Giovanna Chesler, a film professor, couldn’t have scripted a screenplay more provocative than the drama that recently unfolded in her own life.
Sitting at a 45-degree angle, clad in a paper gown, legs in stirrups, Chesler received the diagnosis from her gynecologist — she had HPV, a sexually transmitted infection (STI).
“I was shocked,” says Chesler, who later found out that the cells were pre-cancerous and needed to be removed.
Chesler, a 33-year-old filmmaker who’d immersed herself in women’s studies during her undergraduate years at the University of Virginia and illustrated the complexities of the female body through film, found herself at the forefront of a women’s sexual health issue that affects millions, the human papillomavirus, better known as HPV.
