Tag Archives: women’s health

Doomed If You Do, Doomed If You Don’t: Scientists Attribute Endometriosis to “Attractiveness”

Laurie and Debbie say:

A recent Italian study claims that women with the most severe form of endometriosis happen to be unusually attractive.”

The women also completed a questionnaire about their sexual history, and the results showed that women with severe endometriosis were more likely to have had sexual intercourse before age 18. This could be a result of these women being more attractive, even during adolescence, the researchers said.

So many things are wrong with this that we had trouble figuring out where to start, until we caught the most important point. Patriarchal/kyriarchal society has spent millennia punishing women for any kind of attractiveness or sexuality, while also punishing us for being unattractive and/or sexually unavailable. This punishment specifically includes the belief that the Judeo-Christian god requires women to suffer pain in childbirth. This page has several examples of women punished for transgressing that belief, including:

In 1591 in Scotland, Euphanie Macalyane used a remedy to reduce delivery pains. For bypassing the Biblical curse of Genesis 3:16 – where God cursed Eve (and thus, women) with pain during childbirth – the devout King James VI had her burnt at the stake.

The researchers in the endometriosis study are more 21st century and less draconian–all they want to do is make sure that “attractive” (i.e., conventionally attractive to the four researchers who assessed women for the study) understand that their attractiveness puts them at risk, even while it makes them “more likely to have sexual intercourse before age 18.”

That’s the next problem. Any woman knows, and anyone who has ever paid attention to women’s sexuality should know, that conventional attractiveness is completely unrelated to when a woman first has sex. Some conventionally beautiful women have sex young; some don’t. Some conventionally unattractive women have sex young; some don’t. Some of the vast group of women in the middle have sex young; some don’t.

That begs the question of what defines attractive–in this case, two men and two women with a questionnaire. Or the question of how endometriosis can be most common in conventionally attractive women when there are endless studies, such as this one, that say that fat women (and especially women who were fat as children) are at the greatest risk. Don’t trust those studies any more than you trust this one, by the way–any study that blames fat is immediately suspect.

But you begin to see the jaws the researchers are putting women in: be conventionally attractive? You’re at higher risk for endometriosis. Be fat? You’re at higher risk for endometriosis.

In case that’s not enough, a few more points:

The study consisted of 300 women, 1/3 with severe rectovaginal endometriosis, 1/3 with less severe endometriosis, and 1/3 who were in gynecological treatment for “other reasons.” We’ve seen smaller studies, but this not a large one, and because the women were all in treatment in the same area, diversity is likely to have been very low. The evaluati0n of attractiveness was largely subjective. The sexual histories were based on a questionnaire, and questionnaires about sexuality are known to be deeply unreliable.

Evaluation of people’s medical and internal physiological characteristics based on appearance has been disproved since the early 20th century, when Lombroso‘s theories that you could recognize murderers and other criminals based on their facial characteristics were disproved.

And, finally, can you imagine anyone, anywhere, defining a male disease based on the man’s looks, as in “We’ve noticed that men who work out young and get really buffed muscles are more likely to have an enlarged prostate gland”? We can’t. But then, men aren’t guilty of the sins of Eve.

Thanks to Stef for the original link.

What Matters? The Implant or the Woman?

Laurie and Debbie say:

We first came across this story at the article at the link, a blog post on the L.A. Times site. Newspaper blog posts are paid journalism.

A British woman’s breast implant reportedly exploded after she was hit in the chest by a paintball, which can travel at 190 mph.

picture (from the back of her head) of a woman aiming a paintball gun

UK Paintball has now adjusted  its policies accordingly. “We respectfully ask that any ladies with surgical breast implants notify our team at the time of booking,” according to a statement on its website. “You will be given special information on the dangers of paintballing with enhanced boobs and asked to sign a disclaimer. You will also be issued with extra padding to protect your implants while paintballing.

Yes, their official statement says “enhanced boobs.”

What struck us immediately was that the L.A. Times blog piece (by Amina Khan, who appears to be a regular science blog writer for the newspaper) doesn’t say anything about what happened to the woman. Did she die? Did she suffer minor injuries and go home with no problem? Was it something in between? Googling around yields a little more information. ABC News says that the paintball company says “the woman is likely to make a full recovery.” Well, that sounds fairly serious, but it’s hardly detailed.

The International Business Times says: “Apparently, this injury could end up costing the woman almost $5,000.” That might not sound astonishing to American readers, but in the United Kingdom, spending that kind of money out of pocket for a medical issue is far less common. Again, a  serious comment, but hardly detailed.

Various articles talk about the safety issues regarding paintball and/or the safety issues regarding breast implants. We did a little research ourselves, and it would appear that while some dangers of breast implants have been exaggerated (such as the unsupported belief that there’s a link between breast implants and fibromyalgia), in fact the gel implants don’t have a long life (more than half need attention within 15 years) and the FDA recommends an MRI once every 2-3 years, to be paid for out of the patient’s pocket. (Minimum MRI prices in the U.S. are about $1500.) We wonder how many women with implants are getting those MRIs? And how many end up with either major health problems and/or even more major expenses if they don’t get them.

But regardless of how you feel about breast implants, and how you feel about paintball, it seems clear that everyone is focused on the implant, some people are focused on other breast implant stories, some people are focused on paintball and the company’s response, but no one is very interested in what has happened to the woman.

And here we would have thought that this was her story.