Two things that you can always count on: death and taxes. In fairness the revenue income tax has been around for just over a century, but we have been dying since the beginning of time by popular theory. Contemporary data supports that women have longer life spans than men. For the purposes of this blog, I am choosing to annotate men and women in their binary / assigned anatomical genders at birth. It doesn’t necessarily take extensive research to assert that men, being the boys that society rears at one point, engage in more risky behavior. I am a retired skateboarder. I identify as a cis gendered male. Growing up, it was practically anomalous to meet a female skateboarder. Though this particular stereotype and many like it are being shattered regularly, the data still supports that when boys become men, they continue to engage in health adverse events more than women.
It is not true that women only have estrogen or that men only have testosterone, a popular fallacy or misnomer that the article Gender and Health Inequality nearly recites. Sure, the amounts of these stabilizing hormones exist majorly as depicted, but as students of science we should expect more measured language from academic journals. We know that women and men both possess both hormones. It’s also not accurate to suggest that anatomical differences must be the predictor of health outcomes. The blame is really on how our society raises boys and girls to think and behave differently. This allows for more horseplay among boys, more double-dog-dares, which might develop a pattern for men. More beers, “bet you a cigarette my team beats your team,” kind of development. And should we blame a man for acting out of their own youthful exuberance?
Women, on-the-other-hand are socially driven to lead healthy lives thereby avoiding even the most subtle risks. This is not a wild claim, but it is perhaps the only argument I will take from Gendered biopolitics of public health: regulation and discipline in seafood consumption advisories by Becky Mansfield. For some odd reason Mansfield has a real grudge against the advisory committee for the FDA or the EPA that says “’women who are pregnant or may become pregnant, nursing mothers and young children,’” should essentially limit their consumption of fish products (Mansfield p. 190). I say odd since, all the advisory statements listed have a few things in common. Number 1, they implicitly agree that digesting mercury is bad. This is a fact.
Number 2, the advisory groups do not dispute that fish has deposits of mercury, so by digesting fish, one may also be consuming mercery. In a similar rational, these advisories suggest that the specific population of women and children should avoid eating contaminated fish. Here I am incline to co-sign on Mansfield’s journal again because it would be just as simple for an advisory to provide general advice on this matter irrespective of anatomical or other gender differences.
On that same token, my issue with Mansfield extends to the idea that advisories provide advice; it is not equivalent to a government regulation that punishes or taxes an individual if professional advice is not adhered to. So, what’s all this talk about biopolitics?
There really is no widespread agenda to informing the public of findings related to the fish we consume, and the risk of mercury poisoning. Why the issue of seafood should matter at all to someone in the Midwestern part of the country is beyond me. Mansfield writes, “advisories are based on population-based calculations of risk,” to which I believe is non-sequitur. Where else would you correlate your data for an entire nation? In random samples all over the country?
Finally, Mansfield ascribes some socially punitive strike on would-be-mothers who miscarry or deliver life with complications. I have never once heard of such a thing outside the world of criminology. Clearly if a pregnant woman is engaged in drugs or alcohol that is criminally chargeable for the harm it does to the unborn child. Never have I heard someone chastise a would-be-mother for eating too many fish. To take out the frustration on advisory committees is all the more perplexing.
Governmental advisory committees perform many different functions, but they carry out duties similarly. Most committees collect information, analyze, and report. It would seem well within the scope of the EPA and FDA to consider the correlation of seafood consumption with health and safety outcomes. Plainly, I don’t think advisories are promoting discipline as much as they are providing suggestions. There is a major difference between discipline and regulations. To conflate those, as I claim Mansfield has, is to be hyperbolic.