#the reproductive burden is on the woman

[daportalpractitioner]

the 12th house + your period

the 12th house is associated with the menstrual phase of your cycle. during the menstrual phase, our wombs are not only shedding on a physical level, but on an energetic level. we are participating in self-undoing as we shed harmful attachments which is ruled by the 12th house. the 12th house is also "the void" and the menstrual cycle is associated with the nu moon phase of the moon cycle which is in fact - a void. it is best for women who are menstruating to remain introspective + stay in solitude during her bleed - solitude being ruled by the 12th house.

aries 12H: your period may be physically painful + internally chaotic. she can also come knocking on your door unexpectedly. she is here to help you shed attachments that refrain you from dishonoring your true power. your period can feel like a time of renewal for you each month. it's possible that you may have tended to disregard your cycle at first + not deem the importance of it, and were met with reproductive issues from not prioritizing your physical health. aries 12th housers should do very light workouts to get your qi flowing so that the womb can have the energy to push you through the (re)birth canal.

taurus 12H: this is the type of woman that can eat chocolate in bed + cuddle up while watching a movie during her period (and should!). your period is here to help you shed attachment from the things that aren't adding true value to your life. if you've been holding yourself up to a high standard, there are no afflictions in your 12th house, and if venus isn't being afflicted in your chart, your period could be a calm time with nothing more than a bit of discomfort. otherwise, taurus 12th housers could experience heavy pain + cramping as well as a sign that it's time to level up. remove all stressors during this time as stress can also trigger menstrual pains.

gemini 12H: during your period, your mind could be running at 1000 miles per minute, making it more difficult for you to be present, still, and introspective. there's nothing like the downloads that you receive on your bleed. your intuition is on point, so any uncertainty can be met with clarity during your cycle as your aha moments can multiply. you can optimize your spiritual gifts by using this time for astral traveling + divination serves as powerful guidance and confirmation for you during this phase. a variety of PMS symptoms are commonly experienced with this placement, especially unpredictable mood swings. you can use this time to creatively brainstorm and write down any sudden ideas which come to mind, but wait until after your period to actually start any projects.

cancer 12H: the need to crawl into your shell to protect your innerG is crucial. when this time is honored well, this is a rejuvenating period for you. use this time to get some serious rest + reflection in. this is the perfect time to focus on matters of the home, making sure that your home still aligns with you and brings out the best of you. do an emotional check-in and reset for yourself during your period. cancer 12H natives often carry the burdening pain + trauma of the women ancestors that has come before them so you can use this time as a period of karmic healing to release the baggage that was passed down to you. your period may be a very sensitive time with low pain tolerance for not honoring your womb in the ways she deserves to be cared for.

leo 12H: many leo 12H natives are unaware of their cycles and therefore experience heavy PMS symptoms without even thinking that maybe they could be the issue. the nature of your period is connected to the story that you tell about your period. if you say that your period is this really painful, negative experience, you will continue to experience it negatively. lean into creating a positive narrative about your period; for example - my period is an exciting time for me to rest and become the best version of myself! similar to cancer 12th housers, your period is a very sensitive time and is not afraid to act up when you don't honor your womb's needs + love her wholeheartedly. this is the perfect time for self-love healing as painful periods are an indication of inadequate self-love with this placement.

virgo 12H: naturally, you may experience issues surrounding your period because of virgo's nature of being a "fixer". issues could manifest as painful periods + health issues related to the womb. your period is a detox time in order for the womb space to be purified. in order for the womb to undergo an efficient detox, conscious eating would be super beneficial for you, especially during the luteal phase of your cycle. creating a health regimen around your period is also very beneficial for healing any issues that you may be experiencing monthly.

libra 12H: your period is here to help you restore balance in life by urging you to release the ways in which you have put others before yourself. this is coming back to the essence of the divine feminine. any pain + unfortunate symptoms that arise during your period can indicate you over-exercising your masculine energy. your period reminds you that you should not find yourself in a space of chasing anything or trying to control any situation, putting you in a prime position for receiving just as nature has intended. periods are a time for realignment for those who surrender and leave it to the Divine to shift them where they need to be.

scorpio 12H: your period can usher in transformation through a (painful) death + rebirth process. your womb is shedding emotional baggage that it has not forgotten and has stubbornly been holding onto. this is a time where you would want to cut things or people off that are no longer a reflection of a high self-esteem. though this can be an emotionally intense and painful time, you can transmute this innerG to make it an empowering time rather than just a painful time. these are growing pains that you're actually experiencing. scorpio 12H natives need to find their power in their period. magick would even be highly beneficial for you to practice as your energy is super potent and magnetizing during this time.

sagittarius 12H: this is a time for you to gain insights and wisdom from the previous cycle, innerstanding the significance + purpose of that experience. the downloads go crazy during your period as your womb is consistently emitting spiritual knowledge. things can get spiritually intense and you can feel the need to switch up your flow, expand, or change direction based on divine insight given to you. it's easy for you to disregard your needs so make sure that you're taking care of your menstrual health + indulging in womb enriching foods + activities.

capricorn 12H: your period is a phase you need to take extra seriously in your cycle. she is not here for the play play! she's here to assist you on this level up to success. it's important to practice discipline on your period, especially when it comes to taking care of your health + wellness. there's a need to dismantle how the patriarchy has affected how you perceive your period. use this time as a time to rest - it's so important and this placement can humble you if you don't. you hurt your womb by participating in overexerting your masculine energy during a season of rest. your karmic lesson here is to reconnect with your femininity through your womb. infertility can be a theme + womb disorders can manifest from the disconnect to your feminine nature.

aquarius 12H: there is this innate detachment to your womb, especially if there has been a disconnection between you and your mother. you may experience or have experienced irregular periods due to the influence of uranus. this is a time for you to do some deep healing + innovation each month. your period can feel like a spiritual upgrade as you detach from whats no longer serving your vision. dive deep into the collective consciousness + use your period as a time to reflect on how you're being called to show up for the collective. there's a need to embrace your womb + honor her, not reject her. also, make sure you're taking time to be present in the moment as you can experience the difficulties of being still.

pisces 12H: you are deeply + psychically connected to your womb. you know when your period is coming + you naturally feel connected to all the phases of your cycle as they all have an effect on your body. allow this time to be a time for much rest + solitude. this could be a very sensitive time with heavy emotional releases. disregarding the unaddressed emotional turmoil taking a toll on your womb can allow the manifestation of disease in the womb to take place. spiritual upgrades leading you to feel closer to God happen during this time as well. you may have grown up not innerstanding the importance of your cycle + perceived your period to be a time of suffering rather than a very healing + empowering time. i'd highly recommend cycle syncing for cycle awareness.

#flygrlalchemy #astro observations #astrology observations #astro notes #astrology notes #astroblr #astrology #divine feminine #cycle syncing #menstrual health

[probablyasocialecologist]

Ruth Schwartz Cowan, surveying domestic technology from 1860 to 1960, found that rather than relieve beleaguered housewives, domestic technologies tended to ease home activities traditionally performed by men. Innovations such as the gas cooking stove and the automatic flour mill freed men from chopping wood and grinding grain, allowing them more time to work outside the home. Meanwhile, women assumed a greater proportion of domestic labor: “You [the housewife] bore the whole burden of housework. For your husband and your children, the house became a place of leisure.” According to Cowan, one result of the mechanization of housekeeping was a dramatic reduction in the number of paid domestic laborers, with the concomitant extension of housekeeping duties for the woman of the home. The introduction of the washing machine replaced the reliance on professional laundresses— instead, the housewife could do the work for free. The mechanization of the work of social reproduction, in this account, serves to shore up a gendered division of labor, rather than reduce the time spent in toil. “The end result is that housewives, even of the most comfortable classes (in our generally now comfortable society) are doing housework themselves.”

Gavin Mueller, Breaking Things at Work

#Breaking Things at Work #gender #suburbia #technology

[sophie-frm-mars]

trans rights

The basic claim of trans rights isn't that trans people exist (a non-negotiable human fact) but that trans people deserve everything available to cis people, in the same way that the original feminist claim was not that women exist but rather that they are equally as human as men.

The shift in material terms (what opportunities we have, how we are treated and so on) as well as societal understanding of us is that we are not implicitly sexual objects, the same as the original feminist push for change.

Along the way to explaining this to people we have to divorce the notions of sexuality and gender, which many cis people still do not understand as distinct, but although they are divorced, sexuality and gender are not completely alienated from one another. Gender and sexuality are friends with benefits.

Trans people put a lot of labour into their gender.

(Please read Wages for transition if you haven't)

The labour that trans people put into their gender is quite visible in ways that the labour that cis people put into their gender is not. For many cis people this creates an implicit impression that trans people by existing are claiming that their gender is more valuable than cis people's. This exists quite comfortably in a society that never talks about trans people unless it acknowledges their existence as sex workers or fetish objects, but not in a society that would treat trans people as equally human. Therefore a push for social and legal equality for trans people is, in the minds of those cis people, a push for a society in which it is broadly accepted that some people's gender is more valuable.

However, we already live in a society where it is broadly accepted that some people have more valuable gender than others. "Hot" people, many of whom put a significant amount of labour into their gender, are also treated as having more valuable genders than others. I'd like to draw attention to the obvious similarity between transmisogynistic rhetoric and ideology and the rhetoric and ideology of incels. Incels believe in a sexual hierarchy which essentially treats "more sex" as better and reflexively indicative of a more valuable person, rather than a uniquely communicated and negotiated consensual connection between two or more people.

(We could also draw a parallel between people's reaction to nonbinary people and people's reactions to vegans, i.e. "so you think you're better than me?")

Under patriarchy, women are treated as responsible for the reproduction of society, which is often essentialised as an inherent (biological) quality of women. Trans women, assumed by people who are not trans women to not be burdened with a disproportionate share of reproductive labour, are treated by transmisogynists as getting to enjoy all the aspects of being a woman (implicitly under patriarchy being a woman is doing more gender than being a man) without paying the price for being a woman.

When we say that we are gender abolitionists we simply mean that we are feminists, and that we wish to abolish societal hierarchies based on gender and allow people to self-determine and fully control their own gender without it having implications on their social status. Naturally the relations between genders are not abolished unless they are hierarchical because gender is frequently constructed through gendered relations. This, again, is why sexuality and gender remain close despite the fallout from their earlier codependent relationship. We should, in fact, want a billion squillion kajillion genders because allowing people to treat gender as a multifaceted social performance instead of an inherent characteristic rigidly attached to sex, we support implicitly the abolition of cisheteropatriarchy.

[prolifeproliberty]

This is an old article, but there’s a phrase here that just made me laugh:

Now, what they mean is “you probably won’t die from having an irregular cycle” - and we could go into the complications, including cancers, that are related to the reproductive system and that could be influenced by something that is impacting the menstrual cycle, but more importantly here…

The menstrual cycle - or rather, a woman’s fertility cycle - is integral and essential to the process of new human life being created.

It’s literally an issue of human life.

Stop letting doctors lie to you and tell you that your reproductive system is unimportant, irrelevant, or just a burden. It is a part of you, and a competent doctor will recognize that a healthy reproductive system is part of your overall health as a person.

[djuvlipen]

If you came here to block me, especially if you're a Romani girl, PLEASE READ THIS FIRST.

Romani women are oppressed because of what we were born as: our biological sex.

Some Romani communities practice sex-selective abortions: when they learn a fetus is female, they abort it, because a girl is considered a burden. (x) "The birth of a daughter is quite a tragedy for a family, whilst the birth of a son, glossed metonymically as ‘birth of happiness’ (bucurie) is always an outstanding event (see also Gay y Blasco)." (x)

Romani women were sexually abused all throughout slavery. Assaulting Romani women was essential to slavery because it terrorized us into subjugation. It also allowed the slaveholder to control Romani women's reproductive abilities: birthing children meant more livestock for them. (x)

Romani women were shipped as slaves to American colonies to be bred with plantation slaves and, once again, increasing the number of slaves. (x)

During the Holocaust, Romani women were once again targeted by sexual violence, at higher rates than Romani men. Romani women were forced to serve in military brothels by the Romanian army allied with the Nazis (Anton Weiss-Wendt, The Nazi Genocide of the Roma). Romani women were also forced to serve in Nazi camp brothels (Sonja M. Hedgepeth, Rochelle G. Saidel (eds.), Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust).

Romani women have had our reproductive rights threaten times and times again, we were sterilized in Sweden (x), in Hungary (x), and in Czechoslovakia (x) during the 20th century (not to even mention the forced sterilization of Romani women in Nazi camps).

Romani women are among the first victims of the sex trade in Europe, we are trafficked at alarming rates by our relatives, friends or strangers, Romani or not. (x)

Because we are female, we are impacted by racism in a way that Romani men aren't: Romani women are more likely to have complications and to die during pregnancy and labor. (x)

Biological sex is relevant, even essential, to studying and challenging violence against Romani women. In all these instances, a privileged sex group (males) oppressed another sex group (female Roma) to dominate us.

Sex is an observable fact and distinct from gender. Gender refers to a set of roles ascribed to one sex in one given society. Gender is enforced by violence. You are socialized into a specific gender, whether you want it or not. For the Roma who are born female, that means:

You are expected to marry a man. A man whom your family approves of. Some Romani communities practice arranged marriages for their daughters, some of them are not even adult yet (x). It's not racist to state this, Romani women deserve bodily autonomy just as much as White women.

You are expected to remain a virgin until you're married. This is once again enforced with violence: in Spain, Romani women insert a handkerchief with their finger in the vagina of the bride to make sure she's a virgin, lest the entire family is dishonoured. (x)

In traditional communities, you are expected to stay at home, cook, and clean for your husband. You are expected to respect a strict dress code.

If you disobey to those rules, if you don't dress modestly, if you are a lesbian, you can be beaten, shunned, excluded by your Romani community. This is something I've personally seen and of which testimonies are easy to find.

These gendered expectations are part of the reason why Romani women are hit more harshly than Romani men by structural anti-Romani racism:

Romani women are more likely not to complete education.

Romani women are more likely not to know how to read and write. (x)

Romani women are more likely to be unemployed. (x)

Gender non-conformity is strictly punished, because people have a fixed idea of what being a woman is, and they will punish you if you try to act otherwise. The solution to this is not to say that a Romani woman who wants to pursue a career, doesn't dress modestly, or date other women, is actually a man or non-binary. The solution is to fight gender roles and get rid of gender altogether. Radical feminism is about fighting for the rights of those born female (women) against the domination established by the privileged sex class (men). The way to do this is to dismantle gender roles.

Stating this is not transphobic in any capacity. If you want to call me a "transmisogynist" or a "fascist" and block me, I want you to think really hard on why you are so ready to silence Romani women fighting to end the sex-based oppression we suffer from, do you think you are really a good ally by doing this?

#roma #sex based oppression #radical feminism #radfems do interact #radfems please interact #radfems do touch #radfems please touch #romani #cultural misogyny #romani reproductive rights

[haggishlyhagging]

In the West, feminists who oppose technological reproduction are likewise accused of "no sympathy for the infertile." . . . To encourage technological reproduction in the name of sympathy for the infertile is to sentimentalize medical violation. As journalist Ann Pappert has written, "I am a feminist, a journalist who writes frequently on medical and health issues, and a woman with a fertility problem. Like many other infertile women, I initially looked upon reproductive technology as a beneficial option for infertile women, but after spending a year researching and writing on these technologies I have come to regard them as a highly destructive science that not only offers little benefit to women, but causes great harm."

Pappert is one of the increasing number of women with an infertility condition who are speaking out against reproductive technologies. She notes that technological reproduction puts a huge burden on women, greater than the original burden of infertility, because now women have even less of a chance to say no to childbearing. Women feel pressured to try technological reproduction simply because it exists. Concerned relatives and friends ask the inevitable question, "Have you tried IVF?" If not, then obviously she has not done all she can, and in Western patriarchal society, she must do all she can to remedy this supposedly unnatural condition of childlessness.

-Janice G. Raymond, Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle Over Women’s Freedom

#janice raymond #infertility #reproductive technology #patriarchy #mandated motherhood #childlessness

[magnoliamyrrh]

By Hawon Jung

After trying for over a year to persuade more South Korean women to have babies, Chung Hyun-back says one reason stands out for her failure: “Our patriarchal culture.” Ms. Chung, who was tasked by the previous government with reversing the country’s plummeting birthrate, knows firsthand how tough it is to be a woman in South Korea. She chose her career over nuptials and children. Like her, millions of young women have been collectively spurning motherhood in a so-called birth strike.

A 2022 survey found that more women than men — 65 percent versus 48 percent — don’t want children. They’re doubling down by avoiding matrimony (and its conventional pressures) altogether. The other term in South Korea for birth strike is “marriage strike.”

The trend is killing South Korea. For three years in a row, the country has recorded the lowest fertility rate in the world, with women of reproductive age having fewer than one child on average. It reached the “dead cross,” when deaths outnumbered births, in 2020, nearly a decade earlier than expected.

Chung Hyun-back, who was South Korea’s gender equality minister in 2017-18, tried unsuccessfully to raise the country’s plunging fertility rate. Among the obstacles she says are to blame is the country’s “patriatchal culture."

Now, about half of the country’s 228 cities, counties and districts risk losing so many residents they might vanish. Day care centers and kindergartens are being converted into nursing homes. Ob-Gyn clinics are closing, and funeral parlors are opening. At Seoksan Elementary School, in rural Gunwi County, the student body has shrunk from 700 pupils to four. When last I visited, the children couldn’t even form a soccer team.

Young Koreans have well-documented  reasons not to start a family, including the staggering costs of raising children, unaffordable homes, lousy job prospects and soul-crushing work hours. But women in particular are fed up with this traditionalist society’s impossible expectations of mothers. So they’re quitting.

President Yoon Suk-yeol, elected last year, has suggested feminism is to blame for blocking “healthy relationships” between men and women. But he’s got it backward — gender equality is the solution to falling birthrates. Many of the Korean women shunning dating, marriage and childbirth are sick of pervasive sexism and furious about a culture of violent chauvinism. Their refusal to be “baby-making machines,” according to protest banners I’ve seen, is retaliation. “The birth strike is women’s revenge on a society that puts impossible burdens on us and doesn’t respect us,” says Jiny Kim, 30, a Seoul office worker who’s intent on remaining childless.

Making life fairer and safer for women would work wonders toward reducing the country’s existential threat. Yet this feminist dream seems increasingly far-fetched, as Mr. Yoon’s conservative government champions regressive policies that only magnify the problem.

South Korea’s demographic crisis was once inconceivable: As late as the 1960s, women had six children on average. But the state, pursuing economic development, carried out an aggressive population control campaign. In about 20 years, women were having fewer than the 2.1 children needed for replenishment, a number that’s only continued to drop. The latest available data from South Korea’s statistics agency put the fertility rate at 0.81 for 2021; by the third quarter of 2022 it was 0.79.

Recent governments have indeed been alarmed by a rate that’s seemingly approaching zero. Over 16 years, 280 trillion won ($210 billion) has been poured into programs encouraging procreation, such as a monthly allowance for parents of newborns.

Many women still say nope. No wonder. There’s little escaping suffocating gender norms, whether in pregnancy guidelines to arrange clean undergarments for your husband before labor, or the dayslong kitchen drudgework for holidays like the Chuseok harvest festival. Married women are saddled with the lion’s share of chores and child care, squeezing new mothers so much that many give up professional ambitions. Even in dual-income households, wives daily spend more than three hours on these tasks versus their husband’s 54 minutes.

Discrimination against working mothers by employers is also absurdly common. In one notorious case, the country’s top baby formula maker was accused of pressuring female employees to quit after getting pregnant.

And gender-based violence is “shockingly widespread,” according to Human Rights Watch. In 2021, a woman was murdered or targeted for murder every 1.4 days or less, according to the Korea Women’s Hotline. Women have dubbed the act of ending a relationship without getting a vicious reaction a “safe breakup.”

But women haven’t passively accepted the toxic masculinity. They’ve organized raucously, from Asia’s most successful #MeToo movement to groups like “4B,” which translates to the “Four nos: no dating, no sex, no marriage and no child-rearing.” The country’s feminist movements have won the decriminalization of abortion and harsher penalties for an epidemic of spycam-porn crimes.

Many young Korean men, however, have declared themselves victims of women’s activism. President Yoon rose to power last year by leveraging this resentment. He echoed the dog whistle of men’s rights advocates, declaring that structural sexism no longer exists in South Korea and vowing tougher punishment for false reports of sexual assault.

Mr. Yoon’s government is removing the term “gender equality” from school textbooks and has canceled funding for programs to fight everyday sexism. “If you find gender equality and feminism so important, you can do it with your own money and time,” said one lawmaker in his party.

The government is also working to dismantle its own headquarters for women’s empowerment — the gender equality ministry. Established in 2001, it’s been transformative in normalizing parental leave for fathers and helping more women achieve workplace seniority.

Comments by the gender equality minister under the Yoon administration illustrate its abandonment of women. In September, Kim Hyun-sook rejected the idea that misogyny was at play when a Seoul Metro worker stabbed a female colleague to death in a subway bathroom after stalking her for years. Ms. Kim also initially declared that the rape and killing of a college student on campus last June was not violence against women and shouldn’t be used to fan “gender conflict.”

So far, none of the measures implemented by successive governments have flipped the trends in marriage and childbearing. Worse yet, the current government seems to be actively undermining efforts that gave women hope. “This is a historical regression,” says Ms. Chung, who was the gender equality minister from 2017 to 2018. Society can’t end the birth strike without acknowledging women’s grievances, she says.

Motivating Korean women to reconsider marriage and children involves infusing every aspect of their lives with agency and equality. A feminist approach would remove obstacles to motherhood simply by enforcing existing laws against workplace discrimination. It would destigmatize births outside of marriage and make domestic duties everyone’s responsibility. It would condemn gender violence as reprehensible. A feminist approach would admit there’s a systemic problem.

It’s clear that countries with a disproportionate division of child care or lacking national paid parental leave, like Japan and the United States, also have plunging fertility rates. It’s the same with China, where women inspired by South Korea started their own “Four nos” movement; government data this month reveals its population is shrinking, too. But countries with cooperative fathers and good family policies, like Sweden, or that recognize diverse companionships, like France, have been more successful at stabilizing or even bumping up births.

The United Nations projects that South Korea’s 51 million population will halve before the end of the century. Survival of the nation is at stake.

Hawon Jung (@allyjung) is the author of the forthcoming “Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide,” and a former Agence France-Presse reporter in Seoul. She splits her time between South Korea and Germany.

#4b

[cocksuki2]

breasts and eggs by mieko kawakami is so uniquely woman. not in a feminine sense, or a gender-identity sense, but in the sense that i can feel the soul of womanhood in it, which i have rarely ever felt in other books. 

it captures the experience of being labelled “woman” so precisely that it’s startling and there were several times in the novel i had to put it down and take really deep breaths. 

natsuko, a 30 year old and unmarried woman living in tokyo, experiences the challenges of female bodily autonomy and questions what it means to be a woman and what it means to have children. the novel raises questions about family, sexuality, child-rearing, and womanhood through the eyes of its protagonist who, 10 years later and at the age of 40, grapples with wanting to have a child of her own without a partner. 

in the novel, natsuko, while working on her book, begins to question what it means to raise children, as well as the possibility that she would like to have a child of her own. however, she faces roadblocks on account of strict social norms in japan and the lack of bodily autonomy of women.

the novel, deftly and beautifully, traverses across women’s reproductive rights while posing questions about not only the ethics of anonymous artificial insemination, but of having children in the first place. posing it as both delight and misery, natsuko navigates her way through conflicting ideas about life, death, and birth as a single woman. 

the story deals a lot with natsuko’s own ideas of romance, sex, and loneliness, as well as her own image of herself. she questions her own family and history, reminiscing often on the time she spent with her mother, grandmother, and sister in her childhood, as well as what it meant for her to grow up poor. she considers cycles of poverty, as well as the cycles of mother and daughter, through the lens of a woman with no desire for a longterm partner or sex. 

natsuko, is asexual and sex repulsed. it’s a large part of the story, though it’s not a defining trait in who natsuko is as a person. still, she experiences the desire to have a child. she calls her own womanhood into perspective, doubting it on account of her lack of sexual attraction, detailing it as it “being as if the sexual part of her never grew up”. she states often that she has breasts, that she gets her period, that she is as woman as any other woman, yet still feels that some part of her womahood is missing because of her lack of sexual attraction. 

the novel raises challenging questions of self discovery, as well as details the frustration in being labelled “woman” in society. it beautifully captures the thoughts and burdens that come with womanhood, as well as gender identity and bodily autonomy. 

there are so many aspects of this book i could go into. i truly could not get enough of it while reading. not just because i found the protagonist to be both relatable and interesting, but because kawakami’s voice as an author is so gripping and emotionally real. reading the book, it felt as if natsuko’s thoughts mirrored my own and often, after finishing reading, i questioned whether i had actually read lines in the book or if i had thought of them myself as part of my own inner dialogue. 

it’s so beautifully layered, to the point that i think it would take me multiple posts just to cover what i’ve picked up on the first read-through, and reads like you’re looking back on a life i could have lived at some point. it’s delightfully human but also, uniquely woman. it touches on many of the unspoken (and often unaddressed) trials of being a woman that otherwise would go unheard about. 

i don’t think i’ve ever read anything like it. it touched me in a way no other novel has and detailed an account of womanhood that i felt in a very deep part of my being. this may sound cheesy, but in a way, i felt a large kinship with a lot of the women in the story. whether it was their experiences with men, their experiences with children, or their experiences simply moving through the world, i found connection in all of them. 

#breasts and eggs #mieko kawakami #i could go on for a while summarizing and giving my opinions on my favorite parts about this #it's so beautifully written #and such a fantastic glimpse into the mind of a woman who feels the burden of societal pressure but has no desire to participate in what's- #considered 'the norm' #natsuko is FIERCELY independent but experiences a very human loneliness that's both relatable and slightly frightening #ALL OF IT is deeply emotional in a way that is difficult to describe #i wish i had a better way to put this in words #and i may come back to talk about and break down certain aspects of it #but here is my review <3 #gonna make a new tag for book reviews #review.breasts and eggs #cal.gen #book.breasts and eggs #author.mieko kawakami

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

What are your thoughts on polyamory?

I was a firm believer in it when I was younger, and still think it can work for certain people with certain temperaments and certain beliefs about life. For myself, I've come to realize that even when I was involved with multiple people I was only truly in love with one person at one time, that the others were people I just liked an awful lot, and that I'm unable to accept the person I'm strongly commited to being with anyone else. So I guess I've drifted towards a more loosely monogamous position over time, after a lot of trial and error and heartbreak.

My hunch is that biology has a much larger part to play than any of the people in the polyamorous scene I've known are either aware of or willing to accept: when people are in their teens and twenties, their brains and conclusions about the world are still developing, and so it is to be expected that people often experiment with identities and play dress-up with labels at that time. This is why it's so common for teenage girls to proclaim themselves lesbians (or more recently, trans) for a few years, since their adult sexuality has not fully kicked in and their statistically-likely desire for children, along with their sexual peak, is still up to a decade away. At this point in their lives, sexuality is often a relatively abstract concept disconnected from the frenzied biological drive to reproduce, and so the idea of sex being just a simple, pleasant, non-threatening extension of friendship seems an appealing safe harbour to drop anchor in for awhile.

The hormones invisibly controlling our actions are also something I've never heard the people I personally know in polyamorous relationships directly acknowledge and address: when women go to bed with a man, their bodies release large amounts of oxytocin, which is a bonding hormone, presumably because, on a simple biological level, every time a woman has sex with a man a new life could result, which will change hers forever, so she is unconsciously driven to try make a strong bond between the two of them so she has someone to protect and provide for her and her potential child once pregnant and increasingly burdened and incapacitated. When a woman goes to bed with lots and lots of men, though, that hormonal process is continually thwarted and confused and stops functioning properly, so she often finds herself unable to fully commit or connect to any of them, and usually ends up deeply unhappy and lonely and unable to maintain any lasting relationship at all.

As for men, they don't tend to release much oxytocin when having a one-night stand, which evolutionarily makes a lot of sense, since their evolutionary job really is to go from woman to woman planting as many seeds as they can to increase their chances of reproduction. To put it at its simplest, on the level of human/mammalian cost, sperm is very cheap and eggs are very expensive.

When men are repeatedly with the same woman over a period of time, the bonding hormone they release is not oxytocin but vasopressin, the amount of which governs how much they jealously mate-guard: it's the hormone that can make men monogamous for life, but it's also the hormone that can make men murder their lovers for infidelity.

The reason I'm bringing all this up is that all of these are invisible forces guiding our actions that we have no control over, and indeed should be very wary of trying to assert control over, since they are survival mechanisms evolved over millions of years that have led us to even be alive today at all. Because of the heavy feminist (and hence social constructivist) influence in the polyamorous scene, there's a denial - or at least a glossing over - of biological differences between the sexes, and biological imperatives that fall outside the more politely communistic ideal of "share and share alike" are treated as secular sins; a solitary individual's personal failing to live up to an ideological group ideal. Once I began to see that clearly, I also began to have reservations about the whole conceptual framework of polyamory as some sort of identity and community.

But as I say, I still respect the people who try to make it work, and I do believe a small minority of people are of the right chemical composition to be able to make it work for them.

#polyamory

[iamafanofcartoons]

With elections coming up in America, I think its important to remind everyone why its important to vote blue.

The artist who posted this? Was trying to draw focus to the point that restricting women’s reproductive health/rights was never about women’s rights. It was always about the idea of the child being born a man.

" Men in the replies say these things because when they have children they sacrifice nothing, they can't fathom having to give up their future for a child, because there is always a woman who will carry the burden for them. Women can aspire to be more than the hero's mother. “

“ Nothing will ever convince me that an unborn matters more than me, a living, breathing human with experiences, pain, family, and has made it this far. Of all i have given of my life, i DO NOT deserve to have yet more be TAKEN from me by FORCE “

But if you look in the QRTs and the comments?

You’d see both men and women bashing the artist and the Pro-choice men and women on Twitter.

You have the power to make a choice, and your choice matters when you cast your ballot.

Please vote Blue. 

Women’s rights depend on it, for women’s rights are human rights.

https://twitter.com/LHeidhoff/status/1540373467731599360

#women's rights #vote blue #womenshealth #reproductive choice #pro-choice #pro choice #roe vs wade #women's choice #LHeidoff

[iirulancorrino]

Best books I’ve read this year: end of year edition

I read a lot of great books this year so it’s really hard to narrow down my favorites, but here are some I read during the past six months that I most enjoyed. (You can read part one here).

Best new releases: fiction

Not a ton of novels I loved but I thought Afghan American author Jamil Jan Kochai’s short story collection The Haunting of Hajji Hotak was absolutely stellar.

Honorable mentions: Flight by Lynn Steger Strong and Small Game by Blair Braverman.

Best new releases: nonfiction

Partisans by Nicole Hemmer - argues convincingly that Trump was the natural evolution of decades of reactionary GOP politics, not an abberration.

Ducks by Kate Beaton - amazing graphic memoir by the Hark, A Vagrant writer about working in the Alberta oil sands to pay off her student debt. An incredible portrait both of what it’s like growing up working class in a small town and the sacrifices that entails and the trauma of being one of the few women in a very harsh working environment.

Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv - fascinating series of vignettes by one of my favorite New Yorker writers exploring different people’s perceptions of mental illness and how we can become trapped in our own narratives.

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners by Margaret A. Burnham - this was hard to stomach because of the depth of cruelty it described but is well worth reading to understand just how all-encompassing a reign of terror Jim Crow was for black Southerners.

Getting Me Cheap: How Low Wage Work Traps Women and Girls in Poverty by Amanda Freeman and Lisa Dodson - Damning Indictment of how this country treats poor people and how women and girls, particularly single mothers, bear the worst burden.

We Need to Build: Field Notes for a Diverse Democracy by Eboo Patel - I would get every left-of-center person to read this if I could.

Honorable mentions: His Name Is George Floyd by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa and Bad Jews by Emily Tamkin.

Best fiction (non new)

I ended up reading a lot of fiction by 20th century European authors, and particularly loved The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig, Everything Flows by Vassily Grossman and The Years by Annie Ernaux. Reading these felt like getting a little tour of the century, particularly of how radically modern Europe was shaped by WWI and WWII.

Boy Parts by Eliza Clark and In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes were my two other favorites, and are of a pair in that they’re refreshing (despite being over 60 years old in one case) takes by woman writers on a specific style of novel and make incredible use of an unreliable narrator.

Best nonfiction (non new)

I continued to read a lot of nonfiction about abortion and most appreciated The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler, which details the human cost of the “baby scoop” era and Beggars and Choosers by Rickie Solinger, which criticizes the shift from rights to choice-based language in discussions of reproductive politics.

I also really enjoyed Mark Lilla’s The Shipwrecked Mind about reactionary politics, which honestly felt like a better version of The Decadent Society and Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong, which was written before the pandemic and felt extremely prescient about a lot of the discourse of the past few years.

Best poetry

I didn’t read a ton of poetry that really grabbed me but I enjoyed Sherry Shenoda’s The Mummy Eaters, which explores the author’s Coptic Egyptian heritage. From previous years, I enjoyed Philip Metres’ Shrapnel Maps and Richie Hofmann’s Second Empire.

#what I'm reading

[mausarchive]

I thought you were somewhat a feminist and now i see you are anti abortion? Fucking really?

i am pro-responsibility, when talking about having sex recreationally; i don't think the first resort of anyone in that context should be abortion, i think it should be being intelligent enough to use common sense, whether that be through your male partner getting a vasectomy or whatever form of contraceptive you are comfortable getting (you're not a child im assuming so i feel no need to list them here). celibacy and abstinence are two things i will never not promote, they are what is ultimately the most effective form of birth control. i am anti hookup culture, i think it is the death of love and commitment and i think one of the wisest things you can do as a woman is be abstinent and keep yourself safe from men interested in nothing more than what you can offer them for 30 seconds. on that same token i think men that are pro-abortion are misogynists; of course they're pro-abortion. they don't value women or the gift of children so they want to have sex without consequence, as much as they want, with as many women as they can. note i said pro-abortion, not pro-choice.

as someone who is heavily involved in the lives of multiple children that i have helped raise from birth, i will never regard a pregnancy as a disease or a child as a "tumor". nobody asks to be born, or conceived. you are responsible for your body, your sex life, your womb. it is wrong to punish a life that never asked to be born. and that is my ultimate opinion. i see them as human beings, not burdens.

when it comes to pregnancy as a result of rape, i obviously would not ever vouch to force a woman to carry a baby that is a product of rape. i think that is the choice of the individual and not one i feel i could ever speak or decide on unless it was in my own case, my own experience. but i do think forcing that is wrong.

in short i promote healthy mindfulness when it comes to sex and reproduction. i wouldn't say im ardently anti-abortion. i think it is important to take things on a case by case basis. but if you are a casual sex having person who gets abortions as freely as someone might pop breath mints, i think you are a misled woman who needs to do some serious self-reflection and thinking on why, exactly, men would promote abortion so strongly, why anyone would, and why they want you to see children as abominable little burdens, and why you also having that point of view directly benefits them.

does this make me anti-feminist? i don't know. do i care? no. i don't identify with that label, i am not your friend, i do not care about you. i am my own person with my own experiences and opinions. if you don't like them, or they even deeply offend you, that's fantastic. do us both a favor and block me if you feel the need to do so.

#txt #ask #thank you for the opportunity to elaborate

[haggishlyhagging]

Altruism has become part of the vocabulary of reproductive technologies and contracts. We hear about altruistic surrogacy; for example, a sister becomes pregnant for another sister with no money involved. A mother becomes pregnant for a daughter "out of love." We even hear that women who are paid "surrogates" conceive, not mainly for the money, but primarily to give help to an infertile couple. We hear about egg donation. A woman undergoing a hysterectomy reasons that since she has no future use for her eggs, she may as well donate them to an in vitro fertilization program where they will aid an infertile woman. We hear about fetal tissue. A woman becomes pregnant with the intent of aborting for a family member who has Parkinson's disease and needs such tissue. We also hear about medically mandated, court-ordered, and postmortem cesarian sections, which are often rationalized as giving women a chance to express their altruism even in death—or just prior to it, knowing that to give birth may cause them to die.

Altruism is so accepted as a positive personal value that few question the way it has been used to legitimate many new reproductive technologies. We do not hear about the family pressure exerted on some women to become pregnant for a sister or cousin unless, like other surrogacy cases, the situation lands in court. We do not hear about the surrogate brokers who go to great lengths to soften their entrepreneurial image by portraying their hired "surrogates" as "special ladies" who really become pregnant for the joy of giving life to others. We do not hear about the numbers of egg donations used for embryo experimentation and genetic engineering and to further the research ambitions of reproductive scientists and technologists. We do not hear about the international traffic in fetal tissue or about the ways in which the procurement of fetal tissue for medical research adds a burden on women already facing a difficult abortion decision. And we hear little about court-ordered cesarians where the underlying norm is that the woman owes the fetus life. We do not hear about how women's altruism has become obligatory.

New reproductive technologies and arrangements are constantly portrayed in a personal context—as hope for the infertile or as resolving acute medical conditions such as Parkinson's disease or Huntingtons chorea. Moreover, the discourse of altruism is appropriated by reproductive scientists to shield their objectives, interests, and ambitions; instead, the alleged miraculous technology is portrayed as bestowing a gift only dreamed of—a child, a cure, a self. Supposedly, selfless scientists engender a selfless science and technology, all for the benefit of individuals in desperate need of medical help. The alibi of altruism makes the technology beneficent, and lots more becomes acceptable.

-Janice G. Raymond, Women as Wombs

#janice raymond #altruism #reproductive technology #women as wombs

[watermelinoe]

so if anyone who identifies as a woman gets to be one, what do adult human females get to be? vagina owners? people who menstruate? how do you plan to address the "afab" plight of being singled out and exploited for our reproductive labor? what should the uterus owners do about that, i wonder?

of course, this detached way of referring to our bodies and our humanity as disparate elements is a tacit acceptance that to be female is to be less than human. they admit it all but outright. "by defining women as adult human females, you're reducing women to vaginas/uterii/giving birth!" that's assuming that adult human females must only be vaginas/uterii/giving birth. how wonderful, then, that we've freed women from this terrible burden of being adult human females!

now if only we could do something for those poor uterus owners...

[black-paraphernalia]

Black Paraphernalia have posted a overview excerpt summary of a NIH study that was done. This subject is a very near to our heart and we being health care professionals who read many research studies in general and understand the double and triple risk a black woman face on a day to day but especially when it come to maternal care in the United States started with SLAVERY.

We decided to do a few post on Black women and Childbirth disparities and injustices in the medical arena. The sad thing even as health care license professionals, we have experienced covert discrimination and disparity when it came to our own professional positions and personal health. 

This is the first of a few posts that we will present in hopes of B1 community awareness. Please check out this post and others to come.

For the entire study click on the title to read in full.

Health Equity Among

 Black Women in the United States

Journal of Women's Health NIH - The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health

J Womens Health (Larchmt). February 2021; 30(2): 212–219.Published online 2021 Feb 2. doi: 10.1089/jwh.2020.8868

Black women in the United States experienced substantial improvements in health during the last century, yet health disparities persist. Black women continue to experience excess mortality relative to other U.S. women, including—despite overall improvements among Black women—shorter life expectancies and higher rates of maternal mortality.

Moreover, Black women are disproportionately burdened by chronic conditions, such as anemia, cardiovascular disease (CVD), and obesity. Health outcomes do not occur independent of the social conditions in which they exist.

The higher burden of these chronic conditions reflects the structural inequities within and outside the health system that Black women experience throughout the life course and contributes to the current crisis of maternal morbidity and mortality. The health inequities experienced by Black women are not merely a cross section of time or the result of a singular incident.

No discussion of health equity among Black women is complete unless it considers the impacts of institutional- and individual-level forms of racism and discrimination against Black people. Nor is a review of health equity among Black women complete without an understanding of the intersectionality of gender and race and the historical contexts that have accumulated to influence Black women's health in the United States.

Research consistently has documented the continued impacts of systematic oppression, bias, and unequal treatment of Black women. Substantial evidence exists that racial differences in socioeconomic, education and employment and housing outcomes among women are the result of segregation, discrimination, and historical laws purposed to oppress Blacks and women in the United States.

The intersectionality of gender and race and its impact on the health of Black women also is important. This intersection of race and gender for Black women is more than the sum of being Black or being a woman: It is the synergy of the two. Black women are subjected to high levels of racism, sexism, and discrimination at levels not experienced by Black men or White women.

In contrast to Black women, White women in the United States have benefited from living in a politically, culturally, and socioeconomically White-dominated society. These benefits accumulate across generations, creating a cycle of overt and covert privileges not afforded to Black women. 

The history of Black women's access to health care and treatment by the U.S. medical establishment, particularly in gynecology, contributes to the present-day health disadvantages of Black women. Health inequality among Black women is rooted in slavery. White slaveholders viewed enslaved Black women as a means of economic gain, resulting in the abuse of Black women's bodies and a disregard for their reproductive health. Black women were forced to procreate, with little or no self-agency and limited access to medical care.

The development of gynecology as a medical specialty in the 1850s ushered in a particularly dark period for the health of Black women. With no regulations for the protection of human subjects in research, Black women were subjected to unethical experimentation without consent. Even in more contemporary times, these abuses continue.

As a result of this history and the accumulation of disadvantages across generations, Black women are at the center of a public health emergency. Maternal mortality rates for non-Hispanic Black women are three to four times the maternal mortality rates of non-Hispanic White women.In

Racism and gender discrimination have profound impacts on the well-being of Black women. Evidence-based care models that are informed by equity and reproductive justice frameworks (reproductive rights as human rights need to be explored to address disparities throughout the life course, including the continuum of maternity care, and to ensure favorable outcomes for all women.

Health does not exist outside its social context. Without equity in social and economic conditions, health equity is unlikely to be achieved,and one cost of health inequality has been the lives of Black women.

The above is a summary excerpt take from the study by the Journal of Women's Health NIH - The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health

BLACK PARAPHERNALIA DISCLAIMER - PLEASE READ

#black paraphernalia #disparity in black women health care #maternal deaths in healthcare with black women #the worst sight