Start- Lecture 2 Flashcards
What do mass media vs alternative film makers accentuate about the birthing experience? (2 bullet points)
- mass media routinely accentuate fear and danger,
natural film makers emphasize calm and confidence - hollywood features women laying down being told what to do but natural films feature women working with gravity.
What is the perspective portrayed about childbirth in mass media vs in alternative media
Theres a huge juxtaposition and it shows that natural film makers, and mass media both have their own narrow perspectives of childbirth.
How does Hollywood portray empowered women in mass media?
holly wood frames the hard work of childbirth as pain that no one wants, promote anesthesia. In holly wood an empowered woman is a woman with an epidural.
What are the 4 main things that mass media portray about birth and pain? How many of these relate to humour? How?
- A self-evident, indisputable fact
- unavoidable except through pain medication (epidural)
- its so bad it makes you want to die (humour in media emphasizes this)
- it makes women (and their mothers) go mad - and sometimes turn violent to men. It causes women to break the social taboo (being polite etc), the humour adheres to this because it is the most culturally disapproved of.
Do medical professionals sometimes perpetuate the idea that its so painful you’ll want to die?
yes.
What percentage of women in the US regularly watch reality-based programs on pregnancy and birth?
68%
What percentage of women pregnant for the first time say that the shows “help me understand what it would be like to give birth”?
72%
What is the problem with the “just entertainment idea” when it comes to the portrayal of birth in mass media?
there is a problem with this “just entertainment idea”, women actually watch a lot of reality tv shows and get an idea of what childbirth will be like. Women think that mass media provides ‘education’ on childbirth.
What is an example of how childbirth is really trailing behind in terms of progressive representation in media?
sex education is very progressive in regards to sex but the show still represented childbirth in the same way as the holly wood representations. As soon as she goes to the hospital she gets put in a wheelchair and then what we see is a disaster, some type of near death experience. This tells us that childbirth is really trailing behind in term of our thinking and representation of it in the media.
How does the alternative media portray pain in Childbirth?
- only one of the many sensations during labour
- other sensations - bliss, joy, satisfaction, ecstasy, excitement - can be much more powerful than pain
How can childbirth be compared to psychodelics?
childbirth is like psychodelics in some way because both experiences are really hard to describe. It’s ineffible. there’s a real mixture of emotions that is really hard to describe because we are used to saying that we have an emotion but there is a large mix of emotions in these experiences
What was the woman likely describing when she explained her pregnancy as feeling like “love was bursting out”?
Contractions can feel like an enormous excertion of the body which is where these descriptions come form
What does the business of being born say about the oxytocin rush in birth? How does it describe pain?
“You get the highest oxytocin rush you’ll ever have in your life when you give birth.”
“You will go into an altered state of consciousness… yes there’s bliss and yes there’s pain and it’s all tied up together… ”
When considering the different perspectives on childbirth between the mass media and the alternative media, is one of the perspectives wrong?
is one of these perceptions wrong? no there is no right or wrong especially when it comes to experience.
Is alternative media a female perspective?
not necessarily
