This Prick Will Make a Woman Out of You

Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at 8:16 AM on January 9, 2008.

It’s quickly becoming an iconic moment of adolescent female sexuality. First you’re penetrated, then it hurts terribly. You may cry. You may even faint. For a day or two afterward, you might feel kind of weird.

Losing your virginity? No, getting the HPV vaccine.

75% of me wants to write off this story about how incredibly painful the shot is (with hints of maybe you shouldn’t let your daughter get the raging slut shot) as mostly laziness. The reporter clearly went to a CDC-based conference in Georgia and saw this presentation and thought, “Both easy to write about and has a great hook, because it’s about teenage girls and Teh Sex.” But the hyperbolic language of the piece, especially the stuff about the vaccine being the most painful shot ever (more painful than having your cervix removed?) is irresponsible in an atmosphere where sexphobic, religion-addled parents are resisting getting this life-saving prevention for their daughters in the first place, and are probably looking for any excuse possible to avoid it.

Because the shot doesn’t sound significantly different than other vaccines.

The pain is short-lived, girls say; many react with little more than a grimace. But some teens say it’s uncomfortable driving with or sleeping on the injected arm for up to a day after getting the shot.

Ever get a flu shot or a tetanus shot as a teenager? I suspect that girls are alarmed by this shot, because their vaccination point of reference is all from childhood, when they don’t really remember how much it hurt. Also, as the article notes later, teenagers are special fainting risks from shots, so this is probably all more a result of what age you are when you get it, not the shot itself. Nervousness is also a factor, and considering that a percentage of these girls are probably getting a dose of parental hysteria and lecturing about having a sexuality (even if being sexually active is way in the future), I’m not surprised some have high emotions to go with the pain. But all this information is buried in the second half of the article, i.e. the “don’t expect people to read it” half.

Again, I doubt the reporter is trying to stir up right wing nonsense. And a quick bout of googling shows that the anti-choicers out there have largely ignored this story. It’s more a combination of laziness, and the fact that this story fits a pre-existing cultural script about female sexuality. I wish I had Hanne Blank’s book here, because she describes the script perfectly, about how female sexuality is about pain and sacrifice. Anything unpleasant, from childbirth pains to medical treatments like this vaccine to the objectifications and humiliations for women in so much porn, gets put into a cultural narrative about how women’s very biology speaks to our rightful position in society as lesser to men, and how our sexuality is about pleasure and use for them, and pain and sacrifice for us.

To make it clear to those who confuse (often deliberately confuse) describing with inventing a cultural construct, I reject the notion that a woman’s natural role is to suffer and sacrifice, or that it’s inevitable. It’s not impossible to reimagine most of our feminine sacrifices in a way that doesn’t construct women as lesser than men. The HPV vaccine is not all that unique in terms of vaccines of the sort that even men get, for instance, and imagining it that way gets it out of the realm of feminine suffering and into the realm of normal medical prevention.

Tagged as: sex, feminism, vaccine, hpv

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon.