Here’s a fun story you can tell at parties. One gloomy afternoon in the mythological kingdom of Argos, the virgins felt they had just had enough, enough of men’s laws and their sexist attitudes, enough of their sexual violence. So they fled to the mountains and hid in the mist. But as you might expect, before long they were roped back home where they were forced to resume their places in the masculinist world of Argos. And that’s where the story really starts to get interesting. Melampus, the physician of the kingdom was puzzled by the women’s flight, their unhappiness. “They must not be feeling well,” he thought, and so he diagnosed them with “uterine melancholy.”

Now “uterine melancholy” has got to be one of the funniest diagnostic terms ever invented by the custodians of labels in the millennia-old kingdom of physicians. It’s so funny that it might just win you some new friends.

Here’s another story you could try at parties, but it’s a little racier so you might want to consider your company before you share it. In 1875, a young girl named Augustine was dropped at the steps of the Salpêtrière Asylum in Paris after she started displaying undesirable and disturbing behaviors and an intractable and very unladylike anger. Within minutes of the door of the great asylum shutting behind her, Augustine, who had experienced incestuous attacks, started yelling about fire, blood, her hatred of men, revolution, escape, and rape: “Get rid of the snake you have in your pants… It’s a sin.” At which point, the famous head of the asylum, still known today as the father of modern neurology, Jean-Martin Charcot, intervened. “You see how hysterics scream,” he told his interns as he chloroformed Augustine into unconsciousness. “Noise… Much to do about nothing.” He diagnosed her with hysteria (Hippocrates’ famous formulation for “disorders” of the uterus); today, she would most likely be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Here’s one more. Remember when Anita Hill testified against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas after accusing him of sexual harassment?  During the hearing, many doctors and members of Congress determined that she must be delusional; before finishing her testimony, she was diagnosed with the newly minted “victimization disorder.” In other words, in a millennia-old sleight of hand, male physicians and government officials asserted that something was wrong with her—not Thomas—whose behavior was never scrutinized.

It gets old doesn’t it, the way our culture’s epistemological stakeholders continue to interpret women’s protests against male sexual violence as “symptoms,” signs of an illness, a manifestation of a malfunction within as opposed to a response to an oppressive and unwanted external event? 

It’s worth pausing a minute to think about why the medical model of incest and other sexual violence crimes has had such staying power. I don’t profess to know all the answer(s), but it’s something I’ve thought about a lot. And it seems to me that it’s much safer for the patriarchal order to encourage and allow unhappy and suffering women to express their grievances and discontent through idioms of illness than to have them agitate for political, legal, and economic rights. The medical model does nothing to transform the imbalance of gender and power that exists in our culture. Instead, it shifts attention away from the misogynistic and sexist social and political context in which sexual violence crimes occur, and makes the work of remediating the crime the girl’s or woman’s responsibility. As such, it turns the aftermath of the sexual violence into a disorder and the sexually violent behavior into a mere preceding event. As a result, it eclipses the perpetrator from our view as successfully as Charcot’s dismissal of Augustine’s words.

If the three stories I’ve told you here interest you, I would love to know why and how you think you might apply them in your work and your life!