Life as an Extreme Sport

The Daily: She Wore a Slinky Red Thing

...and everything else, Academics, Spring 06, The Daily, University of Washington

She Wore a Slinky Red Thing
Publish Date: 2006-04-10

This op-ed was pitched as being a weekly take on medicine in pop culture. I figured it would give me a chance to rant, rave, and giggle about some of my favorite subjects: House, Grey’s Anatomy, the Law and Order franchises, whatever came to mind and seemed interesting.

It was an opportunity for me to gain experience producing a weekly column before leaving the University for other pastures.

It still is.

But this week I’m going to deviate just a bit from my course, and I’m going to talk about the news rather than popular culture, and I’m going to talk about something other than medicine.

I’m going to talk about sexual assault.

Violence.

Rape.

If you haven’t been hiding under a rock (or buried in your textbooks), you’ve heard about the Duke University lacrosse team and the accusations of rape.

For those of you under that proverbial rock, Google is your friend. In a nutshell, the lacrosse team hired two black strippers to entertain them and their guests at a party.

The accounts of what happened next vary. One stripper claims she was dragged into a bathroom, held down by three white men and brutally raped, sodomized and strangled for 30 minutes. The team denies it.

Durham police are investigating this as a case of rape, kidnapping and a hate crime, searching the house and demanding DNA from the white players.

Protestors and the media have latched on to the hate-crime aspect of the case, focusing on the deep racial and class divide that exists between Duke and its surrounding community.

And in all the noise, the fact that someone was raped is being lost, and I don’t think this is unintentional.

We don’t like to have rape be personal. We want the victims to be hidden behind blue dots. If anyone talks about it to a paper, this one included, they opt for pseudonyms.

Is this any surprise, when we live in a society where politicians talk about “simple rape”?

I don’t control the media, and I certainly don’t control what others do. But I do control the timing of what I write, and that this is published at the start of the University of Washington’s Sexual Assault and Relationship Violence Awareness (SARVA) week is not a coincidence.

Go talk to the folks running this event, and while you’re there don’t think about numbers. Don’t think about 1 in 3, 1 in 4, 1 in 5.

Numbers are anonymous and impersonal. They don’t have faces or feelings.

Think instead about your favorite singers, professors, your sister or brother or mother, your best friend.

Think about someone you care about, and whether you want them being accused of deserving it because they dared to wear that slinky red thing.

Because they’ve had sex before; because if they’re not a Madonna, they must be a whore.

Stigma, the classic book by Erving Goffman, talks about how the stigmatized convey themselves with those who are not, have not, been stigmatized. How the stigmatized are shunned, shut out, made anonymous and encouraged to adopt what he calls an “air of good adjustment.”

“The unfairness and pain of having to carry a stigma will never be presented to” those who are not stigmatized themselves; and they “will not have to admit to themselves how limited their tactfulness and tolerance is.”

Those who view themselves as “normal,” Goffman argues, “can remain relatively uncontaminated by intimate contact with the stigmatized.”

And in writing this article, I have perpetuated the very thing that I rant against. I have kept anonymous, because I know that by admitting I was raped as a teenager means that every single person I know will look at me a little differently from now on.

But over the years, as I’ve seen cases come up again and again, I’ve begun to realize that the veil of anonymity society offers rape victims is not a shelter; it’s not a protection. It’s a way of removing the violence we don’t want to see, we don’t want to admit to.

The anonymity reinforces the stigma, and the only way that’s going to stop is if we remove the faceless numbers. If we stand up and say, “It was me.”

It was me.

The Falling Woman

wisdom and folly

Have you ever…have you ever had your life fall apart underneath you? Where suddenly everything and everyone that you trusted went away? It’s as if the ground moved out from under you, as if the world shifted and you didn’t belong anymore.

You get through it and you think that everything’s fine again. But you keep thinking that it will happen again. You watch. You see little signs that suggest things are going on under the surface of things. And you don’t know what they are. Someone is angry, and you know that they will vanish forever. Everything is too close to the surface.
-Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

El Salvador – In a Pro-Life Nation, Back Alley Abortions Go HiTech

...and everything else

The New York Times has a scary look at what happens in a country that bans abortions. El Salvador is a very Catholic country, and has banned all forms of abortions, for all reasons – yes, all reason. Even if the mother’s life is in danger. (So, among many other concerns, byebye Hippocratic Oath.)

Jack Hitt went to El Salvador to talk to women who had abortions, defying the law, to find out why, and how. The story is horrific. Back alley abortions are no longer wire hanger affairs; instead, it’s spraying pesticides into the uterus, inserting abortificants, praying that things work as described by anonymous people providing services. If a woman is caught, has to go to the hospital, she will be arrested – doctors are required to report the abortion/attempted abortion. Many women say that they were trying to kill themselves, a crime with a lesser sentence than abortion, which can garner 30 years in jail.

Perhaps the most horrific aspects? Forensic vaginal inspectors.

Read, weep, and vote prochoice.

Stolen Themes – What I’ve Been Reading

Academics, Bioethics

The kind folks over at AJOB* have a neat feature that summarizes what they’re reading in the daily news. Once again, I have too many open windows and not enough time to write a full op-ed on each one, so I pay homage to the idea.

Report Faults Video Reports Shown as News – great. Next time you’re watching the news, just ask yourself whether or not it’s news, or actually an advertisement. The Daily Show covered this several months ago, but it’s still frustrating to see how widespread it actually is. Add this to another reason why I get the majority of my news from a frakkin comedy show.


Lessons in Conflict of Interest: The Construction of the Martyrdom of David Healy and The Dilemma of Bioethics – mules, COI, KOL – betcha never knew bioethics had so many acronyms. It’s like the government, only less headache inducing! Seriously, this is a really interesting article that I read when it originally ran in the print edition of AJOB. I came across it again recently, when it was brought up in a discussion on the AJOB blog. It takes a look at conflicts of interest in bioethics, and how two major journals, The Hastings Center and AJOB, handled the situation when unreported conflicts of interests came to light. It also raises some really interesting comments about COIs, all amidst a fascinating and indepth discussion of the Healy affair.

Pioneering surgery on girl, 12, reverses heart transplant – how cool is this? The girl suffered heart failure at age 2, and had a donor heart “piggy-backed” onto her own. This leaves her own heart in place, but the donor heart does all the work. 10 years later, she begins to reject the donor heart, and through a rather interesting and dramatic series of events, her own heart is reconnected… and works fine! How fabulous for this girl, and how monumentally important for medicine.

Pope condemns geneticists ‘who play at being God’ – The title basically says it all here, but in his Good Friday meditations, the Pope condemned geneticists playing at being God. This comes at interesting timing, what with there being a new clinic just opened solely for the purpose of creating tissue-matched siblings (see further down). It also indicates Benedict’s commitment to becoming a more conservative Papa.

Runners’ bar codes may help health officials: Boston Marathon provides training ground for tracking disaster victims – basically, runners bibs are being imprinted with a bar code. If they require medical assistance, they will be scanned as the enter and exit medical tents, providing tracking of movement. The theory is, in natural disasters, you slap a wristband on someone with a similar bar code, and track them as they are removed from the site of the disaster and moved around the country, providing better tracking. An aside of the technology, race designers will be able to see if there are hazards over the course forcing people to drop out, and epidemiologists will be able to analyze similar.

How long do you think it will be before we start hearing about the number of the beast (again)?

Print me a heart and a set of arteries – what else do you say to this, other than how fucking cool? I’ve been following this technology for several years now, when I first saw the concept on a Discovery-affiliate. Basically, bioink dumps cells designed to flow like liquid onto a supporting gel (biopaper), and the ink flows and grows together. Within a day, the chicken heart cells were beating in tandem… So let me just reiterate: how fucking cool. I love technology.

Do we still need the Cartagena Protocol? – a prominent proponent of the Cartagena Protocol says we don’t need it anymore, and that GM crops don’t harm people or the environment. …did he forget to talk to butterflies? Or maybe GM foods cause long term memory loss…

Siblings of Disabled Have Their Own Troubles – this was an area of study for my sister when she was in school. Interesting to see it continued.

Lab-Grown Bladders Successful in Humans – speaking of growing organs… this is cool in its own right (although admittedly not as neat as printing an organ). Click the link to take a look at the picture, if nothing else!

My Black Skin Makes My White Coat Vanish: Even in one of the world’s most diverse cities, I have to convince my patients that I am the doctor. – an interesting personal take on the prejudiced faced by being a black, female doctor. That the bias is being continued by other black women is especially interesting, and speaks to greater problems than just getting through the bias in the established medical community.

UK team to open “designer baby” clinic – the Women’s Bioethics Blog saves my op-ed skin and presents an interesting tidbit about a new, designer baby, clinic opening in Britain. But it’s not just a designer baby they’re creating, but saviour babies…

*And I don’t say that just because some of them will be my professors in the upcoming years. They really are genuinely nice folks, and I’ve enjoyed all my interactions with them, which would be a large reason why I opted to throw my name in their grad program hat to begin with.