Customer Reviews

The Wise Wound: menstruation and everywoman

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Pre-menstrual syndrome, with all its characteristics of cramps, pain, depression and headaches is nothing more than male programming or 'Howlback' according to the WW. Women have been conditionned to perceive the bleed as just a biological inconvenience which can be modified or 'treated' with drugs or ignored completely. Shuttled and Redgrove theorize the motivation behind this pattern and deconstruct it using examples from ancient cultures and horror film imagery of the menstruating female.

But the text covers much more than PMS; in a way, the latent significance of menstruation has been turned 'outside- in', concealed from and downgraded by modern society and suppressed. The WW demonstrates how the gifts of the bleed can be turned back inside (from the unconscious) out (to consciousness), that is back to the right and Natural place in the importance of our femality.

If you are looking for advice on how diet can help with PMS dont bother with this book. If you want to change the 'curse' into a very wise wound indeed, the you MUST read it. My wisebleed is now my 'call of the wild' and PMS is His-story !

This book changed the way I see my femininity for ever. I think everyone should read it.

This book is one of the books I recommend to anyone trying to understand more about modern culture and menstruation. Shuttle and Redgrove do a very decent job exploring myth, biology, and psychology to present the menstrual process as a holistic experience. The book is a hefty read which can at times be tough to follow, but for a beginning look at sociology and menstruation it really can't be beat.

There are reasons I didn't rate this book as 5 stars. The authors fall back on Jungian psychology for almost all of their assumptions. I find Jungian methods to be inherently flawed in their assumptions, that the active portions of the psyche are inherently male, and the passive portions are inherently female. The authors also rely on free association with myth and popular culture to tie the book together, diminishing the book's usefulness as a basis for a scholarly discussion on the culture towards menstruation.

In other words, a good place to start looking, but if you're serious about researching the phenomenon, keep reading other books after this one.

I found the first edition of THE WISE WOUND in Laney Community (Oakland CA) College's reference library back in the '70s. It was an astonishingly accessible scientific explanation of how our periods work... & why!

As a teenager holidaying on a Herefordshire farm during my English childhood, I asked Farmer Jones why he put the ram to the ewes when they were bleeding. The poor chap went brick red & silent. I went away mystified.

Some years later when I was on the hunt in Earls Court for a contraception contraption I could put in & take out, I was told by the chap behind the counter, who was showing me a pink little French "chapeau," that my periods were the one time I was least likely to conceive but that men & their religions had many taboos about women's blood. He c/wouldn't explain why. This was in the Dark Ages when you had to ask your doc for a birth control Rx B4 The Pill.

All I knew was there were times of the month my body was randy & other times when she just wanted to be left alone so my mind could think everso Big Thoughts about life, that thing called LOVE & its highly addictive exchanges of body fluids, the amazing grandeur of pregnancy, the incarceration of motherhood & the bliss of being celibate.

By the time I got to Berkeley, I'd already had my two children & my tubes tied, & still didn't know the first thing about how menstruation happened & why we had periods & not estruses like all other mammals, so one year at a college I could afford, I decided to find out, B4 PCs!

First I had to explore horizontal mammals' reproductive cycles & then, bearing in mind that we are the only mammal to live in an upright position, THE WISE WOUND, along with the library's extensive & new anatomical & medical reference section plus Gravity, became my sources.

The authors' names, Shuttle & Redgrove, was my first Cosmic Clue that they know of what they wrote.

Although this is a great book. It was a little more academic than I typically like to read. Filled with great information on the societal changes of the view of women's bleeding, the academic approach left me a little bored, but this is just my reading preference. If you are looking for a great book about mensturation, how to love your body, in a no nonsence, textbook way, this book is for you.

This book bothered me a little bit, because the author pulls a lot of referencing from Carl Jung (who was believed to be a bit of a sketchy psychologist). It's too academic for me; reads like a very long college essay. I don't like how biased and overdramatic the views came out to be. Overall, great for someone who wants to learn about menstruation and the history, but really, I don't recommend it for anyone under eighteen. Also, I wouldn't read it again.