VIDEO. General practitioner, Marine Loiseau speaks on sexist and moral violence in medicine

She still remembers the sexist and inappropriate remarks she received while she was doing her medical internship, in surgery, when she was 22 years old. “In this surgery internship, the atmosphere was extremely heavy, I constantly felt uncomfortable. People could comment on my outfit, whether I wore makeup, etc. I was asked questions about my privacy. Do you like this or that position? It was that atmosphere, really very, very unpleasant. I had a really bad experience” explains Marine Ltemporel, former Miss France 2013, who today works as a general practitioner. At the time, she didn’t talk about it because she didn’t feel “specially victim” : “We don’t realize, when we are at the heart of a system, that it goes too far. When we are inside, when it seems to be usual, and when we turn everything that happens into a joke, when we justify it on the witty spirit, we do not realize that it is not normal. We can suffer from it, but we say to ourselves: “Well, it doesn’t matter, I’ll take it upon myself and then it will go better in the next course.”

“Some young women stopped their studies because they lost self-confidence”

These remarks were “constantly“tours”as a joke” by these doctors who had these inappropriate behaviors. “So we don’t necessarily know how to react to this. And above all, we don’t want to make waves or get noticed, because that could mean more hours in the operating room, more hours in training, pressure with the possibility that we invalidate our internship as a student. So, it still has a potentially negative impact on our studies and the future” specifies Marine Ltemporel. She adds that “some young women stopped their studies because they lost self-confidence. I also received quite a few messages from young women who have not yet dared to speak and who said that they could not because they have the dream job in the hospital near their home, and that ‘They wouldn’t know what to do if they lost their job’.

Finally, she explains: “We also have the right to use humor, obviously, but humor has its limits, in fact, when it impacts others negatively. We still need to make the management bodies and orders move a little. There you have it, the Order of Physicians, today, it must be sharper, it must know how to make more radical decisions and remove the possibility of practicing from some who go too far. There was a lot of this spirit of brotherhood, of: “We support our colleagues”, “we are here so that our doctors can practice”. No, we also have to be able to be sharper and say stop when it goes too far”.