Finally, some progress on my paper. I'm halfway through page 7 and things are moving along much more smoothly. Thank God.
Getting into all this HPV stuff pisses me off to no end. I wrote an impassioned thing on The Phoenix about my HPV experiences the other day, and it drew very few responses. It doesn't seem to be much of a resonating feminist issue. Makes me wonder if it's really all that important, or if I just think it's important because it has affected me personally?
I do think it's important, though. Something about millions of women trooping dutifully in every year to have Pap smears when they have no fucking clue what they are being tested for rubs me the wrong way. It seems unethical. Don't people have the right to know what the fuck they are being tested for? Or do only men have that right?
The reasons for not making the connection more explicit make some sense, but they all come down to stigma against female sexuality. Unlike breast cancer or endometrial cancer or whatever else, cervical cancer isn't a "blameless" disease. You got it from sex. No, you didn't necessarily h ave to have multiple partners or even have gone unprotected, but the bottom line is that saying a woman has cervical cancer is saying she has fucked, and nobody wants to admit that women fuck. It is supposed to be burnt or frozen off quietly and not mentioned, rather than talked about, because while cancer makes you a martyr, sexually transmitted infections make you a whore.
So what happens when the two collide? Lots of lying and looking the other way, apparently.
I'm not sure the paper is going to be any good, policy-wise. At least not in this incarnation. Hopefully I can have it whipped into shape for either or both of the conferences, though, if either of them accept me.
I'm increasingly interested in lesbian health issues. Again, the whole idea of stigma and misinformation. Hopefully I can get further into that in the future.
A lot of people think that public education campaigns are "soft" policy. What do you think?