Interviewee: Anahita Seraji | Authors/Editors: Romina Garcia de leon, Shayda Swann (Weblog Co-coordinators)
Printed: June seventh, 2024
Are you able to inform us extra about your analysis?
My analysis focuses on ladies’s generalized concern of males. This analysis addresses the #NotAllMen and #YesAllWomen debate that transpired just a few years in the past. Whereas #NotAllMen argued that the majority males don’t wish to damage ladies and therefore, males shouldn’t be a supply of concern, the #YesAllWomen contended that ladies nonetheless expertise a generalized concern in the direction of all males. My analysis used behavioural studying rules corresponding to concern conditioning, stimulus generalization, and operant conditioning to deal with three essential questions. 1. Why do ladies turn out to be frightened of males? 2. Why are ladies’s fears generalized in the direction of all males? and three. How does the patriarchy use ladies’s fears to bolster their position in society? My third query highlights the constraints of concern discount methods to scale back ladies’s concern of males. These methods usually normalize ladies’s fears as a substitute of truly addressing the basis trigger as they emphasize behavioural pointers to stop ladies from being harmed by males. These embrace carrying much less provocative clothes, not venturing out late at night time and all the time carrying a whistle.
How did you become involved on this subject of analysis?
I used to be impressed by private expertise. Whereas residing on campus as an undergraduate pupil, I started listening to extra tales of girls’s experiences with males. I additionally skilled getting cat-called. Moreover, I used to be all the time captivated with Feminism, Psychology, and Girls’s Well being. Sooner or later, on the finish of a Psychology class, I used to be reminiscing on these experiences and it dawned on me that ladies have been conditioned to behave in accordance with societal expectations. Our fears are used to regulate and drive us into this prescribed social position inside the patriarchy. This was the start of my pursuit on this space. I hope my work can inform women and men in regards to the energy dynamic that’s at play, empower ladies to alter the narrative and assist males turn out to be conscious of their affect in altering societal perceptions of girls.
What analysis initiatives are you engaged on now?
At present, I hope to segue into analysis on intra-uterine system (IUD) ache administration. I volunteer with Entry BC, a bunch in British Columbia whose major purpose is to scale back the limitations to accessing contraception. Final April, we have been profitable in getting ladies entry to free prescriptions. This was an enormous win for us. I’m actually glad to have been part of the advocacy group. Nonetheless, I perceive that though IUDs can be found, we nonetheless have many ladies who’re hesitant to get an IUD due to insufficient ache administration. I hope that my future analysis can discover methods to mitigate ache by implementing acceptable ache administration through the IUD insertion and removing. That is a technique we are able to begin taking ladies’s ache in healthcare critically. We should always cease brushing it apart with undermining feedback corresponding to ‘This solely takes 10 minutes’ or ‘You will be tremendous, you may give beginning, that is nothing’. We needn’t proceed these practices particularly if we are able to administer drugs to make the method tolerable.
What affect do you hope to see along with your analysis?
I hope my analysis evokes others to make a distinction by participating in Girls’s Well being analysis. In the end, I would love my analysis to trigger systemic change by altering coverage, much like the contraceptive work I did final April. The older I get and the extra time I spend participating within the subject, the extra I’m dismayed on the state of girls’s healthcare. I feel it’s time that we make modifications on a bigger scale in order that no girl has to fret about coping with extreme concern or ache. I hope that my work can contribute to that.