More Medicalizing of the Female Body
scrappybadger May 1st, 2007
If the incredibly bad acting and even worse writing doesn’t instantly jiggle the mute button under your forefinger when the newest Yaz commercials come on, then you will have the opportunity to witness the medical industry’s latest attempts to regulate women’s feelings about their bodies. Doctors, nurses, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and medical researchers have a long history of bullying women. They have successfully convinced most people in the U.S. that babies can only be born safely in hospitals, that menstruation should occur at the same time in the same way for every woman, and that, in many cases, women neither understand nor correctly interpret physical reactions in their own bodies.
My favorite part of the Yaz commercial is when the robot-Doctor, adept at reciting prescription inserts, differentiates between PMS and PMDD (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder) by saying something along the lines of, “unlike PMS, PMDD can interfere with your everyday life.” Those few words say a lot. They say that only the medical profession can tell a woman when her pain or level of discomfort is enough to interfere with other things in her life. Only a doctor or a pharmacist or a lab-coated researcher can determine how severe is severe enough. Left to our own devices, women are incapable of quantifying our own pain. Well, thank goodness someone is there to do it for us. Luckily for us, there are a select few who can tell us when our pain, emotional or physical, is mild, severe, or simply not there at all. And even better, they’ve named those stages for us. So women, I urge you, run to your doctor. Get an official diagnosis because for crying out loud, you are in no way qualified to determine what you are feeling.
