The Unethicist: Lo Means No
"The Ethicist" is Randy Cohen's long-running advice column in the New York Times. Each week, Gabriel Delahaye's "The Unethicist" will answer the same questions as "The Ethicist," with obvious differences.
This week, a capital-J Jew writes in with a medical concern, and a date rapist is amazed at the lengths some women will go to make them feel bad for what they've done.
When I went for an examination, my surgeon asked if two residents could be present. I felt uncomfortable being undressed in front of extra people, and so I declined. My surgeon scolded me, saying I was preventing the next generation of doctors from being trained. Why is it my responsibility to provide training for medical students? — name withheld, Beit Shemesh, Israel
Dear "the Hebrew word for 'Tobias F nke,'"
As someone who abhors locker rooms and urinals and dance clubs and swimming pools and the outdoors, really anywhere in which the human body is reduced to something other than a highly stylized signifier of the social contract, I am on your side on this one.
That being said, please come down off your high "the Hebrew word for 'horse'." People of all ages get surgery, but very few of them then write in to the newspaper afterwards, so you've got to be middle-aged at the youngest. And a bunch of baby-faced medical students who unwind by shooting syringes full of ether into their necks and rubbing medical-grade topical cocaine on their balls do not give a shit about your dusty vagina.
So no, it's not your responsibility to provide training for medical students. But think about it like a restaurant: the more obdurate and needy you are, the more likely there're pubes in your Cobb salad. Next week, when you're walking around, feeling all unviolated, that gentle stabbing in your lower back, that's a scalpel that has been sewn into your body, and frankly, you "the Hebrew word for 'deserve'" it.
I am a volunteer firefighter. I responded to an accident involving someone I knew to be infected with hepatitis C, a contagious disease. As we cut the roof off her car to remove this injured and bleeding woman, two police officers approached to administer first aid. They were not wearing protective gloves, so I offered each a pair; they declined. Should I have revealed her medical condition? Should I inform those officers now so they can be tested and perhaps treated? — Ryan Thomas, Oakland County, Mich.
Dude, how bad does it suck when you go to save someone's life and you get the jaws of life out, pry shit open, lights all flashing, your adrenaline is pumping and shit is GETTING REAL, and then you're like FUUUUUUCK, I totally gave this bitch an STD after too many Jaeger-bombs at Goodnight Gracie and never called her again.
AWKWAAAAAAAARD.
Your situation kind of reminds me of that old early-AIDS-era warning that when you have unprotected sex with someone, you're having unprotected sex with all of their former sexual partners, too. It follows that when you go to staunch the arterial bleeding of someone, you go to staunch the arterial bleeding of everyone they've ever slept with, too. That is why I never help anyone, ever.
Since you couldn't really explain the situation to the police officers who assisted your former one-night stand without divulging personal information, your best bet is to fuck both of them without protection, thereby virtually insuring that they get hepatitis C. At least then you'll know that there was nothing that you could have done to protect them from infection. You know, besides not fucking them.
