Women are just victims of everything these days. Born a woman? You’re automatically a victim by today’s standards.
Now CNN is reporting that even sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are sexist. Let’s be honest, STDs are bad no matter what sex, race, sexuality, creed, or disability one has, but CNN, with the help of doctors, has found a way to make the diseases yet another notch in the women-as-victims bedpost.
“STDs are biologically and psycho-socially sexist at all levels,” the outlet quoted Dr. Hunter Handsfield as saying. Handsfield is a professor emeritus of medicine and the University of Washington Center for AIDS and STD.
“Women bear the largest burden of these diseases,” another doctor, Edward Hook, told the outlet. Dr. Hook is co-director of the Center for Social Medicine and Sexually Transmitted Diseases at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.
“Chlamydia and gonorrhea, for example, are two of the leading preventable causes of infertility and ectopic pregnancies in the United States, and on Earth,” Hook added.
In heterosexual couples, as CNN reported, men or more likely to transmit STDs to women than women are to men. That’s because the lining of the vagina is thinner and more delicate than the skin on a penis, so it’s easier for bacteria and viruses to penetrate and take hold. Once there, the moist environment of the vagina is perfect for growth,” the outlet reported.
Once contracted, some STDs can be more harmful to women than men. Handsfield offered the example of Herpes.
“Because of the nature of the female genitalia, if you get new herpes, there’s likely multiple painful blisters,” Handsfield said. “For men, typically a few blisters.”
Multiple vs. a few.
HPV was a better example, as women are far more likely to get cervical cancer from human papillomavirus than men are to get penile cancer.
The outlet also couched STDs as sexist because… women might confuse them for a yeast infection.
“If a woman has a little burning on urination, maybe it was too much time on the exer-cycle, maybe the underwear was too tight, maybe there were spicy foods for dinner,” Dr. Hook said.
“Maybe there’s a little discharge, a little itch,” Handsfield added. “It’s easy for a woman to think it’s a yeast infection and self-treat while the chlamydia is climbing up into her fallopian tubes.”
Naturally, CNN had to include an unproven anecdote about one of the doctor’s daughters whose OB-GYN performed an exam and then allegedly lectured her about sex when she asked for a chlamydia test.
Today, we’re told everything is sexist, from telling someone to smile to political disagreement to air conditioning. If a woman says she is inconvenienced, she’s the victim of sexism.
Diseases hurt some people more than others, but it doesn’t have to become a rallying cry for feminists. The moral of the STD story should be that men and women need to be aware of what STDs can do to their body and how they’re at risk. They should take steps to defend themselves from contracting STDs, not just because of what it will do to them but also because of what it might do to others.
The moral should not be that women have yet another thing to claim victimhood status over.