I had the opportunity the other day to leaf through the February issue of Marie Claire. I never read women’s magazines (except every now and then when I’m stoking an eating disorder and stockpiling ‘thinspiration’), and as usual, momentarily glancing at one completely reassured me that I am entirely correct to avoid them, and surely everyone reading this blog will understand my standpoint on this issue, even if they do not agree with it, so I will spare us all the tiresomeness of going on about it at length.
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[...Except I must just say that, for the same reason I had occasion to peruse Marie Claire, I also had a briefer encounter with the January issue of Vogue, which, along with other travesties, contains (near the back) a photo of a model holding a bag designed by Richard Prince. The bag is printed with a number of jokes, all based on the classic ‘my wife is so dumb and/or ugly that...' formula (the blurb refers to these as ‘witticisms'), and retails for $2,720. Looking at it, I thought to myself that perhaps my sex fully deserves all the ill-treatment and inequality it suffers under, just for being so unbelievably foolish and masochistic as to thoroughly embrace (and eagerly line up to swallow whole) every ridiculous demand and pronouncement of an industry that exists solely for the purpose of milking every last dime out of every last woman by the (inexplicably) effective means of: convincing her she is ugly, vapid and worthless; encouraging her to desire nothing so much as her own utter and complete disenfranchisement and objectification; and praising her for valuing nothing so highly as vanity, materialism and greed.]
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There! Aren’t you glad I resisted the urge to succumb to a full-out hysterical rant?
Except don’t breathe a sigh of relief, as all this was merely a prologue to what really pissed me off: tucked away in the back of the (pointless and embarrassing) Marie Claire issue in question is a brief article by Julia Scirrotto describing the trial of a time she had getting her gyno to vaccinate her with Gardasil.
To be fair, it sounds like Scirrotto just has a particularly shitty gynecologist. Still, from what I’ve seen, the promotional campaign for this vaccine has been limited to Gardasil’s own television spots featuring teenage girls (and I haven’t seen one of those in quite some time, come to think of it). Looking at Wikipedia, it appears state governments aren’t exactly rushing to make vaccinating students mandatory.
According to the CDC website, in the U.S., about 5,000 people per year die of illness resulting from Hepatitis-B infection, and in 2006, about 3,700 women were expected to die from cervical cancer. In 2003 about 73,000 people were infected with Hep-B, and every year about 6.2 million people get HPV. I see no reason why cities and schools shouldn’t make vaccinating for HPV as big a priority as they made vaccinating for Hep-B several years ago. But maybe they’re getting around to it. I hope so.
