5 Excuses the Authorities Use to Get Their Fingers in You
If you found your way to this article based only on the title, you saw the words “get their fingers in you,” and you likely figured we were speaking metaphorically. We might as well have said “get their hooks in you” or “get their claws in you” because we were really just referring generally to how authorities insert themselves in your life.
Reader, we have bad news for you. We are instead here to talk about literal fingers entering you. They are not entering surgically — they are entering orifices, orifices that are normally shielded from the world by underwear. And they aren’t entering because you told them that this is something you’re into. Instead, these unwanted probes come in the form of...
Airport Virginity Tests
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In the 1970s, at Heathrow airport in London, women sometimes arrived at the immigration counter saying they were here to marry their British fiancé. This was allowed and entitled them to a three-month stay, after which they would need additional paperwork to stay longer. If they were instead already married and coming to join a husband in the U.K., that was also allowed. But that required prior authorization, which takes time. In theory, someone who wants to join their husband could attempt to jump the queue by claiming to instead be coming for their wedding.
You could probably think of several forms of evidence a bride-to-be could provide to support her story. Airport officials thought of another: They’d take her to a private room and ascertain her virginity, by trying to insert two fingers into her vagina. If two fingers fit, she wasn’t a virgin, so she was likely married and was lying to them. If they didn’t fit, that supported her story and meant she should be admitted into the country.
Opponents of this practice offered several objections. The first was that it was rape and rape is wrong, but even assuming British officials don’t care about that, the system still didn’t make sense. Perhaps the passenger wasn’t a virgin but still was coming to marry her fiancé as she said. Perhaps she was a virgin but was still lying. And perhaps this test had zero chance of revealing anything because you can’t actually test someone’s virginity. The body doesn’t work like that.
Britain ended the practice in 1979, after an outcry when one teacher from India went public about her experience. The Home Office offered this teacher £500. A payoff of that size doesn’t really sound like compensatory damages so much as payment for services rendered.
The Trauma Handshake
You find yourself in an accident. Paramedics arrive, and they treat you in accordance with Advanced Trauma Life Support, a protocol that involves assessing your injuries and trying to stabilize you. And then, someone sticks a finger up your butt. This is a bit of a surprise. You’ve heard about men having digital rectal examinations (DREs) for their prostates as part of regular checkups, but no one ever told you about this.
Doctors perform these DREs on incoming patients for a few reasons. By seeing if the body reacts to a finger introduced into the anus, they see whether the spinal cord still functions. The exam also aims to check for injuries to the bowel and urethra. The patient doesn’t understand any of these reasons and may find the intrusion unpleasant, and they may even sue for assault. The exam is sometimes called the “trauma handshake,” both because it’s performed on trauma patients and because it’s traumatizing.
Of course, we have to weigh that psychological trauma against the benefits of doctors quickly diagnosing patients and possibly saving their lives. So, in recent years, doctors conducted a series of studies evaluating the trauma handshake. These found it’s not a very good tool after all. We have a bunch of better ways of assessing patients, and the handshake is largely ineffective at spotting injuries, especially when done on children. The alternative method of just checking for bleeding is more reliable and is also something they’re probably going to do either way.
“Maybe. But we need a finger up the butt. You know the drill.”
Plus, once they reach the hospital, a full CT body scan is pretty standard for trauma patients, rendering all firsthand anal checks redundant. Every study that assesses trauma handshakes concludes by saying, “Hey, maybe let’s stop doing this.”
Some patients don’t want to feel a finger up their butt. Though, that’s not as bad as some things you can experience as a trauma patient. For example, maybe the doctor sticks a finger up your butt, and you’ll realize you don’t feel it.
DMV Gynecology
As you can see, we need to distinguish between doctors legitimately examining patients and doctors sticking fingers in us for no reason. While we can conceive of a world where body scans have made all intimate exams obsolete, in which case our descendants will look back and consider all such exams deeply creepy, for now, we shouldn’t be fearmongering about proctologists or gynecologists. If anything, we should be dispelling people’s natural revulsion toward medically necessary probes, for the sake of their own health.
But the key words there are “medically necessary,” and we could add another one as well: “voluntary.” On the other hand, if you’re sentenced to be probed, you might well object, even if the prober is an M.D. Such was the case in the Soviet Union, where women had to get gyno exams in order to receive driver’s licenses.
In the USSR, getting a car was so difficult that this medical exam hardly seemed worth discussing next to all the other hurdles. You couldn’t simply buy a car. You had to apply for one through your trade union, convince them you were especially worthy and then wait for years for one to become available. The country wasn’t able to manufacture enough for the demand. Then the Soviet Union fell, and things became better for post-Soviet countries, but some of them like Lithuania retained the exam requirement for driving licenses.
The stated reason was gynecological diseases create sharp spikes of pain, which may impair drivers. The worst of these cause total loss of consciousness. This could lead to some problems on the roads, even in a country with so few cars as the USSR had.
In 2002, following complaints that this requirement counted as sex discrimination, Lithuania launched a study on those stabbing/dizzying gynecological diseases to see if they really did impede driving. The five-month study ended by concluding that no such diseases exist, so the country got rid of the rule. “It should have been revoked a long time ago,” said one government official. “This requirement made our country look more than strange.”
The Oil Check
Wrestling is often considered homoerotic. That’s true whether it’s Ancient Greeks wrestling naked before going off to do it Greek-style or modern-day athletes grabbing each other in close holds and merely looking like they’re making love.
But only occasionally does wrestling get truly penetrative, as in the case of the maneuver known as the oil check. The oil check (also known, in its milder forms, as the butt drag) is when one competitor inserts fingers up an opponent’s butt. This gives the aggressor more grip, as well as an advantage because the shocked opponent loses concentration. The move is banned in some arenas. Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) rules explicitly forbid the oil check. High school wrestling, however, has no such rule.
The reasoning behind that lack of a rule actually makes some sense: Schools have more leeway when punishing students, so they can crack down on anyone who tries something improper even without this specific rule inked out. That reasoning falls apart, however, when you learn that the move does happen and goes unpunished. “It happens all the time,” say some wrestlers, while others claim, “That never happens, that sounds crazy,” depending on their own experience. Then we finally get one case where a parent presses assault charge, which might not be the best way of dealing with this, especially since the charges get dismissed.
The oil check also pops up in professional wrestling, despite the UFC rule. Here’s one MMA fighter laughing off being at the receiving end of an oil check at a 2020 UFC event:
Similarly, if you were considering taking part in Brazilian jiu-jitsu in Russia, beware. “Show me in the rules where it’s said that this move is illegal,” said one fighter caught trying it. “Now, it’s new school of BJJ!” That last bit might be some kind of attempted pun on the word “BJ,” but we’re not sure.
As for the WWE, Hulk Hogan claims, “Andre used to do that all the time. He’d do it for a rip. If there was somebody he didn’t like, you know?” The Andre there is Andre the Giant, a man known for his huge hands — his pinky was the size of two of Hulk’s thumbs, by Hogan’s estimate.
via Wiki Commons
Hogan said he received an oil check from Andre once in Montreal, and if this were a tall tale, you’d expect it to end with Hogan explaining how he got his revenge on him by besting Andre in some later fight. But no: He says he didn’t even call the guy out for it. “You don’t say nothing to the boss man,” says Hogan. “He has his way with you, my brother.”
It shouldn’t be controversial to say some parts of the body are off-limits when two people play-fight for public entertainment. In boxing, such a taboo is the origin of the phrase “hitting below the belt.”
Secret Pelvic Demos
Returning to the topic of good medical exams versus bad medical exams, imagine a woman unconscious in the hospital. Someone in the room performs a pelvic exam on her. Only, she didn’t come to the hospital for a pelvic exam. She came for surgery. The examiner (who is a medical student) does the exam on her anyway. Then a second student does an exam, too. Then a third. An entire class of medical students put their hands inside this woman. She didn’t consent to this and is never informed about it, either before or after.
This isn’t some uniquely terrible incident that happened just once and resulted in everyone going to jail. Instead, this has been standard practice for medical schools, anywhere that it’s not expressly legal. At the start of this year, 21 states had banned unauthorized pelvic exams (UPEs), while the remainder had not.
Hospitals say UPEs offer some benefits. Medical students need to learn how to do exams, and there aren’t enough volunteers. If an entire class must practice at roughly the same time, an anesthetized subject is ideal. Subjects give legal consent by signing general hospital admissions paperwork, even if the paperwork doesn’t say what they’re consenting to. As for why hospitals can’t seek actual informed consent before doing this to patients, well, hospitals have an answer this as well: Most patients wouldn't give consent. So, if students couldn’t do these exams without consent, they wouldn’t be able to do them at all, and this would deprive them of vital practice.
“Don’t be silly. That would be exploitative.”
In the past year, the federal government finally cracked down on this, issuing new guidelines saying hospitals can no longer give patients pelvic exams without express consent. It’s still not a crime to do so, but any hospital that does will forfeit Medicare and Medicaid funding, which should be enough to scare them into stopping. So, you can breathe a sigh of relief now, knowing it will never happen to you.
Unless you’re a woman who was unconscious in a hospital any time before April of this year, in which case maybe it already did.
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