ABSTRACT
Within twenty years the feminist campaign to seize control over women’s health from the medical profession had given way to statesponsored, doctor-led systems of vaginal examination and cervical surveillance. It is doubly ironic that within the same period, male resistance to medical regulation was replaced by the demand, under the banner of ‘men’s health’, for invasive screening tests analagous to cervical smears. Whereas the early women’s movement rejected medical inspection of the cervix as an act of symbolic domination, the modern men’s health movement invited rectal penetration as a symbol of its subordination to medical authority.
