Can I please get a new nurse?
how is this a universal experience?
male high school bullies: become cops
female high school bullies: become nurses
But now I’m curious. As far as a power fantasy goes, the cop is scary but makes sense. A nurse isn’t that much a position of authority, and it’s supposed to be a job of empathy
It’s a position of near-ultimate femininity, I’d the thing.
Generally, femininity is not associated with authority and control over others. And when it is, it’s almost always limited to control over children, eg motherhood and teaching. Our, it’s associated with “immoral” expressions of sexuality. The seductive femme fatale.
Nursing, however, is an ultimately feminine social role that gives a woman power over the choices, pain, and literal life and death of adults and children of all genders while still being morally pure and socially laudable. A similar phenomenon arises in the also typified as feminine roles of psychologist/therapist, and of social worker.
Now, obviously, a great many nurses are people who care uttery for their patients, whether or not they experience “empathy” in any particular way. Indeed, high levels of empathy can be detrimental to nurses’ longevity. Nursing is an often hellish, almost always thankless job that requires setting all the worst things about humanity and the human body. It is physically, emotionally and intellectually demanding work which, due to its feminized reputation, is also plagued with severe underpayment, and under staffing.
But for a particular type of woman, who has absorbed a lot of very dangerous messages about femininity, and who is looking for power over others by which to not only enact abuse, but be praised for it like so many of their peers who happen to be men?
Nursing provides a handy, gender conforming opportunity.
In short, the presumption that nursing is high empathy–given that high empathy is considered feminine in our society–is the exact reason why it appeals to women predisposed to abusive behavior.
I imagine that appeal combined with the horrible reality of the job is also part of why most nurses give up the job after less can 5 years.
That’s EXACTLY why abusive women take up nursing. Because everyone expects a cop to be abusive, but everyone expects a nurse to be protective. People trust doctors the way children trust – this allows nurses to get away with abusing their patients in an insidious and covert way, all while avoiding accountability for their abusive actions because “women are angels and victims.”
Another area where you see this happening is Pediatrics, there are many stories of pediatrics abusing babies, being physically rough with them, giving them wrong medication, even a female pediatrician performing GODDAMN FGM on little girls at the behest of their mothers (who lied to the children to get them to do the procedure!) in the name of religion!
Male abusers are overt in how abusive they are. Female abusers want to appear trustworthy and friendly so that they can hurt you and play the victim when they get caught doing so, all because most of society can’t fathom that women can be just as evil as men.
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