Insomnia again ...

So to begin where I had left it yesterday night when sleep fortunately intercepted...The question was why are women plagued more by lack of sleep.

In trying to fathom an answer I let my mind dwell on two factors to start off with,one is obviously sociological, the other hormonal. The sociological factors operate in diverse ways and all roads including,pathways,subways,alleys, ultimately lead to insomnia.

Sample this(not that you need to stretch your mind too far for this,instances like these are omnipresent):

A young girl admires the college hunk from afar and dreams of dating him but obviously she is not blessed with the peaches-n-cream skin that would melt the boy's heart,eyes..and let's not go any further...So what does she do..well quite the evident deed..lose sleep over it,and finally inspired by the rags to riches Cindrella story communicated to her through the media(read advertisements,anorexic models in skimpy outfits),she decides to purchase a tube of the cream that promises her the Paradiso...what else,the boy's attention. Now just as she trimphantly asserts..Veni Vidi Vinci, enjoying the fruits of her tube of fairness cream,she is gripped by the fear of losing this hunk..so again loss of sleep.

Now what anybody would say is"How silly!!!Trust women to lose sleep over a pimple or a wrinkle or even a grey strand" and we would wipe our hands across our mouths and laugh in derision. But to get to the basics, I would like to remind you of Simone de Beauvoir who had proclaimed "A Woman is not born but made".

With Beauvoir I come to the idea of social construction of gender.What both Beauvoir and later on Judith Walsh declare is that a woman is a construct, dug out of a patriarchal society's primeval need to fashion binaries to suit its patrifocal ends. Women are not born passive,submissive but they are socially conditioned to behave as such.Social conditioning also demands that a woman always be appealing to the male gaze; the image of the fair,blue-eyed blonde is one such construct meticulously permeated partout for women to follow in blind submission.

So if a woman finds it difficult to conform to the role that patriarchy has forged for her she inevitably suffers from the "anxiety of influence" and that is enough to make her lose precious sleep.