today I'm thinking about Rebecca Myers, a forensic psychologist who spent 16+ years working in prisons rehabilitating sex offenders
and how after years of working in sex offender rehabilitation the conclusion the government came to from the large amounts of data they got (2500+ offenders who went through the programme vs 13000+ offenders who did not) is that not only did nothing they did work, the sex offenders who went through the programme reoffended at higher rates:
keep in mind how few sexual offences get reported, never mind going to court and securing a conviction. keep in mind how few rapists go to jail, never mind get killed by the state for raping, never mind getting killed by anyone for raping.
I'm thinking about Rebecca Myers' conclusion at the end of that Times article about her book
she has to believe that she and the programme whose "graduates" only succeeded in reoffending more than those who hadn't gone through the programme did make a difference, because otherwise there wouldn't be a point in continuing on.
Leigh: What about the doctrine of “live and let live” and civil liberties issues?
Audre: I don’t see that as the point. I’m not questioning anyone’s right to live. I’m saying we must observe the courses and implications of our lives. If we are talking about feminism then the personal is political and we can subject everything in our lives to scrutiny. We have been nurtured in a sick, abnormal society, and we should be in the process of reclaiming ourselves, not the terms of that society. This is complex. I speak not about condemnation but about recognizing what is happening and questioning what it means. I’m not willing to regiment anyone’s life. If we are to scrutinize our human relationships, we must be willing to scrutinize all aspects of those relationships. The subject of revolution is ourselves, is our lives.
Sadomasochism is an institutionalized celebration of dominant/subordinate relationships. And, it prepares us either to accept subordination or to enforce dominance. Even in play, to affirm that the exertion of power over powerlessness is erotic, is empowering, is to set the emotional and social stage for the continuation of that relationship, politically, socially and economically.
Sadomasochism feeds the belief that domination is inevitable. It can be compared to the phenomenon of worshipping a godhead with two faces, and worshipping only the white part on the full moon and the black part on the dark of the moon, as if totally separate. But you cannot corral any aspect within your life, divorce its implications, whether it’s what you eat for breakfast or how you say goodbye. This is what integrity means.
i never understood why feminists get upset when people say our view of womanhood is just downright dreadful, that it’s not tea and it doesn’t eat and it’s just not the moment and it’s booooring and we make womanhood sound awful. and such and such demographic has a more beautiful view of it that we just don’t see.
because it’s true. it’s all true. they are right.
gender is the social system of female slavery that predates written history. gender was designed for this purpose and that is how it is enforced. what we call “female socialization” is really the psychological torture of the female human from birth to grave. all of these sociological terms, these analytical definitions, these cold, academic phrases protect us all from plainly confronting the horror and violence. psychological torture of women and girls becomes “female socialization,” the culturally encouraged compulsion to violate women and girls becomes “male socialization,” rape becomes “non-consenting sex,” sexual slavery becomes “heterosexuality,” and so on.
this psychological torture induces suicidal tendencies, self annihilation, and slave-like discipline and obedience into the minds of the female human. our natural fight or flight response is cruelly ground into dust due to the enforcement of gender. we are taught that self defense is inconvenient. we are violently groomed to value frailty and cowardice over strength and bravery, because femininity demands weakness. we do not eat. we put cancer causing chemicals on our faces, in our hair, in our vulvas in an attempt to fix what isn’t broken. we give ourselves infections. we punish our bodies for the crime of being female and our punishment is celebrated and rewarded. we are dying. we are taught to accelerate our own deaths for the benefit of men and civilization at large. a death cult and a slave society is forcefully installed in our minds and we are not free until death. that is what gender is.
gender transforms us into non-sentient objects, socially speaking. our social, physical, and sexual boundaries are held in contempt because they are not supposed to exist. gender maims and kills us. gender is wrapped up in god and the devil, and scripture and psychology, and religion and secularism, and it seems like we need to destroy heaven, hell and earth to be free of it. that is our impossible task.
that’s not very beautiful.
we aren’t supposed to see these things and we definitely aren’t supposed to name them. seeing the truth makes us mentally ill, naming the truth makes us bigots. i embrace our status as black sheep. we are criminals for seeing and naming. i look forward to what we will become when we move from seeing and naming and become brave enough to organize and attack. monsters? ghouls? a new kind of witch? the right wing says our rejection of men’s birthright makes us exterminators, harbingers of human extinction. that’s pretty cool. but that’s not beautiful. none of it is beautiful, and it is bereft of romance. the lovers of womanhood are right about that.
this is where we depart from our male supremacist enemies on the right and our male supremacist “allies” on the left. malcolm x spoke of foxes and wolves and they both have an appetite for our flesh as an entitlement and as a commodity, because of gender. all political movements need us to comply with our subjugation—the fascists, the communists, the anarchists, the liberals, the centrists. everyone loves gender. we must kill what they love. that’s not fun. no revolutionary goal is fun.
rejecting men’s ultimate political interest in our subjugation is very, very dreadful, and you will be excommunicated from the dominant social fabric for doing so. the wife who complains of her husband raping her too much will be banished from the village. the uterus haver whose vulva fails the moral criteria of unfettered inclusitivity will be kicked out of the queer socialist group chat. what happened to eve is simply the instructional manual for all women under patriarchy—you will be excommunicated for seeking knowledge and being disobedient.
being free sounds scary, confronting our prison sounds alienating, wouldn’t it be better to just have fun? if the slaves are conscious about their condition, they might resist, and that just isn’t beautiful. it’s not tea. it doesn’t eat. it’s not the moment.
while queers are telling us to smile a little bit more, to tap into our beautiful feminine souls and become empowered, sounding eerily similar to the christians they claim to hate so much, their right wing rivals want to abolish no fault divorce. our male comrades tell us we are counterrevolutionary for refusing to wait until they address men’s issues first. subservient leftist women who are deputized as prison wards to contain a feminist revolt are no better than tradwives. they both have chosen a specific male demographic to serve. why can’t we?
we are caught between two competing male supremacist movements that seek to extract resources from women’s labor, wombs, vulvas and flesh. that is what “Politics” is. that is what the real gender binary is. the global war between the older patriarchy of traditional feudal-agrarian societies and the modern patriarchy of liberal industrialized nations. they are competing over how the woman is regulated—through prostitution or through marriage? as birthing people or as surrogates?
it is too late to remove this knowledge from written history, so the modern patriarchy of liberal, industrial capitalism seeks to obfuscate these sexed patterns instead. we can’t name what we can’t define. it’s just too complex and too sophisticated and you need to be intersectional. if you still manage to name it after cutting through all of these distortions, excommunication awaits. we are all at risk of becoming eve for looking patriarchy in the eye and gouging it out. we must band together as vagrants and refugees.
but let’s not get distracted here. we are on no side of this war. excuse me for being ugly, and dramatic, and offensive, and boring. i like doing fun things. maybe the buzzkills will figure out what fun and beauty are all about one day. until then, the accusations are all true. our assessment will resonate with women as they see their position in our civilization for what it is, and we will not stop naming it until we have freed ourselves from it. i’m tired of us complaining too. we need to wrap this stage of history up and put it to sleep, for good.
One day you’ll have whatever it is you’re now so confusedly seeking. That kind of calm that comes from knowing oneself and others. But you can’t rush the arrival of that state of mind. There are things you only learn when no one teaches them. And that’s how it is with life. There’s even more beauty in discovering it for yourself, in spite of the suffering.
Clarice Lispector, from “Gertrudes asks for advice” in The Complete Stories
Women with mesh implants have been suffering for years. And it's not the only time they have been ignored.
Claire Cooper’s voice wavered as she told the BBC interviewer that she had thought of suicide, after her mesh implant left her in life-long debilitating pain. “I lost my womb for no reason”, she said, describing the hysterectomy to which she resorted in a desperate attempt to end her pain. She is not alone, but for years she was denied the knowledge that she was just one in a large group of patients whose mesh implants had terribly malfunctioned.
Trans-vaginal mesh is a kind of permanent “tape” inserted into the body to treat stress urinary incontinence and to prevent pelvic organ prolapse, both of which can occur following childbirth. But for some patients, this is a solution in name only. For years now, these patients – predominantly women – have been experiencing intense pain due to the implant shifting, and scraping their insides. But they struggled to be taken seriously.
The mesh implants has become this month’s surgical scandal, after affected women decided to sue. But it should really have been the focus of so much attention three years ago, when former Scottish Health Secretary Alex Neil called for a suspension of mesh procedures by NHS Scotland and an inquiry into their risks and benefits. Or six years ago, in 2011, when the US Food and Drug Administration revealed that the mesh was unsafe. Or at any point when it became public knowledge that people were becoming disabled and dying as a result of their surgery.
When Cooper complained about the pain, a GP told her she was imagining it. Likewise, the interim report requested by the Scottish government found the medical establishment had not believed some of the recipients who experienced adverse effects.
This is not a rare phenomenon when it comes to women’s health. Their health problems are repeatedly deprioritised, until they are labelled “hysterical” for calling for them to be addressed. As Joe Fassler documented for The Atlantic, when his wife’s medical problem was undiagnosed for hours, he began to detect a certain sexism in the way she was treated:
“Why”, I kept asking myself, when reading his piece, “are they assuming that she doesn’t know how much pain she’s feeling? Why is the expectation that she’s frenzied for no real reason? Does this happen to a lot of women?”
This is not just a journalist’s account. The legal study The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain found that women report more severe levels of pain, more frequent incidences of pain, and pain of longer duration than men, but are nonetheless treated for pain less aggressively.
An extreme example is “Yentl Syndrome”. This is the fact that half of US women are likely to experience cardiovascular disease and exhibit different symptoms to men, because male symptoms are taught as ungendered, many women die following misdiagnosis. More often than should be acceptable, female pain is treated as irrelevant or counterfeit.
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In another significant case, when the news broke that the most common hormonal birth control pill is heavily linked to a lower quality of life, many uterus-owning users were unsurprised. After all, they had been observing these symptoms for years. Social media movements, such as #MyPillStory, had long been born of the frustration that medical experts weren’t doing enough to examine or counter the negative side effects. Even after randomised trials were conducted and statements were released, nothing was officially changed.
Men could of course shoulder the burden of birth control pills - there has been research over the years into one. But too many men are unwilling to swallow the side effects. A Cosmopolitan survey found that 63 per cent of men would not consider using a form of birth control that could result in acne or weight gain. That’s 2 per cent more than the number who said that they would reject the option of having an annual testicular injection. So if we’re taking men who are afraid of much lesser symptoms than those experienced by women seriously, why is it that women are continually overlooked by health professionals?
These double standards mean that while men are treated with kid gloves, women’s reactions to drugs are used to alter recommended dosages post-hoc. Medical trials are intended to unearth any potential issues prior to prescription, before the dangers arise. But the disproportionate lack of focus on women’s health issues has historically extended to medical testing.
In the US, from 1977 to 1993, there was a ban on “premenopausal female[s] capable of becoming pregnant” participating in medical trials. This was only overturned when Congress passed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Revitalisation Act, which required all government funded gender-neutral clinical trials to feature female test subjects. However, it was not until 2014 that the National Institutes of Health decreed that both male and female animals must be used in preclinical studies.
Women’s exclusion from clinical studies has traditionally occurred for a number of reasons. A major problem has been the wrongful assumption that biologically women aren’t all that different from men, except for menstruation. Yet this does not take into account different hormone cycles, and recent studies have revealed that this is demonstrably untrue. In reality, sex is a factor in one’s biological response to both illness and treatment, but this is not as dependent on the menstrual cycle as previously imagined.
Even with evidence of their suffering, women are often ignored. The UK Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA) released data for 2012-2017 that shows that 1,049 incidents had occurred as a result of mesh surgery, but said that this did not necessarily provide evidence that any device should be discontinued.
Yes, this may be true. Utilitarian thinking dictates that we look at the overall picture to decide whether the implants do more harm than good. However, when so many people are negatively impacted by the mesh, it prompts the question: Why are alternatives not being looked into more urgently?
The inquiry into the mesh scandal is two years past its deadline, and its chairperson recently stepped down. If this isn’t evidence that the massive medical negligence case is being neglected then what is?
Once again, the biggest maker of the problematic implants is Johnson&Johnson, who have previously been in trouble for their faulty artificial hips and – along with the NHS – are currently being sued by over 800 mesh implant recipients. A leaked email from the company suggested that the company was already aware of the damage that the implants were causing (Johnson&Johnson said the email was taken out of context).
In the case of the mesh implants slicing through vaginas “like a cheese-wire”, whether or not the manufacturers were aware of the dangers posed by their product seems almost irrelevant. Individual doctors have been dealing with complaints of chronic or debilitating pain following mesh insertions for some time. Many of them just have not reported the issues that they have seen to the MHRA’s Yellow Card scheme for identifying flawed medical devices.
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Shona Robison, the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport, asked why the mesh recipients had been forced to campaign for their distress to be acknowledged and investigated. I would like to second her question. The mesh problem seems to be symptomatic of a larger issue in medical care – the assumption that women should be able to handle unnecessary amounts of pain without kicking up a fuss. It’s time that the medical establishment started listening instead.
Je peux voir que je suis devenue plus fluide en français et ce n’est pas une surprise pour moi parce que j’essaie d’étudier tous les jours. Qui aurait cru, la cohérence est la clé 🩷🧠
