Don’t act like you don’t like old Bon Jovi references.
One of my most radical (and therefore coolest) readers, chlorophyll, has pointed out one of the most insidious forms of terrorism women face, the terrorism inherent in the medical system/industry/whatever-you-wanna-call-it.
I’m out of town right now and don’t have access to my usual school clinic, which is thankfully lousy with female nurse practitioners, and I just had to go for a little visit to the doctor for a little flu-type thing. I normally request a female doctor, but they didn’t have one available and I decided to stay and see a male doctor. I can honestly say that I felt uncomfortable making that decision, because I felt like I was going to subject myself to emotional discomfort in order to avoid offending their male doctor with my preference for a female doctor. What the fuck? I heard my Homeland Security-issued Terrormeter (TM) start to twitter (It looks kind of like that thing they used in Ghostbusters to detect paranormal activity. I suggest you get one.). Was some subtle form of terrorism afoot?
My doctor, who looked like a cross between Craig Kilborn and Larry the Cable Guy in Crocs, was pretty cool as far as male doctors go, but the experience nonetheless reminded me what a strange position a visit to the doctor puts women in. Despite the fact that this doctor was perfectly well-behaved and a nice dude, I couldn’t help but think of George Bush’s little gaffe about gynecologists practicing “their love with women” and some of the experiences I had with male doctors before I was old and wise enough to know what was and wasn’t appropriate behavior on the part of a doctor.
I remember going for my yearly women’s exams when I was younger and not knowing that I had the option to request a female doctor. Those exams are heinous enough with a woman doing the examining, but when you’re 18 and alone in a room with a dude doing the exam (this was 10 years or so ago, before having a female present became standard practice during gynecological exams), it can be borderline traumatic, and that’s if the motherfucker behaves himself. As such, I would often go 2-3 years between exams, making and canceling appointment after appointment because I didn’t want to deal with the weirdness of the whole thing, which I hear is common behavior. The fact that women avoid examinations that are crucial to the protection of their health because the exams are so emotionally trying should tell us there’s a problem with the way we’re doing things.
There’s a problem with the entirety of the way our medical system deals with women’s health, and, though this connection is going to be about as easy to make as one between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, I’m going to show that the way our medical machine operates amounts to terrorism in that the culture of our medical system terrorizes women into acquiescing to treatments and procedures that are detrimental to their physical and emotional wellbeing.
First off, doctors are invested with WAY too much authority; as people with several years of training that supposedly makes them experts on that most important of subjects, health, they unsurprisingly command respect from the culture at large, and especially from their physically vulnerable patients. We are told from childhood that doctors are to be respected and listened to at all times, and that what they say goes as far as our health is concerned. It’s no shock, then, that we don’t think it’s our place to question their pronouncements. It’s only in cases of flagrant misconduct that the authority of these experts ever comes under any kind of scrutiny, and it’s a funny thing, because they rarely even seem to know what is wrong with us. The relationship between a western doctor and patient is a distinctively lopsided one; the patient must do what the doctor says and must maintain reverence for him (or sometimes her) regardless of whether his/her diagnoses and treatments prove correct and efficacious (respectively).
That to me seems ridiculous; a doctor and patient, despite the fact that the doctor may possess more cultural authority than the patient, ought to form a reciprocal relationship in which the doctor, in exchange for the respect afforded to his/her authority, takes responsibility for the care of the patient and the results of his/her ministrations. But doctors in western medicine have the full weight of science behind them, which means that they are representatives of the source of truth as our culture defines it. That’s pretty heavy shit, if you think about it. In China, for example, there are several different ways of understanding the human body, and though some of them tend to carry more authority than others depending on the circumstances, there is no one source of immutable “truth” about the human body and how it will operate. And hence, the relationship between a Chinese doctor and his/her patient is a much more reciprocal one. (I know, I know, Chinese medicine includes eating bears’ dicks and whatnot, and often doesn’t work in the way we’d expect it to, but just remember that your opinion of it is heavily influenced by your having been raised in our own science-says-it’s-so-so-it-is culture.) Anyway, what all this means is that questioning the authority of a doctor in our society is akin to questioning the established source of all truth and knowledge, and who’s going to be brave enough to do that shit? I imagine that someday our slavish belief in the ultimate truth of science will seem as odd as the unquestioning faith people had in the Church before the Enlightenment, but for now our obsequiousness toward doctors seems to know no bounds.
It’s easy for doctors to let that shit go to their heads, is it not? Imagine if 50 people came to see you every day to ask for your advice about something essential to their beings, like whether they should get tribal tattoos, and they listened raptly to whatever you said and then went home and followed your advice to the letter (the answer is no, in case you were wondering). How would that not cause some delusions of grandeur? Sure, some medical professionals can minimize the egoism corollary to such a dynamic, but most of them succumb to it to some degree over time, and some of them get into the profession knowing full well that they’ll be invested with that cultural capital and intending to use it to their own ends, whether those ends be as relatively benign as self-aggrandizement or as nefarious as easy access to victims to sexually assault. Just think about it: how many medical students do you know that aren’t assholes? Most people’s motives for entering the field in the first place are pretty weird, kind of like those of the majority of the people who choose to become cops.
So, we women head into the doctor’s office expected to place our unalloyed trust in someone whose motives we have every reason to doubt, and whose expertise has yet to be verified, and we’re expected to eschew asking any questions lest we offend this sacred authority figure with our impertinence. I don’t know about you, but that sounds suspiciously like terrorism to me, if terrorism equals the use of fear to manipulate the behavior of others.
But what fear are doctors are using to manipulate us? Are they doing it on purpose? Can we consider most doctors terrorists? I’d say that in most cases it isn’t that a doctor is consciously using his/her position of authority to frighten us into submission, but that there’s an unspoken awareness on both sides that the doctor can help us or hurt us, and we don’t know which he/she’ll do, so we’d better play nice lest we offend the doctor and bring his/her wrath (or complacency) down on our already vulnerable bodies. That fear confronts men, too (although they are conditioned to defer to male authority figures to a much lesser extent than women are). But there’s another fear that only women face when deciding whether to question a medical professional’s authority: doing so likely means we’re going to be accused of being irrational, overly emotional, or (fuck!) hysterical.
The medical system we live under right now tends to see being female as pathological by nature, and sees the female body as particularly likely to betray its owner. Everything our bodies do that men’s bodies don’t do is treated like a disorder, from menstruation to pregnancy to the fact that we have breasts. Our bodies are seen as enemies that will stop at nothing to sabotage us. Menstruation and pregnancy aren’t natural states in this system (unless you’re arguing against abortion or for women’s sequestration within the home, that is), but rather things to be “dealt with” by professionals. Saith chlorophyll:
I’m especially sketched out by the traditional insistence that women give birth lying down in a hospital, administered by a male doctor, rather than giving birth in the natural squatting position with the assistance of a midwife. … [T]here is something wholly unnatural about a woman needing institutionalized male assistance in an act as biologically reflexive as childbirth.
Post-industrial American culture seems to have conditioned its female subject from an early age to believe that pregnancy outside the institution of Christian marriage is an unnatural and dangerous phenomenon. The fear of dying by childbirth seems to be a timeless and exaggerated fear, because come the fuck on, people — the female body (as many misogynists love to observe) is perfectly designed for the process of conception and birth.
Unfortunately, most young girls throughout historical cultures have been raised in a heavy fear of illegitimate birth for reasons beneficial to men, and this fear has been wrapped tightly around the spaces of the female body. Childbirth is a natural act that even a mute retard in a McDonald’s stall could do simply because that is what the female body is equipped to do.
Why, then, should young girls be conditioned to believe that she must not, under any condition, be impregnated without the proper social sanctions in order to give birth? Most reasonably well-do young girls are raised to believe that a successful live birth is absolutely impossible without expensive medical care and a team of medical practitioners. Is it an issue of class or something? Do the upper and middle class women unconsciously seek to require such extensive professional care in regards to the primitive instincts of childbirth in order to distinguish themselves from the lower classes that are forced to give home births like crossbreed bitches because they simply can’t afford the “proper” medical care?
Most contemporary women who decide to get pregnant are subjected to a series of social obligations like frequent medical checkups leading up to the Big Day when she will be placed on her back on a stretcher before being wheeled into a room full of doctors and nurses to give birth. The helplessness conveyed by a body lain out on a stretcher is further magnified by the fact that this position defies the very gravity that is actually a helpful proponent in easing the fetus out of the womb through the vaginal canal.
Exactly.
The medical system also tends to assume that women, when they are ill and when they are not, are especially susceptible to bouts of irrationality and hysteria, that most feminine of mental maladies. Our mental health system, because we live in a society in which the default identity and the default normative experience is a male one, tends to treat women’s mental health as naturally defective, and tends to treat women’s emotional concerns as trivial or irrational. I’ve yet to meet an adult woman who hasn’t had a mental health professional tell her she’s a few beers short of an 18-wheeler because she’s unhappy to find herself stuck in a repressive patriarchy that limits her freedoms and subjects her to terrorism on a daily basis. I once told a psychologist that I thought this world a difficult place to be a heterosexual woman because sex was so closely tied to power, and he told me I needed to go to biweekly counseling for at least half a year to “deal with” what I consider a fairly clear and sound assessment of the current state of things. (Remind me not to share my most logical of worldviews with men whose authority that worldview threatens anymore.) I wonder if men go into a phsychologist’s office and get told they need to straighten their loony asses out when they complain that they don’t like the current government’s policies or some such thing. Probably not many.
And here’s how this all amounts to terrorism: doctors and mental health professionals, having the power to label us irrational and hysterical, having the power to deem us “abnormal,” and having the power to harm our health, hold us in a state of extreme vulnerability. Though they don’t always use that to blatantly sinister ends, they do avoid having to explain their actions and decisions (and mistakes) to us, and we keep silent out of fear of offending them, even when it comes to our own physical and emotional wellbeing. That’s the best case scenario, which we all face every time we see a doctor. Unfortunately, I don’t think there are many of us who can’t give an example of the worst case scenario, in which a doctor or psychologist, knowing that he has us in such a position of vulnerability, uses his advantage to abuse us sexually or mentally. That sure as fuck sounds like terrorism to me, since there’s an awful lot of fear being deployed to manipulate women into acquiescence and silence, even in situations in which an assault has taken place.
So what’s the solution? Frequent female doctors until the demand for them evens the field between male and female doctors? Sorry to say, that ain’t going to work. There are far too many appeasers working in the medical system, and especially the mental health field, for that to prove effective. I hate to say this, but I have to be a serious radical on this issue: our medical system isn’t ever going to serve women’s needs, nor will it ever be free of terrorism directed at women. It operates under the assumption that maleness is the ideal and that femaleness is inherently pathological, and is therefore fundamentally flawed when it comes to treating women (I won’t even get into transgender issues), and it places many women at the mercy of men who most likely don’t understand women’s experiences and who frequently abuse their position. Really, it doesn’t even serve men’s health needs very well (although that’s their problem). We’ll have to scrap the whole thing and figure something else out. But you’ll have to call Michael Moore for that shit. All I do is complain, I don’t offer alternatives.
15 Comments
May 22, 2008 at 10:46 pm
WHOO! Nine Deuce, thanks for the reference — that made my day!
It really is difficult being a heterosexual woman who chooses not to live within the margins alloted to women in society. Thirty years after the sexual revolution, there still seems to be a binary allotment: you’re either traditionally feminine (whether it’s to the extreme or in various degrees is inconsequential, because ultimately you are still existing within the social constraints), or you’re a radical feminist and/or lesbian. Radicals and lesbians, despite their public marginalization/erasure, at least have a solid social identity carved out for them. For the rest of the critically-thinking female population, it seems as though they are assigned a certain ambiguity between the two ends of the pole, and very much denied certain intellectual rights. How many times do you go into an intelligent internet discussion only to observe that there are only a handful of women posters? And how many times do you seem to observe that these women posters seem to be rather self-denying insofar as they mimic the men’s behaviorisms without giving heed to the fact that most liberal, intelligent men (who, at first glance, seem to be unlikely candidates for sexism) are actually quite linguistically sexist?
May 23, 2008 at 1:12 am
I don’t go to male doctors if I can help it. Yes, some women docs are appeasers, and in that case, I find another one. I have a good female doc now, but she’s a traditional M.D., so the treatment is ridiculous.
You’re right, Nine Deuce. Doctors don’t know what they’re doing half the time. I work in the medical field (in the laboratory), and I can tell you, doctors order lab tests about which they know very little. They can’t interpret results very well, and they often ask me what something means. I tell ‘em, “Trade yearly salaries with me, and then I’ll tell you.”
No, I don’t really say that b/c insubordination to a doctor is a major offense. They can call us up and cuss and swear at us for something we didn’t even do, but we have to be all sweetness and light towards them, simply because they had wealthy parents who could afford to put them through medical school and an ability to stay up for two days straight.
Anyway, I did a post recently on western medicine. I think I’m safe linking to my blog from here. I think I’ve confounded my stalker. That bastard.
Anyway, I love any post that trashes medicine. It’s so fucked up.
My first gyne exam happened at 22, I was a virgin, and I had severe cramps. I went to see my mother’s doctor who was a male…an Italian with sausages for fingers. After that, I started going to women gynecologists.
May 23, 2008 at 1:31 am
Damn it, that song is stuck in my head, now!
May 23, 2008 at 4:39 am
Surely the same criticism can be applied to the police? You’re not as vulnerable in front of a cop (ie, naked and on your back) but from what I’ve heard of police (thank god I’ve been able to avoid them up to now) they take advantage because of their power.
A friend of mine is studying medicine, and she said originally she thought it was selfless reasons that made her go into it, but after some self-discovery, she’s realised it’s all about the power and control she will have over other humans.
An anecdote: my sister had thrush one day and went to the chemist to get cream and this short little old guy in glasses spoke at the top of his voice, “Would you like the vaginal cream?”
Chemist tend to have power issues as well. The way male chemists glare at you when you buy birth control or a pregnancy test.
May 23, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Possibly. But then again, this raises another question. I have anxiety problems with just about any public situation, and I used to have pretty bad panic attacks. I’ve had to learn to force myself to not care, it’s tough, though, because the result is I do wind up putting my personal comfort over the consideration I would normally give others, and, yeah, I come off sounding like a jerk.
What’s “cultural authority”? Is the doctor a better Trivial Pursuit player? Or is it that he holds a more authoritative role in a given cultural? I didn’t even know that Americans (and yes, I’m American) even had a unified culture. I would expect a doctor from D.C. to have a different culture than a bartender in Chicago and a farmer in Tennessee.
Whoa, whoa, whoa! Philosophers, theologians and others would disagree.
I’m still not going to eat a bear’s dick :lol:
Excuse me. No one knows what truth is, or, I guess, there is no agreement as to what truth is. If you don’t believe me have a gander at the many, many books entitled “What is Truth?”
Easy. If one was already suffering from grandiose delusions before she became a doctor, then those delusions would not be caused by that fact.
My god. How dare they treat “actual disorders and diseases” like disorders! I kid, I kid :P
Oh shit! It’s before 10:30am! I can still make to Mickey D’s for breakfast, YES!
I’ll bbl.
May 23, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Shut up, Konservo. Yet again, you have fucking missed the point. Just shut up.
ND, this is an awesome series. Thank you for writing this.
May 23, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Good question. At first I thought that mortality rates for infants and mothers would be far higher amongst home (or McDonalds) births. I did a quick web search and found many articles suggesting that it is much safer for a woman to give birth at home (or at least, not in a hospital). However, most of these articles were put out by “mid-wifery centers” and a crucial point to their argument was the dangers of the cesarean section operation. It seems that this is a valid point, but it seems to me, and I’m no expert, that there might be occasions when the operation could be beneficial and it’s conceivable that a woman’s life could be threatened by a pregnancy due to complications and in an attempt to save her life an emergency c-section might be preformed however, such attempts are not always successful and a woman might die anyway. Of course, the mother who gives birth at home will have had to be healthy enough to carry the child to term, this makes me wonder about the women who do not have health care and are not healthy enough to carry the child to term… the reports I (briefly) read did not seem to address this issue.
Hmm… it seems to me that the doctor’s job is to make sure the infant is delivered with as little complications as possible (meaning, for the child and the mother). If this involves checking to see that the umbilical cord is not wrapped around the infant’s head, that the cervix is fully dilated, etc., then it would make sense, to me (i.e. Konservo, not the third commenter above), if the doctor did not want to poke her head under a squatting woman during child-birth.
Why must we figure out something else if we scrap the whole thing?
I don’t think I would trust anyone to plan things for me. Who would you put your faith in?
It would be helpful to get a response a bit more constructive than “Just shut up.” If I offended you I’m sorry, it was unintentional.
May 23, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Konservo, I think it’s high time you made the acquaintance of Drakkar Noir and BUTTKICKER 69.
As for the lying down/squatting debate, I think that the doctor is making things harder on the woman for his/her own convenience by requiring her to suffer the discomfort of giving birth lying down so he/she doesn’t have to strain his/her neck to make sure things are going smoothly.
Just because there are people who are confused about the source of truth doesn’t mean that we aren’t culturally conditioned to believe in the absolute authority of science (in medicine, at least). There are a few creationists who would disagree, but mainstream American culture places an awful lot of faith in the truth of scientific reasoning. And that’s where doctors’ cultural authority comes from, meaning our culture has placed a lot of authority in doctors.
As to the bit about actual disorders, touche. I knew that sounded weird.
Don’t eat McDonald’s breakfast. The sausage is all lips and assholes.
I think Konservo may just become a radical feminist sympathizer if he keeps coming to this blog.
May 23, 2008 at 7:12 pm
L – Thanks! I haven’t planned this one in the same way I did the porn one, so it’s kind of freestyle, as in I come up with each topic after I finish the last one, which I’m sure I’ll come to regret. The next one is about anti-American terrorists trying to block women’s access to health care, in which I may be needing to quote you.
May 25, 2008 at 12:18 am
Having had doctors of both varieties, I obviously prefer a female doctor. Right now, my doctor is male and that is because where I live, female doctors are are more rare than talking pigs.
When I was pregant with my daughter, I wanted a female OB and found one who worked with 3 other doctors, all male. She was so overworked (so much more than her partners) that she bordered on bitchy whenever I went to see her. Of course, when my daughter was born, she wasn’t available (Which originally pissed me off as SHE should have been the one to deliver) so one of her partners delivered my daughter. He ended up being so much nicer than her. I do believe her behaviour was because of how overworked she was but who knows.
Now, I have seen doctors’ behaviour towards all other medical professionals and patients as I am a RN (right now I do homecare and don’t have to talk to anyone!!) and it is amazing how they view themselves. Their anger when their patients don’t do what they’re told, the way they talk to other medical staff is so maddening. The few ‘good’ doctors that I have worked with (both male and female) are the ones who listen to what the nurses have to say and sit and talk with the patients. They do not think “I will cure you” but say “I will help you cure yourself”
May 26, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Why would ANYONE go to a male doctor? In my experience, they are all about pushing tests and pills and they barely listen to you.
The female doctors I have seen seem to have more of a natural healing essence about them.
May 26, 2008 at 10:45 pm
Bill – I generally agree with you, but I don’t know that I’d say that’s an essential female characteristic. I think it might be more of a socially-inculcated one. Regardless, it holds a lot of the time and I’d much prefer to see a female doctor.
May 28, 2008 at 3:25 am
[...] have endured a lot of harm, and they have heard many apologies. Many of them have probably also forgiven the [...]
May 28, 2008 at 6:40 am
Pregnancy and childbirth may be natural, but I don’t know that we’re “perfectly” designed for it. It is uniquely awful for human beings, due to our huge baby heads, total helplessness as infants, rotated birth canal and narrow upright-balancing pelvises. It’s one of the many reasons I’m pro-abortion, given these factors humans have an *obligation* to use our intellect to prevent pregnancy except when the end result of a baby is actively desired. But since we are designed not just to enjoy sex, but to be better, friendlier people when we are having sex, using our intellect to solve the problem of pregnancy by not having sex results in nasty, moralistic judgmental assholes who sniff other people’s panties until they get caught soliciting cops for sex in the men’s room.
But I digress. Obviously there is a lot wrong with healthcare system. Attitudes toward pregnancy and childbirth included. I don’t think however that it’s fair to ever make generalizations about a profession or any group of people for that matter. My best friend has given birth twice. Both times, she was in control, with her loved ones, in a place where she felt comfortable, with a midwife attending her that she knew and trusted. She was free to walk around, eat a snack, take a nap and have hot showers/baths. It was a very happy atmosphere where she was revered and her body and desires listened to. Both times she was at a hospital. I recognize this is probably an exception, but I think ideally women should be able to make an informed decision, whether for home birth or hospital, and ideally doctors and hospitals would show willingness to work with midwives and birthing centers. It’s odd, when I was younger (from about 4 or 5 to 16-17) I insisted on having all female doctors (pediatrician, dentist, orthodontist, optometrist, gynecologist, everything). I got over it though and now I even have all male doctors, all of whom I am very comfortable with.
I see the cultural authority that is given to doctors and how the position can in some cases go to their head. Maybe it’s just because I watch a lot of Discovery Health (for which I have much love), but I feel like there is a real emphasis toward participating in our own health. This may be more a factor of our consumer culture but there are websites and magazines and books rating doctors, and hundreds of easily accessible books and websites on diseases and disorders. I guess my point is this stuff isn’t special doctor-only information. I am especially addicted to the show Mystery Diagnosis, which always features the same theme; don’t give up, ask questions, seek other opinions, and do your own research.
September 15, 2008 at 6:23 am
Interesting post, I never really gave the medical field a lot of thought with regards to feminism until recently.
What do you make of “PMS”? Frankly, I am offended at the label “syndrome” for something that most women’s bodies do on a monthly basis. I think PMS is a socially-constructed hypochondriac catch-all term for stuff that many (but not all) women go through that has been sold to us as a problem so that we can get “treatment” for it, and so our frustrations and moods can be gendered and dismissed as some weird female hormonal thing.
I am not denying the hormonal fluctuations that occur in the body, and I know that for some women the effects of that are more severe than for others. But I wonder how much of that is medically/scientifically justifiable, and how much of that is due to our being taught that women get crazy and ‘irrational’ on a monthly basis, to the point where we have psychologically accepted it as a common problem.
P.S. I love your blog :)