Jessica Wynn

So this guy, J. Marion Sims, is often called the father of modern gynecology, but he developed surgical techniques by experimenting on enslaved black women without anesthesia.

He operated on one black woman over and over, like at least 30 surgeries.

And he claimed black women didn't feel pain the same way white women did, which is a racist lie that still echoes in medical bias today.

Yeah.

And today, black women in the U.S., they're still three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy related complications.

Recently, Serena Williams, she almost died after giving birth because the doctors didn't listen to her symptoms.

So when we talk about vaginas, we're not just talking about anatomy.

We're talking race, class, power, history and sex.

Still, women's pain is generally dismissed as hysterical.

Yeah, it does.

Hysteria comes from the Greek word for uterus.

And for centuries, any woman who was anxious or depressed or angry or just inconvenient could be labeled hysterical and was institutionalized.

And then one of these treatments was pelvic massage.

So doctors manually stimulated women to orgasm to supposedly release their hysteria.

And eventually, the vibrator was invented as a medical device, not to help women, but to speed things up because, and this is a real quote, the doctor's hands got tired.

God, yeah.

Raw dog medicine.

Yeah.

The fact that pelvic massage brought women pleasure was treated like a side effect.

So that's the level of absurdity we're dealing with historically.