“It's not very feminine to have a mustache”: Experiences of Danish women with polycystic ovary syndrome

ABSTRACT

This article explores women's lived experiences with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) on the basis of semistructured interviews with 21 Danish women. It provides insights about the problems that they experienced and how they coped with PCOS. The interviews revealed that they were highly influenced by society's femininity norms. Many of them perceived their bodies as “different” because of the symptoms of PCOS, namely, hirsutism. They used different strategies to live up to body ideals and cope with the symptoms. However, hirsutism had a decisive negative influence on the women's everyday lives, particularly with regard to male partners and sexual relations.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Professor Bente Kiens, Ph.D. student Solvejg Hansen, and Research Assistant Frederikke Jensen for their help with recruiting interviewees through the physiological research project at the Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports at the University of Copenhagen. We also thank Ph.D. student Verena Lenneis for constructive feedback. We extend a heartfelt thanks to the women who shared their stories with us.

Notes

1. Conchita Wurst is an Austrian singer who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2014. He/she performs in the role of a drag queen on stage; in “real life” he/she identifies as a homosexual man.

2. We use the term polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) in this article, but the same condition is also known as polycystic ovarian syndrome, polycystic ovary disease, sclerocystic ovarian disease, and Stein-Leventhal syndrome.

3. In this article, body hair is defined as any hair growth on the body including the face, except from eyebrows and hair on the head. A hairless body thus designates a body without hair growth other than that of the head and eyebrows.

4. Hirsutism is a medical term applied only to women designating “excessive” hair growth on body parts where typically only men have hair, for example, on the upper lip, chin, chest, stomach, or back.

5. One of the components of this binary construction is the mind-body dualism; male as mind and female as body (Leavy, Gnong, & Ross, 2009, p. 265).

6. The research project is part of work package 1 “The study of women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS)” in the research program “Copenhagen Women Study.” For more information see http://cws.ku.dk/workpackages/wp1/

7. Among these inclusion criteria were the requirements that the women had to be lean, were not or only to a small extent physically active, had excess androgen production, were not pregnant, and did not take any hormones such as contraceptive pills. A high number of women with PCOS are obese, and there is a lack of research about lean women with PCOS.

8. Other symptoms of PCOS also affected the gender identity of the women interviewed, for example, fertility problems and irregular menstrual cycles. These topics will not be addressed here but will be presented in another article.

9. Atlas.ti is a software that enables the user to locate, code, and annotate findings in qualitative interview material that has been thematically coded according to the research questions. See http://atlasti.com/

10. When it came to other symptoms such as fertility problems, they were recognized as severe by health professionals.

11. Threading is a temporary hair removal method where cotton threads are twisted to pull the hair out from the root. The method is used mostly on eyebrows, cheeks, and chin, as well as the upper and lower lips.