Scripts for Talking to Doctors

We aggressively believe that patients shouldn’t have to do a bunch of emotional labor to get their needs met by their healthcare providers, but the reality we live in means this is an important skill to have as a spoonie.

Luckily, we have some new resources for you!

💊 This super long thread on code words to use with doctors [CW exaggerated ableism/use of slurs], kicked off by the Cliff’s Notes on “How To Negotiate Your Disability Without Curling Into A Ball And Weeping More Than Once Or Twice A Week *Or* Murdering The Entire Universe (More Than Once Or Twice A Week).”

Covered topics:

💊 This response to a request for help talking to a surgeon and getting him “to take me and my mysterious health issues seriously while still coming off as a ‘good patient.’”

💊 Our archive of advice under the “Dealing with Doctors” tag (yeah, we’re mad this has to exist, too.) And to those about to enter appointments… we salute you.

Loosely implying a cat 2

ghosting everyone because i think i’m annoying

I have ADHD so I’m immune to podcast

stealing this from @chefpyro 's tags cause same

always thought that it was crazy other folks with adhd couldn't focus on podcasts when i was totally immune from that issue then quarantine happened, i stopped driving long distances every day, and you will never fucking believe what I learned I can't do

kate_rose_morgan

what’s it like to be unstuck from canon?

How to change your mood while honoring your feelings

So this is a pretty complicated subject, but here are the basics

This is so helpful.

PRIDE & PREJUDICE   2005 | dir. Joe Wright

yeah.

yeah.

heart sweater

so women are supposed to grin and bear the books, the comics, the movies, the plays, the tv shows, the stories, the sci-fi, the translated ancient poems, the fucking millennia of men writing about their self inserts torturing women and it being declared as High Art by other men, we’re supposed to read it in our free time, study it in classrooms, include their styles in our own writing, accept their cultural influence as natural, watch it in the cinema, write about it, talk about it, accept it, aspire it, but men can’t tolerate three seconds of female wish fulfilment of a woman snapping the wrist of a creep without feeling personally kicked in the balls.

This reminds me of something I observed in college while I was doing my honors thesis on women in modern horror films. I watched a LOT of horror during that time as part of my research, and sometimes that was done with my family around.

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

And they flinch every time.

Here have a newspaper comic from 1993