2021-06-25 19:15:49
Britney Spears' conservatorship is the most extreme, heightened, distilled version of something that I think most women have experienced.
That issue is misogyny in medical care and other professions.
How many women have been patronized, ignored, and abused by medical professionals?
Usually it's something like a doctor ignoring your pain, even if it is the most extreme pain of your life, because of course you are just a whiny, attention-seeking girl or woman with low pain tolerance and nothing is actually wrong with you.
Or it's a doctor doing shit like refusing to prescribe birth control pills to a teen or 20-something unless they get to stick their fingers in their vagina first, even though the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists stated 20 years ago that there is no medical need for pelvic exams to be performed on young women seeking hormonal birth control.
Or going to the ER while bleeding internally, and being made to wait 5 hours for a cat scan at the EMPTY ER, even though the blood is visually draining from your face and you are fainting when you stand, and your stomach is slowly growing more and more distended as the blood gathers in your abdominal cavity, because of course you are just a whiney girl who just has cramps or bad gas instead of, you know, a hemorrhagic ovarian cyst that is bleeding uncontrollably and will require emergency surgery and blood transfusions.
Or it's the psychiatrist who is re-diagnosing you with ADHD (re-diagnosing because the college you teach at doesn't believe that your ADHD diagnosis could be real and is making you get re-diagnosed by a second doctor) asking you how long you've been overweight before stating that there are cheaper diet pills than adderall, and saying that it is impossible to have ADHD and an advanced degree so you MUST be lying about one or the other.
Or it's the doctor who tries to make you pass a pulmonary functions test over and over again right after you spent a week on a ventilator, and doesn't believe that you can't blow the minimum force required, even though you also just spent over a month with one lung fully collapsed and you have a tumor pressing on a major nerve, causing all your muscles to spasm uncontrollably whenever you inhale deeply, and they refuse to prescribe you appropriate painkillers because "there's nothing wrong with her chest".
Or they strap you down to the bed when you have a ventilator in, and don't communicate to you what meds they are giving you, don't give you access to a call button, and don't give you a method of non-verbally communicating with the nurses and doctors even though you are fully lucid and aware of what is happening around you.
Britney was young and pretty. She was seen as girly and dumb, but she was also rich and sexualized.
Then Britney shaved her head, and she hit a stalker's car with an umbrella when they wouldn't leave her alone. And she drove with her kid in her lap.
And for that, they took away all of her rights, possibly for the rest of her life.
I can't help but think that part of this is that she was a young and pretty woman, so they saw her as a child. And being both sexualized and rich, they saw her as someone who doesn't follow certain norms/expectations, and therefore a threat.
What has happened to Britney is nothing short of a tragedy. The tiniest silver lining in this is that it has shown people how very real these issues are, by showing that even one of the world's most famous pop stars who has millions of dollars can be victimized this way, and effectively forced into slavery by the courts.
www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/o7d90m/britney_spears_conservatorship_is_the_most/ source
3 views16:15
S
