Sep 12, 2019 06:57 PM
https://www.damemagazine.com/2019/09/12/...es-period/
EXCERPT (Sady Doyle): . . . Consider—as I do, every day—the Twitter account @men_writing_women, which routinely turns up psyche-scarring works of accidental body horror: Women who tuck purses into their vaginas, or whose vaginas don’t exist until they have sex, or whose vaginas and neighboring regions are somehow so hypersensitive that they can feel a sperm penetrating one of their ova. Elderly women who are “still beautiful” at the advanced age of 36, or fat women who weigh “one hundred and fifty pounds.” It’s not about bad writing: The books being quoted are often widely acclaimed. It’s about the fact that it is completely acceptable for men to write scientifically impossible female characters, because they’re not encouraged to learn how women experience their own bodies. Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides thinks women’s breasts shrink when they get sad. Another unfortunate young lady, as penned by canonical great John Updike, will never make the swim team; her “buoyant” butt floats to the surface of the water, like an inflatable swim raft.
In a world where you can get a Pulitzer for mood-ring boobs, how is it surprising that people don’t know enough to be horrified by a six-week abortion ban? If you think every menstruating person on Earth gets their period at the same time as their rent is due, it follows that knowing you’re pregnant should be easy and instant; it would never occur to you that someone’s abortion window might expire before she even realizes she’s missed a period. In a culture where gynecologists aren’t trained on cervical anatomy, it’s not shocking that cardiologists aren’t trained to recognize heart disease symptoms in female and AFAB patients; in one study, 53 percent of women with heart attacks were turned away by their doctors, who told them their symptoms were “not health-related.” A medical establishment that doesn’t know how to care for AFAB bodies inevitably winds up abusing them. Until very recently, it was standard practice for medical students to perform non-consensual pelvic exams—in layman’s terms, sticking their goddamn hands up people’s vaginas—on patients under anesthesia. When I say very recently, I mean very. States just started banning the practice this year.
This isn’t about “women’s” bodies, necessarily, because many of the bodies that fall into this blind spot aren’t women’s; they belong to trans men, or to nonbinary people... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT (Sady Doyle): . . . Consider—as I do, every day—the Twitter account @men_writing_women, which routinely turns up psyche-scarring works of accidental body horror: Women who tuck purses into their vaginas, or whose vaginas don’t exist until they have sex, or whose vaginas and neighboring regions are somehow so hypersensitive that they can feel a sperm penetrating one of their ova. Elderly women who are “still beautiful” at the advanced age of 36, or fat women who weigh “one hundred and fifty pounds.” It’s not about bad writing: The books being quoted are often widely acclaimed. It’s about the fact that it is completely acceptable for men to write scientifically impossible female characters, because they’re not encouraged to learn how women experience their own bodies. Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides thinks women’s breasts shrink when they get sad. Another unfortunate young lady, as penned by canonical great John Updike, will never make the swim team; her “buoyant” butt floats to the surface of the water, like an inflatable swim raft.
In a world where you can get a Pulitzer for mood-ring boobs, how is it surprising that people don’t know enough to be horrified by a six-week abortion ban? If you think every menstruating person on Earth gets their period at the same time as their rent is due, it follows that knowing you’re pregnant should be easy and instant; it would never occur to you that someone’s abortion window might expire before she even realizes she’s missed a period. In a culture where gynecologists aren’t trained on cervical anatomy, it’s not shocking that cardiologists aren’t trained to recognize heart disease symptoms in female and AFAB patients; in one study, 53 percent of women with heart attacks were turned away by their doctors, who told them their symptoms were “not health-related.” A medical establishment that doesn’t know how to care for AFAB bodies inevitably winds up abusing them. Until very recently, it was standard practice for medical students to perform non-consensual pelvic exams—in layman’s terms, sticking their goddamn hands up people’s vaginas—on patients under anesthesia. When I say very recently, I mean very. States just started banning the practice this year.
This isn’t about “women’s” bodies, necessarily, because many of the bodies that fall into this blind spot aren’t women’s; they belong to trans men, or to nonbinary people... (MORE - details)