It wasn’t already bad enough for women in the U.S. to have the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world while our rights are being taken away at breathtaking pace. Doctors are only recently admitting that women need pain medication for IUD (intrauterine device) and IVF (in vitro fertilization) insertions, after ignoring women’s pain for decades. Texas just passed a bill to turn its citizens into bounty hunters with the right to sue any abortion pill provider in any state if they mail a pill to anyone in Texas.
We are experiencing a tidal wave resurgence of misogyny in our country. It’s fashionable. TikTok hosts multiple forums daily where men discuss repealing women’s right to vote.
You could call me overly sensitive. Guilty as charged. Working for women’s rights and witnessing them being eroded globally will make a woman hyper alert to any further encroaches on our boundaries.
The Sansum health-worker video is a screaming example of that rampant misogyny.
Some of the video shots look just as if a woman has gotten up from a pap smear, while others could be from other care situations, male or female. The after-pap-smear images unleashed angry screams from women across the internet.
Women dread this procedure, meant to detect cervical cancer, a deadly disease. You lie naked from the waist down on a thinly padded table with crinkly tissue stretched across it, slide your butt to the edge, and place your feet in stirrups. The doctor inserts a metal speculum into you with KY jelly on it to lessen discomfort. It’s cold, invasive, and uncomfortable. The KY jelly dribbles out. The workers in the video seem to think women are supposed to pick up the evidence from the table afterward and skulk away with it.
We trust health-care professionals, imbuing them with godlike status. We hope they can find out what’s wrong with us, and fix it. Women pay thousands of dollars for IVF treatments and surgeries to get rid of fibroids, breast cancer, endometriosis, and problems that arise from being female.
Some women learn the worst news of their lives on that paper, on those tables. The longed-for-baby that isn’t. The cancer that is. The fibroids that must be surgically removed. The mysterious bleeding that won’t stop. For women in a red state, being turned away from the hospital while bleeding, because you’re pregnant.
The reaction online to the video is universal: shock and anger.
While I appreciate the Sansum administration’s CYA statement that strict policies safeguard patient privacy and dignity, those policies were an abject failure. The workers were fired, but this will put women off about getting care for their intimate health-care needs, wondering, the next time she puts her feet in those stirrups, is some part of this going to end up on social media? Women will quietly dread the already dreaded pelvic exam even more.
The vast majority of those howling online about the workers’ video do not live in Santa Barbara, a city that embraced multiple female mayors and elected officials, from school boards to Congress, including the first Latina and mother as the next president of the California Senate. This is a city with a strong history of solid feminist organizations, always ready to stand up for women. How could this happen here?
It’s easy to condemn. It’s easy to be angry. Forgiveness is the greater path and leads to understanding. I’d like to call in those ex-workers in the videos, rather than call them out. I want to ask why did you mock the most embarrassing, private, intimate exam that women endure? What led you to believe it was okay to do this?
I invite those in this video to reach out to me and have a real conversation about what happened. We need to heal, and resolve that we are going jerk this highspeed train of misogyny off its tracks, because women are humans who deserve equal human rights, dignity, and privacy.
Sharon Byrne is executive director of Women’s Liberation Front and a delegate to the United Nations Conference on the Status Of Women. The views expressed herein are entirely her own.
