Page 73 - El-Placer-De-Volar-VersionDigital-Dic-2023

that later the myth spread that the uterus
was like an animal inside the woman and
that it then wandered around among the
organs and caused all kinds of diseases
in women. Imagine the size of such ig-
norance at a time when women were not
allowed to study! Because a woman could
not practice medicine. And if she thought
of becoming a herbalist, she ran the risk
of being accused of being a witch. So we
were diagnosed as hysterical by this pair
of sonsons at a time when there was no
ultrasound, no x-ray... and that makes me
very angry".
In the book, which has twelve chap-
ters, Santodomingo wanders through
anecdotes about the treatment of hysteria
at the time of the Crusades, the Inquisition
and the French Revolution. "In Victorian
times, for example, hysteria was not only
considered a disease but a plague. And
almost all women were sick, supposedly.
If you had a headache, the diagnosis was
hysteria. Fever? Hysteria. Toothache?
Hysteria. And the treatments were one
more painful, ridiculous and absurd than
the other. Some women were sent to ride
bicycles for miles. And when the church
got involved, there was talk of performing
exorcisms, because supposedly the hyste-
rical woman was possessed," she illustrates
some of her findings.
And she even dares to relate in the
book two intimate episodes that, she now
confesses, came very close to the abuse to
which many women are exposed. One of
them happened when she was thirteen. "In
the building where we lived, we kids from
the different apartments would go out to
play in the park. And one of the securi-
ty guards started to tell me: 'Come here,
come here,' and suddenly he closed the
door and tried to... and I kicked him. But
what if it had been any other child? That
marked my life a lot.
Paradoxically, Isabella Santodomin-
go accepts, the telenovela has contributed
precisely to accentuate those female ste-
reotypes. "Soap operas have always shown
the helpless girl, the poor girl, so that her
great luck is that she finds herself a millio-
naire. But I say, 'Let's raise our daughters
well so that the millionaires are us.' It is
time to change the chip and leave aside
those super violent soap operas in which
we Latin Americans sell ourselves as cri-
minals and thugs. Television has a very
big responsibility and it is time to sell the
good stuff as well.
And he concludes: "Doing a soap ope-
ra at this time? Not a chance. A series, yes,
but written by me".