Dr. Elizabeth Comen

And we've said as a field, oh, but you're alive.

You're alive.

You may be miserable.

Sex may feel horrible.

You may be having these hot flashes, but you're alive.

And for so long, for example, even the concept of vaginal estrogen as being safe, which we know is not systemically absorbed and safe to be used even in breast cancer patients, has not been explored, has not been disseminated as widely known information because it hasn't been something that we valued.

And that speaks to a long history of devaluing women's sexual health and sexual function.

In my field and in almost every other field of medicine, it's been dominated by research into men's sexual health as opposed to women's sexual health.

Yeah, and I say this as a very happy, proud mother of three incredible children.

Not every woman wants to be a mother, can be a mother, and yet everything around the narrative about women's health from head to toe is about preserving reproduction, which is potentially important, but not the whole story, right?

And whether that, even just looking at how we learned about our anatomy earlier,

in medical school, right?

When do you learn about female anatomy?

You don't learn about like the lungs in a chest cavity of a female, right?

It was always the male body in anatomical studies, except when you're learning about reproductive function.

Then, oh my God, suddenly we have different anatomy, right?

Because that's the only anatomy that is valued, our reproductive fitness, as opposed to, you know, even studying women's pleasure.

The Grey's Anatomy, the seminal, most important anatomical textbook, sometimes didn't even have the clitoris in it.

In the 1940s, it's missing.

It was never missing from women's bodies.