CNN calls women "individuals with a cervix" but prostate-havers are still "men"

submitted by Terfenclaw from self.GenderCritical

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[–]MarkTwainiac 7 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 2 fun -  (4 children)

I and others who were teaching and providing social services to women from former "Iron Curtain" countries found it very hard to believe as well.

But this is what our students and clients kept telling us, which caused us to have to develop special curricula and programs for them. Except for those who were physicians, midwives or nurses and had received special training in gynecology - a topic not taught in standard medical schools or nursing programs in most of the bloc - none of the full-grown adult females from the Soviet Bloc who came through the very large refugee resettlement agency I worked for had EVER seen an anatomical drawing of the female reproductive tract.

In Soviet Russia from 1930 - 1985:

"The very mention of sex became objectionable, and the topic was absent not only from magazines (both for teenagers and adults), but even from the main Soviet encyclopedia. The idea was that children should be taught morality, and distracted and kept busy as much as possible. The thrust of sex education was to replace the nascent sexual interest with public work, physical education, reading, and to channel this energy in a different direction."

https://www.rbth.com/education/329540-russian-kids-sex-education

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/opinion/sunday/soviet-era-sex-ed.html

In the USSR, sex ed in its most rudimentary form was not introduced until 1985, when it was confined to 17 and 18 year-old students:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-01-13-mn-8756-story.html

The average rank and file female population in countries like the USSR and Romania were routinely subjected to traumatic exams, birth procedures and (depending on the specific decade and country) abortions or forced pregnancies and births under horrific conditions - and because women were kept in the dark about their own physiology, they had no way to frame, share and properly process what happened to them until years later.

Under the communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, sex education in Romania from 1966 on was restricted by the draconian Decree 770. Prior to then, abortion was a/the main method of birth control, and birth rates declined due in large part to high rates of female participation in the workforce outside the home. Decree 770 made contraceptives illegal and all Romanian women were forced to be monitored and subjected to regular invasive medical exams to make sure they weren't taking any measures to prevent pregnancy. When a woman was found to be pregnant, she was closely followed and checked until birth. Secret police kept a close eye on hospital procedures.

Under Decree 770, so-called sex education in Romania focused primarily on propaganda that played up the benefits of motherhood and indoctrinated the population to believe that the greatest satisfaction and achievement that a woman could realize in her life was to be a heroic mother who gives her homeland many children.

Rudimentary sex ed and basic info about reproductive health only became available in Romania after the fall of communism in 1990 (and now it's been rolled back again, for different reasons).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4085661/

[–]Realwoman 3 insightful - 3 fun3 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 3 fun -  (3 children)

Interesting, I'm from a former socialist country, not Romania though, so this is all very surprising to me since all older women I have know know about the women's reproductive system. But I guess it was different in different countries.

[–]MarkTwainiac 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

But did you grow up and reach adulthood under socialism? And witness/experience the dramatic changes that occurred quite quickly once the Berlin Wall came down and communism collapsed? As the German tragicomedy "Goodbye Lenin" about the GDR made so clear.

The women I was speaking of all grew up in and reached adulthood in Soviet bloc countries, and came to the US from the early 80s - when Gorbachev opened the floodgates partly as a way to get rid of dissidents, Jews, the elderly and the unemployable to make them the responsibility of Reagan, Israel and the West - into the early 90s, after communism fell. These women ranged in age from approx 20 to approx 70 - so most had been born between circa 1910 and circa 1970-74.

BTW, it wasn't just in Soviet bloc countries in the communist era that many women were in the dark. Even in "liberal" Western countries like the USA and Canada, huge swathes of women of earlier generations didn't have access to much in the way of information about their bodies. Which is why there was such a need for "Our Bodies, Ourselves" - which was originally self-published on cheap newsprint pages stapled together (that was the kind of copy I originally got), and only was "formally" published by a big name mass market press - Simon & Schuster - in 1973.

Sex education in schools in the US was strongly resisted by many parties in the 1960s and 70s. The story of the woman who pushed for it - Mary Calderone, a physician and public health expert - is instructive.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4605187/

[–]Realwoman 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

I didn't but my mom did and she was super knowledgeable about the woman's reproductive system and she wasn't in healthcare. I guess that's what I'm basing my observations on but I can't think of any woman I know that grew up during that time that doesn't know those basics.

I did experience all the dramatic changes after the Berlin wall fell, well, I was too young for the first few years and to me, that was just the normal state of things, with the adults talking about the past.

But then, I was a very curious kid and I loved reading about science and about pregnancy and genetics, so I knew so much by the time I was 9 and I guess my perception is skewed.

[–]MarkTwainiac 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Nah, your perception is your own. I was simply reporting on what the Soviet bloc adult female students/clients of mine in the resettlement agency I worked for reported in the 80s and 90s. There were/are always outliers and exceptions. Both as individuals and as countries - like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.

If you'd been an adult back then, you might have experienced the changes that started occurring in the Soviet bloc countries in the mid-80s, and especially after 1990, as more dramatic and profound.