The medical community on literally every female specific health issue ever: “very common condition” “no known cause” “no known cure” :))))))

What the fuck is tumblr? Like honestly what is this? Do you guys pull shit out of the inner most depths of your rectum and then just throw it on your keyboard and have it turn into a post???? This site is something else what the fuck is wrong with you people????!?!?

Endemetriosis

Vaginal Thrush

Menorrhagia

Polycystic Ovary Syndrome

Fibroids

Very common conditions, causes are unknown or only speculated, long term cures have not been found. Most can cause chronic pain or discomfort, all can seriously impact your quality of life.

Men are so damn privileged they can’t even imagine female bodies have different healthcare needs than theirs and that our healthcare needs are important even if they can’t be affected by one of these conditions.

Endometriosis causes excruciating pain and is a leading cause of infertility. Thrush is extremely uncomfortable, and expensive to treat repeatedly; over-the-counter preparations rarely completely eradicate it. Menorrhagia, which I have, makes you anæmic. PCOS causes hormonal symptoms that are socially difficult (facial hair, acne, hair loss, weight gain). Fibroids are so common, and are often treated with a hysterectomy.

Add in fibromylgia, which affects 8x as many women as men, as well as lupus (and almost any other autoimmune condition), systemic exertion intolerance disorder (SEID), iron deficiency anæmia (all of which affect more women than men), and you have well over 25% of childbearing-age women globally living with chronic pain and tiredness.

Chronic pain is overwhelmingly experienced by women, and women are less likely to be taken seriously or given treatment by medical professionals. I went through two years of diagnostics to finally find out I had occipital neuralgia; I felt doubted when I described my pain at every step of the way, but was lucky to have a partner who was persistent in helping me get treatment.

Basically, this is a huge problem, and also one of the reasons I have been considering medical school.

Don’t forget that most pharmaceuticals go to market without ever having been tested on people with a uterus, lest someone get pregnant… seriously that is the whole rationale behind not testing >50% of the population. This has been legislated against in some countries, but still persists in the of majority drug development because of other regulations, and traditions and laziness. The use of a drug is of course monitored in the population after release, but the people “trying” it in this capacity get none of the insurance, close and regular medical examination or monetary benefit of essentially being in a late stage drug trial. Drugs that are pulled from market after release are sometimes done so on the basis that the dosage is just too high for females/afab people and this is, of course, after they’ve experienced the adverse affects. 

This is why if you get pregnant your doctor will take you off basically any and all medication you’re taking (including mental health medication, can’t imagine any implications/dire consequences there), not because they know it will have an adverse affect on the foetus but because they have no idea. How wonderfully kind of them to prioritise the health and life of an unborn foetus over that of a living person, let’s just hope they don’t become ill whilst pregnant. How charmingly logical it is that they wouldn’t even bother to test drugs in people with a uterus because it’s all too difficult and gosh, darn what an ethical conundrum we’ve been faced with, let’s just not! Which is so in the spirit of capital S, Science!  

Sources: Nature, Nature, Medscape, Biomedcentral.

Indeed, the issue is so severe that, in many cases, folks with uteruses are routinely told that their diseases and disorders are not, in fact, disorders at all, and are just a normal part of having a uterus.

Take menstrual cramps, for example. Everybody knows that cramps are a normal part of menstruation, and that virtually all people who menstruate experience them throughout their lives, right?

Except that’s not right at all.

Yes, it’s true that about two-thirds of individuals who menstruate begin to experience menstrual pain during adolescence, but it’s basically a side effect of puberty, and normally subsides by your late teens. Only about 20-40% of menstruating adults experience menstrual pain on a regular basis - and according to some estimates, as much as 80% of that figure is due to undiagnosed endometriosis or some other underlying medical condition.

Yeah, roll those numbers around in your head: if you’re an adult who experiences menstrual cramps, it’s overwhelmingly likely that your pain is a symptom of some potentially serious medical condition.

And yet we tell folks it’s just a normal thing that everybody has to deal with.

Bonus round: Look up PCOS and gender identity.

Then look up PCOS and diabetes.

Ok, to show how incredibly important this post fucking is, I just looked up endometriosis and I match just about every sympton, and it would explain not just my incredibly painful periods but many other things as well. I had no idea this existed. Please, read this post and reblog this so others can learn.

I will reblog this every time because my cousin (a cis girl) went through seven years of pain without being taken seriously until SHE suggested it was endometriosis. And that’s not even unusual - that’s the average amount of time it takes between first symptoms and a diagnosis of endometriosis.

Only 20-40% of menstruating adults experience cramps???? Fuuuuuck >:[

PCOS also has additional health risks, including but not limited to, Depression/mood disorders, diabetes/insulin resistance, abnormal cholesterol and triglyceride levels, heart disease, stroke, endometrial cancer, obesity, sleep apnea and other issues, and fertility problems. With treatment (usually the pill or other hormonal treatment) these risks decrease.

Despite having many of the symptoms of pcos for all of my teen years (abnormal/irregular periods, chronic fatigue, severe hormonal acne, pelvic pain, sleep problems, headaches, and depression/anxiety), I wasn't actually diagnosed until I was 21. Fortunately, I was already on the pill to regulate my periods, but after a test to see if I had endometriosis, my doctor was like "you seem to have PCOS, but that was already suspected" and like??? No one ever told me that! Apparently my doctors thought I had it, but I was never informed that it might be a possibility!!!

Medical care for ppl with vulvas and/or uteruses is so utterly inadequate

You’re fucking ridiculous if you think tumblr’s porn/nudity ban actually has to do with child pornography. Literally every other site can effectively moderate this issue and tumblr has been actively closing in further on their anti-NSFW move. Many sex workers and NSFW artists were removed starting last month after the iOS app was removed from the App Store. Look at FOSTA/SESTA, look at the moves throughout the year to push sex workers and NSFW artists away, look at the way Patreon, Paypal, Craigslist, credit card companies, etc. have over-policed this issue and forced sex workers away. This is all so obvious. 

Also, explicitly banning and calling out “female-presenting nipples” - note there’s an exception if it’s after giving birth or during breastfeeding because OBVIOUSLY the only way breasts and nipples are okay is when you’re fulfilling your goddamn job of being an incubator and not just posting nipples wilfully or for (gasp) money. Because obviously, when we’re talking about the banning of child pornopraphy we must target “female-presenting nipples” and let everyone know that those are the real problem. Nipples are only okay when they’re “male-presenting” and in the proximity of a newborn that is confirmed yours. 

Like c’mon… FOSTA/SESTA has been presented under the guise of fighting human trafficking just like these moves are no different. If they wanted to go after these very real issues then they would and they definitely wouldn’t be (dangerously) conflating the issues. Also why can I still look up violent pro-Nazi, antisemitic imagery but not a goddamn nipple??

BTW read into how Apple has been forcefully pushing for this move & how easily they can go after other NSFW-content websites and force them to comply. 

Fr tho the ne0nazis are still rampant despite tumblr's @staff claims about their "new policy" on posts encouraging violence or harassment of people due to race/ethnicity/religion/gender/sexual orientation/disability/etc. In fact they've shown they themselves will discriminate against the chronically ill and disabled community, by flagging posts and banning users who post in the "chronic pain" tag and removing chronic pain from the tag search altogether.

everyday i must reconsider pursuing a career in animation because of how much targeted harassment there is online from both entitled old men and entitled teenagers towards female creators 

You can still do it, just keep your online presence incognito to avoid any extra attention. Really, I don’t know why industry folks even bother with having any level of social presence anymore. There was a golden era of fan and crew interaction, but its passed now and that era isn’t coming back. I feel like we should just be inaccessible now it’s just better for everyone.

This makes me really sad. I SUPPORT FEMALE, WOMEN, AND FEMME ANIMATION CREATORS

I found out recently that at a time of his life when Tolstoy was in a slump and had stopped writing & earning money, his wife Sophia borrowed money from her mum to start her own publishing office and publish editions of his works—and in order to figure out how publishing worked, she travelled to St Petersburg to ask Anna Dostoyevsky for advice, as Anna had also spent the past 14 years planning the editions of her husband’s work, correcting proofs, placing ads in papers, battling official censors, etc. It reminded me of this post about women writers supporting each other—so many links between women in history that we never hear about. Someone please write a book about the wives of all the great male writers…

(In previous years Sophia, while giving birth to Tolstoy’s 13 children and raising them and managing his estate (he was a count) pretty much on her own, also wrote the clean copies of all of his manuscripts out of his nearly illegible drafts—the final draft of War and Peace was 3,000 pages and she copied it seven times, correcting spelling and grammar and offering key suggestions and critiques of the plot; for example explaining to him that people would be more interested in the social or romantic plots, the human aspects, than in the minutiae of the battles and war strategy plots. A few months before his death, Tolstoy named a male friend the executor of his literary estate rather than his wife, who had been doing this thankless job since she was 19, and gave to the public domain all the copyrights to his works that Sophia had previously owned (for her publishing company). She wrote in her diary “Now I am cast aside as of no further use, although I am, nevertheless, expected to do impossible things.”)

Also I shouldn’t be surprised (but I am) at just how many “great male writers” read their wife’s (or female relatives’) diaries and drew a lot of inspiration from them, stealing ideas or even sometimes entire sentences / paragraphs / poems out of them. This is such a recurrent pattern. There’s Tolstoy (who read Sophia’s diaries and also asked her, when she was 17, to show him a short story she’d written, gave it back to her the next day saying he’d barely glanced at it, when he actually wrote in his diary “What force of truth and simplicity!” and used the story as the embryo for the Rostov family in War and Peace), but also William Wordsworth who read his sister Dorothy’s journal and drew a lot from it, and F. Scott Fitzgerald of course. When Zelda was still young a magazine editor offered to publish parts of her journals, and her husband (of 5 months!) said he couldn’t allow it because he drew a lot of inspiration from them and planned on using parts of them in his future novels and short stories. There’s also French novelist Raymond Radiguet who stole his female lover’s diary to write his novel The Devil in the Flesh, and was lauded by fellow male writers & critics for his brilliant insights into a woman’s mind. Which had been copy/pasted from this woman’s diary. [Also, while he didn’t read it until after her death, Henry James’s sister Alice mentions in her diary that he “embedded in his pages many pearls fallen from my lips, which he steals in the most unblushing way, saying, simply, that he knew they had been said by the family, so it did not matter.”] I really love reading women’s journals, and when they were married to a famous writer, you wouldn’t believe how often the person who edited them mentions in the introduction “if some passages sound familiar it’s because her husband was reading her diary and ~getting inspired” ie plagiarising although the term technically doesn’t apply because every word his wife wrote and idea she had was legally his property (just like she was).

It makes me feel so bitter to contrast what women do—decades of unpaid, unacknowledged work to proofread, copy, publish, preserve from censorship, improve, develop and promote their husband’s writing—with what men do—openly steal ideas and whole sentences from their wife’s writing while forcing her to give birth to 13 children that she didn’t want and he doesn’t help raise.

There has been a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet in my house as long as I can remember, and I held dear many verses from it for a long time. Then I read about his relationship with one Elizabeth Haskell, who supported and edited and worked so closely with him that, “Haskell’s contribution to his writing, including The Prophet, was such that by today’s standard she would be acknowledged as co-author.” (Wikipedia, but there was a much longer article about her I stumbled across once.)

Kind of takes the mystic-spiritual edge off a male writer when you learn that much of what was published under his name was discreetly written into his work by a talented but nameless woman behind the scenes. 

Petition to stop using the phrases “hard sciences” and “soft sciences.” Different fields of science shouldn’t be pitted against each other. A hierarchy of importance shouldn’t exist among scientific fields.

Instead use phrases like “physical sciences,” “social sciences,” “life sciences,” “medical sciences,” etc. You better get across what field you’re actually talking about and don’t put down anyone’s work in the process! It’ll take time to make advances in interdisciplinary research, let’s start by leveling the field to make it possible

#there are a lot of reasons the term is problematic #1) as mentioned it inherently labels a field as difficult (worth respect) or easy (not worth respect) #2) as fields become more woman dominated they become #it happened with social sciences and it’s happening to biology #I can even see as astronomy becomes more woman dominated some physicist men are viewing it with less respect #Also I know a lot of this comes from being defensive and believing your field deserves funding more than others #but chill #don’t be a dick

Good advice: Don’t be a dick. Communicate better, and don’t forget we also work with mathematics (mostly statistics), we also deal with fields that require knowledge from the biological sciences (such as neuropsychology, biopsychology, psychophysiology, health psychology), the biomedical method for evaluating psychological clinical practice has been used since it’s worth the “title” of science, not to mention that the ones who dedicate themselves to research have to learn how to program to work with certain softwares. 

a restaurant in my hometown got a review that said the servers should “show some skin” so the owner added a potato skin special to the menu and all the proceeds from the special go to the west virginia foundation for rape information services (x)

That’s exactly the appropriate response.

While almost all of the country’s major newspapers led with the news of Clinton’s nomination, many — including the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Buffalo News, and even the Arkansas Democrat Gazette — chose to feature images of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, who gave a lengthy speech last night touting his wife’s accomplishments. (x)

i had a moment today while watching a whiny shitlord complain about the injustice of new sci-fi media having more female leads, i suddenly felt the strangest sense of déjà vu. i couldn’t pintpoint it at first but then out of nowhere, it fucking dawned on me

men need to learn that they are programmed to ignore women, and interrupt women ,and speak over women, and undermine and under appreciate them and then they need to spend a lot of time consciously trying to stop 

:-)

yoooooo

Here’s some more:

1. You repeated my idea 2. You’re in my space 4. No, I won’t do that for you 5. I am aware of that

And for when people aren’t listening to you say all of these

1) Stop ignoring what I’m saying

Yaaasssss

Lol

The Pennsylvania Ballet shared the following Facebook post

Pennsylvania Ballet

“A Facebook user recently commented that the Eagles had “played like they were wearing tutus!!!” Our response: “With all due respect to the Eagles, let’s take a minute to look at what our tutu wearing women have done this month: By tomorrow afternoon, the ballerinas that wear tutus at Pennsylvania Ballet will have performed The Nutcracker 27 times in 21 days. Some of those women have performed the Snow scene and the Waltz of the Flowers without an understudy or second cast. No ‘second string’ to come in and spell them when they needed a break. When they have been sick they have come to the theater, put on make up and costume, smiled and performed. When they have felt an injury in the middle of a show there have been no injury timeouts. They have kept smiling, finished their job, bowed, left the stage, and then dealt with what hurts. Some of these tutu wearers have been tossed into a new position with only a moments notice. That’s like a cornerback being told at halftime that they’re going to play wide receiver for the second half, but they need to make sure that no one can tell they’ve never played wide receiver before. They have done all of this with such artistry and grace that audience after audience has clapped and cheered (no Boo Birds at the Academy) and the Philadelphia Inquirer has said this production looks “better than ever”. So no, the Eagles have not played like they were wearing tutus. If they had, Chip Kelly would still be a head coach and we’d all be looking forward to the playoffs.“ Happy New Year!”

!!!!!

Drag them!!!!!

Confirmed: felt that one from Mississippi.

Of all the nerd sex symbol archetypes, “perpetually scowling girl whose only visible emotion is being vaguely annoyed at everything” perplexes me the most. Since when is grumpiness sexy?

Nothing says sexy like the person you’re interested in rolling their eyes at all of your advances!

Huh.

You’re proposing that the Grumpy Girl archetype is a geek sex icon because it provides a frame for socially maladjusted nerdboys to reinterpret women’s hostility and disinterest as an expression of affection?

#I love the realization that a lot of nerdy shaming is just archetypal misogynistic bullshit (via @riihaana)

Watch: How toxic masculinity follows men from birth to death.

if someone claims to be feminist but doesn’t support this, then they aren’t a feminist

IMPORTANT!!!

^^truth.

Things I’ll never tire of: • pads being called “feminine napkins”

• shaving commercials for women where their legs are completely hairless before the razor even touches them

• paper towel commercials where the father bursts through the door with his son, tracking mud everywhere and breaking something, and the mother smiles fondly and cleans by herself

• kids’ protein shake commercials where the six year old refuses to eat his dinner and the mother smiles fondly and?? replaces his dinner?? with a drink??

• shoe commercials where a bunch of women are screaming hysterically and thus making me associate that company with agonizing shrieks

• cake toppers where the bride is dragging the groom because nothing says love and devotion like hatred and regret. these people are going into marriage expecting and even enjoying the idea that they’re not happy.

• bumper stickers that insult the person behind you because for some reason you really want to file all that paperwork when some inevitable idiot rear ends you out of spite

• when teachers divide girls and boys during class discussion, generalizing their opinions by gender, so that they basically discourage anyone from entering the conversation with the goal of understanding each other. now you have spoken for people you never asked the opinion of, as well as made sure that guys feel it’s okay to dismiss the perspective of women and vice versa. education = ignorance after all

• diet Dr. Pepper for men