"Sex and the..." Advocacy

Written by Sophia Falbo | Designed by Karoline Cunico | Photographed by Samantha Grobman

Women’s Health and the Surprising Place TV Got Some of It Right

The most famous and fashionable quartet in TV history is no doubt Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha from Sex and the City. From their timeless dating advice to the iconic places they visit in both the TV and movie versions of the show, the ladies’ impact on feminism in America, and even across the globe, is inarguable. However, another major area of womanhood that the show covers is the failings in women’s healthcare. Particularly, how female health concerns are not always taken seriously. While the show first aired in 1998, the problems it highlighted persist. Women's medical care still seems to be an issue present in the world today.

As a woman in society, we are supposed to simply “deal with” our medical problems alone, or we are forced to be our own best advocates if we do seek help. For hundreds of years, women were always considered the caretakers in marriage and family. In the 1800s, when their husbands were feeling ill, or their children, it was the women’s responsibility to nurse them back to health by providing them with various medicines, soup, tea, and accompanying them on a trip to the doctor’s office. However when the women become sick, how much energy was diverted to properly diagnosing them and treating their illness? Often, not enough. In Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick, Maya Dusenbery touches upon the gap in knowledge about women’s health compared to men’s health as one of the most important “gender biases” in modern medicine. She writes, “In a 1995 report, the Council on Graduate Medical Education concluded that physicians have not been well prepared to meet the challenges of women’s health.” It’s unacceptable, yet it is a reality that women of the twenty-first century still face. While some health concerns are universal and are not gender specific, there are many matters only women endure, or suffer from at a disproportionate rate, and that doctors all over the globe need to be aware of to provide proper care.

Between Charlotte’s infertility issues and Samantha’s breast cancer diagnosis, there’s numerous Sex and the City episodes devoted to creating exposure for women’s health complications. They can help educate and advocate—creating, at the very least, awareness. The show acts as a vessel introducing real-life health problems, such as Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, to be addressed and handled in a manner that mimics the way these health issues might be taken care of should they come up in a woman’s life. As Angela H.E.M. Mass described in “Empower Women in Healthcare to Move Women’s Health Forward”: “Medical science and patient care have historically focused on male patients. Many diagnoses in women are still undetermined and it takes several years longer to establish comparable diagnoses in women as in men.” So many diagnoses take years, if they ever become conclusive at all. Unfortunately, many doctors and physicians across the world don’t properly know how to treat much of what women experience that is unique to the female reproductive system or similar sex-specific hormonal systems, unlike how familiar most doctors are to properly taking care of men’s health issues. In many ways, treatments have been devised with the average male in mind, not female. Sometimes, doctors will treat for pain without concluding its cause, and thus never fully addressing the ailment. It is this kind of situation twenty-first century medicine should be moving to progress beyond. If one Sex and the City episodes sheds light on the reality of infertility—a common complication women face worldwide—and therefore champions a little more awareness, than it’s properly doing it’s job.

Sex and the City may be most popularly known for its fashion and leading characters’ romantic lives, but honestly, it’s nice to seee something else come from the story—representation of women’s health struggles. Despite how much more has been discovered in the medical field in the twenty-first century with advanced technology and science, there is a long way to go in properly diagnosing and treating women’s ailments. Meanwhile, women must continue being their best advocate, but also an advocate for women everywhere who may face similar conditions and have been misdiagnosed by a physician. Representation is something we can control, and feeling understood as a woman within the medical field is the first step to progressing the agenda for women’s medical health.