Jessica Wynn

Because doctors just don't take women's pain seriously.

They say it's just part of being a woman or it's in your head.

Women's pain is routinely dismissed as emotional or exaggerated.

People are just living with it.

And it's well documented.

This is a systemic issue and it's rooted in centuries of medical sexism.

It's really bad.

And modern gynecology in the United States was literally built on experiments and torture on enslaved black women.

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.