I talked to a woman right after she had one inserted and that’s what she told me: intense cramps. I believe her. I’m not just spouting my opinion based on nothing.
If only science would study women as much as men, this procedure from the 1800s could be understood. It’s getting better for sure, at least you believed the one person who you talked to about it. You ever see the device they use to “pinch” and open the cervix? I could never. It’s called a tenaculum and looks like a torture device from the 1800s.
It’s well discussed and documented that medical science regularly ignores and brushes aside women, and is constantly several decades behind men’s science. So regardless of male or female obgyns or doctors, the scientific understanding SYSTEMICALLY of women’s issues AND women in general are more often brushed aside than not, so this push for actually doing something about the pain is a step in the right direction.
We already have rampant sexism, patriarchy, and male chauvinism in society as a whole - why would you believe academia and medical and scientific communities would be immune to those problems?
Science does ignore women a lot of the time but it’s not because they hate women. It’s because of medical ethics rules which make it a lot more expensive to include women in studies. You have to pay for pregnancy tests for women in the study and you have to do all kinds of corrections and extra analyses to make sure women’s menstrual cycles are not interfering with the data. Women who do get pregnant during the study need to be detected and removed from the study because any effects from the study that harm their baby can expose the researchers to enormous lawsuits.
So many studies, which don’t have a lot of money to begin with (we’re talking university studies run by grad students, not massive clinical trials run by big pharma) exclude women because it’s cheaper and easier and they get to run more studies as a result. The major exception to this are psychological studies that don’t carry the same risks, but these are usually run on the psychology students themselves (many of which are required to participate in them in order to receive course credits).
Pragmatism and idealism are almost always opposites, morality often lies on the side of idealism, and pragmatism is often used to sidestep morality.
We need to do better; it’s far better and efficient for society to do so.
I understand that explanation is not justification, but even if you assume this is a complete and wholly true explanation, do you really not see the problems with potentially justifying these things? Imagine like never feeding a few of your kids “because it’s too expensive”. That’s completely unacceptable, incomplete, and deeply flawed, scientifically, and leads to MASSIVE problems in society.
These are systemic oversights that needn’t happen in almost all cases. It’s the exact same bullshit as promoting the men’s sports teams, budgeting, and prioritizing them more for resources and time. It’s literally systemic oppression.
Oh I can’t justify it at all. These things come about because of complex interactions throughout society. Scientists didn’t decide for themselves to have these strict rules on experiments involving women who might become pregnant. Those rules were imposed on them by politicians and regulators whose goals were not to promote the best possible research.
The same goes for the situation in the US with employers providing health insurance through group policies. That situation came about during a war-time cap on employee compensation. Employers used the insurance benefit as a way to circumvent the cap. Now Americans seem to be stuck with a system they increasingly do not want.
One of the worst heartbreaks I experienced growing up was when I realized that no one is really in charge of anything and that we’re all trapped in a system we can’t escape. 1984 was a big influence for me on this one.
I hear what you’re saying about budget, but this just goes to show how women are considered like some special kind of human. As if men, with all their hormonal and biological peculiarities, were the default.
Women are kind of a large part of the human population – over half of it. It’s not like some nice demographic.
I talked to a woman right after she had one inserted and that’s what she told me: intense cramps. I believe her. I’m not just spouting my opinion based on nothing.
If only science would study women as much as men, this procedure from the 1800s could be understood. It’s getting better for sure, at least you believed the one person who you talked to about it. You ever see the device they use to “pinch” and open the cervix? I could never. It’s called a tenaculum and looks like a torture device from the 1800s.
It’s well discussed and documented that medical science regularly ignores and brushes aside women, and is constantly several decades behind men’s science. So regardless of male or female obgyns or doctors, the scientific understanding SYSTEMICALLY of women’s issues AND women in general are more often brushed aside than not, so this push for actually doing something about the pain is a step in the right direction.
We already have rampant sexism, patriarchy, and male chauvinism in society as a whole - why would you believe academia and medical and scientific communities would be immune to those problems?
Science does ignore women a lot of the time but it’s not because they hate women. It’s because of medical ethics rules which make it a lot more expensive to include women in studies. You have to pay for pregnancy tests for women in the study and you have to do all kinds of corrections and extra analyses to make sure women’s menstrual cycles are not interfering with the data. Women who do get pregnant during the study need to be detected and removed from the study because any effects from the study that harm their baby can expose the researchers to enormous lawsuits.
So many studies, which don’t have a lot of money to begin with (we’re talking university studies run by grad students, not massive clinical trials run by big pharma) exclude women because it’s cheaper and easier and they get to run more studies as a result. The major exception to this are psychological studies that don’t carry the same risks, but these are usually run on the psychology students themselves (many of which are required to participate in them in order to receive course credits).
Pragmatism and idealism are almost always opposites, morality often lies on the side of idealism, and pragmatism is often used to sidestep morality.
We need to do better; it’s far better and efficient for society to do so.
I understand that explanation is not justification, but even if you assume this is a complete and wholly true explanation, do you really not see the problems with potentially justifying these things? Imagine like never feeding a few of your kids “because it’s too expensive”. That’s completely unacceptable, incomplete, and deeply flawed, scientifically, and leads to MASSIVE problems in society.
These are systemic oversights that needn’t happen in almost all cases. It’s the exact same bullshit as promoting the men’s sports teams, budgeting, and prioritizing them more for resources and time. It’s literally systemic oppression.
Oh I can’t justify it at all. These things come about because of complex interactions throughout society. Scientists didn’t decide for themselves to have these strict rules on experiments involving women who might become pregnant. Those rules were imposed on them by politicians and regulators whose goals were not to promote the best possible research.
The same goes for the situation in the US with employers providing health insurance through group policies. That situation came about during a war-time cap on employee compensation. Employers used the insurance benefit as a way to circumvent the cap. Now Americans seem to be stuck with a system they increasingly do not want.
One of the worst heartbreaks I experienced growing up was when I realized that no one is really in charge of anything and that we’re all trapped in a system we can’t escape. 1984 was a big influence for me on this one.
I hear what you’re saying about budget, but this just goes to show how women are considered like some special kind of human. As if men, with all their hormonal and biological peculiarities, were the default.
Women are kind of a large part of the human population – over half of it. It’s not like some nice demographic.