All Them Witches: How ‘Ginger Snaps’ Teaches Us How to Heal our Bodies
Alisha Mughal explores the contemporary classic teen-werewolf flick and how it can be read as a commentary on the mainstream medical systems failing women and AFAB people.
There is a scene in Ginger Snaps (2000) that, on the face of it, seems inconsequential, just a funny little bit meant to complement the film’s dark humor but not absolutely integral to the main movement of the plot. Nonetheless, it’s a scene that rattles around my mind, because I feel almost certain that nearly every person with a uterus has experienced something similar to what Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and her sister Brigitte (Emily Perkins) experience.
Ginger, 16 years old, gets viciously attacked by a werewolf the night of a full moon and her first period, as the scent of her blood attracts the creature. After this attack, not only is she experiencing strange changes to her body — like hair growing out of the werewolf’s scratches — but also excruciating pain and profuse bleeding. “Are you sure it’s just cramps?” 15-year-old Brigitte asks her older sister at the drugstore, as Ginger speaks through clenched teeth, doubled over with pain. Brigitte, understandably concerned, drags Ginger to the school nurse to get some answers. “Something is wrong, like more than you being just female,” Brigitte says.
In a pristine blue room, the two girls sit across from a cheery-faced, blue clad nurse. Ginger’s hair is disheveled, falling across her face as though she’s been through the tumble dryer, she is pale and her voice cracks. She hugs her stomach. “I’m sure it seems like a lot of blood, it’s a period,” the nurse exclaims with a Joker-esque grin. She is obstinate, her cheery voice unchanging. “Everyone seems to panic their first time.”
“So it’s all normal?” Ginger asks after the nurse explains more, her eyes glazed over with pain, her skin balmy with sweat. “Very,” the nurse says. It’s certainly worth noting here that nary a word is said about Ginger’s physical appearance, no recommendations made to assuage the pain she so obviously is in. The nurse might as well be in another room or speaking to the girls over the phone, so little does she acknowledge Ginger’s physical presence before her.
“What about hair that wasn’t there before?” Brigitte butts in. “And pain?”
“Comes with the territory,” the nurse says, that damned smile unwavering. It’s no longer than two minutes long, this nurse scene, but it’s unforgettable. I watched this movie in a theater recently and heard women snickering around me when Ginger asks if all her bone-racking pain is normal, looking as she does, like hell frozen over. I smiled, too. It’s familiar, going to someone in the medical profession with severe pain or discomfort and being told that our deeply uncomfortable experience is completely normal, according to the books, told that it will go away in a few days. So many women and assigned female at birth (AFAB) individuals have stories of living everyday life while experiencing a gut-wrenching pain — how can this be normal, we wonder. The thing is, this pain being ignored, or having our experiences undercut by a medical professional who cites their academic learnings, which they believe to be infallible as if carved in stone, even as we ramble on about the particulars of our unique and individual experiences — all this isn’t accidental, cannot just be chalked up to one or two incompetent practitioners.
The reason why this nurse scene in Ginger Snaps is so unforgettable for me is because, short though it is, it’s got hundreds of years of history informing it. In the West, our current medical system is built on the basis not only of belying women and AFAB people’s experiences as patients, but also of denying us a way of healing that would value individual concerns and lived experiences, our stories, a way that would value listening to patients and prescribing treatments informed by this listening. This nurse scene in Ginger Snaps speaks volumes because it tersely encapsulates the way the medical system works around us as though it were some indomitable divine doctrine, as though it were the only lens through which to look at science and medicine. 22 years after its release, the commentary Ginger Snaps makes on the way in which our systems fail women and AFAB people is still trenchant and acerbic as ever, especially in light of the fact that the film simultaneously shows us a potentially right way to be.
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