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Not staying in Vegas: Truth chapter protests "naughty nurse" contest at the Mirage
May 17, 2010 -- Today members of the Las Vegas chapter of the Truth About Nursing staged a protest outside the Jet Nightclub at the Mirage Hotel, and rather than letting the story stay in Vegas, we're going to tell you about it. The club was holding a contest in which the winner would receive $2,500 for the best "naughty nurse" costume. The event was held on a Monday night from 10:30 p.m. - 4:30 a.m. Determined members of the Truth's Las Vegas chapter, led by chapter co-president Dee Riley, RN, MSN (center), gathered outside the club and greeted patrons of the Jet with signs as they arrived. The chapter members report that they had friendly interactions with patrons, educating them about the value of nurses and the damage caused by the naughty nurse stereotype, which sexualizes the profession and undermines real nurses' claims to the resources and respect they need to save lives. We thank Dee Riley for her leadership, tenacity, and donation of the posters for the protest. We also thank chapter members Juliann Riley, Carla Diaz and Rocky Diaz for speaking out forcefully about stereotypes that harm nursing. We urge all Truth chapters to consider organizing such events to challenge poor images of nursing. With enough of this kind of spirited advocacy, we can beat the house! more...
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March 16, 2010 -- Today the Daily Mail (UK) ran an unsigned item about a West Midlands bus company that was using a large naughty nurse ad, with the clever tag line "Ooooh matron!," to promote its route to the hospital. Nursing representatives and National Health Service officials asked the Diamond Bus Company to pull the ad, arguing that it trivialized and sexualized the profession, making it more difficult for real nurses to do their work. But the company refused, noting that it needed to create a "bright and positive brand" and that the ad had been "vetted" by a "group of nurses" who agreed it was "funny." However, something can be "funny" and at the same time promote a harmful stereotype. These aren't just jokes about some random profession; they're about a disempowered profession that has been the subject of the same bimbo stereotype for decades. The image really does undermine the profession's standing among career seekers and others, as recent research in the UK has shown. Please help those in the corporate world understand that the image of nursing matters as much as the need for a "bright and positive brand," and that in any case there are ways to promote services without the naughty nurse. more...
April 7, 2010 -- Perhaps the CBS sitcom Accidentally on Purpose isn't the first place you'd expect to see a complex blend of nursing issues. But tonight's episode is about the decision of the main character, the pregnant Billie, to hire an attractive "baby nurse" (nanny or infant care provider) named Nicole without consulting Zack, the baby's young father. Characters twice refer to Nicole simply as a "nurse." At first she seems nice, skilled, and professional, but she turns out to be a manipulative nymphomaniac, seducing two of Zack's friends for a three-some practically on sight, while she's supposed to be baby-proofing. The show repeatedly focuses on her breasts. Exploiting the naughty nurse stereotype? A little. Then there's the episode's use of the term "baby nurse," a dangerous distortion that implies that such infant care providers actually are nurses, when few if any have the years of college-level health science training real nurses do. In addition to misleading new parents about what their "baby nurses" know, the term suggests that real nurses have as few health skills as the infant care providers do. The show also tells us that Nicole has a "nursing degree from Cal," as if it thinks "baby nurses" really are nurses. This "baby nurse" mess, along with the naughty angle, outweighs any potential benefit from Nicole's apparent knowledge about basic infant care, and the fleeting suggestion that real nurses may have university degrees. But the episode goes further. At one point, Zack's friends fantasize about the hot Nicole squeezing the breast milk out of Billie's breasts. And we get a brief scene showing how that might work, sexualizing real nurses' focus on breastfeeding and subtly reinforcing the enduring practice of considering breastfeeding a type of "nursing," which associates a modern science profession with unskilled female care giving--though the show does not refer to breastfeeding itself as "nursing." Actually, the show really missed an opportunity by not having Nicole offer to "nurse" the infant herself. Maybe that "degree" was in wet nursing! The episode, "Face Off," was written by Kevin Bonani and Jenn Lloyd. more...and please join our letter-writing campaign!
January 21, 2010 -- In a minor plotline in tonight's Private Practice (ABC), nurse midwife Dell Parker actually shows some autonomy and knowledge in coaching an expectant single mother who is determined to stick to her "natural" birth plan, despite spending three days in labor. The mother ultimately succeeds in her plan and the show displays real sympathy for her. But the plotline also spends time mocking the holistic birth model that she wants and that real midwives follow. And the show gives no real indication of why that birth model might make sense--why, for example, a mother might want to avoid drugs, C-sections, or physicians--offering only the mother's vague statements that she wants to "experience" the birth and to give her baby the "best chance that he can have." The episode also presents Dell less as an expert in natural birth than as someone trying to cope with the mother's odd ideas. And at one point, Dell brings in superstar OB/GYN Addison Montgomery for a consult about the mother's status and options that a real nurse midwife would need no help with, partly undermining the sense that Dell is an autonomous professional. Still, Dell does show psychosocial skill in helping the patient through labor, and he does finally deliver the baby solo with no problems. The plotline ends with the mother looking ecstatic. So we give the show credit for a mildly positive, though deeply flawed, portrayal of a nurse midwife. This episode, "Best Laid Plans," was written by Patti Carr & Lara Olsen. more...and please join our letter-writing campaign!
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April 2010 -- It's a naughty nurse smackdown! Recently the press has reported that Arizona's Heart Attack Grill has filed a lawsuit to shut down a new Florida restaurant called Heart Stoppers, which the Grill claims has swiped its intellectual property by featuring similar anti-health themes. Both restaurants include waitresses dressed as naughty nurses, reinforcing a tired stereotype of female sexuality that undermines real nurses' claims to adequate respect and resources. These culinary landmarks also seem to share the view that encouraging people to eat lots of fatty food and become obese makes the restaurant owners the revolutionary equivalent of the nation's Founders. Which ever way the court rules in this important case, we applaud Grill owner "Dr." Jon Basso for his tenacious efforts to close down other restaurants with similar themes, which we hope will at least limit the damage caused by the type of anti-nurse marketing that he has done since 2006. And let's not forget the Delray Beach "nursing director" who explained her Heart Stoppers visit this way to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel: "I heard they all dressed up as nurses and I wanted to check them out. At my hospital, they never let us wear fishnets." Fight the power! Please write to the owners of both the Heart Attack Grill and Heart Stoppers--one of whom, Iggy Lena, is a real-life paramedic--and tell them that there must be some way to make money without portraying nurses as bimbos. more... and please take action by sending one of our instant letters!
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Mariah Carey campaign update: A Vision of Love?
March 14, 2010 -- Recently the Truth's campaign to persuade Mariah Carey to reconsider her use of naughty nurse imagery in the video for "Up Out My Face" has received coverage in the Hartford Courant, the Baltimore Sun, the India Times, the Calgary Herald, ADVANCE for Nurses, Scrubs Magazine, HCPro, the Dallas Morning News, and other news sources. Unfortunately, there has still been no response from Ms. Carey herself. However, the pop star's "lambs" (fans) have learned of the campaign and responded in force. They have argued that the video is just a harmless fantasy, that nurses' business is solely caring for patients at the bedside, that the Truth is just seeking "publicity" (which evidently differs from raising awareness), and that we have no right to criticize Carey's work, because she is successful, powerful, talented, and beyond our limited understanding. However, research shows that even fantasies and "jokes" can have a real effect on how people think and act, especially when repeated countless times in all media worldwide over a period of decades, as the naughty nurse has been. By relentlessly associating the profession of nursing with female sexuality, the naughty nurse makes it harder for real nurses to get the respect and resources they need to save lives, and discourages many advanced students from choosing the profession, as recent research shows. more... or go straight to our letter-writing campaign or post your own comment to respond to those of Carey's fans. Thank you!
March 24, 2010 -- Living in Emergency, which will be in U.S. theaters on April 17, tells the stories of four developed world physicians who have worked on Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) aid missions in Congo and Liberia. The documentary feature offers a somewhat confused but still fairly engaging look at MSF's work in these war-torn nations. Of course, the film is an advertisement for MSF, but it is admirably frank about tensions between foreign and local staff, the stress of confronting widespread suffering in dangerous areas, and the despair that critical resource shortages can cause. The film even offers some insights on foreign aid work. But it mostly ignores MSF's local staff, and completely ignores its nurses and logistics officers, all of whom play key roles in the Nobel Prize-winning group's work. Although nurses are the most numerous MSF health professionals, this film is almost entirely about physicians, who do virtually all of the talking and acting. Viewers learn what the physicians do, what they think, and how they feel. Other MSF staff may flit across the screen, unidentified, but they are portrayed as peripheral to the stories that matter: those of the casually heroic physicians who provide all meaningful care to these populations in great need. In the end, the distorted film's treatment of emergency aid mirrors that of MSF's name: it's a physician thing. more...
"Naughty Nurse Delivers Nice Profits for RestoreMax"
December 11, 2009 -- A Florida company called MensMax recently issued a press release boasting that its new "naughty nurse" online ad was boosting sales of "RestoreMax," which the company says is "the first ever penis skin care cream." The company said that its YouTube posting of the "sexy nurse" video had already gotten more than 150,000 hits. In the release, Michael Dugan, president of Redu, Inc. (which seems to own MensMax and markets other skin care products), said that he had tried the "serious" marketing approach using "doctors and health care professionals." But he said the "naughty nurse" is "funny" and "delivers exactly the same message...in a way men can enjoy and relax with." The press release also reported that the company was creating a naughty nurse ad "that can be cleared on regular television." Great. In the online video, the attractive young "nurse" claims to be a "professional," and she is certainly articulate in explaining the product's virtues to a gowned male patient--she's doing patient education! But her very short white dress, her leering, flirtatious manner, her enthusiastic application of the product to the male patient, and her suggestion that the patient can "get some" by taking her to dinner leave a little something to be desired. Naughty nurse imagery like this may generate profits, but it also reinforces a damaging stereotype of nurses as sexually available (if not sexually aggressive), and it undermines real nurses' claims to adequate resources for clinical practice and education. more...and please join our letter-writing campaign!
Take Action! Use your lungs!
November 2, 2009 -- Today the national advocacy group Lung Cancer Alliance (LCA) launched a high-profile media campaign to increase awareness of how dangerous lung cancer is for women. The campaign is built on a rap video called "Waitin' Room Service" that features "Dr. Lung Love," who manages to work several important ideas about lung cancer into the song, including the importance of screenings and increased research funding. The LCA video is a shot-by-shot, line-by-line parody of Pitbull's recent video for "Hotel Room Service," which featured the rapper and hot, half-dressed women. Sadly, the LCA parody substitutes "nurses" who, though fully clothed in scrubs, offer 
attention to the Lung Love character, caressing him and dancing suggestively with him. And in one lyric, he informs us that the "nurse just left," so he'll "love your lungs tonight." Ewww. Anyway, it seems that swaggering, masterful physicians handle important health matters, while cute nurse helpmates provide, well, waitin' room service. With more inspired writing and direction, a great video could have been made to advance awareness without reinforcing the naughty nurse stereotype that has plagued real nurses for decades. The LCA video is a special insult to the oncology nurses who actually provide much of the care for cancer patients--what Lung Love so eloquently calls the "somethin'" that "can be done" if the cancer is not too far advanced (or even if it is). The Lung Cancer Alliance site makes clear that the video was not something some low level employee stumbled into. It is being promoted by the group's leadership as the central part of a major national publicity effort during Lung Cancer Awareness Month. Of course this is not the first PSA to degrade nurses (see Jon Corzine's seat belt ad and Saw III's blood donation ad), but the fact that a major DC health care charity would employ the naughty nurse image in a campaign of this magnitude surprises even us. The nurses who fight cancer deserve better than this video's tainted Lung Love, which undermines real nurses' claims to adequate resources and respect. So please give LCA some love...of nurses. Join our campaign to end the video's needless use of naughty nurse imagery!
October 21, 2009 -- Are the nurse characters on Mercy and the other new Hollywood nurse shows just self-righteous nags who have forgotten their proper place, which is certainly not to challenge physicians who are trying to do their supremely important work? Shouldn't nurses' highest aspiration be to attend medical school, or at least to marry someone who has? Some elite media critics seem to think so. Ginia Bellafante's contemptuous September 23, 2009 New York Times review suggested that Mercy's nurse characters were pathetic bridge-and-tunnel women who had fallen pretty far from ER nurses, who got to marry George Clooney and maybe even join their "superiors" by attending medical school! And today, Heather Havrilesky's roundup of new shows in Salon was practically seething about Mercy; apparently, it's a "mercilessly self-righteous" vision of nurses "wagging their fingers" at "cartoonishly self-concerned" physicians. In other words, these nurses may think they're fighting for patients, but they're really more like tiresome sitcom wives, nagging and wagging. There are reasons to fault Mercy as a drama, but it and the other nurse shows have gone out of their way to include positive counterexamples of physician conduct (the lead physician in each is smart, able, and attractive) and to show that the nurse leads are deeply flawed and sometimes wrong. It seems like some critics can't handle the idea that there really are smart, educated nurses who do (and must) challenge the care plans of physicians who are not so McDreamy in their professional roles. We can't recall such media critics attacking the far more extreme and unrealistic heroic-physician / servant-nurse narrative that has dominated the last 100 or so other hospital shows. Bellafante acknowledges that shows like House suggest only physicians matter, but apparently there's something unseemly about an "angry little soap" like Mercy trying to counter that vision. Some critics seem to identify more with physicians--the master class that smart, ambitious women like the critics themselves can now join--than they do with nurses, the sad yestergirls who still do subordinate "women's work." Sadly, the dismissive attitudes of female media figures speak volumes not only about the hard road faced by shows like Mercy, but also about why nursing itself remains undervalued and underfunded. Few may consider shows like Mercy subversive, but they do contradict some powerful "feminist" assumptions. Maybe the shows hit too close to home: How dare they suggest that nurses are like me? more...and please join our letter-writing campaign!
October 2009 -- Starting last year, Virgin Mobile India has apparently been broadcasting a "naughty nurse" television ad as part of its "Think hatke" (Think differently) campaign. In the ad, a supposedly immobilized young hospital patient tricks a hot, compliant young nurse in a very short white dress. The patient has a friend call his cell phone, then asks the nurse to find the ringing phone and help him answer; that requires having her reach around in his pockets, that is, in his genital area. Of course, there is also the irony of a "think different" campaign whose central idea is actually swiped from Apple's legendary campaign of the 1980's. The Virgin Mobile ad does not represent anything "different" from the naughty nurse advertising that CEO Richard Branson and Virgin Mobile Canada indulged in several years ago, or from the ubiquitous naughty nurse imagery that has infected the globe for decades, undermining nurses' claims to adequate resources during the global nursing crisis. As for the "thinking" part, we'll leave it to you to compare the ideas of the people who appeared in Apple's original campaign--for example, Mohandas Gandhi--with the idea of tricking a nurse into sticking her hand down your pants for a few seconds. We urge Virgin Mobile to think different. more...and please join our letter-writing campaign!
July 9, 2009 -- In the June 4, 2009 premiere of USA Network's new hit summer drama Royal Pains, the brilliant and heroic physician character Hank Lawson was fired and blackballed by a New York City hospital for treating all patients equally. Afterwards, Hank lamented that he could not even find a job as a school nurse! (See the Quicktime clips at broadband or dialup speed.) The message for the episode's 5.6 million viewers was that there could not be a more trivial and unskilled job for a health worker than that of school nurses, who presumably spend their days placing band-aids on scraped knees. But in fact Hank could not get a job as a school nurse because he has not spent years in nursing school, has no nursing license, and knows little about nursing. While the contempt in this episode continues to infect the mass media, it's no surprise that real school nurses struggle for the resources they need to save lives and improve student health. Ryan Blackburn's May 8, 2009 story in the Athens Banner-Herald (GA) explained that school nurses manage chronic health issues like allergies, diabetes, and seizures so students can continue learning. Anemona Hartocollis's April 28 New York Times article described the work of New York City school nurse Mary Pappas. She became "a sort of folk hero to nurses" for setting in motion the governmental response to the October swine flu outbreak, identifying and managing hundreds of students' symptoms in a way that might even impress Hank Lawson out in the Hamptons! And today the Associated Press ran an excellent item by Lauran Neergaard about Pappas's "riveting" performance at the Obama Administration's swine flu summit. 
There the nurse explained how she handled the huge triage challenge in October, and her plans for the coming flu season, offering this pointed advice to the government: "Every school needs a nurse." Kris Sherman's March 8 article in the News Tribune (Tacoma, WA) offered a tragic example of what happened in that same October at a local school with no nurse: A fifth-grader died from a massive asthma attack, even though she was taken to a school health room where materials were reserved specifically to save her life. No one with significant health training was there to use them. These recent press pieces paint a picture of a vital professional specialty worthy of more than the undervaluation that has strained its members beyond the breaking point--and that continues to take our children's lives. We urge everyone to help change that situation. Join the National Association of School Nurses in the effort to pass the student to school ratio improvement act and ask your organization to join their list of supporters. more...and take action to support school nurses!
A Short History of Dr. Feelgood
March 16, 2009 -- Today the veteran metal band Motley Crue got coverage in the rock press by arriving for a New York City press conference to announce its summer 2009 Crue Fest 2 Tour in a classic Cadillac ambulance with two women dressed in naughty nurse outfits. The ambulance and nurses underlined a central theme of the tour, which is that the band will play its popular 1989 album Dr. Feelgood all the way through at every show. But it's still a predictably lame reinforcement of the naughty nurse stereotype, which despite being a "joke" degrades nursing in the public consciousness and undermines nurses' claims to adequate respect and resources during a critical nursing shortage. Why predictable? Because the band has not been able to resist the naughty nurse in recent publicity efforts, including as a 2007 promotional theme for frontman Vince Neil's West Palm Beach club "Dr. Feelgood's," as well as in drummer Tommie Lee's appearance as "Dr. Feelgood" in Keith Anderson's 2005 "XXL" video. It's not clear if the naughty nurses will be along for Crue Fest 2. But since the band is stressing that its shows are a way to help fans cope with the lousy economy, maybe it would consider applying that laudable concern for public wellbeing to the nursing crisis, and leave the bimbo nurse part out. more... and please join our letter-writing campaign!
"And yet nowhere in that newspaper article does my name appear. I am the unseen hand to his brilliance."
-- Cristina Yang, having quit surgery for nursing, protesting the media's tendency to credit physicians for the important work of nurses
May 8, 2008 -- Tonight's episode of ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" was a tour de force of physician nursing and portrayed nurses as so desperate for physicians' romantic attention that they would stop work and call in their union if they failed to get it. In the episode, Seattle Grace's surgical nurses boycotted all surgeries of plastic surgeon Mark Sloane because he had loved and left too many of them. The boycott lasted until resident Miranda Bailey gave the mute ninnies a public lecture on romantic maturity and how their hurt feelings were probably a little less important than the lives that could be saved by, um, actually doing the surgeries. The producers probably thought they could not be accused of promoting the "naughty nurse" because Sloane was, as Bailey stressed, the real "whore." But the plotline suggested that nurses were too dumb to realize what Sloan was all about despite his reputation, and that they were after more of his attention than they could have, underlining the sense that they are slutty serfs grasping at any available hunky physician. Meanwhile, the episode relentlessly showed the surgeons doing important work that nurses actually do: running the surgical board; providing all psychosocial care to distraught patients and families; giving IV medications; doing all patient monitoring, including of a patient's intracranial pressure; and doing a clinical trial essentially by themselves. Finally, resident Cristina Yang gave a bitter speech about ex-flame Preston Burke winning a prestigious medical award without crediting her help--an astonishing echo of the show's own crediting of physicians for work nurses really do. The episode was Tony Phelan and Joan Rater's "The Becoming"--drawn from a Nine Inch Nails song, because if any TV show is in sync with Trent Reznor's fiercely bleak view of modern life, it's definitely "Grey's." The episode drew 15.6 million U.S. viewers. more...and please join our letter-writing campaign!
April 27, 2009 -- Today's New York Times Crossword puzzle sought the answer "nurse" with the clue "hospital attendant." But nurses are skilled, autonomous professionals who use their years of college-level education to save lives and improve patient outcomes. They are not "attendants," a word which is generally used to mean an assistant or service worker with relatively little formal education in the relevant field. The clue recalls the Times Crossword's even more inaccurate February 2007 nurse clue "ICU helper." Of course, some will note that it's "just a crossword puzzle." But all mass media has some effect on how people think and act. And the fact that the premiere crossword in the world repeatedly features such clues illustrates the range of media that contributes to the deadly undervaluation of nursing, and of course, also shows how difficult it is to correct such stereotyping. This puzzle was created by Joe Krozel, and the current Times puzzle editor, as in 2007, is Will Shortz. more... and please join our letter-writing campaign!
February 15, 2009 -- Today many press outlets ran a very good Associated Press story by Rasha Madkour about nascent efforts to keep new nurses at the bedside through nurse residency programs. The San Diego Union-Tribune headlined the piece "Amid nurse shortage, hospitals focus on retention." But the article really focuses on the particular problem of helping new nurses adjust to the intense demands of practice through formal, hospital-based training programs. The report gives a good basic sense of some of the major types of residency programs and how they can reduce the remarkably high 20% attrition rate for new nurses in the U.S. The article might have included more detail about features of the longer nurse residencies--which are still just one year--and more context regarding the far more extensive physician residencies, including the billions of dollars in federal government support those receive. We thank Madkour and the AP for this very helpful report on an important but often overlooked factor in the nursing shortage. more...and please join our letter-writing campaign!
Please write to television producers at the following addresses:
Grey's Anatomy
Mark Gordon, Betsy Beers, Krista Vernoff
Executive Producers, "Grey's Anatomy"
The Mark Gordon Company
12200 W. Olympic Blvd., Ste 250
Los Angeles, CA 90064 USAShonda Rhimes
Executive Producer, "Grey's Anatomy"
Shondaland
4151 Prospect Ave. 4th Fl.
Los Angeles, CA 90027Channing Dungey, VP Drama Series
Touchstone Television
500 S. Buena Vista St.
Burbank, CA 91521Charissa Gilmore, VP Media Relations
Touchstone Television
500 S. Buena Vista St.
Burbank, CA 91521
Private Practice
Shonda Rhimes, Lauren Schmidt, Mark Tinker
Executive Producers, "Private Practice"
Raleigh Studios
5300 Melrose Avenue
East Office Building, 4th Fl.
Hollywood, CA 90038-5111
House
David Shore
Executive producer, "House"
Twentieth Century Fox Television
10201 W. Pico Blvd; Bld89 Rm 230
Los Angeles 90035Paul Attanasio and Katie Jacobs
Executive producers, "House"
Heel & Toe Films
2058 Broadway
Santa Monica, CA 90404-2910Jeff Zucker, CEO
NBC Universal Television
100 Universal City Plaza
Universal City, CA 91608-1002Kim Kurland
"House" Publicist
Fox Network
PO Box 900
Beverly Hills, CA 90213-0900
Kim.Kurland@fox.com
Also see our past campaigns; our success stories; action pages for Grey's Anatomy, House, Private Practice, ER and Scrubs
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