No, I’m serious, if women all got together and went into electrical engineering or automotive repair en masse, then ten years later people would be talking about how it was a “soft field” and it would pay proportionately less than other fields.
Likewise, if men moved en masse to bedeck themselves in sparkles and make-up, then suddenly you’d get a bunch of editorials talking about how classy they look.
None of these things are inherently masculine or feminine; none of these things inherently elevate you or drag you down. But whatever women are seen to do is automatically seen as being inherently more frivolous than anything men do. And shaming women for not pigeonholing themselves into a narrow range of acceptable “masculine” behaviours is just going to result in the goalposts getting moved once again.
This is literally what happened to basically every field women have entered. The opposite happens when men enter. Computers used to be a “woman thing” until the guys who did it got really mad about how badly their job was viewed and realized they could fix it by forcing out women.
Also happened/ is happening with the fields of biology and psychology….
I honestly wonder how much of the backlash against public education in the last generation has been due to teaching becoming a woman-dominated profession.
Fashion used to be a men’s thing. Then women got involved in the late 17/1800’s, so men went the other way because it came to be seen as “frivolous” and “anti-intellectual” to care about how you looked. Add in the homophobia that arose around that time, bam, staid bland dress. Ditto leggings/tights, that are now called attention-whoring when on men they were required to show you cared about your figure and had the money to pay for such a fitted item.
People want to say misogyny doesn’t exist, that male privilege doesn’t exist. Look beyond “living memory” and you’ll find that’s what drives the “inexplicable reversals” society seems to make on many things. Hell, just look beyond your own society, and you’ll find out that what’s considered “for men” elsewhere is held in high esteem while here it’s scoffed at purely because it’s “for women”:
Skinny jeans are the height of masculinity in several east Asian societies, rather than being seen as “gay” in the USA because of their association with femininity.
Medical fields in Russia are valued like kindergarten teachers are here, because it’s women who are the doctors instead of men.
Love and romance are highly valued in eastern countries, because men are interested in it too—of course they would be, surely you want to share your life with someone? Here, it’s strictly a women’s subject.
The field of anthropology as a whole illustrates this.
Significantly higher proportions of females compared to males are currently entering the fields of archaeology and biological anthropology, and as this occurs, the prestige, funding, acceptance as valid kinds of science, etc, are fading quickly.
This has already occurred with linguistic anthropology and cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology in particular went VERY quickly from being seen as a manly, scientific discipline (e.g., Franz Boas, Bronisław Malinowski) to being seen as a touchy-feely female thing.
What I get from this is that we should equally distribute ourselves among all fields until we’ve ruined absolutely everything.
Cooking as well; Men moved into the field and now we hear things like “women belong in the kitchen” when we talk about marriage and domestic life, but cooking shows full of “do you think you can keep up with the guys in the kitchen” simultaneously.
Wherever there is prestige and money, women are forced out.
Think about that cooking one for a second: It’s very explicit in terms of how society considers men’s work and women’s work differently not by the nature of the work done, but who is doing it.
Another woman utterly failed by our society’s devaluation of women’s reproductive health.
We can’t wait around for male doctors to decide what we need to know.
This is why we need to take control and educate ourselves about our own bodies.
and here’s some comments i saw under the post. why is this a pattern?? why is this a recurring theme?? why is this information not common knowledge? what the fuck are doctors doing??
This is news to me so let’s share it so people will know!
Gross tmi: but i passed a pretty big clot after having my daughter. It was about the size of a baseball. It actually hurt worse because while 15 hours of labor opened my cervix, i passed the clot in 30 minutes. I knew it was a possibility because of my midwife and reading, but everyone Ive told after this (mostly other pregnant women) were shocked that this could happen.
In our culture, it’s much more common to do deep research about what family cars we want to buy than we do about childbirth when we ’re pregnant.
Tmi: I passed a huge clot after birth in the bathroom of my hospital room and called the nurse sobbing because I didn’t know it was normal. She treated me like an idiot, but NO ONE told me it was a possibility. And the pain associated with healing for the first couple of weeks after birth was worse than the labor imo. Again, I had no idea. They didn’t tell me a thing besides “sitz bath regularly and change your pads.” Before discharging me from the hospital.
I was most definitely told about this in school. Fucking hell, 4-6 weeks of bleeding? My periods were/are bad enough, why the hell don’t we get told this?
I didn’t know it could last so long, wtf? Is the bleeding inevitable after birth?
Bleeding is inevitable after birth – your uterine wall is shedding a fuck ton of lining. It can last from three to six weeks (possible longer) and it tapers off.
More TMI – I passed a MASSIVE clot after my fourth birth. At this point I already knew this could happen – it’s normal. What I DIDN’T know, was that I had caused it.
My post birth contractions were so bad after the birth that it felt like full transition labor. And they don’t give you anything for the pain. So I used a hot water bottle, without the nurses knowing, and it caused me to bleed even more. I lost so much blood that by the first time they sat me up to go to the bathroom, I fainted. It took three more tries until I could sit up.
Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, the next morning I passed a clot the SIZE OF ANOTHER PLACENTA I KID YOU NOT, and I know what is and is not normal. So I called for the nurse and through the door told her I had passed a huge clot, and her response was – “It’s not big. I know what big is.” She hadn’t even looked. So I rolled my eyes and said, “Yeah, no. It’s big, I’m telling you.”
So, sounding extremely put upon, she asked me to open the door. I did, and after a long pause she goes, “Okay, yeah, that’s a little big.”
YOU DON’T SAY.
The point I’m trying to get across is that this shit is so common – women not knowing this stuff is so expected, and it keeps getting reinforced. People don’t expect you to know anything, don’t teach you anything, and then make you feel like you’re totally ignorant and a burden for your lack of knowledge when THEY WON’T SHARE.
Fucking learn EVERYTHING you can when it comes to childbirth, girls. It is the single most empowering thing you can do for yourself. And if you missed something, that’s okay. But the more knowledge you arm yourself with, the more in control of your situation you’ll be.
A few post partum tips:
DON’T use a hot water bottle – lol.
ONLY pads – NO tampons. Tampons can cause severe infection, not to mention, you probably don’t want to be shoving anything up there any time soon.
If you’ve had stitches, sitz baths DO help relieve the pain. Another great pain reliever? Dampen some pads and freeze them. Let one thaw slightly and use it on top of another pad. This will help with the pain as well as reduce swelling. Change the pad out as soon as it’s thawed completely. This REALLY helps on the first couple days after giving birth.
If you pass a clot, don’t sweat it. Even the one I passed, which was fucking massive, just required that we keep an eye out to make sure it didn’t happen again. If it does, talk to your doctor.
Take a pain killer half an hour before nursing. Because YES – your uterus is contracting after you give birth, to get back to its original size, and nursing causes much stronger contractions. Taking nursing-safe painkillers won’t prevent the pain, but it will reduce it.
Buy disposable underwear for the first few days after birth. They will get VERY dirty. Or use your ratty old pairs that you’re ready to get rid of. Double up on pads – line them all the way up your ass-crack. I am so serious. And wear dark pants.
Pee in the shower. You do NOT want to wipe down there right after birth because ow. Peeing in the shower lets you just rinse afterwards. Especially if you’ve had stitches, peeing in the shower, with the shower-head rinsing AS you go, keeps stinging to a minimum. And fuck everyone else – keep on peeing in the shower until you feel ready to move back to toilet paper. Middle of the night and need to pee? Get your pants off – get in the shower and just go.
This is just a few things, but PLEASE feel free to send me an ask if you have any questions about ANYTHING childbirth/pregnancy/nursing related. I have four incredible kids. I’ve done it all – c-section, vacuume birth, episiotimy, stitches, with an epidural, without an epidural. I’m here.
More tips: GET A PERI-BOTTLE. If you have a hospital birth, they’ll probably give you one. If not, you can pick up any kind of small squeeze-y bottle (or even an empty, CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN spray bottle if it comes to it). It’s like a little portable bidet. Use it after you go to the bathroom, then pat dry. This way you don’t have to climb into a shower every time if you don’t want.
IME bags of frozen peas in your underwear with proper covering (you don’t want to get frostbite) are the best sort of cold compress.
Those contractions during nursing? They are v v important. They shrink your uterus, helping your body get back to normal faster (and helping you pass blood quicker). They hurt. Keep drinking red raspberry leaf tea (which hopefully you drank during your third trimester). It should help not only with the contractions, but with your milk supply as well. Take a nursing-safe NSAID if you can.
REST. I know this is especially hard for people who are already parents, for poor folk, for people with a ton of responsibilities in general. This is when you call in the cavalry, if you’re lucky enough to have support. FRIENDS AND FAM of birthing persons, leave the parent alone with their baby. Do a load of dishes. Pick up. Check to make sure the parent has their baby supplies handy (as in, within reach). Bring them food. The more they rest, the faster their body heals, and the shorter the bleeding period will be. If it tapers off and then ramps back up, YOU’RE DOING TOO MUCH. Slow down. This is the perfect time to learn that, as a parent, you can’t do it all. Always prioritise your kid. If there’s one time you’re allowed to just let shit go, it’s during your babymoon. (Google is telling me babymoon now means a trip you take with your partner before you have your baby. What. No. “Babymoon” means the first week after your birth. When the hell did that switch happen?) REST. REST. HOLD YOUR BABY. SLEEP. NURSE. EAT. This bonding time is imperative. You and your baby deserve this time.
….I know I keep reblogging this but people keep adding super important information.
I feel like no one tells women this stuff because if a woman was even a little on the fence about having a baby before this would kinda make them run for the damn hills.
…..you are correct, typing.
300% EXTRA SURE I’M NOT HAVING BABIES.
peri bottles, witch hazel or anti-pain anticeptic spray are your friends. Also passing large clots after birth is a WARNING SIGN. Bigger than a half dollar is a sign that you have not passed your entire placenta (this is most common in hospital vaginal births where the mother is not allowed to naturally birth the placenta and instead has it ripped out by the doctor) if there is any placenta left in your uterus you can get extremely ill. This happened to both myself and my mother in law
WOW I didn’t know any of this and I’m terrified of what more I’m unaware of about my own body 🙁 Honestly when will we fucking abolish this taboo about the female body…
I had pretty great sex ed in school (lots of contraceptive information, and totally acknowledged that teenagers might have sex) and all of this is news to me.
And, as a 28-year-old person with a uterus, I’m extremely appalled I’m just learning this.
Long, but very important information, even for those who don’t plan to have children, because you will almost certainly know someone who will, and you might be able to to help them. Or at least increase your level of empathy for them.
The shit they don’t tell us.
i need more of this on my dash.
This is just second nature to me because of my job, but I don’t remember where I learned it all. I’ve had moms that have no clue that you bleed after birth. They thought they were dying.
Oh.my.effing.goodness I had absolutely no freaking clue this even happened!! What the actual fuck?!! How do they not teach you all of this in sex ed?! I can’t even right now. Saving to reference when I do have my own kids.
So when I was in float unit and had my orientation shift on the OB/birth unit, I was blown away by all this stuff. I’m a CNA at the moment, so we get the patient rooms ready post-partum and the girl orienting me was talking about all this stuff that I had NO clue about. The only reason why I learned this was because of that orientation and my human physiology class.
My sex ed in middle school and high school was practically non-existent. Everything I learned I did so through planned parenthood and my own research. This stuff NEEDS to be talked about. Because I, as a 26 year old person with a uterus, was unaware of this until this year. And that is fucking sad.
I don’t particularly want kids but I only knew a tiny bit of this and that’s not ok! And the little I knew was from EMT/etc. So for anyone interested in kids!
I only vaguely knew about this before, and it wasn’t from sex-ed.
I saw a little girl today who was absolutely riveted by the life in the rotting seaweed around the harbour. I love seeing these little moments, because it takes me back to some of my first experiences as a ‘young naturalist’ of sorts.
I was nearby, photographing and identifying pollinators: I was just about to go over and ask her what she had found…
Both of us had our moments shattered, however, as her mother started screaming at her about getting her clothes dirty. Unfortunately, I also have memories of moments like these, where the female obligation to be decorative trumped my right to be fascinated and curious about the world around me.She immediately started crying when he parents took her by the arm and led her away.
For those of you who are parents or caregivers, think of what is means to prioritise a child’s appearance over her learning and interests. It’s not fair to socialise girls this way: it breeds self-consciousness, insecurity, and I’m absolutely sure has a direct link to why girls and women are under-represented in the sciences.
I am finding it very interesting that over 1600+ people, presumably mostly women, have indicated over the past few hours that this experience resonates with them.
The thing is, I’m not pulling these connections out of thin air: I’m drawing on scholarship, my observations (data), and my own experiences,
in that order.
I am wondering what it would take for me to be taken at my word about my perception of reality, and my academic background. In order to be objective, should I have a male witness come with me at all times, and notarise my observations? Should I get a male co-author to peer-review my life? I’m half-joking here.
(If you sincerely need a man to vouch for my rationality, my legal partner oz7am – scientist, electrical engineer, radio amateur, and most importantly, male person – will be happy to provide you with assurances that I am not suffering from hysteria.)
In all seriousness, I’m a person who spends about a two hours a day photographing and doing some pretty detailed writing about plants. I took a break from regular programming to talk about this incident, because it took a long time for me to overcome some pretty noxious – and astonishingly similar – socialisation I received in my own upbringing, and really dive head first into applied science.
I’m not trying to have a conversation about laundry: I’m trying to talk about girlhood, because for many women, it was full of nebulous little moments of deprivation like these that are difficult to even see or comprehend when you haven’t lived them.
I don’t want young girls to have to overcome their stifling childhoods the way I did: I want their childhoods to be full of nature, adventure, play, and curiosity. I’m just trying to do my part to make a slightly better future.
being a female means needing to see 10 different doctors to get a proper diagnosis because they always think you’re exaggerating and/or lying
define proper diagnosis. I mean, does that just mean the diagnosis you want?
no 🙂 it means going to 10 different doctors who disbelieved your symptoms until the 11th found cysts on your ovaries 🙂 which may mean infertility 🙂 sit on a cactus 🙂
or being told not being able to walk up a flight of stairs without fainting/not being able to stay awake for more than 5 hours was ‘anxiety’ until finally the 5th doctor you saw diagnosed ur CFS/ME
It’s not getting proper treatment for over a decade because people think another female only disease isn’t real. And your insurance still does not cover your prescription even though it’s the only one you can take.
Dismissing symptoms for three years before finally sending you to a specialist and suddenly everything is happening very very fast because it is so obviously cancer.
or being told for ten years that your constant stomaches are probably caused by weird eating habits, overweight or not enough work out and suddenly your gall bladder gets removed in an emergency surgery – including about 10 gall stones.
And don’t even talk to me about being (a cis) female with mental health issues. “Do you feel the worst when you’re on your period?” “Yes.” “It’s probably just hormones then, honestly.” Or, or, OR, hormones just aggravate the problems I already experience, and I still have issues every other time of the month as well. (I had no full explanation of what was actually wrong with me until I saw a counsellor who only asked about my mental health throughout a typical week, and didn’t ask about my goddamn period, or hormones, or whether or not I had a boyfriend or had recently been through a breakup)
Yeah it means 13 years of dismissed excruciating pain before to get diagnosed with polycystic ovaries because I finally asked to be checked for that precisely. General diagnosis : “you’re being over sensitive, it’s normal to be in little pain on your period”
It means about a year of weird faintings, depressive feelings, slow brain fiction, and general weakness before someone realizes (because I asked to be checked for that again) I had the most serious anemia. It was so bad I was hardly fonctional, I should have been hospitalized, they just gave me inefficient pills. General diagnosis : “it’s just in your head.”
It means falling into depression and getting sudden personality changes because no one believes you that pill’s hormones can fuck you up that way and doctors just keep on prescribing other pills, even after I refuse to keep taking it. General diagnosis : “nah, pill has nothing to do with your mood and sex drive”
It means having a fucking bad pneumonia and agonizing for about ten days before a female doctor sent me to x-Ray my lungs. I internalized the “this is somatization” so much at this point I though I was just being a sissy over a bad cold.
I could add unrecognized and untreated PMDD, undiagnosed ADHD, allergies no one believes until tested, undiagnosed neuralgia for years cause no one believes I was in such pain, unchecked streptococcus because gynecologist didn’t believe me, etc etc.
Honestly just the question on that second post made me furious. It’s like, yeah, perfect illustration of how people never believe women !
Ah, fanart. Also known as the art that girls make.
Sad, immature girls no one takes seriously. Girls who are taught that it’s shameful to be excited or passionate about anything, that it’s pathetic to gush about what attracts them, that it’s wrong to be a geek, that they should feel embarrassed about having a crush, that they’re not allowed to gaze or stare or wish or desire. Girls who need to grow out of it.
That’s the art you mean, right?
Because in my experience, when grown men make it, nobody calls it fanart. They just call it art. And everyone takes it very seriously.
It’s interesting though — the culture of shame surrounding adult women and fandom. Even within fandom it’s heavily internalized: unsurprisingly, mind, given that fandom is largely comprised by young girls and, unfortunately, our culture runs on ensuring young girls internalize *all* messages no matter how toxic. But here’s another way of thinking about it.
Sports is a fandom. It requires zealous attention to “seasons,” knowledge of details considered obscure to those not involved in that fandom, unbelievable amounts of merchandise, and even “fanfic” in the form of fantasy teams. But this is a masculine-coded fandom. And as such, it’s encouraged – built into our economy! Have you *seen* Dish network’s “ultimate fan” advertisements, which literally base selling of a product around the normalization of all consuming (male) obsession? Or the very existence of sports bars, built around the link between fans and community enjoyment and analysis. Sport fandom is so ingrained in our culture that major events are treated like holidays (my gym closes for the Super Bowl) — and can you imagine being laughed at for admitting you didn’t know the difference between Supernatural and The X Files the way you might if you admit you don’t know the rules of football vs baseball, or basketball?
“Fandom” is not childish but we live in a culture that commodified women’s time in such away that their hobbies have to be “frivolous,” because “mature” women’s interests are supposed to be marriage, family, and overall care taking: things that allow others to continue their own special interests, while leaving women without a space of their own.
So think about what you’re actually saying when you call someone “too old” for fandom. Because you’re suggesting they are “too old” for a consuming hobby, and I challenge you to answer — what do you think they should be doing instead?
they’ll never get anywhere in life working with other people’s characters
george rr martin? yeah, he’s standing outside a soup kitchen right now. shoulda made better choices. neil gaiman? learning to use an ebt card as we speak–what was he thinking, writing fanfiction of Hellblazer instead of making his comic completely original?
Rebecca Sugar? oh, she’s been cryogenically frozen so that someday she can fix the mistake of drawing other people’s characters. like that’s any way to break into an industry!
There’s an Onion article out there about a sports nut making fun of a (male) fantasy/sci-fi geek, someone post it.
And jfc have you seen the number of sportsball conventions?! goddamn they’re bigger than PAX and they may be short but they have AT LEAST one a week in the larger cities. how the hell even.
And, just about now, somewhere in the manosphere, someone is furiously typing, “Stop whining, women over there are really suffering,” which actually means “Shut up and consider yourself lucky that we treat you as well as we do.” The idea that women’s rights are measured in terms of competition with other women is just about as sexist as something can get. It demonstrates an utter inability to imagine a world where women’s rights aren’t being traded and regulated by men.
Soraya Chemaly, ‘What Exactly Does ‘It’s A Man’s World’ Mean?’ (Role/Reboot)
so basically… To be a good man you should only be with one woman for your entire life? And if you’ve been with someone that’s disgusting? Ok.
dude. it’s a play-off of how people treat women by slut shaming them. see how ridiculous it sounds when they switch genders? then why is it that way for women.
I wrote a post a while back about how some people are very good at getting away with doing intentionally creepy things by passing themselves off as just ~awkward~.
Recently, I noticed a particular pattern that plays out. While creeps can be any gender, there’s a gendered pattern by which creepy men get other men to help them be creepy:
A guy runs over the boundaries of women constantly
He makes them very uncomfortable and creeped out
But he doesn’t do that to guys, and
He doesn’t talk to guys about it in an unambiguous way, and
When he does it in front of guys, he finds a way to make it look deniable
And then some women complain to a man, maybe even a man in charge who is supposed to be responsible for preventing abuse in a space
and he has no idea what they are talking about, since he’s never the target or witness
And he’s had a lot of pleasant interactions with that guy
So he sympathizes with him, and thinks he must mean well but be have trouble with social skills
And then takes no action to get him to stop or to protect women
And so the group stays a place that is safe for predatory men, but not for the women they target
For example:
Mary, Jill, and Susan: Bill, Bob’s been making all of us really uncomfortable. He’s been sitting way too close, making innuendo after everything we say, and making excuses to touch us.
Bill: Wow, I’m surprised to hear that. Bob’s a nice guy, but he’s a little awkward. I’m sure he doesn’t mean anything by it. I’m not comfortable accusing him of something so serious from my position of authority.
What went wrong here?
Bill assumed that, if Bob was actually doing something wrong, he would have noticed.
Bill didn’t think he needed to listen to the women who were telling him about Bob’s creepy actions. He didn’t take seriously the possibility that they were right.
Bill assumed that women who were uncomfortable with Bob must be at fault; that they must be judging him too harshly or not understanding his awkwardness
Bill told women that he didn’t think that several women complaining about a guy was sufficient reason to think something was wrong
Bill assumed that innocently awkward men should not be confronted about inadvertantly creepy things they do, but rather women should shut up and let them be creepy
A rule of thumb for men:
If several women come to you saying that a man is being creepy towards them, assume that they are seeing something you aren’t
Listen to them about what they tell you
If you like the guy and have no idea what they’re talking about, that means that what he is doing is *not* innocent awkwardness.
If it was innocent awkwardness, he wouldn’t know how to hide it from other men
Men who are actually just awkward and bad at understanding boundaries also make *other men* uncomfortable
If a man is only making women uncomfortable but not men, that probably means he’s doing it on purpose
Take that possibility seriously, and listen to what women tell you about men
tl;dr If you are a man, other men in your circle who are nice to you are creepy towards women. Don’t assume that if something was wrong that you would have noticed; creepy men are good at finding the lines of what other men will tolerate. Listen to women. They know better than you do whether a man is being creepy and threatening towards women; if they think something is wrong, listen and find out why. Don’t give predatory dudes who are nice to you cover to keep hurting women.
“If you like the guy and have no idea what they’re talking about, that means that what he is doing is *not* innocent awkwardness. If it was innocent awkwardness, he wouldn’t know how to hide it from other men”
DINGDINGDINGDINGDING!!!!
This applies to abuse in so many other contexts too. If someone is hiding their behaviour, then it is 1) intentional, and 2) under their control, and 3) they know it’s wrong
All the men following me PLEASE read this and take it seriously.
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