I reveal no secrets when I say that the idea of the male ob/gyn sorely inflames the revulsion center in my obstreperal lobe. This morning, as the rosy fingers of dawn reached across the sky to chuck me under the chin, this inflammation was exacerbated by a tiptoe through an ob/gyn listserv.
The thread in the listserv to which I was directed (by one of our patriarchy-blaming MDs) begins with a male ob/gyn whining that one of his adult patients wants him to recommend a female gynecologist for her teenage daughter. The discussion turns into a celebration of (mostly) male resentment over patients who have the gall and stupidity to prefer women doctors when “chromosomal arrangement” is clearly irrelevant to medical expertise.
Of course it is! Or rather, it’s irrelevant when the chromosomal arrangement is XY. That’s because, in a patriarchy, men have a perfect right to be in charge of female reproductive organs. And since the context is “medical” rather than “sexual,” any gender preference manifested by the patient is, as one of the male ob/gyns put it, “illogical.”
Because of the lame listserv architecture, the thread is difficult to follow, and as a result I’m sure I’ve missed a few gems, but here are some of the lowlights:
Dr. A: I suspect that many men overestimate the pain of a normal birth.” [context]
Dr. B: My assertion has never been that one needs to have had a baby […] to provide good care, but that it is not unreasonable for a person to prefer someone who at least has the same equipment to care for their sexual health.
Dr. C: Nonsense! [context]
Dr C: My mother fixed this problem when I was born and named me Lynn. Many a woman has been quite shocked when a 6′4″ male walks into the exam room. When they say they thought I was a woman, I simply respond by saying, “too late now.” [context]
Dr D: Our hospital referral line was responding to requests for a referral to an OB/GYN would you like a women [sic] doctor and until one of our male OB learned this and complained about discrimination did they stop [context]
But here is the pièce de résistance, a female ob/gyn (thanks a bunch, sistergirl!) who opines that a woman patient whose history of abuse has made her leery of the idea of a strange man cramming his hand up her vagina should, for her own good, be “desensitized” by disallowing her preference. “Going along with [a patients’ preference for a female doc] is not ultimately healing.”
This patronizing arrogance is astonishing, but not surprising, given the supremely misogynistic nature of the medical establishment. Women, who their whole lives have been conditioned to exist in a perpetual state of reaction to male authority and who have justifiably found this situation unsatisfactory, clearly have no business expressing this sort of “sexist” and “discriminatory” preference. Social control of women morphs into medical control.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: in a patriarchal society–which, let me refresh your memory, is a society more or less built on the fetishization of female genitalia–any dude who springs out of bed one fine morning to declare “I will be a gynecologist, by Jove!†is precisely the sort of dude who should be confined in an asylum.
I mean, in what other profession does a man view disembodied pussy as a source of revenue?
Hurrah! This is the question I’ve been wondering about for years. Why would a man want to become a gynecologist? And the only answer I’ve been able to find is an ugly one.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: in a patriarchal society–which, let me refresh your memory, is a society more or less built on the fetishization of female genitalia–any dude who springs out of bed one fine morning to declare “I will be a gynecologist, by Jove!†is precisely the sort of dude who should be confined in an asylum.
Knowing a lot of doctors in my family (but no male ob/gyns), I don’t think specialization choice happens that way. I know a lot of people who’ve gone into specializations not because it’s the one they wanted but it’s the one that they could succeed at. For instance, one of my relatives wanted to be a radiologist but is instead a (female) ob/gyn…
Also, there is no other medical profession which has a large component of dealing with a very wanted condition for some people: birth. I think that the alienation of men from children and childbirth is actually a problem. I mean, I’m not a doctor, but I happen to like babies (got no time for one of my own at the moment…). If I were to be a doctor, and if I wanted to be a doctor for happy things, then there really aren’t very many choices. Pediatrician, but that deals with illnesses of children of all ages. The other is ob/gyn. I share some of your “ick” factor about the “examining genitals” bit, but I’ve been told that some men become ob/gyns because the maternity ward is usually the “happy part of the hospital.”
As a lifelong victim of the HMO (I grew up in Minnesota, where the HMO was invented), I’ve had a steady parade of unchosen gynecologists, male and female, good and bad, checking out my twat. I find this fact MOST ironic: The very best gyn I ever had was a middle-aged man in private practice, and the very WORST one was the woman at the family planning center I visited to get The Pill when I was a teenager. So while I prefer women gynecologists (I go to a women’s center now), I TRY not to judge, even though the idea of a male gyn skeeves me on principle.
(For what it’s worth, that one fabulous male gyn was so good because he was just an extraordinary human being all around. He didn’t even presume my lover was male, like all the others, female gyns included. He always referred to my lover as “your sweetie,” just in case I was gay. Nothing he ever did to me caused any pain - - it’s as if his very hands were anesthetic. He had so many private patients he had to stop taking new ones. Extraordinary human beings such as he are exceedingly rare. I’m sure he’s retired now.)
Here’s something to throw on the debate: A doctor once revealed to me (about 20 years ago) that most men do not “choose” gynecology. Apparently, the conventional wisdom is that male doctors end up specializing in gynecology or proctology when they get very bad grades in med school, because it’s the only specialization that will take them. Hopefully, now that there are so many female gyns now, the medical field no longer accepts the losers.
Here’s my most horrific male gyn story: I had a new male gyn tell me I was probably “abused” as a child because I winced when he shoved his hand up my twat and my ass. He was like a jackhammer, but apparently I was supposed to be okay with this? He suggested I get therapy. I left the office crying and feeling like I’d just been raped, thinking, “Well, I guess I need therapy NOW . . .” It goes without saying that I refused to let him touch me again.
“Going along with [a patients’ preference for a female doc] is not ultimately healing.â€
and raping her is?
Just a suggestion, but have you thought about checking out a midwife? Many of us are trained in well-woman care, and (at least up here in Canada) we get vast amounts of training about the social aspects of reproductive health as well.
Twisty: I had a visit the other day from my parents (they’re in their ’80s). Dad was telling about his latest visit to the urology group that has been treating him for bladder cancer in recent months. Seems part of the exam involved the insertion into his penis of a catheter, which this time would have involved the sole female practitioner in the group — a horror, he concluded relievedly, that was circumvented when one of the usual males stepped in instead. MY MOTHER then added, “Can you imagine having something like that done to you by a person of the opposite sex?” Since she is my mother, and I knew she was not being ironic, I said, “Well, yeah, I can, since this is what women who go to the gynecologist have almost always faced until recent years.” I still don’t think either of them heard or understood, but then, that probably explains my ambidextrosity for blaming the patriarchy.
How many female urologists have you heard of?
Riiiiiggghhhhtttt.
BTW, I think Mandos has a very good point. The doctors who ran the extremely progressive and sensible OB/GYN practice I used for my second child’s birth were both male. They had women on staff and a bunch of midwives (including a midhusband!), but they were male just the same. They were very woman centered and most excellent - and when my son came out butt first, they caught him as he came. No c-section. These guys were also at the forefront of learning and teaching ways to treat various gynocologic issues without hysterectomy, and known to be supportive of child free women as well.
On the other hand, I’ve met/known some real bitch on wheels OBs and GYNs with two X chromosomes. Some doctors are jerks, some are not. Gender neither precludes or guarentees sensitivity.
It is fair to say, however, that if said daughter is not comfortable being manhandled for any reason, get her to a woman doctor and shut the fuck up. I think this guy should give a serious two thinks to finding himself or his son a woman urologist if that’s where he’s coming from!
Ms Kate, I was going to say the same thing: if a man says that a woman shouldn’t care about going to a male ob/gyn, ask him if he minds going to a female proctologist or urologist.
It is not a hospital’s job to desensitize me after my sexual abuse. If I call any type of medical practice and they won’t let me see a female doc, I am more likely to go without care than see a male doc. I am willing to see a male dentist, ENT, and podiatrist. For anything between the neck and knees, I’m going to someone with the same equipment.
Interestingly enough, I’m contemplating loosening that rule. As a lesbian who is planning to get pregnant, I’ve been refered to a gay male ob/gyn who is apparently responsible for lots and lots of lesbian offspring and is loved by every lesbian within a 100-mile radius. I’ve visited a couple of female ob/gyns and my female internist and all have been quite dismissive of a lesbian trying to get pregnant. “Find new doctors” is high on my to-do list, and after lots of frustration I’m wondering if a gay man who comes highly recommended might be preferable than the constant search for a woman who doesn’t immediately dismiss my concerns.
when it got to be time for my daughters to have a first gyno exam, i always request the female doctor where i go.
i, myself, happen to trust the male gp i have(first time THAT ha ever happened). but the girls get a woman because it might be easier for them to talk to a woman doctor about stuff they don’t want to talk to me about. i also don’t want them to ever think that men know their gear better than they do.
my ex MIL was in her 50s when she got her first NON painful pap smear. she came home talking about it like it wasn’t supposed to be that way. i got to be the one to inform her that no it’s not supposed to hurt and no, you don’t ordinarily spot afterwards.
“I think that the alienation of men from children and childbirth is actually a problem.”
The alienation of men from their OWN children is a problem. If I believed that it were so that men became obstetricians (nothing will convince me about the sanity of them becoming gynecologists) out of awe for the lifegiving powers of women, then I’d be a little less freaked out at the idea. But after all the horror stories I’ve heard about men doctors in the maternity ward, I feel that their choice to adopt that profession has more to do with their affinity with the rest of the medical profession’s love of power and prestige than any commitment to the ‘care’ part of healthcare. In most cases, it’s the nurses who offer this anyway.
This is actually a gripe I’ve had with men in the medical profession in general lately. Like last week when a crappy dentist who can’t administer anesthesia properly to save his life, told me the pain I felt as he drilled into the inner recesses of my tooth was ‘psychological’. Or the (again male) resident who partially ripped of the skin of my Mother’s breast when removing the surgical tape during a procedure she was undergoing for Breast Cancer (”Oops. My bad.”). Men are taught to listen to women’s pain, which is the most necessary attribute of a good doctor.
If a man really wants to reconcile himself with his inner maternal spirit (or whatever), here’s a radical idea: take up a childcare or teaching profession, or just be the one to stay home and raise the kids. There’s a lot more to motherhood than the triumphal moment when the baby pops out its wrinkled head for the first time. It’s also the day-to-day drudgery of raising it…but I guess 18 years of this isn’t as worthy of admiration in a patriarchy as the few minutes when the doctor proudly proclaims a new life to the world.
Besides the very significant gross-out factor, my other main objection is how the hell a man can empathize (or even genuinely sympathize) with my medical relationship with my genitalia and reproductive system. Personally, I’d no sooner let a man give me a pap smear than I would a veterinarian give me a root canal.
Generally, I prefer female ob/gyns and, if I were male, would prefer female urologists for one simple, practical reason: smaller average hand size. That counts when the doctor is going to put his or her finger in a narrow body cavity with lots of nerve endings.
The male ob who did my c-section was quite good. The only reason I didn’t stay with him for routine aftercare was geographic inconvience. (Of course, I strongly suspect that he was gay, for whatever that has to do with anything.) However, on average I would rather have a female ob/gyn: it’s just easier to deal with someone who has some idea of what a pap smear, menstral cramps, and labor pains feel like than someone who is totally clueless.
“Too late now”? Are his patients locked in until he gets to examine them or something?
How many female urologists have you heard of?
Actually, a man near and dear to me was recently distressed to learn that his female GP was being replaced by a male GP — precisely because his annual exam will now involve larger fingers. But then again, this woman didn’t set out to be a urologist.
I’ve always been icked out by the whole pelvic exam business. Do we really need these so often, even when we’re not experiencing anything out of the ordinary? I mean, men don’t have routine rectal exams every 1-3 years, do they?
What a change these responses to male OB-Gyns signal. In my youth, in the 50’s and 60’s, most women I knew would never trust a woman to have the competence to deal with their reproductive systems. They would not feel “safe” and in good hands with a mere female in charge of their equipment. Even the best ones were insufferably paternalistic.
Over the years, I have had some unbelievable adventures with male OB-Gyns, the only gender of OB-Gyn available to me for many years. There was the one who insisted that I had to take the Pill to avoid pregnancy. When I asked him to fit me for a diaphragm, he allowed as how he did not know how to fit one and that if I got pregnant, not to come to him asking for an abortion. Then there was the guy who had me strip and spent 1/2 hour staring at my body before he began his examination. And the one who had a tantrum because I refused to let his nurse induce labor in the a.m. on my due date without examining me (!). I went into labor that evening. He must have had a date or something and was infuriating at having to deliver my daughter instead. He yanked her out with forceps to hurry things along, and she had a bump on her head for weeks.
These pleasant experiences all took place in Switzerland, which is male dominated to the max and whose medical system is highly overrated.
We are so much better off these days. Of course the guys in the field don’t like the competition. They had it good when they were the medical representatives of the husbands of oppressed women who had been taught to submit to male authority.
I love the idea that men are too sympathetic to women in childbirth and imagine that the pain is worse than it is. HA!!!
“any dude who springs out of bed one fine morning to declare “I will be a gynecologist, by Jove!†is precisely the sort of dude who should be confined in an asylum.
I mean, in what other profession does a man view disembodied pussy as a source of revenue?”
I find this statement to be ridiculous. For a moment, I will leave aside the technical aspects of what might make an ob/gyn practice interest (combination of surgery and having patients that you can know and help).
I can certainly understand that some women might feel more comfortable with a female ob/gyn than a male or a male ob/gyn than a female.
But to suggest that a female ob/gyn is going to be more understanding than a male ob/gyn because she understands what it feels like ignores that fact sympathy and understanding are not gender specific. That female might have never had a baby or worked until the day she delivered or a myriad of other things. As a result, she might not have much sympathy at all because it was relatively easy for her.
Why do you question why males become ob/gyn’s and not why females become ob/gyns? Are you suggesting that it is sexual for men, but not women?
What is different about the motication for men than for women? Men cannot want to take part in the childbirth process? Only women can be sympathetic to other women?
the women-to-women and the women-to-expert forums reopen shortly.
“my ex MIL was in her 50s when she got her first NON painful pap smear. she came home talking about it like it wasn’t supposed to be that way. i got to be the one to inform her that no it’s not supposed to hurt and no, you don’t ordinarily spot afterwards.”
The lousy female gyn I used to go to always hurt me, there was always blood on the slide, I always spotted, and I always had a little pain in the very middle of me for the rest of the day. She was one damn lousy doctor. One time I complained that she had hurt me, and she took that to mean she should dig a little deeper to find out why. Lady, it’s because you’re too rough, not because I am built funny. I only stayed with her b/c there’s a 3 month wait to get an appointment with someone new. Always. What’s up with that, anyway? The male gp I used to go to was a really nice guy and a pretty good doctor, and noticed how extremely uncomfortable I was as I lay on my back in a dress while he waved my leg in the air (note: when going to doctor about hip pain, wear pants) and took measures to preserve as much of my modesty as he could given the situation without making it worse by commenting on it. Dog bless him. Am I ever going to drop trou and spread my legs for a pap with him? No. Uh uh. Too much social conditioning not to be naked in front of men. The clincher for no male gyns for me are two experiences from high school: 1) Male doc refusing to prescribe pain killers for a bladder infection b/c “how will you know if you are feeling better?” Fortunately those meds are now OTC. 2) Male doctor telling me the pain I was feeling wasn’t menstrual cramps b/c “those are more of a dull ache”. And you know this how? He didn’t even ask if I was in the middle of or about to get a period, which I wasn’t. Thus I continue to search for a decent female gyn.
‘I’ve always been icked out by the whole pelvic exam business. Do we really need these so often, even when we’re not experiencing anything out of the ordinary?”
Yes. At least until the HPV vaccine gets going. Cervical cancer doesn’t cause symptoms until it is very far advanced, but pre-cancerous lesions can be picked up on a pap smear and treated well before they are dangerous. A yearly pelvic exam can be the difference between getting a minor (if not at all pleasent) local procedure and getting your uterus and ovaries removed, undergoing a chemo/radiation treatment that makes twisty’s look fun, or dying of cervical cancer. Sorry.
“I mean, men don’t have routine rectal exams every 1-3 years, do they?”
They don’t have to start them until they are 45 or so, but after that, yes. A rectal exam every year can be the difference between having a relatively minor prostate surgery and dying of prostate cancer or between living and dying of colon cancer (though really both men and women need colonoscopies every 5-10 years to best avoid that.)
I’m not automatically suspicious of male ob/gyns. My mother had one to deliver me and my brother; he was also our family doctor for over a decade and he was well known for being gentle, responsive, etc.
In addition, well, there’s Henry Morgentaler, who is and was a pretty huge figure in the Canadian abortion rights struggle, and if it’s for fetishistic reasons I’ll eat my hat.
That said, I’ve always preferred to have female ob/gyns myself, and the sense of entitlement coming off these doctors’ comments makes me sick. A lot of women are just more comfortable being naked around strangers if they are female; we’ve spent our entire lives using all-female changerooms, washrooms, etc. so why is this surprising?
The comment about “desensitization” is truly god-awful. I can’t even enumerate the ways in which that’s horrible and wrong.
But to suggest that a female ob/gyn is going to be more understanding than a male ob/gyn because she understands what it feels like ignores that fact sympathy and understanding are not gender specific.
Will, sometimes you gotta have the equipment to know. I say this not theoetically, but out of experience, to wit:
Several years ago, I had an abnormal pap, and so had to go in for a “punch biopsy.” I was too anxious about the possible results to worry about the ominous-sounding procedure itself. For those of you who haven’t had one, it involves inserting something like a long-handled hole-punch and using it to snip off a bit of cervical tissue for further examination.
This all happened at a student health clinic where most of the exams were done by woman nurses, but there were only two actual OB/Gyn’s on the staff. By unlucky chance, I drew the old white-haired dude, who proceded to prep me for the exam, all the while muttering about the dire consequences of young women having indiscriminate sex (did I mention I was 31 at the time?). Then, he did the “punch.”
Yeeowch!
I twitched, stiffened and tears sprang to my eyes. But the good doctor assured me that “you don’t have any nerve endings there, so that couldn’t have hurt.”
This may be chalked up to incompetence and insensitivity, rather than sex, but just the same, I’ll never have a male gyn again.
Why isnt it simply the search for a good doctor?
The problem with a bad doctor isn’t that they are male or female. It is that they are a bad doctor.
Women have the right to have quality medical care. Quality ob/gyn care involves medical expertise as well as an understanding of the invasiveness and vunerability of ob/gyn care.
It sounds as if people here assume that female ob/gyns automatically have it and male’s do not. Vote with your backs! Go to excellent, understanding doctors whether they are male or female. If you give your business (so to speak) to a female simply because she is a female, you are losing an opportunity to reward the good ones and punish the bad ones.
What’s with this woman hater?
‘The mom would have her young daughters see a FEMALE physician, presumably because males are, well, they’re MEN!!! (”Not with MY daughter yo (sic) won’t!!”) But then they get the female docs to put them on The Pill. Reason being, so they can go out and have sex and not get “in trouble.” ‘ - Joe P.
umm, it was for irregular periods, but whatever…
Dianne, American Cancer Society recommendation for pap smears is every 3 years now.
American insurance company recommendations continue to be every year if you are on the pill b/c obviously if you are on the pill you are a whore (see above).
“Dr. C” is creepy. “Ha ha! You thought you were getting a female doctor, you silly girl! But here I am, a man–a giant man who can use my size to intimidate you, too! Freaking out my patients is so much fun!” And that woman who wants to force frightened and traumatized patients to see doctors they are extremely uncomfortable with for “healing” purposes is even worse.
My husband prefers female doctors. He was born with a disability, and had way too much experience growing up with patronizing, old school patriarchal male doctors who refused to listen to a thing he (or his mother, who did a lot of the talking with his doctors) said. For myself, given a choice between a male doctor and a female doctor without knowing anything about either, I’d take my luck with the woman first. But I’d be willing to see a male doctor who was recommended to me by someone I trust as a good doctor.
i trust female ob/gyns more for probably somewhat bigoted reasons, but their motives are no clearer than those of male ob/gyns or dentists of any sex.
people do weird things for money. it’s not a he/she thing. whatever gender and motivation, i’m certainly glad i can get an expert to look at my moister parts every now and again.
you’re great, twisty, but if men were insisting on male urologists, i suspect you would be taking the opposite tack here.
“But the good doctor assured me that “you don’t have any nerve endings there, so that couldn’t have hurt.â€
This may be chalked up to incompetence and insensitivity, rather than sex, but just the same, I’ll never have a male gyn again. ”
Cafesiren:
So if you have a bad experience with a female doctor, is it because she is female or because she is a bad doctor?
The doctor that you had was an idiot. Everyone knows that procedure hurts like hell.
What if you had a female doctor who had that procedure, but it didnt hurt her very much? Is she going to be as sympathetic?
My point is a bad doctor is a bad doctor.
I can certainly understand the point of the person who said she was more comfortable being unclothed around other women. You should be as comfortable as possible but that doesnt mean that male doctors are perverts or less compentent than women.
The inability of those docs to understand that some women have a problem with males during an intimate exam just reinforces my desire to see a female gyn.
It’s not prejudice to prefer a female gyn; it’s a comfort issue. I don’t feel comfortable unclothed in front of a stranger of any sex (never had gym class), so to decrease my anxiety, I’ll pick the one I feel least uncomfortable with. There was some posting there about how the medical profession desensitizes one to nudity; well, it hasn’t desensitized me to MY OWN nudity, just to that of others.
If I had to see a psychiatrist, I wouldn’t go to one who looked like my mom; that’s also a comfort issue, but the difference here is that the psychiatrist wouldn’t take it personally.
reading over the other comments, i realize that perhaps my preference for female doctors isn’t so baseless after all.
due to some bad communication, i needed plan b once, and the male doctor i ended up with dragged his feet HARD about forking it over. when i asked if i could have some extra as a back-up, that was a no-go for sure. then he wrote me a birth control pill prescription, though i’d made it crystal clear i would not take them (i prefer condoms as needed to pumping my body with unnatural hormone levels at all times).
i picked up the pills anyway, which i’ve occasionally used as plan b (google can tell you how). i know what i’m doing — i’ve been at this for 15 years with no unplanned pregnancies — and no female doctor has ever disrespected me so utterly as this male doctor.
Furmious: Pap smears can be done less frequently in a woman who is low risk (ie has no history of either HPV or abnormal pap smears). For someone at higher risk, it’s still better to screen more frequently. Cervical cancer is usually slow growing but pap smears are relatively insensitive and it’s possible to miss early lesions that might be only mildly progressed after one year but more seriously so after 2 or 3 years. But technical improvements are making pap smears more sensitive so maybe that claim will be obsolete in a few years. I’d certainly rather only have to get a pelvic exam every three years. I have the vague idea that the pill can make cervical cancer act more aggressively, which would be another reason for wanting more frequent pap smears in women taking oral contraceptives, but I’m not sure I’m right about that. That claim may be full of santorum.
All this talk about doctors who don’t believe that pelvic exams can hurt reminds me of a story I heard once. I’m not sure it really happened, but I rather hope so. Doctor X (a particularly nasty ob/gyn attending whom I hesitate to call “misogynistic” because I think the term isn’t inclusive enough to describe him: he hated men too), after a rather rough and painful pelvic exam says to patient, “Stop whining. You don’t have any nerves down there. Do you really think that that hurt?” Patient responds with right hook to the jaw and the comment “Yes. Did that?”
American insurance company recommendations continue to be every year if you are on the pill b/c obviously if you are on the pill you are a whore (see above).
Not so fast, Fruminous. Individual doctors may harbor this garbage thinking, but insurance companies are generally loathe to pay for anything they aren’t convinced of by actuarial data.
The population on the pill is a population that tends to be more sexually active. But pill users are also taking synthetic hormones which can influence carcinogenesis in responsive tissues. Furthermore, birth control pills regulate hormonal cycles, meaning that certain types of changes may be masked or go undetected.
Just because patriarchy exists and it sucks and flavors all that it touches, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take care of ourselves!
In response to Kat, I am inclined to say yes - we do need those exams so routinely. (Disclaimer - I am a medical student, and thus may be a bit brainwashed by “the establishment.” But hear me out.) Early detection of gynecological cancers can be key in catching them before they have changed from a totally treatable condition with virtually 100% cure rate to a more invasive condition.
To quote “Cervical cancer used to be one of the most common causes of cancer death for American women. But between 1955 and 1992, the number of deaths from cervical cancer declined 74 percent. The main reason for this decline was the introduction and use of the Pap test, which detects abnormal cervical cells, to find cervical cancer early.”*
However, having said all that, the American Cancer Society says that if you use the new liquid-based Pap, it is acceptable to have an exam every 2 years, and for women over 30 who have had 3 normal exams in a row and who don’t have other risk factors, they can switch to every 2 or 3 years.
I think it’s good to think about avoiding excessive invasive testing, but I think that the more important problem is the group of women, mostly of lower SES, who never get a Pap at all or never get one until there is a problem. These women will continue to die in greater numbers from preventable cancers until we can find a way to make healthcare more accessable.
In response to Will, yes - thank you. I know many OB/GYNs of both genders, and they go into the profession for a variety of reasons. Also agreeing on the “bad doctors can come in any gender” thought. I go to school with some men who will make very fine sensitive doctors, and some women who I wouldn’t want to go to with any sort of problem, let alone a GYN one. The point remains, a bad doc is bad because they are insensitive or ignorant, NOT because they have a certain set of genetalia. I don’t see anyone saying they’d only go to an oncologist who’s had cancer. Does that mean that cancer docs can’t be empathetic and treat their patients well? I sincerely hope not. I know that some women have personal reasons for preferring women for such a sensitive exam, and I can respect that. But I do not think that gender bias (in either direction) should be that basis - women do not always make better doctors, period. Neither do men. Intelligent, caring people make good doctors. My dream is that some day the “bad” docs will go out of business - patients will feel empowered enough to leave behind the docs that don’t respect them, and nobody will have to endure bad practice of medicine any more. Idealistic, I know, but let me dream.
*http://www.fhcrc.org/research/diseases/cervical_cancer/
well said, Sara.
No kidding, Alexandrine. If that were me in the examination room and Dr. Lynn said “too late now,” I would say “no, it is NOT too late” and leave. Just for that statement, I would leave. If a doctor is that arrogant and dismissive before the exam starts, how will he be during the exam? If he doesn’t give a shit about my comfort when he walks into the room, am I supposed to believe he’ll start caring once he’s got the speculum in his hands?
It sounds as if people here assume that female ob/gyns automatically have it and male’s do not.
Will, I don’t think that is what people here are assuming at all — certainly not across the board. Certainly that is not the point I was making. It’s all very well to say competence is not gender-specific — and it isn’t — but if a woman, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to take her clothes off in front of a strange man, she is not obliged to “get over” that discomfort for the sake of the male doctor.
I agree that she isnt obliged to “get over it” just for her doctor. As I said, every woman deserves to be treated with respect by her doctor. Period.
But wasnt the point of the post that men somehow are horrible ob/gyn’s?
The examples were given as reason to avoid all male ob/gyn’s. The statements were provided not as examples of insensitive or bad doctors but of reason why men are bad ob/gyns.
Thus, if I posted a bunch of ridiculous, indefensible statements made by female doctors, I wouldnt suggest that you avoid all female doctors.
[Men] don’t have to start [rectal exams] until they are 45 or so, but after that, yes.
I had my first rectal exam at age 18, and have been getting them pretty consistently at checkups since then. Based on the way the doctors approach doing it, I think I find the procedure much less unpleasant than the average male patient, which I guess makes sense given my sexual orientation. Nevertheless, I tend to like my women doctors’ exams better, and not just because of smaller finger size. They just seem to have (on average) a gentler attitude and less of a tendency to act as if they know what my experience is going to be like.
Testicular exams absolutely freak me out, on the other hand. I’ve never had a woman do one of those, but some of my male doctors have more or less implied that it doesn’t bother them, so it shouldn’t bother me. In other words, having the same anatomy seemed to result in less rather than more empathy.
This experience leads me to suspect that a part of the problem with male doctors may be that they have (again, on average) a greater sense of entitlement to decide what their patients are feeling, or should be feeling, and that this might be so even if they have, or could have, undergone the same medical procedures as their patients. Although I’ve had many good experiences with both male and female doctors, I’ve had fewer bad experiences with the women. So, other things being equal, I tend to prefer women doctors–in general, not just for “sensitive” procedures.
I guess my point is, my preference for women doctors is mild, but it’s there. Put me (hypothetcially) in the situation of being an ob/gyn patient, and I’m sure it would get a lot stronger. I’m sure there are male ob/gyns who are excellent, but unless I already knew one I’d be playing the odds to minimize the chances of an experience like some of those described above. If I had abuse issues, much more so.
Will says: “Men cannot want to take part in the childbirth process?”
I want to find those men that truly, meaningfully want to take part in the childbirth process.
I want to find the ones who can’t wait to have their stomachs heave every peice of food and in response to every slight odor for the first four months, then feel their bodies become stretched beyond belief, unable to walk or move around, chronic heartburn, poor bladder control, widened hips and ribs, risk of toxemia and other disorders.
I want to find the men who will lay on the delivery table, and push a watermelon out of the their penis.
Oh yes, I want to find the men who can’t wait to have swollen breasts, have to deal with gawking morons when having to nurse.
I want to find those men who will sacrifice years of their own personal ambitions because their first and foremost job is housecaring and child rearing and to like it and shut up about their their dreams of personal success. And of course, I want to find those men who will take the blame when the child is less than perfect, his mate leaves him or he can’t find a way to balance child rearing and earning a living.
Sure Will, come on, show we what part you want.
On a positive to you Will, you point up what I agree with: “It sounds as if people here assume that female ob/gyns automatically have it and male’s do not. Vote with your backs! Go to excellent, understanding doctors whether they are male or female. If you give your business (so to speak) to a female simply because she is a female, you are losing an opportunity to reward the good ones and punish the bad ones.”
I have three children and my experiences with ob/gyns is pretty limited to those experiences as i must admit, without health insurance I haven’t been keeping up on my regular pap smears. I guess I should make an appointment somewhere.
Anyway, the first ob/gyn was a young doc who was as cold as ice and I couldn’t understand for the life of me why he was in that particular field as it seems that he didn’t give rat’s ass about women. Almost every visit he referred to me as some other woman and then would look at his file, and say, “Oh, sorry…” and search his file for the right name.
When wheeled in to the delivery room when the child was crowning and my body was feeling like it was ripping apart, the nurses admonished me, “Not now, not now, don’t push now.” Whilst saying to eachother, “Where is he?” “Doesn’t he know she’s here?” Another nurse retorted, “I guess he doesn’t want to be interrupted for his morning coffee.” He was there to catch the kid, snip the cord, did his other duties and promptly left. I told later that because I didn’t have insurance, this doc did not register me as being affiliated with his practice, I guess for fear of compromsing his standing with the hospital, so when I entered the hospital that night, no one even knew who I was and there was all kinds of flurry about what to do with me.
My second child, in another state, I decided I’d do something different and see a female gyn. I went to the appointment and lied about having had a child previously. I was nineteen and filled with guilt because i still wasn’t married (that’s another story). The woman had me down on the table, jamming her fingers inside me saying all the while, “Why did you lie to me? I can tell you’ve had a child. You have stretch marks.” She must have prodded my insides for a good five minutes while chiding me, like I was going to sit there and tell her that I felt like the dirty whore the whole world was telling me young unmarried mothers were while she had her fingers inside me, ramming me impetulently. I never returned to her.
THen there’s the third child, in yet another state where I saw a male gyno who was located down the street from where I lived. Mind you, I had no way of communicating with anyone about who was good and who wasn’t, it was hit or miss.
I was lucky. He was sensitive and caring and although I don’t think any pap smear or ‘exam’ can ever be less than humiliating, he was perfunctoral and also understanding. He had a pic of Magnum PI on the ceiling, “At least you’ll have something to look at.” he said, I liked his sense of humor. He knew I was too young to already be on my third child. He knew that something was wrong with the much older than me assbag I was married to, he knew that I lived in poverty and it wasn’t all my fault.
Once he came up to me and said, “You have a donation today?” when I began to explain how I had no money to pay and no insurance because my then husband wasn’t working, he said, “I’m only kidding, don’t worry about it, I want you to not worry about money, lets just focus on you staying healthy and not getting all worked up over that. I’ve got plenty of paying patients.”
Prior to delivery he told me that the powers that be at the hospital didn’t like it when he referred non-insured patients and not to be upset if they give me a run-around, that its a sucky system, but there it is. He said to call him before I had to go, at home, no matter what hour so he would know to get ready and be there. And he was, true to his word.
I never paid the guy because I never had the money and he never bothered me about it. He saw all my children for well child visits and never asked for a dime. He always asked me how I was doing and made it clear that he didn’t think that my ‘marriage’ was much of such. I wasn’t hearing anyone at that time for further help, but I know he would have tried to help me get out of there if I was ready and had asked.
O still think about him and I know he’s in practice in the same place. I am climbing out of years of poverty and when I get the money, I intend to pay him even though it was years ago, I want him to know he did right.
Yes Will, you are right. There are good and bad among all. The patriarchy would never be so successful if there weren’t so many women out there willing to assist.
The reason I want a female gyno is not because I think her gender will make her a good doctor or because she will automatically be more sympathetic. I want a female gyno because of the power imbalance between my doctor and me. Being in a doctor/patient relationship already gives a doctor power over me, adding male privilege to the picture puts me in a situation where I have little voice. While he may not use this power in an unscrupulous manner, he could. That is not a situation I am willing to put myself in.
I am appalled that this discussion of when it is permissible for a woman to want a female gyno is even taking place. Since when it is it up to us to approve or disapprove of the reasons a woman chooses a female doctor? The fact that women are being forced to justify their choice of doctors shows the level of control this culture exerts over female bodies.
“I am appalled that this discussion of when it is permissible for a woman to want a female gyno is even taking place. Since when it is it up to us to approve or disapprove of the reasons a woman chooses a female doctor? The fact that women are being forced to justify their choice of doctors shows the level of control this culture exerts over female bodies”
I must have missed that part of the discussion.
I believe that every single poster has said that any woman can decide who she wants to choose for herself for whatever reasons she wants.
I do not understand your comment about the power imbalance. A female doctor does not have the same power that a male doctor does? I am not following your meaning.
“Male privelege” is a nice feminist theoretical structure which OPG uses to express herself, and to not to have to answer to counterarguements that just about any doctor that has an asshole can be one too.
It has a nice ring to it. Very academic. Very empowering to sling around. It isn’t a preference, it’s power and prevelige deconstructionist discombobulatory obfuscatory and only for those in the know!
Unfortunately, “I don’t want a man touching me and I don’t have to justify it” doesn’t have the same academic whoomph as “I don’t want him exercising his male privelege”. In my mind, however, it is far more feminist to say “you know, I really don’t have to justify this to anybody - my body, MYOFB!, rather than couch it in inaccessible semantic code words designed to set up your own easy-bake heirarchy of exclusion.
MYOB! is another.
when i read this, what caught my eye was the idiotic notion that “men tend to overestimate the pain of a normal birth.” and then, holy cow, the way to overcome PTSD from rape is to be forced to see a male ob/gyn. sheesh.
i had wonderful male doctors when i was pregnant with my first baby, and despite complications requiring a c-section, everything was good. they were good docs; they showed respect for me; never talked down, never made assumptions, always explained, always gave credit to how i felt and what i wanted.
whole different thing when my daughter was born, overseas and at a military hospital. the docs i saw pre-delivery were fine, but when she decided to emerge, i got stuck with “super-patriarchy-doc”! a doctor so wonderful, he never introduced himself to me! he thought i was “not really in labor” and went to play cards, up until the time of delivery!! i wanted pain meds, but i couldn’t get them, because by the time HE figured out i was in labor, it was too late! and THEN — during the actual delivery, when my body was 100% in charge — this damned moron told me to “stop pushing.” let me tell you, he did not get a tip for service. i believe he is the person who thinks men overestimate the pain of regular childbirth. it is probably lucky i never learned his name.
i really agree with the good doc/bad doc points people have made.
and i really agree that if someone has a reason for seeking a female OB/GYN, that is fine. it is more than fine for people who have been victimized — surely these doctors are not so uneducated as to believe severe trauma should be disregarded, or that parents should choose a more frightening way to do first exams than one that is easier for the child.
I’m the patient, I pay the bills, I get to choose my doctor just like I get to choose my lawyer, my accountant, my dentist and any other professional I’m paying. It is no one’s business but my own what professionals I choose and why. (Like maybe if I was raped I would choose a woman therapist, my husband used to do divorce law-lots of guys chose him because he was a man over the woman lawyer in the area .)
The doctors on that site sense of entitlement is so off the charts-acting like women are children who should be good little girls and do what daddy doctor tells them-that they even put down their real names, office location and e-mails! Anyone could make a list of these jerks, and print it all over the internet as in “OBGYN’s for Women to Avoid!”
(Boy their partners in practice will be so pleased with these fool doctors come monday morning-all this good free publicity and all for their offices. I’m sure these posts will have women lined up to make appointments-If there is one thing no woman wants to know it is the secret thoughts of her OBGYN-male or female.)
The examples were given as reason to avoid all male ob/gyn’s. The statements were provided not as examples of insensitive or bad doctors but of reason why men are bad ob/gyns.
That isn’t how I read it; I didn’t get the impression that Twisty thought all male ob/gyns are incompetent. I think that technical competence is beside the point. It’s not that the commenters are bad doctors (although given their expressed attitude towards their patients, I’d be willing to bet that they are); it’s that they exhibit a really typical variety of patriarchal male entitlement. They, as men, believe they are entitled to access to women’s naked bodies, regardless of our wishes. Our refusal to grant them this access is taken as an insult, as unacceptable discrimination, as bigotry.
If a hospital refused to hire a male obstetrician I’d agree with you — competence should be all that matters.
I don’t think you could find comparable statements made by female doctors — even female urologists. In this culture, there isn’t an expectation that men owe women access to their bodies or that women should be allowed to speak for men.
I don’t think male gynecologists are perverts or incompetent. I’ll leave it to Twisty to clarify how she feels about that; I have a feeling I don’t entirely agree with her. But I do find this “a bad doctor is a bad doctor” argument really simplistic.
MsKate: Excellent points, though I disagree with the entire notion of being “more” [or less] “feminist.” Speaking of the subject at all makes a woman more a feminist than the patriarchy would seem to prefer, and qualifies, for me anyway, as “enough.” Which is maybe what you meant when you closed with “MYOB is another.” I presume you meant “MYOB is another [easy-bake code for setting up a hierarchy of exclusion.]” Yes? No?
Then again, the whole “what is feminism?” question has been very hard for me to answer in any kind of specific way.
Will: The fact that you actually felt it necessary to say (way up there), “Women have the right to have quality medical care,” lies right at the core of this and so many issues regarding women’s health care.
I was just reading about this very thing, albeit in an oldish book, Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology which I think is from 78. What got me was that many of the things she was saying, like abot estrogen replacement for post menopausal women being potentially harmful, have come the fruition.
I am generally distrustful of the medical profession, having taught many a pre-med;in general I find doctors to be bad scientists. That is, they tend to be dismissive of anything outside the range of things they memorized in med shcool, and they don’t aren’t generally good at diagnostics becuase they dont bother employing the scientific method. Hence they wouldn’t be likley to listen when you say “that hurts”, which is an empirical obsevation, but instead they would just say, “according to so so so it shouldn’t hurt that much therefore it probably doesn’t…just suck it up”. I can only assume female gynos would be less likely to do this becuase at least they have some first hand experience.
Wow. Great thread.
And I’ve learned something: apparently, Pap smears, done properly, aren’t supposed to make you bleed and cramp up. Chalk that up as one more reason for me to hate my appalling student health service–and, by the way, most of these rough exams have been conducted by women, because I’m more comfortable with women doing my gyno exams.
Will, I absolutely agree with you that male doctors (ob-gyns included) can be excellent and that female ones can be terrible, and that it’s best to work on the basis of individual, rather than gender-based, selection. The single most incompetent doctor I’ve ever run across in my life–who put not only me, but two of my friends, in life-threatening situations–was a woman. (Then again, I’ve had plenty of experiences with male doctors which were pretty appalling, and I had one who couldn’t be bothered to look at anything other than my breasts for the entire exam, despite the fact that the injury was to my ankle.) And, though I love Twisty passionately, I disagree with her assumption that men who wish to go into OB/GYN work are universally suspect in their motivations.
Here’s the thing, though: thanks to the marvelous condition of our health-care system in this country, it’s often very hard to know much of anything about the individual doctors whose names are handed to you on a list of those available to you for insurance coverage. So, yeah, given a choice among doctors I know absolutely nothing about, I choose to have my gyno exam done by a woman. And that’s about my comfort level, which–pace Dr. Face-Your-Fear’s comments from the board Twisty’s citing–is damn important. My gyno exam room is not an arena for me to confront my fears about the possibility of being sexually abused by a pervy male doctor while my feet are up in stirrups. Or of simply having to deal with an insensitive guy who lacks both the equipment and the empathy to understand that yes, dammit, pelvic exams and other gyno procedures can be both painful and traumatic.
I’m also going to back up obsoletepostgrrrl on something here: yes, there is a difference in the power a male doctor has vs. the power a female one does. It’s a sad, but true, fact which results from living life in a patriarchy. Other things being equal, men simply have more power than women. And when the power differential provided by the doctor-patient relationship is compounded by that gendered one, yes, it can make a very big difference.
This is something that Dr.-Boy-Named-Lynn is well aware of when he walks his jerkwad 6′4″ self into an exam room and tells women who thought they’d be examined by another woman that it’s “too late now” to back out. (By the way, seriously! I’d be double-quick about telling Lynn that he was much mistaken about it being “too late” and that, if he planned on forcing me to be examined by him, he’d better get ready to face criminal charges. And that’s not because he’s a man. That’s because he’s a blowhard misogynist who enjoys intimidating women.)
All other things being equal, I’d choose a female OB/GYN over a male one. I’m just more comfortable with someone who, when we’re both fully clothed, is more like me in this polarized society. But how often are all other things equal? I want a good doctor, a kind and skilled doctor, and if that doc is a man, okay. There are a lot of factors in choosing a doctor. For example, I’d tend toward choosing a younger male doctor than an older male doctor. Either can be a big loser dickhead, but I’d be more inclined to trust a man who’s gone to medical school with lots of women.
In reality, most of my routine exams are done by a friendly, extremely competent female nurse practitioner. I don’t have to see a medical doctor, usually.
Will, I appreciate your comments. Here’s the thing: I’ve never exercised my option for child-bearing, even though I have all the requisite parts. Shouldn’t I be a less preferred choice if I were an OB/GYN?
If I had a daughter, I’d go along with what she preferred, and I’d also be sure she knows that whenever she gets the “uh-oh” feeling, she’s perfectly justified in bringing the action to a screeching halt, even if it’s in the office of a big shot doctor. (As I’d teach a son, too. Question authority, right?)
(Hi Twisty. Give Bertie a tummy rub for me, okay?)
My mom, not exactly the most progressive woman out there, would only see male OB/GYNs and was overly suspicious of and hostile towards female ones. She once made the comment that “you have to wonder why a woman would enter that field.” Did I mention we didn’t agree on much?
Some lame OB/GTN comments/moments that have stuck with me that I blame the patriarchy for:
1) (From a magazine article for pregnant women, written by a dude) “You may experience some mild discomfort during childbirth.”
2) Women have very few never endings in their vaginas. I actually read that in a number of articles in the early 90s. I always figured it was a rumor circulated for the benefit of men with tiny penises.
3) Douchebag gyno from Kentucky who made a habit of branding the initials of his alma mater onto women’s uteruses.
After reading your post, Twisty, I happened upon this Village Voice article on professional submissives, with such stomach-turning quotes like:
“I surprise myself at how far my pain tolerance has evolved. For example, I had a client sew my vaginal lips shut, and I didn’t make a peep,” Ophelia boasts via e-mail. “I had another client who took 18-gauge needles, heated them until they were red-hot, and used them to pierce the insides of my butt cheeks. I could hear my skin sizzling as the needles penetrated me.”
Byron Mayo, co-owner of the BDSM advertising hot spot Eros-Guide.com and former owner of a commercial San Francisco dungeon, has nothing but praise for the skills pro subs bring to their trade. “You can touch places in a really good sub session that most marriages don’t get to in years. The result is a sense of psychological intimacy most of us crave but rarely get,” he says. “In a world of political correctness, confusing role models, and enforced ‘equality,’ the ability to tell a beautiful, intelligent, and demure woman to get on her knees and do what you say is a fantasy come true.”
I understand that people claim painful sex helps them understand fear and trauma and rape and all of that, but there’s something really eerie to me about an entire field of non-penetrative prostitution in which a man pays to torture a live woman who becomes really proud of herself for not responding with screams or calls to the police. Is this some kind of bourgeois misogynist dissociation from suffering? Like, we’re so horrified by what our government does to innocent people in torture camps and by what men do to women every day that we have to repeat it, commodify it, and praise its “open-mindedness” or whatever? Ugh. I feel like I need to throw up.
“In a world of political correctness, confusing role models, and enforced ‘equality,’ the ability to tell a beautiful, intelligent, and demure woman to get on her knees and do what you say is a fantasy come true.â€
I wanna be a rapist! The world is mean to me because it doesn’t let me be a rapist! Waaaaaaa!
I find it revealing, White Bear, that the number of male subs willing to have their testicular sacs sewn to their cock appears to be zero.
This other VV article by the same writer on rape fantasies is pretty disturbing too.
Most of Rachel Kramer Bussel’s columns make me deeply sad. I think it’s fine if she wants to use the Voice as a forum for her sexual insecurities and advertising her desire to get spanked — all of us have insecurities and sexual predilections — but why is she such a vocal advocate of the “right” of women to sell their blood and flesh, literally asking men to cut their bodies into pieces, and of the “right” of men to want to torture, demean, and silence women?
I wonder — why are all these first-person accounts of how right it feels to be anally raped, used like flesh in a butcher’s shop, and bought and sold — why are they all written by women? I read one of them, incidentally, and found out it’s all about Daddy. “Daddy humiliated me, and therefore, it’s reasonable for this stranger to ignore my cries of distress and hurt me. In the end, I see God or something.”
Why isn’t there a better way for women to deal with the harm done to them as girls by their fathers? Is being physically abused and sexually humiliated the only therapy?
I used to feel this way, to some degree, because it was much easier than finding someone who really loved me to undo the damage rather than repeat it. I’ve been lucky, though.
Which is maybe what you meant when you closed with “MYOB is another.†I presume you meant “MYOB is another [easy-bake code for setting up a hierarchy of exclusion.]†Yes? No?
Sorry, that was a fragment of one of the other sentences that got clipped, replicated, and stuck to the bottom. Meant nothing. Sorry.
By “more or less feminist” I meant “more or less of an assertion of personhood”. Even the most feminist-theory grounded of explanations or justifications is still an explanation or justification. When it comes to who touches your body in whatever way for whatever reason, you don’t need one. Nobody needs one. Period.
“The population on the pill is a population that tends to be more sexually active.”
More sexually active than who? Of all sexually active women, the question of who needs to be screened and how often should be based on who is at most risk for cervical cancer. Here is some studies from PubMed on HPV, oral contraceptives, and cervical cancer which find no increased risk of cervical cancer in oral contraceptive users, even compared to users of other hormonal contraceptives:
From Int J Cancer: http://tinyurl.com/dhoer
J Am Acad Nurse Pract (review article): http://tinyurl.com/ak5o4
Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev.: http://tinyurl.com/ey7tc
This one, on the other hand, does show an increased risk
Ann N Y Acad Sci. (review article): http://tinyurl.com/ch2vy
from the abstract:
“In many studies COCs have been associated with an increased risk of cervical abnormalities and cervical cancer, but there might be alternative explanations for these epidemiological associations (COC users can start having sexual intercourse at an earlier age, they have more sexual partners, and they rarely use barrier methods of contraception), so OCs act as a promoter for HPV-induced carcinogenesis.”
ie, it’s not the pills that are the problem, it is the multiple partners and lack of condoms. OC use is a confounding factor. Now, incorporating studies such at these into best-practice in a clinical setting should result in pap recomendations based on a sexual history of the patients (HPV infection state, multiple sexual partners, lack of use of barrier contraceptives). Instead, we have the pill-user-as-whore model. The every-3-years recommendation is relatively new; I would say less than 5 years old, maybe less than 3. The fact that doctors have not adjusted their practices and the insurance companies have not jumped on the bandwagon and stopped insisting on yearly pap results before paying for OC prescriptions shows just how deeply ingrained the whore model is. Show me some data which say that OC using, HPV negative, monogamous women with normal pap results have higher incidence of cevical cancer than non-OC using, etc, etc, women and I’ll quit my bitching.
“I wonder — why are all these first-person accounts of how right it feels to be anally raped, used like flesh in a butcher’s shop, and bought and sold — why are they all written by women?”
That’s and easy one: They are hand picked and proffered to titillate the VV’s male readership! And women unfortunate enough to encounter these articles better keep their damn mouths shut unless they want to be called out for being puritanical or bourgeois or anti-sex or GOD FORBID, anti-men!
And the men who object aren’t treated much better. Didn’t the guy who used to write the porn reviews at the Voice get dumped after he spoke out against a particularly disgusting and dangerous trend in porn? (I’m sparing you the details of the act itself, you don’t want to know, at least I didn’t.)
Will in 35: “But wasnt the point of the post that men somehow are horrible ob/gyn’s?”
No. But I don’t expect all blog readers to read for comprehension.
You will note that the most egregious excerpt–the one about the “desensitization”–is attributed to a woman ob/gyn.
So, just in case you don’t have time to actually read the post, here’s the primary point: some doctors are complete assholes.
Here’s the secondary point: people should be allowed to decide whose fingers they want up their cootchie, and their reasons should not be questioned.
“here’s the primary point: some doctors are complete assholes.
Here’s the secondary point: people should be allowed to decide whose fingers they want up their cootchie, and their reasons should not be questioned.”
I agree completely with your second point. As I said previously, I do not think anyone has disagreed with that idea.
You said I didnt read your post for comprehension. You accused me of not understanding your post. But the very first sentence you wrote was not gender specific. You said “I reveal no secrets when I say that the idea of the male ob/gyn sorely inflames the revulsion center in my obstreperal lobe.”
Then, you finished with “any dude who springs out of bed one fine morning to declare “I will be a gynecologist, by Jove!†is precisely the sort of dude who should be confined in an asylum.
I mean, in what other profession does a man view disembodied pussy as a source of revenue?”
So, now, you say your post was meant to say, in a gender neutral way, that “some doctors are assholes.”
I love your website, but, with all due respect, I do not think that you are correct to say that I have such poor reading comprehension that I didnt understand your post.
Yo, I just have to say that this website opens my mind in every way.
I for one found the arrogance displayed obgyn fourm to be completely nauseating. This has been said, but I will say it agin. Women should be able to pick their doctors on WHATEVER basis they choose. Don’t like western medicine too much? Be free to choose a holistic practitioner. Don’t like haitch-holes? Don’t go see a doctor who is a man! (I kid, I kid. Personally I have bad experiences with both xy & xx doctors.) But see, yo, it’s my choice. If I don’t like big hairy man hands near my nethers, it’s **my** body so **I** get to say who gets to get near ‘em. Not you, dear doctor, or you ole patriarchy.
People pick doctors based on lotsa factors. I know people who have changed/chosen doctors based on whether or not the doctor had the same skin color or ethnicity as them. Whatever makes the patient comfortable so that the patient can discuss her problems with her doctor should be the criteria.
But no, those guys have such an inflated sense of entitlement that they think the patient should be comfortable with whomever sticking their inspector gadgets into her orifices. I would like to see them take all their energy they’ve been using to complain about how they’re “discriminated” against and use it to create equality and a society where women subjugated.
Isn’t it sad that it is just a dream?
Meanwhile they get to pick their patients by deciding which insurance to accept etc.
gah!
two typos at least. shux.
“displayed _on the_ obgyn forum”
i meant “and use it to create equality and a society where women _are not_ subjugated”.
so very sorry bout that!
I think the bottom line, so to speak, is that women and men both have the right to pick the doctor of their choice and owe no one any explanation. Health care is about what is in the best interest of the patient- mentaly and physically. NOT what is in the ego needs of the doctor. That should be self-evident to patients and doctors alike. We as women patients don’t need to reassure male doctors that they are “good doctors” too, nor to reassure random males that they can make good doctors. Cause at the end what has this turned into but another case of women fufilling the role of reassuring the male ego, even when they are the patients paying the bill, even when the doctors are the ones who are suppose to be meeting the needs of the patients. Maybe I like going to women doctors, for the same reason I would choose a woman lawyer or therapist. Because I can focus on my issues and not worry about addressing their ego baggage. Because to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about my doctor’s emotional needs.
Ok, I haven’t read the rest of the post and I haven’t read all the comments and I will admit to having a male OB/GYN (it’s a long story.)
But!!! “It’s too late now”?????????????/ What a bleeding asshole. Obviously, it’s something that’s important to these women, or they wouldn’t have brought it up. I’d like to think that faced with that attitude, I’d say “y’know, nevermind - I’ll find somebody else. Go away so I can change.”
On another note, a hunk of Brillat Savarin, a box of Wheat Thins (it’s good, trust me) and a bottle of Malbec make a fabulous blog-hopping, junior-patriarchy-blaming meal.
Will,
I apologize; I was snippy. Like many feminists who hate patriarchy, I get tired of writing all the time “I dont hate men, I don’t hate men.” I believe that the personal aspects of the post to which you allude, i.e. “I personally prefer a female gyno because in a patriarchy the male/pussy relationship is one of uncomfortable ickiness for me” are not the equivalent of “male gynos are all incompetent.”
But seriously. Isn’t pussy literally the moneymaker for the ob/gyn? Am I missing something?
The least unpleasant pap I’ve had was by a female general practicioner, not a gyno at all. Not that any of them have really been horrific.
I’ve never had a Pap smear. I’ve also never had sex with a penis and I don’t usually use tampons because I really, really, really hate the feeling of having ANYTHING up my vagina. I haven’t been abused. I have no history of cervical cancer in my family. Maybe I’m being irresponsible, but I’d rather not not put my cooch in any kind of discomfort. Reading these comments, it seems like a lot of you have had awful gyno experiences, regardless of the gender of the gyn. I think the whole system is fucked — does this really need to be part of my experience of Being A Woman, having a stranger poke and prod me every year?
“…Isn’t pussy literally the moneymaker for the ob/gyn? Am I missing something?…”
That’s true. It’s why I don’t agree with Delphyne’s assessment. (”… Why would a man want to become a gynecologist? And the only answer I’ve been able to find is an ugly one.”)
OB/GYN is a big, lucrative specialty. It’s unique in that treating healthy women is routine and appropriate. Our reproductive systems are complicated environments, and we don’t have to be “sick” in order to tend to them. (It’s also true that there’s crass exploitation of our health care needs for profit, but that’s not unique to gynecology.) A community can support numerous OB/GYN practices because such a large segment of the population uses their services. It’s a whole different situation with, say, neurosurgeons. Neurosurgeons are more like mountain lions: each one needs a certain amount of roaming space. An average community uses many more OB/GYNs than it does neurosurgeons.
I’m just saying that I can’t automatically ascribe weird or ugly motives to any physician, male or female, who chooses an OB/GYN practice. It’s a sensible choice, in terms of making a living, and as a consumer, I don’t mind having a big roster of practitioners to choose from.
I’m less inclined to judge someone for being picky — for any reason at all — when it comes to something so intimate as their doctor. I think that any reason at all is a valid reason for saying, “sorry, I need someone else.”
I don’t think that this is universally the case. I wouldn’t necessarily approve of a woman who insisted that she have a female investment broker, or a white person who insisted on having a white investment broker.
However, in the case of a gynecologist, I think that the intrinsic discomfort of being the patient validates pretty much any motive, from “I want a woman” to “I want one of the same race as me,” even if we wouldn’t consider such motives valid for a less uncomfortable, intimate form of service.
Gayle wrote: They are hand picked and proffered to titillate the VV’s male readership! And women unfortunate enough to encounter these articles better keep their damn mouths shut unless they want to be called out for being puritanical or bourgeois or anti-sex or GOD FORBID, anti-men!
I should note that I once, on a previous blog, wrote a very tame anonymous response to Bussel’s work, basically saying that her writing lacked focus or something, and suddenly found that (a) Ms. Bussel linked to the post basically saying I’d caused her to feel like she had to toughen up (as if she didn’t know this before? as a tabloid sex writer?) and (b) that various misogynistic defenders of RKB had begun to write on their blogs that I was obviously a “clampc*nt bitch” who “pranced around campus in sweaty underthings” or something. The details were unbelievable. The main leader of the anti-me society started describing how he imagined I looked, physically, what was the history of my sex life, and said that since my writing tended to be on academic issues, that I clearly needed some kind of sex therapy to reorganize my principles. Sure, Derrida wrote about language and he was a genius; I write about language and I’m a clampc*nt bitch.
Gosh, pussies.
I have trouble stating my thoughts on this issue in clear, non-rage-laden tones. It should go something like this, but bear with the rough patches. This is hard work for Sunya:
I don’t think pelvic exams are worth the physical invasion, the anxiety, or most of all the widespread and oppressive pressure to obtain them.
A stupid death from cervical cancer is to me preferable than the biannual rendering-up of my hoo-hoo to the probing fingers of a white-robed “professional.” There are many, many, many risks I - and millions of other women - take with my personal health, and the risk of cancer does not turn me aside from them any more than the risk of cancer turns aside all the other women in America from smoking, drinking, eating fatty foods, exercising seldom, inhaling environmental toxins, drinking bad water, driving cars, taking drugs that should have been FDA approved etc. etc. etc. etc.
All educated human beings make trade-offs where the risk of disease is concerned. I don’t understand why pelvic exams occupy such a sacred space in our collective cancer mythology that smoking women will get their pussies examined but won’t stop smoking, but, preventable death or no, into that pink room with that leg-spreading chair Sunya will not go.
FURTHERMORE, what worries me greatly is the prevalence of sex-organ-specific cancers in women. Men get prostate cancer but that’s about IT. Women - cervical cancer, breast cancer, ovarian cysts, the list goes on and on. I don’t honestly believe it’s a simple case of the “complicated environment” of women’s genitalia. My much darker suspicion is that the whole family of gynecological dysfunctions are less like chicken pox (inevitable in certain groups) and more like hip displasia in, forgive me, Twisty, Golden Retreivers: the result of bad ju-ju in the creation and perpetuation of the breed. To put it bluntly: I think, in a nightmarish little corner of my mind, that many of the problems with womanly plumbing are a kind of reaction to stress and oppression - it is the patriarchy’s fault. Like how animals start to scratch themselves til they bleed or start shedding all their hair when in captivity, women’s bodies eat themselves, in small and terrifying ways, incidentally but increasingly on genetic lines, because it sucks so fucking much to be a woman.
I think if it’s genuinely important to reduce the rates of terminal cancers in women, we ought to start not with invasive medicine, but with wide-spread Swedish-style social upheaval and the preventative medicine of failing to reduce women to walking piles of fuckability.
Sorry to have posted this off-topic series of comments. I just couldn’t shake the rage I felt, and then things happened later tonight that made me even more upset about Twisty’s post and RKB’s article, so I published the whole thing here. I’m waiting for the anger to subside.
Julian, I asked Merrill Lynch for a woman to help me place my 401(k). Not right off the bat, but the guy they gave me at first was the type who liked to boast extensively about all the restrictions he puts on his teenage step-daughter so that she can’t spend too much time with “the horndogs who only want one thing.” If there’s one thing more annoying than the horndogs who only want one thing, it’s the guys who clearly get off on thinking about the horndogs, while simultaneously believing that they’re superior to the horndogs & can put the horndogs to good use as a rationalization for thoroughly controlling the women in their lives. Not surprisingly, he took a very patronizing attitude towards me also.
Now I have a woman who takes what I would call a matronizing attitude, and bores the crap out of me with her excessive & plainly fake interest in my life, my job, my family, etc., but all in all she’s easier to take, and more willing to get down to business when I ask her to. Both of them ignore any attempts to get outside the usual investing box on my part and have probably just guided me wherever they get the best kickbacks.
Let’s put it this way, when I’m dealing with a profession where I know for a fact I’m going to get fucked, I would rather have a woman, because it’s (usually) easier for me to spot & understand their particular manipulative strategies & to pick my battles. Also, it’s important to maintain the principle that men only fuck me when I choose to fuck them back.
On a purely economic note I would much prefer to pay a woman to discuss the health of my naughty bits with me than a man. I also buy local produce and wouldn’t darken the door of a wallyworld. On a more personal note I think men who want to be ob/gyn are suspect, and I don’t trust pediatricians who are men either. I think these things based on personal experience not on propaganda promulgated by the patriarchy. Twisty, I so totally heart the blame button.
“But seriously. Isn’t pussy literally the moneymaker for the ob/gyn? Am I missing something?”
Practicing medicine is the moneymaker for the OB/GYN, as it is for any other doctor.
I’m not sure why this discussion is making me want to jump to the defense of OB/GYNs of both genders, but I’m going to chalk it up to my own stress over med-school-related things, and not to the fact that this