on menstrual suppression. As menstrual suppression continues to be recommended to women as a healthier option than monthly menstruation, it is imperative that we understand the effects of menstrual suppression on women's health and lives.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.887
Threshold uncertainty score0.984

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.024
GPT teacher head0.230
Teacher spread0.206 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2011
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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