The Judgment of Paris Forum - Careers & dieting making women infertile (article)

13th April 2009

Emily

Senior Member

Join Date: July 2005

Posts: 509

Careers & dieting making women infertile (article)

One of the best threads on this forum was the recent discussion about how women, during this recession, are leaving the workplace and returning to a more natural, relaxed, less stressful life.

If anyone needed more proof about why traditional gender roles, and traditional full-figured body shapes, are more natural and healthier for women, a new article in The Times provides it:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/li...icle6073045.ece

It shows that career women often render themselves infertile, both because of the stress of their jobs and because they starve and exercise-torture themselves into an androgynous shape. The results are physically devastating.

The article is a bit long, but it's worth reading in full.

Quote:

Is your career making you infertile?

Recent research suggests a superwoman lifestyle can affect hormones and even body shape, damaging a woman's chances of having a baby

April 12, 2009

Peta Bee

Go-getting women with highpowered jobs and salaries to match might appear to have it all. But results of a new study suggest that, unwittingly, these twenty and thirtysomethings are reducing their chances of having children by doggedly pursuing demanding careers.

Professor Elizabeth Cashdan, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, believes that the pressures that come with the superwoman lifestyle are to blame for hormonal and body shape changes that might affect fertility. The result? When it comes to starting a family, many women struggle to conceive.

In her research, published in a recent issue of the journal Current Anthropology, Cashdan found that career women were less likely to be curvaceous with the hourglass shape long associated with fertility and, instead, displayed the more masculine, straight-up-and-down figure that is less conducive to child-bearing.

With work stress and the drive to succeed, Cashdan says, comes a shift in hormonal balance that leads the female hormone, oestrogen, to be replaced by androgens, a class of hormones that includes testosterone and that are associated with strength, stamina and competitiveness.

One 2004 study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society suggested that women with hourglass figures had about 30 per cent higher levels of the female reproductive hormone, estradiol, compared with other body shapes and that, as a result, they were roughly three times more likely to get pregnant.

Large-breasted women have also been shown to have higher levels of oestrogen and progesterone, other female hormones linked to fertility.

“Although the hormonal profile associated with a high WHR may favour success in some stressful and difficult circumstances where women must work hard, there are well-known costs,” Cashdan says. “Women may suffer lower fertility and possibly lower attractiveness to men who may have an innate preference for curviness.”

Many of Britain's leading infertility experts are unsurprised by the findings. “Certainly, at my clinics we see predominantly very successful businesswomen who do not have hourglass figures,” says Laurence Shaw, associate director of the London Bridge Fertility, Gynaecology and Genetics Centre and a spokesperson for the British Fertility Society (BFS). “They are very slim, very straight-up-and-down.”

Dr Martin Tovee, a psychologist at Newcastle University who has studied the influences on female body shape, says that it is determined by a number of different factors, but that being a go-getter could be one of them. “We know that if women over-exercise or diet obsessively, then their oestrogen levels drop and they become less fertile,” Tovee says. “So, potentially, working hard could affect fertility too.”

Super-skinny women who under-eat to stay that way have long been known to risk compromised fertility. Several years ago, Rose Frisch, an associate professor at Harvard School of Public Health, explained how too few calories and too little body fat triggers a woman's brain to switch off her body's ability to reproduce by gradually restricting the flow of a hormone called leptin.

There is what Frisch has described as a “razor-thin borderline” where a drop of just 3lb can tip a normal-sized woman into infertility without her realising it. She may continue to menstruate, but might not ovulate during her cycle. If body-fat falls much lower, then amenorrhoea occurs when the menstrual cycle simply stops.

However, Cashdan's findings suggest that career women can become infertile even if they don't lose excessive weight. “The new study suggests that these driven women with high-achieving Type A personalities have a lesser oestrogenic state, which doesn't favour their chances of conceiving.”

The stress of some women's lifestyles also plays a significant role. In research at Emory University's School of Medicine in Atlanta, Professor Sarah Berga of the department of gynaecology and obstetrics, has shown how stress often triggers a cascade of events that result in reduced levels of two hormones crucial for ovulation. Women with hectic jobs on top of busy lives, she says, are most at risk.

In one of her studies, Berga found that women who didn't ovulate had excessive levels of the stress hormone cortisol present in their brain fluid, often due to trying to squeeze in too much work and exercise. “Your brain is hard to fool,” Berga says. “If you are under-eating, overworking and over-exercising, then the hypothalamus - the part of the brain that controls the release of hormones - keeps a running tally of what you are doing.”

Around 20 per cent of women who are infertile have problems with ovulation, and lifestyle factors, including anxiety and stress, are often to blame...

“Oestrogen makes someone relaxed, calm and thoughtful, the perfect state in which to become pregnant,” he says. “It is no biological mystery that so many studies have shown men are drawn to women who are curvaceous, indications of health and fertility.”

It's tragic that feminism has brainwashed women into thinking that they need to be wage-slaves, or need to out-men men.

If only women realized that a traditional relationship in which they would play the feminine role that nature intended for them would actually be healthier and more fulfilling for them, and would give them a better opportunity to have children and actually enjoy life.

Sadly, many women realize this only too late.

18th May 2009

Kaitlynn

Senior Member

Join Date: July 2005

Posts: 618

Re: Careers & dieting making women infertile (article)

Infertility is just one of the many destructive consequences of feminism, as a growing number of individuals are acknowledging. Even many former feminists are seeing the error of their ways- and finally admitting it publicly.

This article talks about a British former feminist who now rues the effects of the movement that she helped propagate.

http://www.sundayherald.com/news/he...in_the_home.php

The main points:

Quote:

Feminist pioneer’s rethink: ‘a woman’s place is in the home’

Erin Pizzey claims freedom of choice doesn’t work

SHE IS one of feminism's pioneers and founder of the UK's first refuge for victims of domestic violence, but after decades of fighting for women's rights Erin Pizzey has come to a startling conclusion: women should stay at home and look after the children while men go out to work.

Her revelations don't stop there. Pizzey also believes that with mothers away from home working, their child's development will be harmed. Her views are supported by new research conducted by Birbeck College in London, which suggests that the longer children are in childcare, as opposed to with parents, the more aggressive they become...

She says: "I think the traditional way the family was run has been going for thousands of years and it works. What I see now is men disenfranchised from their roles. Women are lost because they now have to work full-time. They don't have a choice. There is no proper child care, there's nobody home when the children come home."...

She says she now considers the idea of women having it all - a family and a career - to be a myth.

She adds: "I don't think anybody foresaw what that freedom of choice would do. It's imprisoned many women. They don't have a choice - they have to work hard and I just see an exhausted generation of women trying to do it all."

According to ongoing research by Jay Belsky, a professor of psychology at Birbeck College, Pizzey's fears are being borne out.

Research done in America as part of the college's Families, Children and Child Care study of 1200 children claims to show that the more time young children spend in care in their early years, the more aggressive and disobedient they will be by the time they reach primary school.

In another article, Pizzey notes her steady disillusionment with the feminist movement:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/a...oing-chest.html

The pertinent sections:

Quote:

Somewhat naively, Erin joined the women's movement. Starting in America, feminism enjoyed a dramatic revival in the Seventies, and its new proponents would prove even more radical than the female suffragettes of the early 20th Century who chained themselves to railings to raise awareness of women's rights.

Erin's excitement quickly dampened as she realised that, in fact, the group she joined had no interest in solidarity - the sole intention was to obliterate men from the structure of the family, destroy marriage and establish a new female supremacy.

'It was a ludicrous idea,' Erin says. 'It was like a born-again religion"...

'We weren't allowed to mention marriage. If we mentioned religion we had to refer to God as a woman"...

There were also, Erin says, violent members.

'One conference in Skegness ended up in a physical fight,' says Erin. 'The women were always at war about their policies and whether they were following Marxist or Chinese feminism.

'I told them that the women's movement wasn't a women's movement at all, but a Marxist movement'...

Erin's feud with the women's movement grew as they took over the refuges she had opened and banned men from entering. 'They wanted a world where men were excluded and I didn't agree with that at all,' she explains.

In denouncing feminism, though, Pizzey is very much a believer in size-acceptance:

Quote:

Erin maintains her original belief that women need to stop competing with each other - these days in the form of cosmetic surgery and endless dieting. 'It's not men forcing us to do it - it's competition between each other,' she says.

It reminds of the article about Spanish women that M.Lopez recently posted, which mentioned how traditional culture protected women from the concerns about their bodies that they now face. The two go hand in hand: The destruction of tradition devastated the family, male-female relationships, and women's body image; only a restoration of traditional values would heal these wounds.

I just wish feminists like Pizzey had realized this decades ago, before doing so much harm to society with such a destructive ideology.

22nd May 2009	#3
Erika Junior Member Join Date: August 2005 Posts: 28	Re: Careers & dieting making women infertile (article) I hate to say this is NOT revolutionary. Look at Hollywood. How many of those understarved women are getting IVF? Do I have to mention names? It's obvious that if you take your body f below a certain level, your reproduction will suffer. You take it below a natural level and your breasts will disappear. (This will, in America, mandate silicon replacement.) I have seen horrors among female fitness competitors who tan their skin to a crisp, and decide to get their chest pumped full of silicon when they are at 8 percent body f and you can count a six-pack on their abdomen. Does that seem natural? Can we outsmart a human genome that hasn't changed in 10,000 years? Miscarriages abound in Tinseltown, and not one less-than-heterosexually-motivated Hollywood pundit declares that this is a contradiction in biology. Wonder why, hmmm? Does it take a rocket scientist?

3rd June 2009

Emily

Senior Member

Join Date: July 2005

Posts: 509

Re: Careers & dieting making women infertile (article)

Further to this topic, as reported below, a new study has confirmed what has been common knowledge for years: that far from making women's lives happier, feminism (and the destruction that it has wrought on society) has actually made women miserable.

Here's the link:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/o...n-46270417.html

And the text:

Quote:

Why does happiness elude modern women?

By: Meghan Cox Gurdon
Examiner Columnist | 5/27/09

Over the last four decades, American women have got almost everything the feminist movement promised. Lucky us! Are we happy now?

No, we are not. All across the industrialized world, wherever egalitarian feminism has sprinkled its fairy dust, women report that they are considerably less happy and satisfied with life then were their benighted, patriarchy-oppressed, apron-wearing sisters of yore.

“The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” a new study conducted by Wharton academics Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, finds that the happiness of Western women has been steadily declining over the exact period during which egalitarian feminism has supposedly been delivering the goods.

Given the shifts “of rights and bargaining power from men to women in the past 35 years, holding all else equal, we might expect to see a concurrent shift in happiness towards women and away from men,” the authors write.

However, they have found, “measures of women’s subjective well-being have fallen...”

How can this be? After all, didn’t feminism achieve what it wanted? Women are today not just free to pursue education, but now actually outnumber men on university campuses.

Women are not simply going out to work, but are in a position to exude wisdom and empathy from the highest levels of government and commerce.

Women are not only able to control their fertility, as radical feminists demanded, but today girls too young to vote are considered old enough to prescribe themselves the morning-after pill.

And it turns out that all this success – or “success,” depending on your degree of irony – has not made women happier.

Nor, of course, has it satisfied the ever-complaining feminist-industrial complex so brilliantly mocked by critic Camille Paglia as “a jumble of vulgarians, bunglers, whiners, French faddicts, apparatchiks, dough-faced party-liners, pie-in-the-sky utopians and bullying sanctimonious sermonizers.”...

The findings are striking. Before egalitarian feminism came along and substantially rewrote everyone’s scripts – in courtship, job expectations, domestic satisfaction, purpose in life -- women reported greater contentment than men.

To conservative critics of feminism, and indeed to dissident feminists like Paglia, none of this will be remotely surprising.

The anecdotal experience of millions, along with the analysis by women such as Christina Hoff Sommers, Mary Eberstadt, Danielle Crittenden, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, and Kay Hymowitz, all confirm what the Wharton academics discovered: Far from enhancing the lives of modern women, in many respects the feminist movement has diminished women’s happiness and satisfaction.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. Those "apron-wearing sisters of yore" weren't "benighted" or "oppressed" at all. In fact, women of two or three generations ago were happy and fulfilled, because they were living according to their natural inclinations, and because gender relations were in harmony with essential principles. Today, when women run their lives against the grain, against their own needs and desires, no wonder their lives are miserable.

The astonishing thing is that as ridiculous an ideology as feminism ever managed to win as many converts as it did.

But perhaps it's not so astonishing. After all, women are similarly brainwashed into starving and gym-torturing themselves, often at great expense. (Just imagine: paying for starvation. It's sheer lunacy.)

Yet happiness is there for them, waiting, if they ever want to reach out and take it: happiness in a traditional, loving relationship with a man who worships them, and happiness in eating whatever they want, and as much as they want, and enjoying their natural curves.

6th June 2009	#5
HSG Administrator Join Date: July 2005 Posts: 1,725	Living in a better time The following news item provides a welcome alternative to the dismal circumstances noted earlier in this thread. Forum reader and contributor Maureen recently sent us a link to a British article about women who have rejected the modern world and embraced a more traditional existence. The article profiles wives who have adopted a style of living from the 1950s, the '40s, and the '30s. Not surprisingly, the most interesting of the three is a woman named Joanne Massey, who favours the 1950s, since that was undoubtedly the least disagreeable decade of the 20th century (post World War I). Her fashions are also by far the most attractive. The following excerpt from the article quotes Massey's account of her life--but interested readers will want to view the actual Web page (linked below), to see the accompanying illustrations. Massey writes: I love nothing better than fastening my [apron] round my waist and baking a cake for Kevin in my 1950s kitchen. I put on some lovely Frank Sinatra music and am completely lost in my own little fantasy world. In our marriage, I am very much a lady and Kevin is the breadwinner and my protector. We've been married for 13 years and we're extremely happy because we both know our roles. There is none of the battling for equality that I see in so many marriages today. What's wrong with wanting to be adored and spoiled? If I see a hat I like, I say 'Oh, we can't afford that' and Kevin says: 'You have it, I'll treat you.' I don't even put petrol in our Ford Anglia car, which is 43 years old, because I think that is so unladylike. I ask Kevin to do it. I make sure our home is immaculate, there is dinner on the table, and I look pretty to welcome my husband home. I only ever wear 1950s clothing, such as tight skirts [and] a white blouse. Kevin wears 'modern' clothes for work, but at weekends he wears a smart suit and a trilby. I admit I am in retreat from the 21st century. When I look at the reality of the world today, with all the violence, greed and materialism, I shudder. I don't want to live in that world. I try not to interact with the modern world too much at all. My obsession began as a teenager, when I loved old movies because they seemed to represent a halcyon time, when women were more feminine and men more protective. Today's society is all rush, rush, rush, whereas I like to take my time. It may sound silly, but living like this really does make me happier - as though I'm existing in one of those old-fashioned TV shows where everything is always wonderful. Some women I meet ask me if I feel patronised by being a housewife and spending my time caring for Kevin, but I never would. At work, he gets teased because he's the only one with home-made cakes and even home-made jam in his sandwiches. But I often wonder if his colleagues aren't slightly jealous that he has a wife who devotes herself to his happiness. How many men these days can really say that? Although adopting a full-fledged time-travel existence such as this may not be possible for everyone, many elements of Massey's scenario could easily be incorporated into contemporary life. And besides, the 1950s trappings are only incidental. What is far more important is the mindset that they represent. How inspiring it is to see men and women conceptually rejecting the modern world and its degenerate values, and relating to each other in a more traditional, natural way. Consider how Massey's happiness in her domestic situation contrasts with the misery that women experience when they uncritically, mindlessly buy into feminist brainwashing (as described by the articles linked earlier in this thread). Massey and her husband obviously love and cherish each other deeply. Many could learn from their example. Kim Novak--luscious starlet of the '50s and early '60s, and perhaps the closest that Hollywood ever came to embracing timeless beauty. - Click here to read article Last edited by HSG : 6th June 2009 at 18:39.

31st December 2009

M. Lopez

Senior Member

Join Date: August 2005

Posts: 577

Re: Living in a better time

Quote:

Originally Posted by HSG

Forum reader and contributor Maureen recently sent us a link to a British article about women who have rejected the modern world and embraced a more traditional existence.

Thank you for the article, Maureen. It's empowering to find some women defying the modern rules about what they should think, how they should behave, and in what manner they should live their lives. As was said in a different thread, being traditionally feminine these days and believing in traditional values is the truly bold move, the sign of a unique spirit, in contrast to marching in lock-step with the rest of society into the workplace (or into a gym-prison) - and into unhappiness.

If only women could also embrace traditional, more natural ideals of beauty too, then they would really be free (and happy). The two, being naturally feminine and naturally full-figured, go hand-in-hand, and together comprise true beauty.

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